Salty Winter Adult

This was nearly as big a hit as the maple pecan: pleasingly fruity, not overly sweet.

6-7 very ripe pears (I suspect this would also work with fairly tart apples)
about 3 C frozen blueberries.

While you make a bottom crust (or get the one you bought out of the freezer - there really isn't any good reason to make pastry unless you enjoy it) and peel and chop pears, put the blueberries on the stove on medium to thaw, cook, and thicken somewhat - call it 30 minutes. Stir them periodically, but they don't seem to stick or anything so you don't have to be too attentive to them.

Lay the pears in the crust. Pour the blueberry mixture overtop, prodding gently with a spoon to encourage it to fill in the spaces between pear slices.

Make a lattice top if desired, or use cookie cutters to make enough pastry shapes to cover 2/3 of the filling.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

Also: a Ridiculously Simple Sauce For Poultry, Lamb, Game, Etc:

Originally I did this with cranberries, to make a cranberry sauce that my diabetic father-in-law could have without it knocking his blood sugar too far awry. This year I branched out. I suspect that cherries would work well, too, especially sour ones (which I can't seem to find in Ontario, dammit).

4-5 C frozen blueberries
1 can condensed orange juice, ideally the pulpy stuff.

Optional: cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves to taste

Combine, cook over medium heat until thickened, serve hot or cold.

Solicit or offer ideas, cheer each other on, ask for or offer data or resources, team up and do a group-authored post or a mini-carnival cluster of posts, find a beta, be a beta ...

I would like to say: I am not at all worried about avoiding duplication, and suggest that nobody else be either.

If eight people do posts on How To Cook Eggs, they will all be different, they will all be right and useful, and each of them will be somebody's absolute most useful and favourite post of the whole carnival.

Carry on!

Since it was either that or Freezers, and Freezers is, really, a subset of Bulk, at least the way we do it. For now I'll talk mostly about bulk that can be kept at room temperature.

We buy a lot of stuff in bulk; it's one of the ways we keep food costs lower and food quality higher than we otherwise could. Over the course of many years and a lot of mistakes I've developed some criteria for deciding what should and what should not be bought in bulk, and some ideas about how to make bulk buying as painless as possible.

By bulk buying, by the way, I don't mean "buying from the bulk bins", which is almost always a good deal IF you are able to get the same quality of product out of a bulk bin and don't need to worry about cross-contamination or have a way to manage it.

By bulk buying I mean "deliberately buying enough of a given thing that you will not have to buy it again for one or more shopping trips". And yes, you can do bulk buying if you live alone: indeed, you sort of have to, as an amazing number of things are only available, or only available at a tolerable price, in sizes intended for a family of four. If you live alone, Bulk Buying may mean "getting the regular sized bag of rice", but the basic principles still apply.

1) Don't short this week's food to buy something in bulk. If the only way you can buy the 40 kg bag of rice that's such a good deal is by getting fewer vegetables and less milk... that's a bad deal. It is difficult to manage a balanced diet by bulk purchasing alone, and it is very very difficult to manage an appealing and decently varied diet by bulk purchasing alone. If money is tight, setting aside 5-10 percent of your grocery budget every week to put towards building up a nice cushion of bulk-bought foods is going to work out much better.

2) Don't buy what you can't store safely and conveniently. If a bunch of your big bag of flour goes off, or attracts pests, or gets spilt all over the floor, you have not saved money. If the enormous club pack of lightbulbs won't stay on the closet shelf and keeps trying to land on your head, well, eventually it will and they will break.

We have had a couple of outbreaks of meal moths in our kitchen, and once we had mice. We learned fast.

Good storage:

i) Repurposed bulk food containers. Restaurants will often be delighted to let you have some of the white plastic 5-50 gallon jugs that they get food delivered in, if you ask. Scrub them out with dish soap, let them air dry open. If there is any remaining smell of the original foodstuff, put a 1/4 cup of baking soda in the bottom, pour in 4 cups of very hot water, slap the lid on and leave it overnight. The next day your tub should be ready for your new food.

ii) Repurposed jars. Most of our bean stash lives in pasta-sauce jars and similar. The baking-soda trick works here as well - I love pickle jars, but not so much pickle-flavoured tapioca.

iii) Ziploc bags. Not as sturdy as the others, and not free, but more flexible: you can put your purchase in lots of small bags or few large ones, you can split a purchase with someone else, you can freeze stuff in them, you can use them to organise, say, several kinds of rice within one large plastic container. Keeps out bugs but not mice.

