Recipe: Cure Your Cold With Onion Quiche

I get the sniffles a few times a year, usually around allergy season. Because of the timing, I generally chalk it up to pollen and try to get on with my life, but there's something about the clogging of my sinuses that leads to a general clogging of the brain, which probably explains why, on a day when I was feeling all-around miserable, I decided that the only possible solution to my woes was to cook onions into some kind of pie.

Had I had my wits about me, I might have tried to get really fancy and make this a tart (or I would have put this project aside to do when I wasn't feeling quite so far under the weather), but it's really more of a quiche, due to the unashamed use of store bought pie crust and over-application of egg. Let's call it Onion Quiche, then. Whatever it was, it fixed my sinuses and it tasted delicious, so I win double.

Deliciousness!

Fortunately, I was present enough to take some photos, which means a recipe to share.

Cheap and Easy Recipes: Turn Tough Meat Tender by Braising

 Here in the Scrimp household, we braise meat at least two or three times per week. It is by far our preferred method of cooking. Why? Well, it's easy, it's quick, and it's a great way to make the cheapest cuts of meat taste mind-blowingly good. 

Braising is a type of slow-cooking that is best done in the oven but can also be done on a stovetop. All you need is a pot with a good lid. You can even braise in a crock pot, although my experience has been that meat braised in the crock pot does not turn out as well.

The best braising dish is a dutch oven. I have two of them, I swear by them, and I use them for just about everything. One of them is a discontinued Martha Stewart model that I got as a wedding gift, and one of them was a Christmas present last year from Mother-in-law Scrimp--the lovely red Food Network model below.

A dutch oven is made of enameled cast iron. It's heavy. It's a beast. It retains heat beautifully and it turns cheap cuts of meat into magic. If you're going to braise, I recommend getting one, because it just makes life in your kitchen better. 

Last night for dinner, I took a $3.99/lb cut of beef and turned it into something that we gladly would have paid ten times more for. And I didn't even need a recipe. All I needed to know was the secret formula of braising. 

Are you ready? Here it is.

Recipe: Cream of Kale and Leek Soup (GAPS-legal)

Mr. Scrimp recently got a new job that lets him come home for lunch every day, which means two things. One, I no longer eat my lunch at the computer while I work. Two, I had to start thinking a little more clearly about what my (now our) lunch was going to be.

You see, in the past, lunch for Mr. Scrimp has been dinner leftovers, and lunch for me has been... whatever I scrounge up when I remember to eat. It might be peanut butter on a spoon. It might be chicken alfredo. It just depends on what's in the fridge, what my mood is, and whether I care to spend my lunch break cooking instead of relaxing (or blogging).

I'm at the end of my first full week of the GAPS diet, working on healing some GI issues, so I've also had to find lunches that are GAPS legal. This one was quick, easy, and full of gentle, healing ingredients. Yesterday on the fly I came up with this: cream of kale and leek soup. It's delicious! Thick, warm, and packed with flavor that is just perfect on a gray, rainy fall day.

So green, so tasty

Menu Planning Monday: Week of October 10

I've been having a rushed weekend and Monday so it took me a while to get this menu plan out. You'll notice that lots of soup is on the menu again. I love soup in the fall! Fortunately, so does Mr. Scrimp.

For a free printable version of this
menu planner, go here

Menu Planning Monday

Oh my goodness, is it Monday again already? Unbelievable! This weekend went by like a flash.

We made it to the farmers market this week, which really helped supplement our food supply since we didn't get much meat from our CSA. The produce available at the market is starting to change and we're seeing fewer delicate, summery vegetables and more apples, squash, and other hardy plants.

For your own free, downloadable menu
planner, go here

That's ok with me, though. We're halfway through September, and I am looking forward to eating more fall foods.

Showdown: Dried Beans vs. Canned Beans

Mr. Scrimp and I eat a lot of black beans, chickpeas, lentils, and pinto beans. We recently made the switch from canned beans to dried, and I'm here to tell you about why we did it, how it worked, and whether we're going to stick with it.

I had my doubts about this, and so did Mr. Scrimp. Dried beans require so much time. So much extra work. They are so much less convenient. And as far as taste and health benefits... well, there isn't really a difference, is there?

Turns out, I was wrong.

Menu Planning Monday

Wow. The response to last week's printable menu planner was way bigger than I expected! Thanks for visiting, everyone!

This week we weren't able to make it to the farmers market, and our CSA didn't include any meat, so things are a bit slim on the in-stock provisions side. Toward the end of last week we sort of fell away from following the menu plan strictly (read: I didn't bother thawing the tongue) so there are some unexpected leftovers for me to work with, and the rest I'll supplement with a quick trip to the grocery store.

Recipe: Liver and Onions

I know some of you read the title of this blog post and immediately wrinkle your nose in disgust (hi mom!). Well, wrinkle no more. If you've tried liver and you hate it--well, fine. To each his own. But I maintain that this is a delicious thing to eat. Mr. Scrimp and I enjoy it on a fairly regular basis.

