We don’t get to go out to eat very often, but when we do go I have a habit of ordering something without knowing or asking what it is.

I’ll order something with an Italian name that looks easy to pronounce, and if something on the menu is followed by “della casa” or “alla Fiorentina” then that’s usually what I want to try. When the waiter brings it to me, I’m usually pleasantly surprised.

Not always. I thought trippa was seafood, like a type of fish. (Yikes.)

The asparagus at dinner was excellent though, and the next day we made it at home. This was easy to do. I’m not an advanced cook; just so you know, Doug usually does the cooking and I do the cleaning up. It’s great team effort when we both feel like we get the better end.

So yes, this was easy, and good for you! Much more so than the big bowl of tiramisú I ate for dessert.

That next morning after our date Doug went to our favorite corner store to buy the asparagus. It was early, so when he asked for asparagi, they took him outside to get it off the small white truck that was still delivering the fruits and vegetables.

I cannot even describe how huge this asparagus was. We just had to laugh.

Early spring is the peak season for asparagus. I learned that from the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which has one entire chapter devoted completely to asparagus. That’s food appreciation. Did you know one asparagus plant can produce for twenty years? That’s a little bit of trivia.

So after we stood there gawking at and taking pictures of the asparagi, it was time to cook.

Roasted Asparagus with Prosciutto

1. Rinse the asparagus and cut off the tough bottom inch.

2. Spread the spears on a roasting tray or dish and drizzle a couple of tablespoons of olive oil over them. (Roll them so they are coated in the oil.)

3. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

4. Roast in a preheated 425 degree (F) oven for about ten to twelve minutes.

5. Take them out of the oven and wrap a thin strip of prosciutto around them to tie them in bundles of three or four (but in our case they were so big that we wrapped just two spears together).

6. Back in the oven for a couple of minutes more.

7. Then I added a little bit of smoked cheese to the top and let it stay in the oven just long enough to make the cheese toasted and bubbly.

The total cooking time varies according to the size of the asparagus and how much you let it cool off when you wrap the prosciutto around it.

I ate this for a meal three days in a row, and I’m looking forward to having it some more.

See the comments for this post: Date Night & Roasted Asparagus

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I have a short list of kitchen tips that have been really helpful to me lately. You probably know them already, but since I learned them not too long ago, I’m going to share them with you here.

Also, see how pretty and orange those egg yolks are? I can’t believe the difference in things that I appreciate now that I’m a grown-up.

Onward to the list:

1. The best time to clean out your fridge is before you go shopping for groceries. (Obvious, yes I know, so I don’t know why I didn’t do this before.)

2. To keep celery fresh, trim it and put it in a container full of water in the fridge. It will last a long time while it’s covered with water.

3. If you make chicken stock (it’s easy, here is how I do it), keep the onion peel on the onion to lend a richer, more appetizing color to the stock.

4. You know not to wash your cast iron skillet with soap, right? Just give it a good rinse with water and make sure it’s dry. You want that seasoning to stay on the skillet so food won’t stick to it.

5. Using a digital food scale makes your baking better and faster. (I use this one.) Cooking can be done with a little of this, a little of that, but baking requires measurements and precision. I never could figure out why my pie crusts were dry until I started measuring flour by weight and realized I had packed too much flour into each cup. With a scale, pies and cakes turn out consistently good every time. Each cup of all-purpose flour weighs 125 grams. A scale also speeds up the process if you want to make your own bread mix.

6. My favorite tip is one I gleaned from the comments: If you want to have dinner leftovers for lunch the next day, set aside your lunch portion first before you serve dinner. There will still be enough for dinner, and you’ll make sure no one eats too much and consumes your lunch.

See the comments for this post: A Half-Dozen Kitchen Tips

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My view for most of January.

My favorite ways to stay warm during winter: fireplace, hot tea, hot bath, warm food. Are you tiring of your winter stand-by recipes yet? A couple of months ago Shannon shared her French lentil soup recipe with me. I am not exaggerating one bit to say my family has cooked this dish every single week since then. It’s so good that we’re sharing it with you. It’ll keep your family warm and happy.

