Food Stamps Challenge: Day 2 Update!

Yesterday, I started the Food Stamps Challenge #2: Georgia!

Recap

I planned the week, went shopping, and came in a bit over due to an impulse purchase of a really stinky fermented vegetable that no one should eat one handed while driving home, unless they enjoy spilling stinky fermented vegetable in their car.  I really should treat my sweet baby Green Bean (it's an "alien green" Kia Soul) kinder.

Summary of This Post

I'll basically walk you through what I did with my Saturday evening and Sunday to prepare the goods procured prior to last post for the week.  There will be a few recipe updates, and some general food prep updates.  I'll follow-up with some commentary on what is and is-not possible for someone actually living in poverty.  A lot of this is more for a "poor person with really good infrastructure," e.g. farming in a rural area or suddenly unemployed after a good run.

First: Dinner Last Night!

I made Sichuan Boiled Fish.  I had most of the ingredients on-hand, only had to purchase the fish.  I also added some cabbage in for good measure.  The "vegetables" used were 1 carrot and a little shredded cabbage:

These were just poached in a little boiling water until tender, then dropped in the bottom of the serving bowl.
Next steps were to prepare the remaining ingredients (read the full recipe here):

I had to clean and filet the fish; remember I got a discount for doing this myself.  Here are the remains:

As always, we use every part of the buffalo (or fish) in this household, so those scraps were buried in the garden, which will use that nitrogen to make more food later this year.  You'll notice all "clean bones" parts were removed and added to the dish.  I don't care for picking out scales, so I rarely use the skin, fins, head, etc... in an actual dish unless I can be sure to strain out the scales afterwards, or be 100% confident that no scales are going into the dish.  If you don't like picking out bones, either, well, just put that in your garden as well!
Here is the final dish!

I may have made it a tad too spicy.  Look at all that red oil at the surface!  OOOOH SO WONDERFUL!  The fish is tender but holds together, the veggies are infused with flavor, and I will have enough leftovers to feed me again at least twice.

Second: Breakfast This Morning!

On the schedule was rice pudding with coconut milk from my pantry and leftover rice from my fridge.  Turns out I was fresh out of coconut milk.  It's okay, there are two basic ways to make rice pudding: add a milk / dairy product and heat until the rice goes soft and creamy, or boil the rice in water until it goes soft and creamy and add an egg and dairy product and make a custard.  Since I had yogurt and eggs, I did the custard route.

The Recipe:

1 c pre-cooked rice
0.5 c yogurt (usually you would want cream or milk, but any dairy thing will do, including non-dairy milk substitutes; even sour cream works in a pinch, just up the sugar if you have to go this route)
1 egg
0.5 to 1 c trail mix
Vanilla, honey, salt, and other seasonings
Water

Add enough water to rice in a small saucepan to cover the rice, bring to a boil.  Continue to simmer and add water until the rice goes actually soft.  While this is going on, separate the dried fruit from the nuts in your trail mix.  Add the dried fruit to the boiling rice mix.  Roughly chop the nuts and toast them if yours is a "raw" trail mix.  Combine the yogurt and egg in a bowl, mix VERY well.  Add honey, vanilla, salt, and other seasonings to taste.  For me, about 1/4 tsp salt, 0.5 tsp vanilla, and 1 Tbsp honey was about right - but if you like it sweet or feel like you're not hitting every part of your tongue, add more salt.  For vanilla etc.., most people do this with like cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg, the general pumpkin pie spice mix.  I'm 100% not a fan of cinnamon in sweet things, so I stick to vanilla and honey.  Add enough water to thin it into something pourable but not fully liquid (should fully coat everything you mix it with, but should still pour).  Boil down the rice mix until it's mostly rice and fruit, very little water.  Add some ice cubes to cool it down so you don't scramble the egg when you add it.  Pour in the egg-yogurt mix, and reheat on medium, stirring constantly, until thickened, but don't boil because the egg will scramble out.  About 170 F is where you're looking to get.

Here are some photos:

First, I can't get away with this except for the fact that I have an over-abundance of dry goods procured on wicked sale.  This trail mix was gotten from Sprouts on a blow-out sale at something like $0.59/lb:

 Up close, you can see it is a mix of purple and golden raisins, cashews, almonds, and pistachios.

 Separating the mix shows it's about 50/50 nuts and fruit by volume.  Perfect!

 Rough chop the nuts:

 Boil down the fruit with the rice:

 Mix together the egg, yogurt, honey, and vanilla:

 While we're at it, since yogurt is on the menu for breakfast later this week, might as well prepare a sweetened yogurt for later!  This is in a 1-c canning jar with a wide mouth.  I try not to use plastic anymore if I can help it, for a whole host of reasons, and these jars have SO MANY USES!