This is a simple recipe and most of what it requires is time... and an enjoyment of liver. I first started eating liver because I was anemic, and it turned out that Mr. Scrimp and I both had a taste for it, especially with onions. Make sure, by the way, that you have enough onion to go with your liver. The sweetness of the onion compliments the richness of liver perfectly.

Menu Planning Monday & Free Menu Planner

Every Thursday, we get a big load of food from our CSA. On Saturdays, we go to the farmers market and fill in any gaps that we feel like our CSA didn't fill for the week. Then, it's time to eat!

However, if we don't plan out what we're going to do with all of our delicious produce, I know we're going to lose some of it to rot. Food from a CSA usually doesn't last as long as food from the grocery store, because it is almost always perfectly ripe when picked. So, it's important to have a plan for how we're going to use the delicious bounty of our local harvest without letting any of it go to waste.

I used to plan a menu and then go grocery shopping based on that plan. Now that we eat almost exclusively local, seasonal foods (at least during the harvest months, when the only non-local things we eat are organic canned beans and coconut milk), I have to reverse the process. Someone else picks the food I'm going to get, and I have to be creative to make it all work for us. It's been an exciting adventure trying to figure out how to do that.

Eventually what I did was to come up with a dual-function shopping and menu planning list (as you see above). It works in either way--you can fill in all your available ingredients and then make a menu plan from those, or you can write a menu plan and choose the ingredients you'll need to buy to make it. But it's all there together so you always know exactly what food you have or need, and what you're going to be eating.

I've included my list (a knockoff of the Anthropologie style "What to Eat" and "All Out Of" notepads) at the bottom of this post as a downloadable file so that you can print it out and use it too! It's been formatted to fit a full 81/2 x 11" page so you have plenty of room for writing and can store week-by-week copies in a binder if you want.

Want to see how I do it? Below the cut, I've shared this week's food supply and the menu I made out of it so you can see what I'm talking about.

How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying: Stop Looking at the Whole Picture!

Welcome to part 1 of How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying. This is written particularly for those of you who see the blogs and magazines and tv shows of fabulous people and immediately feel guilty and inadequate.

You know she's watching Living right now.

That's right.. now you can discover the fabulous secret knowledge that successful home-makers have always known! 

Are you ready? I am about to give you five shocking domestic secrets that Martha Stewart doesn't want you to find out!

Well, not quite. But I am going to give you a piece of advice that you might not have heard before: Stop holding yourself to someone else's standards, and stop looking at the whole picture. 

Wondering what I mean?

Five Essential Ingredients for a Functional Kitchen

If cooking at home is still a fairly new thing for you, I'd like to help you out by letting you know about a few tools that are really essential for having a successful, functional kitchen.  If I had to start my kitchen over again from scratch, these are the first five things I would insist on making sure I got.

It can be really overwhelming to know where to start when you haven't already been doing the domestic thing for years. I'd like you to treat this as a sort of quick-start guide for spending more time in your kitchen and being more productive while you're there. 

It's taken me a while to work out exactly what should be on this list. How long? Well, I've been keeping house with Mr. Scrimp for two years. Before that, I shared an apartment with my best friend. I've been responsible for several kitchens at this point, and I've worked in a lot more.

These are the tools I can't do without.

How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying

I've learned a lot of things about housekeeping in the last two years. I've learned how to make pasta. How to make jelly. How to take smells out of a sink. How to decorate with no money. How to grocery shop on a budget. I still have a long way to go as a homemaker, but I am definitely getting there.

The one question that I have been asked most often since starting Scrimpalicious is "how do you do it?"

I have a full-time day job, I've had a broken foot for the last five months, I have hobbies in which I am very deeply involved. What I don't have are the oodles of time that a lot of blogging homemakers seem to have. Much as I would love to be a stay-at-home, I'm not. Between work, hobbies, and social life, I usually only have a few hours a day to do all the things I'm doing.

And yet, I get it done. How? Well, I guess I've just picked up a few tricks along the way. I'd like to share them with you, because if I've learned anything it's that being busy doesn't have to stop you from having a home that is, if not Martha Stewart, at least not worthy of a spot on Hoarders.

So, for the next few Wednesdays, I'll be sharing a series on How to Succeed at Homemaking Without Really Trying. You might be surprised how much you can get done with very little time.

Be sure to become a fan of the Facebook page or follow @scrimpalicious on Twitter so you don't miss a word.

Tom Kha Gai / Thai-style Coconut Chicken Soup

Well, I haven't posted a recipe in a while, so I thought I'd share the recipe for the soup that Mr. Scrimp and I had for dinner tonight!

This is by no means a totally authentic recipe--it's my copy of the soup served at a local restaurant, and it's not as good as theirs (but it's close). I usually make a big big batch of this in our stockpot so we can eat it for several days, so this recipe will make you quite a bit of soup. A half or quarter batch is probably plenty.