I am not what you might call an organized person. Our home exists in a semi-ordered state on good days and on bad… well it’s not pretty. I have finally accepted this and try to focus on everyday upkeep and just having less stuff.

Even with all of my type B tendencies, though, cooking makes sense to me. When given a few ingredients from our garden or farmer’s market I can map out dishes that I just know will be good. I can’t explain it, I just seem to “get” the flavor profiling concept.

Cooking is organized flavors like music is organized sound. When you combine just the right ingredients in just the right way you end up with something that is more than the sum of its parts. Add one too many ingredients, though, and the balance is gone. That is why good, nourishing food is simple food.

So I guess you might say that I do create order, but only in the kitchen. Just don’t look at my bookshelf.

Simple French Lentil Soup with Bacon

from my seasonal real food cookbook Simple Food {for winter}

Ingredients:

2 cups French lentils
4 strips of bacon, diced
2 medium onions, diced
2 carrots, diced
8 cloves garlic, finely chopped
6 cups chicken stock or water
1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
1 bay leaf
sea salt & black pepper to taste

Method:

Soak lentils in water for 24 – 72 hours, rinsing and changing the water every 12 hours or so.

Place a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add bacon and cook for about five minutes until fat has been rendered.

Add onions and carrots and season with a pinch of sea salt. Sauté until onions are translucent, about another five minutes. Add garlic and cook a minute further.

Drain lentils, and add to the pot. Cover with stock and add thyme and bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper and bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer on low for 1 1/2 – 2 hours or until lentils are tender.

Taste and correct seasoning if desired. Serve hot with a dollop of crème fraîche.

Simple French Lentil Soup with Bacon is one of thirty wholesome recipes from the cookbook Simple Food {for winter}. (affiliate link)

All the recipes in the book are designed to be simple using a short ingredient list of seasonal foods that you can prepare with just a knife, a cutting board, and a good pan. Also, the recipes in this cookbook are grain-free, so you won’t find thirty variations of pasta here! I thought it was really good and it covered skills about how to eat seasonally in winter, so be sure to check it out.

See the comments for this post: Winter Favorite Recipe: French Lentil Soup

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Me: How many years do you think we’ll stay up late on Christmas Eve making things for the kids?
Doug: Not long enough.

There’s something I could use your help with.

My family’s food diet is free of gluten and dairy, and normally that’s fine. This season though, surrounded by plates of cookies, hot chocolate, and sweet mercy, do Americans put cheese on everything? … well, it became a little hard to bear.

My standby recipes weren’t enough, and so I’m putting out a call for some family-favorite party food recipes that happen to be gluten-free and dairy-free. The kind where you could serve them to your guests who can eat anything, and you get to exclaim, “Wow, that’s delicious!” –  not “I guess that’s not bad considering it doesn’t have flour or butter in it.” Because I don’t want to settle for “that’s not bad” any more.

I know those recipes are out there, but as I’ve been trying to look away from PW’s cinnamon rolls, I haven’t seen very many lately. Surely you can help me, right?

Here are the guidelines: No butter, no milk, no cream, no cheese, no white or wheat flour, or any other gluten or dairy food. Sugar is allowed in moderation. Eggs are fine, so are nuts. Bacon is highly favored and receives bonus points.

My goodness, so many helpful responses and ideas! Thank you!

See the comments for this post: Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, and Festive Recipes: The Search is On!

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Chicken stock is one of those foods that make you feel like you’re a really good cook.

I used to think about making it, especially with a yummy soup recipe in mind, but then I’d turn to the chicken stock recipe in the back of the cookbook, and it had twenty ingredients just for the stock! It felt like I was making soup twice. No thanks, I really don’t have time for that. I’ll just fix scrambled eggs and toast..and I’ll probably burn the toast.

There are as many recipes for chicken stock as there are cooks. I discovered that chicken stock in its most basic form: chicken and water, is actually really good. The recipes that list twenty ingredients are better, in the same way that a tenderloin steak is better than a hamburger, but for some cold winter nights at home, simple food soothes just fine.

