Jenn's blog

I do my best to stick to a grocery budget of $50/week to feed 2 adults and 1 nursing toddler. Still there’s quite a bit of food lurking in my pantry, freezer, and root cellar. So for the next few weeks I’m going to do a Pantry Challenge, inspired by Good Cheap Eats. I’ll be inventorying the pantry, freezer, and storage vegetables today.

Pantry Challenge Steps

• Inventory food
• Plan meals to utilize food already in the house
• Check grocery store fliers for deals on ingredients that we either are going to use this week or that we use frequently
• Make smart choices at the grocery stores.

What do you do to stay on top of your pantry?

A few years ago I acquired my grandfather’s recipe for ginger beer. We’ve kept a 5 gallon keg of it in the house ever since. It doesn’t taste like ginger ale, our ginger beer is lemony as well as gingery, and the recipe has been tweaked over the years to make it suit our tastes.

I’m posting this recipe tonight because of a remarkably active Facebook thread. I wanted a gin & tonic tonight, but when I got out the gin (Death’s Door, it’s local and the botanical flavor is delightful) I found that I was out of tonic water. I had seltzer but no simple syrup and almost no lime juice, so a gimlet was out too. Then I remembered a post on A Bit of Butter about a cocktail called a Horse’s Neck which was ginger ale, gin (or whiskey), and lemon. I’d tried my own interpretation of that as gin and ginger beer. So I put 1.5 ounces of gin into a glass with ice and toddled down to the basement to fill the rest of the glass with ginger beer. It needed a little something more so I put a squirt of key lime juice in, and it was good. My friend Ian tells me that I actually made a Shady Grove cooler. Whatever it’s called it was good.

Ginger Beer

• 16 ounces of ginger, shredded
• 4 lbs lemons, juice and zest
• 4 lbs sugar
• water to make 5 gallons

Boil the ginger, lemons, sugar, and water to fit in your pot for 45 minutes. Strain it create your syrup.

What we do at that point is pour it into a 5 gallon Cornelius keg, make up the rest of the volume with water and force carbonate it. Those of you who don’t have a kegerator at home, I’d suggest diluting with seltzer water, but bear in mind that I haven’t tried this.

We don’t eat a whole lot of meat around here. We like meat, don’t get me wrong, but we prefer meat that has been raised humanely and organically, and that means it’s pricey. So we eat a lot of beans, lentils, and tofu.

Lately I’ve been trying different lentil loaf and veggie burger recipes, and I think I’ve found a lentil loaf that suits our tastes. In a great moment of serendipity I noticed that Mark Bittman’s veggie burger recipe and my Mum’s old La Leche League meatloaf recipe had most of their ingredients in common. I loved that old meatloaf recipe, but it’s not kosher and “a pound of ground” isn’t as cheap as it was in 1980. So I adapted it to use lentils instead of ground beef. One of the nice things about this recipe is that it’s very flexible. Tonight I’ll be subbing in some rice because I’ve got lentils & rice left over from a Thanksgiving dish. Last week I threw in a bunch of shredded carrots, and they blended in beautifully. Be aware, though, that the loaf doesn’t hold together all that well. It works fine on a plate but it might not work so well in a sandwich.

Jenn’s Lentil Loaf

• 3-4 cups of cooked lentils
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1/2 cup rolled oats or bread crumbs (I always use oats. Bread is for eating!)
• 1 egg
• 1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce or a squirt of ketchup
• Salt to taste

Combine all ingredients except the Worcestershire sauce in a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the sauce with a light hand so that your mixture doesn’t get too sloppy.

Put it in a greased loaf pan and cover with foil. Bake at 350°F for 30 minutes covered and then 20-30 uncovered.

This week my husband has been working late on a paper deadline and my toddler has a stomach bug. This has left me cooking dinner for one. It is very tempting to eat bachelor food, but in fact I’ve cooked dinner almost every night. Last night I made my old standby, roast squash and greens.

Tonight’s dinner was inspired by my two favorite cookbook authors, Mark Bittman and Arthur Schwartz. I had homemade veggie burgers with oven fried potatoes and chocolate pudding. Bittman’s basic bean burger always comes out very wet when I try it, but thankfully I have a cousin’s old George Forman grill. Slide those patties onto the cook surface and they don’t have to move until they’re good and solid. I made them with lentils (cheap and fast to cook, I always have lentils in the pantry) and have enough for a second meal. There were hamburger buns in the freezer, otherwise I was thinking of putting the patties on toast and melting a little cheese on top.

The potato recipe has been in my kitchen long enough to shift away from the original recipe in Bittman’s book, and become my own. I slice potatoes into wedges, 1-2 potatoes per person, and toss them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I put them in a 425F oven for 20-30 minutes, until they’re golden brown and tasty. Some nights, like tonight, I toss the potatoes with seasoning blends from Penzey’s Spices, but really kosher salt and fresh pepper is the best.

I had a hankering for chocolate and I noticed a few cans of evaporated milk in the pantry. I immediately thought of chocolate pudding. Of course, looking around the pantry my ingredients weren’t perfect. My recipe called for milk and I wanted to save the regular milk for breakfast tomorrow. The can of evap was 12 fl oz and the recipe called for 20 fl oz. In retrospect I should have made up the rest with water and continued on. Instead I tried to make 3/5 of the recipe, which is a pain in the neck when the sugar, corn starch, and cocoa all are in 1/4 cup increments. I did my best, but I ended up with a pudding that solidifed before it cooled and turned gummy once it did cool. You live and learn. I have to say, though, that when done correctly this is one of the easiest desserts ever. Just Google for “chocolate pudding with corn starch”; this recipe has been around for generations.

Next week is Thanksgiving and since it’s an even year, I’m hosting. Thanksgiving can seem like a complicated cooking holiday, but the fixed menu is so easy. The key is cooking the casseroles ahead so that they can be rewarmed in the oven while the turkey rests. Thanksgiving dinner is a variant on the basic roast meat and two veg dinner that I learned to cook as a child. Roast the turkey, boil and mash some potatoes and sweet potatoes, roast some extra veg, serve with rolls. Even the cranberry sauce is relatively easy. I just need to work out a schedule for cooking stuff ahead next week so I can get it all done even with Danny tugging on my leg.