SRIRACHA ROASTED CHICKEN!

Get chicken pieces.  Butcher your own chicken, whatever I don’t care, just leave the skin on.  Put the chicken in an ungreased pan, skin side up.  For the sauce?  glaze?  I really don’t know what to call it, just do this:

1 stick of FULL FAT BUTTER, OKAY?  OKAAAAY?

2 tbsp sriracha

1 tsp chili paste

1/4 cup honey

1 tsp salt

3 large cloves garlic

Soften the butter, pop the cloves in the mic for about 20 seconds, push them through a garlic press on top of the butter, mix in everything else, and lay it on top of your chicken.  Cook for about 45 minutes at 400 degrees.

This will be spicy, so put your diapers on.

SUPER EASY SCONES

You’ll need:

2 cups all purpose flour

2 eggs

3/4 stick butter (I used light butter)

3 tsp baking powder

2 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

Preheat your oven to 400.

Mix all of your dry ingredients together, then add the eggs.  Crumble up your butter with a fork, and add that.  Mix together the dry ingredients, eggs and butter crumbles.  Sprinkle your countertop with flour.  Scoop out your dough (which should be flaky) and form it into a 1 inch disc.  Place the disc on a cookie sheet (greased or dusted with flour) and score the disc with a knife before you put it into the oven.  Sprinkle with sugar (optional).  Bake for 15 minutes.  Serve with butter and jam.

gamesockson:

haguenite:

I actually don’t like feta. Sad, I know. BUT! I have a favourite artery clogger.

Necessities:
Brie
Egg
Breadcrumbs
Oiled up/buttered up skillet

Spread out the breadcrumbs on a plate. Beat the egg and leave it in a dish. Cut the brie into large, but reasonably bite-sized chunks.

Dip the brie chunks in the egg mixture. Make sure egg is covering every side. Then dip the brie chunks in the bread crumbs, making sure that the crumbs are evenly sticking to the egg.

Place the brie chunks in the hot skillet. Carefully flip until all sides are brown.

Enjoy your gooey bites of instant heart attack.

2 large eggs

2 C flour

pinch of salt

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** it’s a one to one ratio, so adjust the dough for either quantity or style of pasta you’d like to make.

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Pour flour out on dry surface. Make a well in the flour, crack the eggs

Stir the eggs into the flour with a fork

Knead, by hand, the eggy flour mixture until combined and smooth

Evenly divide the dough into 4 separate sections and roll out on your surface.

(many people now switch to the pasta maker, but since we don’t have one, we used a rolling pin)

Roll the dough carefully until very thin and then cut into the preferred shapes. We cut eveything into squares for assembly into raviolis. You can do this for any pasta shape.

Repeat with the 3 other sections

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Ravioli Fillings

Since we’re doing the budget cooking and trying to keep things as inexpensive as possible, we combined our dinner nights. It was International Night, which minisparks chose to be Italian, and we did Leftovers Night and used anything already in the frig for the fillings for the raviolis.

Pot Roast Filling

bubba tore up the remainders of last week’s pot roast and added some crushed tomatoes and salt and pepper.

Greens and goat cheese Filling

We tore up a bag of greens (misc. cooking greens from our CSA), blanched them real fast, squeezed them dry, put them in a strainer and combined with salt and goat cheese.

When the raviolis were finished being cut by minisparks, we made an assembly line.

We lined cookie sheets with parchment paper and laid out the dough.

We took small scoops of filling, placed them on the bottom of the ravioli dough, then took the tops and covered everything. mini painted the edges with an egg wash and sealed them shut with a salad fork.

** OF NOTE - THIS TOOK A LONG TIME

While this was being assembled, bubba poured the rest of the crushed tomatoes into a pot and simmered them with onions, garlic, a little sage and salt and pepper.

We popped the raviolis into boiling, salted water for a few seconds, fished them out, and served them with the random tomato sauce.

Italian Leftover Night was painstakingly long but very delicious. Sheesh.

This was our dinner Sunday night.

It cost little or no money, since it was all leftovers.