Don’t let lack of time and energy for those long-list recipes keep you from enjoying homemade chicken stock. If you make it at home, it will be better than anything you can buy at the store. So go ahead and make it yourself, even when you don’t have time for the bouquet garni.

The cooking time for stock is at least four hours, but hands-on time is fifteen minutes, tops.

The Essentials

Chicken bones. Stock is made from bones, so you don’t need the meat. After we eat roast chicken I’ll save the leftover bones in the freezer until I can make stock with two carcasses at a time. It’s the best possible food for a frugal grocery budget when something amazingly healthy and nourishing can be made from what we would have thrown away. My family can eat at least two more meals that week for practically pennies.

If you have a huge stock pot and freezer space, you could make more and freeze the rest, but I find smaller batches easier to manage, which helps me be willing to make it more often.

Cold water. Start with cold water because certain essential proteins only dissolve in cold water.

Something acidic. I add a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, though some people use wine, or even tomatoes. The acid draws calcium and other minerals from the bones into the stock.

The Extras

Do you have any extra vegetables around? Toss them in. I usually slice an onion down the middle and add it, and you can also try carrots, garlic, or celery. All of these are good if you have them.

Seasoning. Salt is important to flavor, but don’t add it to the stock; wait until you’re cooking with the stock and add salt in the final recipe to taste. In the last twenty minutes of simmering the stock you can add fresh herbs and pepper if you want to. Since I start with the remains from roast chicken, it often has enough seasoning already and I don’t need to add anything.

The Method

Put the chicken bones and any vegetables into the pot and add enough cold water to cover them by an inch or two. Turn the heat on low and let the stock heat slowly. It might take an hour to warm up, and then keep the heat on low so the stock is barely simmering. Skim the top as needed.

Stock requires at least four hours to simmer, but how long you let it go is up to you. You can also try making it in the crock pot.

When enough time has passed, strain and pour the stock into jars. Let it cool and then chill in the fridge. Once the stock is chilled, there will be a layer of fat that you can remove from the top. Chilled chicken stock is thick like Jell-O, and that’s a good thing. That means you’re getting all the healthy gelatin from the chicken bones.

I gain about a gallon of stock when I make it in my stock pot with two chicken carcasses. I pour the stock into two half-gallon glass canning jars. This gives me enough to make soup twice for my family later that week. Stock can stay in the fridge for about four days, or you can freeze it for a couple of months.

When I see a jar of homemade chicken stock in the fridge, I know I’m just minutes away from a cheap and nutritious meal for my family.

And I feel pretty awesome.

See the comments for this post: A Simple Guide to Homemade Chicken Stock

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Wow, what a response to my news last week about Doug’s taking a year off from work. Your questions and comments made me feel very cared for. I’ll try to answer them all, but to touch on the most common questions, we’ll be paying bills with our cash savings (leaving our retirement savings untouched), and we don’t have a guaranteed job for Doug to return to later, but he routinely gets job offers, so I’m not too worried about that.

I think I’ve adjusted to the decision, and I’m ready for it. My hair, however, is not. For some reason, big life changes call for a new haircut, and in an adventurous move while I was sitting in the stylist’s chair last week, I decided to cut about six inches off my hair. Wavy/curly hair always takes a while to adjust. It wasn’t until I got home and looked in the mirror that I remembered having my hair at this length kind of makes me look like Jennifer Gray in Dirty Dancing, which really wasn’t the look I was going for.

On a positive side, every time I look in the bathroom mirror I get to say my favorite movie quote of all time: “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” Doug let me try the famous lift from the movie a few times, which was hilarious and fun and probably really bothersome for my downstairs neighbor. I would make a video for you except I know the internet never forgets, so you’ll just have to imagine it.

The tension from having one foot out the door while working out the last few days at his job necessitated some home cooking, specifically soup. What could be better than red lentil soup to help us feel simultaneously well-fed and budget-savvy?