iv) Purchased storage, if you can afford it and you're in a hurry. Ziploc, Rubbermaid, Tupperware, or, if you're truly flush at the moment, lovely matched canisters in ceramic or glass. I have a rice jar I inherited from my Gran. I love it to death.

v) For semi-perishables: apples, onions, potatoes, etc do well a) hung up not touching the floor b) in CLOTH bags which c) let air circulate and d) if possible, keep light out (the mesh bags onions come in are okay in a pinch, but your onions won't last quite as long as they would in cloth, and potatoes go green exposed to light). Rotate them regularly, though, so you don't end up with one forgotten spud down at the bottom of the bag going moldy and tainting the rest: just reach in and stir them around some.

Bad storage:

i) Don't repurpose non-food containers to store food in. Even if you've cleaned them out absolutely perfectly, you can't be sure what's leaching out of the plastic. It's not worth it. If you're buying new stuff, make sure that it's marked as food safe if food is going to touch it.

Short form: Plastic that "smells like plastic"? Is not food-safe.

ii) The plastic bags bulk food comes home in: no matter how careful you are, they rip, and your food spills and makes messes and attracts pests.

iii) The outdoors, or areas that are not climate-controlled: I am always tempted to store food in our back extension. And we always end up regretting it when we do. Pop cans explode in winter and shower you with shrapnel - seriously, and also OUCH. Canned food thaws and refreezes and goes mushy. Onions get absolutely disgusting if they freeze and then thaw. And so forth.

If you have a chance to get a really amazing deal on more of something than you can store, see if you can split the purchase with another person or family.

3) Be cautious of buying "exotic" things, or very inflexible things (things that can only be used in a limited number of dishes, prepared or semi-prepared things) in bulk. Are you absolutely SURE that you want to eat five gallons of garlic stuffed olives in the next 18 months? Given that you only decided last week that you really like jasmine rice, or Earl Grey tea, do you want to use it and no other kind of rice or tea for the next three months?

Equally, buy a quantity you will go through while it's genuinely GOOD, not just "still safe to use". The savings on 4 months' worth of coffee over 2 months' worth just doesn't make up for drinking stale-tasting coffee for six weeks.

4) Be cautious of things that require additional steps to preserve them: those olives have to go in the fridge as soon as you break the seal on the jar.

You can get a lot of stewed tomatoes at a pretty good price if you can them yourself, but a) buying a canning setup plus jars is a lot of upfront cost: are you sure you're going to do preserving every year? and b) do you have a friend or relation who cans, or at least have you got a good book out of the library and read it very carefully before investing in the tomatoes? "Putting up" food isn't terribly hard, but it does require some skill, and the penalty for messing up ranges from being out the cost of the food AND the jars and having to clean up a nasty mess, because your food fermented and broke them, to making yourself and others really really ill.

My personal feeling is, only do your own preserving if you enjoy doing it; as with knitting or sewing for yourself, it doesn't honestly save you that much money, and if you paid yourself for your work it wouldn't save you any. If you do like it, it's great; even better if you have friends who like it too.

5) Take your calculator shopping. Some things just don't get all that much cheaper in bulk, and some things are already so incredibly reasonably priced that the cost and trouble of getting set up for massive bulk storage isn't worth it: all-purpose flour. Dried legumes. Noodles or pasta.

Exception: if you can get a higher quality at the same price by buying in bulk. We get Rancho Gordo beans and distributing the shipping over a big order is worthwhile. Buying cheddar in a 5 lb block lets us have really good extra-old white for the price of supermarket own-brand medium cooking cheddar. Etc. This is what Costco is especially good for.

Also, petfood has some special problems: your pet can't exactly tell you the food has gone off, but if it does you may end up with a vaguely poorly, hard-to-diagnose animal who isn't eating well, or even who is being made ill by their food. Also, pets are notoriously kind of volatile about what they will eat: I have returned an awful lot of now 9.5 kg bags to our vet or fed it to the neighbourhood ferals because Mr and Ms FussyPants, who were wolfing The New Food down happily when I was bringing it home in pricey little 500 g sachets have suddenly decided that I am feeding them dirt topped with chopped slug.