However it was a huge pain in the ass because making homemade pasta, in this case, ravioli, is enough to drive people insane. bubba and mini were the main chefs this night, but I was there for assistance and, of course, documentation.

I’ll breakdown the ingredients in a separate post.

Mom’s Puffed Pancake

I didn’t get any sleep last night because of the loud pieces up shit that live under me, so after what little sleep I got, I woke up pissed off and hungry.  So obviously, I needed pancakes.  But not just any pancakes, no!  Mom’s puffed pancake.  This is so simple, cheap and it’s not even all that bad for you.  I ate one and I’m not pissed off OR hungry anymore!  Kinda tired, though.

What you’ll need:

4 eggs

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup milk (I used skim to lighten this up)

about 3 tbsp. salted butter (I use light butter, gasp!)

pinch of salt

casserole dish/large pie pan

What you’ll do:

Preheat your oven to 425.  Slice up the 3 tbsps of butter and put them in the bottom of your dish.  Hold onto your dish for a minute.  You’ll put it into the oven to melt the butter before you put the batter in there, but you don’t want it to burn, so don’t do it yet.

With a whisk, mix together the milk and the flour and your pinch of salt.  Make sure there are no lumps in it.  This is not your traditional pancake batter.  This is where I put the dish in the oven to melt the butter.  While the butter is melting, add your eggs to the batter and whisk it up reeeeaaalllll good.  Remove your dish with the melted butter from the oven, swish it around so the bottom and sides have butter on them, and pour in your batter.  Put this back in the oven for *about* 15 minutes.  Ovens vary.  Keep an eye on yours.  When the sides rise above the dish and the top is golden brown, then it’s done.  It will be extremely puffy as you pull it out of the oven, but it falls quickly (hence the undramatic picture) and that’s okay.  Serve your pancake with your favorite jam or maple syrup.  I also sprinkle just a tiny bit of sugar on mine.  This pancake will serve TWO.  If you want to make more, double the recipe but put it in two dishes, etc. You can also divy up the batter and put them into two smaller dishes to make individual servings.

Enjoy!

SO - The $10 challenge? rosasparks = EPIC FAIL.

I wanted to buy food that would feed my family dinner, plus last us the rest of the week. I chose a natural, non-organic chicken. At the regular ‘ole supermarket, the chickens were $2.99/pound, which is an AWESOME sale, but to feed all of us, I needed at least, a 4-5 pound chicken.

SUCKA, there goes my budget. But, I buy a TON of my dried foods in bulk, belong to a CSA and determined that while my chicken was $12, the rest of my food made the total go to about $15. I’ll eat that $5. GET IT?

Anyway, it was French night at our house, so I decided to roast the whole bird and go with some salad vert and cous cous with olives. The olives and cous cous are in bulk, the salad is from our CSA.

Roast chicken

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Remove the innards pouch

Wash and dry the bird - preheat oven to 450 degrees.

No need to truss or tie the bird up, just place on rack and roast in a sizeable pan

Fully cover with spices and salt and pepper. I chose Herbes de Provence. You choose what you like.

Drizzle with olive oil

Turn oven to 350 degrees. Roast in oven, 20 minutes per pound.

Chicken is done when juices run clear

Cous cous with Calamata olives

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The measurement for cous cous is a 1 to 1.5 cous cous to water ratio. I find that I don’t measure exactly and drain the cous cous, like pasta, when it’s ready.

I chopped some pitted Calamata olives, which I buy from the supermarket deli, and added them to the pot when the cous cous was finished. I added a pat of butter.

Salad Vert - I don’t tend to make exact measurements for salad dressing, as everyone has very different tastes, but this is my best guess.

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Wash and thoroughly dry greens

In the bottom of a large mixing bowl

Mix 1.5 Tablespoons of olive oil

1/2 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar

Add salad greens and toss (heh)

Cut one slice of lemon and squeeze over greens

This was my 10 dollar challenge.  My goal was to get 5 meals out of this 10 dollars so I could eat decently during the week.  Also, my ass is BROKE.  No more 10 dollar lunches, bitches!  I can cook too well for that, and you know as well as I do that lunches are A) expensive and B) usually unhealthy.  So that brings us to my project:  5 meals for 10 bucks.  All this shit up in here cost me only $9.95!