 Okay, the rice and fruit mix is softened and mostly dry:

 Here's the thinned-down egg and yogurt mix.  I didn't mean to spill it, I'm just clumsy, but the photo nicely shows about what texture you want to get to.  Pourable and liquid, but thick enough to not really run all over the place.

 Nuts are toasted!

 After adding the custard to the rice and fruit, and cooking.  I ran the spoon through the mix to show how thick it is, but it didn't come out well in the photo.  There's a rice pudding Grand Canyon in the shadow.

 Now topped with nuts (I am going to stir these in for the most part):

 And that, right there, is a perfect breakfast!

Breakfast Recap:

I don't really love rice pudding in all honesty.  Same goes for French Toast, waffles, pancakes, and other sweet breakfasts.  They're good, sure.  Totally edible.  Preferable to other things, like natto, for sure, but some people LOVE rice pudding.  Given that I don't love it, I have no context for the upper end of the scale, and therefore I can merely rate this on at the top of the edible scale for sweet breakfasts.  It's not a donut (which I usually HATE), but it's also not fried rice (which I really like).  Yes, I will eat it again, but that's because I ALWAYS have leftover rice and I can't throw away good food anymore.  It's also basically a different preparation of "leftover rice with egg" of which I am sure we will have many examples of from multiple different cultures as we move through this experiment.  Perhaps it should be unsurprising that from Chinese congee to Korean bipimbap to Japanese rice porridge to British rice pudding that many cultures have found a way to combine yesterday's rice with this morning's fresh egg and call it breakfast!  (French Toast is just a way to combine stale bread from yesterday with this morning's fresh egg, so it fits the trend.  In fact, the custard mix we made for this recipe is the exact same one I would use for a French Toast if I had stale bread!  I'm sure there are countless other examples as well.)

Third: Dinner Tonight!

For dinner, we were planning to use up some of those carrots in a vegetable korma, courtesy of India.  We're really jetting around the globe with this post - first Sichuan province of China, then a very British rice pudding, and now to India, perhaps equal with Sichuan province in how to make otherwise not-very-enticing ingredients taste like pure heaven.  For this, I'm using as a base this recipe.  I didn't want to buy peppers, as they were expensive, and I found out all my potatoes were ready to plant in my garden rather than ready to eat.  As a compromise, I dug into my freezer and found some kabocha squash (hokkaido melon) and some zuchinni.  I also disagreed with the way the recipe online used spices - in an authentic preparation spices would have a very special treatment including specialized toasting and timing of addition.  As a compromise I found from my stocks 2 tsp curry powder, 1 tsp turmeric, 1 tsp garam masala (that I made, every house has it's own blend in India), 0.5 tsp ground coriander, 0.25 tsp cinnamon, 0.5 tsp ground cumin, 0.25 tsp ground cardamom.  These I added with the garlic/ginger mix because I wanted them to toast a little.  It's not perfect nor authentic, but it's a decent compromise.  Also, I found that I needed to add water with the tomato sauce to achieve a good enough consistency to actually allow the veggies to cook without the tomato sauce burning.

The Recipe:

• Korma: I followed this one with the caveats mentioned above.
• Rice
• 1 c basmati rice, dry
• 1 c water
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 star anise
• 6-10 allspice berries
• 1 small pinch safflower (not saffron, that is expensive)

Here's how it went!  First, the korma.  Sauteed the chopped onion in a little bit of ghee (clarified butter, where you basically pull all milk proteins away from the fat so the butter won't burn at a higher temperature).

Got them nice and brown:

 Then added spices, including garlic and ginger:

 These really should smell amazing before moving on.  I also added the jalapeno at this stage.

 Then I added the carrots and winter squash (kabocha), tomato sauce and water.

 "Well if you liked it then you should have put a lid on it," - otherwise it will burn.  Lids can be useful for things like kabocha that need a long time to cook.

 After adding the ground up cashews, the sauce thickened nicely, and I also unceremoniously dumped a pile of frozen zucchini on top.  This stuff cooks in 2 seconds, especially from frozen, which is why I didn't add it earlier.

Now it's ready for cream!

 And that is the final dish!  Isn't it glorious?!!

Now for the rice.  I have a rice cooker, so I just washed the rice about 3x in a lot of water, then added the cooking water and spices:

When it was done:

Tossed with a fork and ready to serve!