6) Remember to factor in transport. random and I have hauled home some truly ridiculously huge boxes and bags by public transit, but I can't do that anymore. OTOH, one cab from the store, or one delivery charge, every three months, can be pretty reasonable, as can getting a friend to drive you and paying them off in shares.

7) Do your bulk shopping when you have as much time, help, and energy as possible, and when you get it all home do the necessary splitting, repacking, labelling and storing right then. Talking of labels, pop into Staples/Office Depot and get a lot of those ones that come off fairly easily; then label everything. If you have to open it to see what it is, you are less likely to use it. Also, you really want to write the purchase date on things.

8) If there are instructions, save them. Nothing fancy: cutting off the relevant part of the box and chucking them all into a shoebox or a drawer will do fine. But do save them; different cereals and rices, for example, have very different cooking times and water/solids ratios, and you will need this information. And if you get serious about bulk buying, chances are you will, at some point, have a lot of jars/bags/canisters of food that look almost, but not quite alike. This is where being able to cross-match the labels and the instructions will save you from accidentally making, as I nearly did once, vegetable-oatmeal soup. You wouldn't think that steel cut oats and pot (as opposed to pearl) barley could look so alike...

There is nothing much wrong - and quite a lot right - with the occasional meal of Cup-of-Soup, or other insta-noodle concoctions, especially late at night when one is Poorly.

If you add 1/4 C frozen peas or similar to the mix and give the results 1 minute in the microwave the nutritional situation improves further, with nearly no extra effort. Some people also swear by the Egg Drop approach, and while I've never been able to get that to work for me in a cup, I will not deny its basic soundness.

Following this up with a large quartered apple covered with a half cup of blueberries and cooked on high for 3 minutes puts you well into the highly nutritious with a side of luxury class of insta-meal, as far as I'm concerned.

Somewhere buried in all the stuff under this tag - originally made for some friends with their first apartments and no real experience feeding themselves on a daily basis - is something resembling a philosophy of food, though I remain uncertain as to what it might be.

It strikes me as mildly significant that a lot of the meals I get very excited about and spend a whole day making are tasty and fancy but not the sort of thing you'd want to try to live on, wheras with the 5 minutes or less ones, I'm much more focussed on getting a lot of fruits and veggies in unfussed condition in there while making the results comforting and appealing. But then, that tends to be when I'm noticing the need of them the most, and is probably for the best.

It also strikes me that once you know how to make some basic dishes, in this case chicken soup, if you keep a fairly well-stocked[1] kitchen you can pretty much design your soup based with a fair degree of exactness on how many minutes you want to spend on it.

[1] Mind you, I was raised by people who lived through two World Wars, the Depression, several bouts of Locally Poor Economic Conditions, and a number of natural disasters of the No Electricity For A Week kind. My definition of "well-stocked kitchen" is many people's definition of Worryingly Close To Hoarding, i.e. I think that at any given time I could keep us in nutritionally balanced meals for about three months without warning and without buying anything, if I had to.

I don't really have a recipe as such for banana loaf: how many bananas I need to use up, what else I have on hand, and my general mood tend to vary too widely.

This is what I did tonight:

Preheat your oven to 350.

Mash together:

3 overripe bananas
1/4 C butter

1 teaspooon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/2 teaspoons Magic baking powder

To this add

3 C white flour, unsifted
2 C rolled oats

When the resulting mixture is fairly evenly mixed, add

1 1/2 C cool water

and mix it just enough to get the liquid evenly distributed all the way through.

Scrape your dough into a well-greased loaf pan and bake it for 60 minutes. Knock on the crust to see if it sounds hollow, poke it with a skewer in the centre to see if it comes back clean. If need be, give it ten more minutes and check it again.

Turn it out onto a wire rack to cool.

Makes a dense loaf with a crisp crust, moist insides, and a mild, somewhat nutty, not-too-sweet and not-too-fruity flavour, which I think will be very good for breakfast, possibly not so much an afternoon-snack bread.

Take frozen edamame, shelled.

Microwave covered, on high, for three minutes in the bottom of a mealsized[1] bowl with 1 T water

Add:

Leftover rice from fridge
Leftover BBQ chicken breast from fridge
Raw almonds.

Microwave 3 more minutes on high, covered.

Use hotpads to remove.

Add

Soy sauce.
Wasabi peas

Nom. Feel better.

[1] It is none of my business to decide what size that means to you. Which is why in retrospect I went back and removed all the amounts. It's the combination I am recommending. If the amount you want is not quite hot enough after the stated time, nuke it longer. If you think 6 minutes total will shrivel the amount you want, try 2 and 2.