SPICY PAN SEARED PORK CHOPS WITH AN APPLE AND ONION SALSA, SAUTEED KALE AND ROSEMARY ROASTED POTATOES!

What you’ll need:

1 dozen little red potatoes

5 pork chops

2 large bunches of kale

4 apples

1 large onion

6 cloves of garlic

1 inch ginger root

salt

black pepper

cayenne pepper

honey

dried rosemary

olive oil

STEP 1:  Preheat your oven to 425.  Rinse off your potatoes.  Slice those bitches up, EVENLY.  You don’t want them to cook at different speeds.  Toss them in a bowl, and drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle in some salt and rosemary, and toss.  Throw these onto a baking sheet, spinkle with salt again, and into the oven they go, for 25-30 minutes.  Keep an eye on them.  Do not let them burn.  About 15 minutes in, give the potatoes a good turn.  They should be golden brown on at least 1 side when they are done.

STEP 2:  Prep your apple and onion salsa.  Peel the apples and dice them up.  Toss these into an ungreased frying pan.  Take that onion you’ve got and cut in in half.  Take one half, and dice it up.  Put the other half aside.  Throw this into the same pan.  Grab your ginger.  You can dice it up finely or you can grate it.  Either way, it gets added to the pan.  Spinkle some salt on this, and then drizzle the whole pile with honey.  IF you don’t have honey (that’s cray-cray) then use sugar or brown sugar.  Put your burner on high, and bring this whole thing up to a sizzle, and then turn it down to medium.  Leave here simmering for about 15 minutes.

STEP 3:  Prep for the kale sautee.  RINSE YOUR KALE WELL or you’ll be eating dirt.  You don’t want to do that, do you?  Nope.  Remove all the big fatty stems from the kale leaves, and chop them up into bite size pieces.  This will give you like a huge amount of chopped kale.  You won’t be able to fit it all into your pot at one time.  That’s okay.  Put in there what you can, and then add the rest as it cooks down.  Take the other half of the onion, dice it up, and throw it in the pot.  Chop the 6 cloves up garlic up finely, and throw that in as well.  Drizzle a little olive oil over the whole thing, give it a good stir and bring the burner up to high.  Keep stirring and stirring until it’s all cooked down and all of your kale is in there.  Then, turn the heat down to low-medium, cover it, and let it simmer.  If you add water, it will help the kale cook, so please feel free to add just a little.  This is done when the kale turns bright green.  It takes about 5 minutes.

STEP 4:  Grab your pork chops.  Season one side with salt, pepper and cayenne pepper.  Drizzle a frying pan with olive oil and get it nice and hot, but then turn the heat down to medium and THEN put the pork chops in, seasoned side down.  While those are cooking on that side, season the other side again with the salt, pepper and cayenne pepper.  Cook until golden brown.  Don’t overdo it- pork dries out easily.

STEP 5:  Portion everything out for your 5 meals, stick them in the freezer, and enjoy them whenever.  Or, you could do like I did, and portion out 4 meals, and enjoy one immediately.

Hey y’all,

rosasparks here. Samanthrax, Sammy if you’re nasty, and I have started a Tumblr about food. No, not a fancy-schmancy one. No, not one about Whole Foods or organic quinces, but about cooking on a budget, with or without access to Trader Joe’s.

Sammy’s got the sardonic single lady (all the single ladies!) thing and I’ve got the frazzled, where the fuck am I mom thing, so we know we represent totally different cooking situations and that’s kind of the point.

So, we’re going to use this space to experiment, talk shit on each other, laugh, cry, rage, and make good food. We hope you follow because you love food, too, and don’t have a lot of pennies and want to share your recipes with us.

A lot of the cooking blogs or shows we’ve seen use expensive, hard-to-find ingredients that can really up your grocery bill if you’re not careful.  We’re trying to keep our recipes as simple as possible, using ingredients any basic kitchen should have.

Onward and upwards, people! Let’s do this thing!