The Commentary

That was actually a really easy dish.  A tad prep-intense for a weeknight, but wonderful for a lazy Sunday when I could watch the Food Network while chopping onions and peeling carrots, etc..  It does taste like comfort food heaven.  This is how cinnamon was intended to be used, my friends.  My only fault with this recipe is now I have about a gallon of korma.  I hadn't intended to eat korma, and only korma, all week, and didn't plan my purchasing accordingly.  I also still have Sichuan boiled fish leftovers from last night.  I think we're looking at an unfortunate major re-plan of the week's meals to accommodate these oversights.  Ramen may not be happening to us this week, and breakfasts may be korma.

Food Prep!

In any case, I will not make it through the week without some general prep for those work nights when I come home late and have limited time to cook.  In retrospect, my focus on preparing for cooking future meal (shredding carrots, marinating ramen eggs, etc...) may have been misguided.  Also, I picked up 3 pounds of strawberries for $3.00, and those go bad as soon as you look at them.  

Strawberries

First, I cleaned and froze the strawberries.  I use these in smoothies, and have learned from experience that if you freeze things in a bag or box, you get a block of frozen thing, not something easy to pull out just what you need, so I laid these out on a sheet tray before freezing:

These strawberries aren't that awesome for eating fresh, but I did clean some for breakfast tomorrow and a snack today.  They have a sub-par texture and not much sweetness.

Ranch Dressing

I mostly run off a recipe from the Pioneer Woman for my ranch dressing since the horrific incident of 2012 (see prior post for details).  Basically, it's a large bit of mayonnaise, a smaller but still large bit of sour cream, mixed together with spices added.  Ree uses fresh garlic in hers, but I find it makes the dressing a bit too hot for my tastes, so I use only dried or roasted garlic in mine.  For this version of what is actually a glorified aioli, I used a tsp of Worcestershire, a tsp of dried powdered garlic, a pinch of dried dill, a tsp of hot sauce, a minced green onion, and a handful of fresh herbs from my garden including sage, thyme, and oregano.  These I mixed all together, and then added salt and white vinegar until it tasted right on a cucumber.  A dressing has to be a little powerful to taste right on its intended target, so I find it best to always do taste tests with something you would use the dressing on.  It turned out heavenly.

I've already eaten this down a bit.  I only made a pint or so.

General Food Prep

Well, I shredded carrots and cabbage in prep for salads and noodles.  Same for soft boiled eggs for ramen (currently marinating in soy sauce and mirin), and hard boiled eggs for a salad later in the week.  I prepped lunch for tomorrow, which is a greek salad with the leftover chicken thighs that I sliced thin and canned, a bit of hummus, some of the ranch dressing (come on, it's really an herbed sour cream mayonnaise sauce), and a wedge of lemon.

I kept the toppings separate from the main salad (just lettuce, jalapeno, green onion, cucumber, and tomato) because lettuce starts to fail miserably the second you load it up with oils and vinegars.  It's more tiny jars to wash, but I have a dishwasher, so YAY!!

I also want to reiterate a couple things.  First, I couldn't do this without a well-stocked (if disorganized) pantry.

I also can't do this without some thoughts to making sure every part of everything finds a use in my kitchen and not in a landfill.  The best way to cut costs, after all, is to actually use every bit of everything you buy.  Food waste goes into the garden - you already saw my fishy get buried, here are the kitchen scraps for the compost:

I even started saving freezer bags.  These things are SO EXPENSIVE if you look at them on a per-item basis, they add $0.10 to $0.15 to food products when I use them, and if you saw my budget on the last post, that's anywhere from 10% to 100% of the cost of a single food item.  They're also bad for the environment (microplastics are everywhere).  OKAY it's a little crazy to reuse a disposable, but it's allergy season and I'm using a million tissues and I hate taking out the trash.

Really, all my eco-hippy ways of "reduce, reuse, recycle" come down to one fundamental principle: I REALLY HATE TAKING OUT THE TRASH.  I would rather go bury a fish skeleton in my back yard than take out the trash.  I have a problem.  Fortunately, it's an easily-justifiable problem if I look outside the neurosis itself to higher matters.

Final Synopsis

It was a good day.  I'm going to wind up with a lot more meals off my $34 dollars than originally planned or anticipated.  Things are looking up for this project.

Leftover Roundup

• Leftovers used up
• 1 c rice
• 1 c hot and sour soup
• Lots of carrots (these aren't leftovers, just so much a surplus they belong in this category)
• Leftovers created
• 4 c Sichuan boiled fish (dinner yesterday)
• 1 c rice pudding (breakfast today)
• 2 qts vegetable korma (dinner today)

Leftovers are net moving correctly, old things are being turned into other things, but overall a net positive in leftover accumulation.  We'll have to work on this in the coming days.