Menu Planner

I really like to have meals planned out advance, even if it's just something like "chicken on this day, beef on that day," et cetera.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I saw this awesome menu planner tutorial. I included both the first one I found, at our perfectly imperfect life, and the one that inspired that, at Thirty Handmade Days.

As you can see, the menu planner (made of a decorated cork board) uses clips for each day so that meals can be rearranged on a weekly basis. It features envelopes for recipe cards and to hold a selection of meal choices to be pinned up.

I think this is such a cool idea, especially if you can find a cork board secondhand where it often costs only a couple of dollars. And, of course, there's no end to the styles or colors you can use. The only limit is your imagination and your materials.

Review: Canning For a New Generation

For Christmas this year, my brother and his wife gave Mr. Scrimp and I a copy of Lianna Krissoff's Canning for a New Generation. Being readers of Scrimpalicious, they knew about my sometime love affair with canning, and also that Mr. Scrimp and I tend to be, well, I hate the word "foodie" because it's a silly-sounding word, but if the shoe fits...

First of all, this book is beautiful. It's worth owning just for the eye candy, in my opinion. From the appealing cover to the photographs sprinkled lavishly throughout, this book is just pretty. I would (and already have) just leave it on my coffee table for people to flip through as an aesthetic pleasure.

Trying This At Home

Tonight, we had another cooking adventure. And I'm really not sure how I feel about this one.

Have you ever heard of sweetbreads? If you have, and you haven't eaten them, you're in one of two camps--either you're intrigued, or you're totally disgusted.

For those of you who don't know, sweetbreads are organ meat. But not just any organ meat. This is the thymus or pancreas of a calf. And we decided (why did we decide this??) that we wanted to try cooking and eating some.

This is our story.

Who Does the Cooking?

Who does the cooking in your house?

In case the "Mrs. Scrimp" moniker didn't give it away, I'm a lady. As a cursory glance through this blog will show you, I do a lot of the cooking in the Scrimp household.

But don't let my "happy housewife" attitude fool you. Mr. Scrimp does fully half the cooking, cleaning, and crafting in this house, and I'd be up a creek if he didn't. I think it's a fabulous thing about life in the 21st century that we both work, we both cook, and we both clean equally.

Why do I mention this? Well, I read an article today over at An Attitude Adjustment. It's called Women in Aprons, and it points out that a lot of us in the foodie movement (and I'm thinking particularly about bloggers just now) have put a lot of focus on women cooking for their families. Don't get me wrong, that's awesome, but... well, I'm just going to let them speak for themselves, here.

"I’m fine with a food revolution. I’d love some simple, tasty ideas for nightly meals that don’t make me break a sweat or gain five pounds. But if the food revolution is going to take hold, we need to make sure it is a joint venture. Men and women roasting garlic and chopping onions. Men wearing the aprons as much as women . . . It’s best if men and women can tackle this new endeavor together, even when the chicken is burned"

Go read the whole thing. There's some real food (ha!) for thought in there.

Julia I Ain't

So, my in-laws are coming over for dinner tonight, along with Mr. Scrimp's grandmother, who has never been to our house before, and for whom I have never cooked.

Naturally, I am also trying to wrap up a massive project at work, my house is a mess due to a series of welcome parties and beloved weekend guests, and I am in a tizzy of panic about, well, everything.

So, of course, I decided that French cooking would be a good idea on a full workday, especially if I made a recipe that I'd never made before. With grand visions of the most delicious boeuf bourguignon EVER dancing in my head, I dropped Mr. Scrimp off at work and headed for Whole Foods.

Recipe: Homemade Oat Flour and Pancakes

I'm not gluten intolerant (as far as I know) but I do have an intolerance to both wheat and corn. When I was first diagnosed, back in grade school, my parents cut them both out of my diet. Over time, we phased them back in (on the advice of my allergist) and things seemed fine.

Recently, though, I've started having allergy problems again, so I'm cutting wheat and corn back out of my diet. As I start to explore wheat-alternative recipes and foods, I'd like to share my findings with you. Many of these will be gluten-free and safe for people with celiac disease. Others won't. Remember, wheat-free and gluten-free are not the same.

What can I do with these delicious looking things?

Depression Cooking

Right around when I got married to Mr. Scrimp, I found a video channel on YouTube called "Depression Cooking With Clara." It was one of the things that ultimately inspired Scrimpalicious.

Clara is a 94-year-old great-grandmother whose grandson decided to help her make some instructional cooking videos for family use. He put them on YouTube, and it just took off--they're now into a second season and have released a cookbook and DVD.

Equal parts memoir and cooking show, Depression Cooking With Clara includes reminisces about the Great Depression, and cheap family recipes (averaging about $1/serving). Go here to watch it. I really recommend it.