I followed the red lentil soup recipe from Orangette, and it was exactly what we needed that night. We topped it with some crushed-up Kettle chips, because that’s as fancy as I get with soup. We listened to “Time to Say Goodbye” by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli. (Have you heard it? It’s magnificent.)

It feels like such a relief to be able to talk about his leaving work, and I have some more news for you: remember I talked about writing that book, the one about blogging and managing the time it takes? It’s ready, and I can’t wait to release it. Wednesday’s the big day, and you won’t want to miss it.

See the comments for this post: What to Eat When You Quit Your Job: Homemade Lentil Soup

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Every family needs at least one meal that they can eat for pennies.

Whether they want to stay on a frugal budget, or do a No Spend Month, or make more money available for expensive foods like organic vegetables and grass-fed beef, it helps to have one good meal that everyone likes and doesn’t cost much.

So, beans and rice, check.

What do you eat when you’re trying to keep your budget low and you get tired of beans and rice?

Eggs cost twenty cents each. (I’m using prices from Whole Foods in Dallas, TX, since I know food costs vary by region.) You can make scrambled eggs with homemade biscuits, and feed a family of four for less than three dollars.

Chicken stock is made from what would have been thrown away. When we have roast chicken, we eat all of the meat, and then I use the leftover carcass to make stock. I prepare this almost every week at our house, and then I add rice to make soup.

More ideas: baked potatoes, pasta, stir fry, hummus

I wanted to mention some people who are doing their own No Spend Month challenge this month so you can cheer for them. (If I missed yours or if you’re not blogging about it, share it with us in the comments.)

Kait from Your Morning Cup is trying to go for the month of July spending $150 or so on food and not buying any superfluous items. She says, “Last year when we did this we were able to save enough to make our $1,000 emergency fund. That sure came in handy when last winter we spent $800 on tires for my car! We were lucky to not have to go into debt then, and quickly built the savings back up. This year the goal is to kick most of the rest of our credit card debt.”

Jamie from SteadyMom has set a limit of $350 to spend on her family of five for the month and she’s thinking of ways to have fun with her kids for free.

Sharon from Musings of a Midlife Mom is doing her No Spend Month with a husband and 4 teenagers. If she can stick with her plan, she’ll save $900! She says, “My ultimate goal (besides saving some money) is to become more conscious of my spending. This challenge will force me to make every dollar count.”

Preeti from Heart and Mind has a $300 budget for a family of 4 for the month. She only spent $33 last week!

Beth Young from Domestic Engineer in Training decided, “We aren’t saying that we’ll only spend a certain dollar amount, but we are saying that we are going to watch every penny.  We are hanging up every receipt for every dollar we spend on the bulletin board on the kitchen.”

You can do it!

See the comments for this post: What to Eat on a Beans and Rice Budget (Besides Beans and Rice)

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Making yogurt at home is really easy. Making dairy-free yogurt at home and having it resemble anything like regular yogurt, or even the dairy-free yogurt from the store, is definitely not easy.

I knew the odds were stacked against me. I’ve heard other people say they could do it, so I tried it.

For all of these experiments I used the same method as how I successfully make regular yogurt, and I used store-bought coconut yogurt for a starter.

My first experiment was with almond milk, though I didn’t have high hopes. It cultured, but it was still a liquid, and the result wasn’t pretty: a beige water with tiny white almond particles suspended in it. Not desirable.

I didn’t try soy milk, but I don’t see how it would thicken up any more than the almond milk, although the results might be smoother.

Next I tried to culture coconut milk. This didn’t seem like a smart idea, because who sits down to eat a nice big cup of heavy coconut milk straight? And in the end, that’s exactly what it tasted like: a big cup of coconut milk. I’m not sure it cultured.

Then I tried a blend of half coconut milk and half water. It cultured a little bit, but I had to keep stirring it to taste it. The coconut milk kept rising to the top in little clumps, and the water settled to the bottom. It was all right, if you were looking for a slightly-cultured coconut milk beverage.