In a nice deep microwave safe bowl with a handle[1], combine:

1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup water

Microwave two minutes[2] on high, stirring at one minute. Remove from microwave, stir vigorously, and add

1/2 cup frozen berries

Return to microwave for one minute on high. Remove from microwave, stir vigorously, and add

1/2 cup applesauce

Return to microwave for one minute on high.

Stir. Add cream or milk and/or sugar if you like. Eat. Feel better.


[1] Everyone should have one or more of these, in my opinion. They make comfort food more comfortable.

[1] Your microwave may vary; keep an eye on things to make sure the oatmeal doesn't boil over, and test a spoonful of oats to make sure they are as cooked as you want them.

The Cook Has A Rotten Cold Vegetarian Soup:

Per 2 litres of vegetable[1] stock or reasonable equivalent thereof (or your favourite UNreasonable equivalent: I've used a) 1 packet Knorr vegetable soup and 2 litres of water, b) 1 big handful dried veggie flakes, 2 litres of water, c) 1 small handful dried mushrooms chopped small and 2 litres of water, d) veggie flakes and chopped dried mushrooms and 2 litres of water ... how sick are you and what do you have on hand?)

10 onions, chopped as finely as you have the energy for.
5 heads garlic, turned into skinned whole cloves.
Black pepper to taste and then add a bit.
Salt to taste.

Simmer until the cloves can be crushed against the side of the pot. Eat until you're tired of it or can breathe again. The two tend to occur at about the same time, actually.

Obviously a deeply lazy recipe, but hey, it's for sick people.

[1] Chicken or beef works just fine too.

Brought to you by me staring into the cupboard and fridge in a surly fashion on a cold, rainy day when everyone was tired.

1 packet Knorr vegetable soup mix
2 medium onions
4 cloves garlic
1 can black beans
1 can chick peas with garlic (Mr Goudas)
About 5 C leftover rice or you could make some fresh.
1 large bunch Chinese broccoli or some other toughish greens - collards, kale ...
1/2 C dehydrated vegetable flakes.

1 T Epazote
1 T Adobo Seasoning
1 T Penzey's Chili 9000
1 T black pepper
1 T ground cumin
4 T cumin seeds.
dash olive oil.
Do not add salt; soup mix is salted. So is bean liquor, often.

Chop onions roughly and sautee in olive oil with cumin seeds until onions are fairly transparent.

Add soup mix, veggie flakes, chopped garlic, 4 C water, beans with all liquid, spices. Stir like Hell and bring to a boil. Cover and let simmer on low while you slice the greens into ribbons. Add them and let simmer, still covered, for 30 minutes.

Add rice, check and adjust seasoning if needed. Simmer uncovered for 15-30 minutes, stirring frequently, until liquid is reduced enough to suit you.

Eat.

When I reheated some just now I added some of the frozen diced ham from the fridge and this is also very good if you're not feeding vegetarians, which I was earlier.

For fajrdrako

Procure some beef ribs, in this case about 1 kg, sometimes labeled "simmering short ribs".

Brown them in the pot you plan to simmer them in, on fairly high heat and then pour in:

Beef broth: I used PC Organic, one litre.

(You can also do this with chicken - thighs, or a stewing hen if you can get one - and chicken broth/stock, in which case everything below remains the same. Don't brown the chicken though, and remove the skin)

2 chopped-up carrots
Small handful dried veggie flakes - available at Herb and Spice and one of my favourite things.
Herbs de Provence, a heaping handful
A smallish handful of ground cumin
Salt and pepper to taste

Bring this to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer - barely bubbling - until tender and coming off the bone. (3-5 hours on the stove; if you want it to cook while you're at work switch it to a slow cooker after browning and it will be quite perfect in 8-10 hours.)

Dumplings:

2 C white flour
2 T baking powder
1 t salt

Handful Herbs de Provence
Scant handful ground cumin

Mix dry ingredients thoroughly, then add enough water to make a stiffish dough - about what you'd do for biscuits.

Remove lid from beef ribs and bring broth to a rolling boil. Spoon in dough until top of liquid is fairly well covered. (Note to self, use bigger pot next time) Replace lid, reduce heat, and leave everything strictly alone for twenty minutes. Do not remove the lid. Do not peek.

Serve immediately, as a cold dumpling is a terrible thing.