There’s a good reason dairy-free yogurt has a combination of cornstarch, rice starch, tapioca dextrose, guar gum, or xanthan gum added to it as a thickener, and now I’ve experienced it first-hand.

I’m not sure what kind of results other people get when they say they make dairy-free yogurt. A drink? I was hoping for yogurt.

But that’s how it goes when you make gluten or dairy-free foods and hope they taste like something you remember. Sometimes you find something really good, and sometimes it fails spectacularly.

See the comments for this post: Don’t DIY: The Dairy-Free Yogurt Experiment

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Photo by D Sharon Pruitt

I think I could use some more lunch ideas. Leftovers from dinner would be excellent, but they are completely gone. Save me from snacking on almonds and raisins all day.

My lunch criteria:

1. Require no more than a few minutes to make, or can be prepared in advance.

2. Bonus if it can be eaten with one hand.

3. Involve no peanut butter whatsoever.

Lunches I’ve been eating lately:

1. Chicken salad made at the beginning of the week and kept in the fridge. So good if it has apple and raisins in it.

2. Hamburgers grilled in advance and waiting in the freezer. I reheat it in microwave for a minute and there is no loss of the “hot of the grill” taste.

3. Smoothie. Especially now that warmer weather is here.

See the comments for this post: Share Your Lunch: What Do You Like to Eat?

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How can you make yogurt? It’s no big mystery. This is something you can easily make at home.

Someone might ask, “Why make yogurt?” for the same reason one might ask, “Why knit a sweater?” Indeed, why would a person spend a hundred hours knitting a sweater when you could just go to the store and buy one? What is so appealing about doing it yourself?

I wanted to make yogurt because I wanted to know how it was made, and I wanted to see if I could do it. Learning new skills is my favorite hobby. I’m no yogurt-making expert, but the good news is I can still make delicious yogurt in the kitchen, and so can you.

I don’t have patience to hand knit a gorgeous sweater like my knitting friends, but yogurt? Yogurt is easy.

Yogurt results when you mix milk with a starter and let it sit. A starter is a nice word for a bacteria culture. I’m sure that’s why more people don’t make their own yogurt; it sounds risky. After decades of marketing from anti-bacterial cleaners and hand soap, bacteria is something we’ve been told should be out of our kitchens! No wonder we view it with suspicion, and at the very least, uncertainty. Perhaps it is something better left to professionals?

No, truthfully, generations of people have been making yogurt in their kitchens long before industries packaged it into convenient little containers for us (along with all the added sweeteners and thickeners). And just like anything else you make at home, it does taste better. More fresh, and not so sharp.

Make-It-Yourself Directions

1. Heat 1 quart of milk on the stove to 180 degrees F. (A thermometer helps to ensure food safety.)

2. Let the milk cool to 110 degrees.

3. Add 2 tablespoons of plain yogurt to a quart jar. Make sure the yogurt has live, active cultures. It can be store-bought plain yogurt or the last spoonfuls of your most recent homemade batch.

4. Add a bit of the cooled milk to the yogurt in the jar and swirl it around. Then pour the rest of the milk into the jar.

5. The jar needs to stay warm for about 8 hours while the cultures do the work. Options:

• Put the jar inside the oven with the oven light on.
• Put the jar inside a cooler, and fill the cooler with hot water.
• Buy a yogurt maker which will keep the jars warm.

6. After the yogurt has thickened, cool the yogurt in the fridge and enjoy!

7. The yogurt is more thin than store-bought, but it’s ideal for smoothies. If you like thicker yogurt, pour it into a colander lined with cheese cloth, coffee filters, or paper towels, and let the excess liquid drip into a bowl below.

The rest of my family is dairy-free, so I no longer make quarts of yogurt to eat all by my lonesome. I’ve heard people say dairy-free yogurt could be made at home…could it be possible? It seems that everyone who actually tried it reported failure, so maybe it’s the holy grail of dairy-free food. I want to find out for myself.

Making dairy-free yogurt at home is my next experiment, and whether it succeeds or flops, I’ll tell you how it goes.

See the comments for this post: How to Make Homemade Yogurt

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