Guys. How good is guacamole? Like so good. Guacamole is more delicious than ten tiny tin dragon statuettes used for table top gaming. I’m serious here.

My constant dilemma, throughout the course of my entire life, has been that store bought gucamole is teh sux. This was compounded by the fact that no human being could possible fabricate this ambrosia with the mere sweat of their brow (and presumably avocados).

Well imagine my surprise when, just like roasting a red pepper, guacamole is embarrassing simple. I’m going to give you two recipes here, below is the first:

• Avocados

Cut the avocado in half, remove the seed, and scoop the flesh into a bowl. Mash up the avocados with a fork. THAT IS IT. The ancient Mexican secret of guacamole has been unearthed from the equatorial bowels of Mexico.

Or you can be insane and follow this guacamole authentico recipe. It is trés authentico.

• 4 ripe avocados, peeled, seeded
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 ripe, medium Roma tomato, seeded, diced — i used a handful of cherry tomatoes
• 1/2 cup minced sweet white onion
• as much jalapeño as you feel comfortable with — i used 1/4 of a pepper
• 4 Tbsp fresh lime juice
• salt and pepper

I also added:

• so much garlic I thought I would die (5-10 tsp)

Mash all this up in a bowl and you’ve got delicious guacamole. Again, as is the theme with stuff I make, this recipe is extremely forgiving. Just throw in what you have laying around or what moves you.

WIU data

• Was the recipe easy to follow: This is easier than Suze’s pancakes. Don’t listen to her. SHE IS A LIAR.
• Did the dish taste good: Of course! Avocados are the gods’ ovaries. How could they not taste good. Furthermore how could any of their byproducts not taste good?
• Would you make it again: Yes, yes, and yes. I wish I had an avocado tree so bad.

My mother went to the Williamsburg Pottery the other day and brought back a cornucopia of hermetic glass jars. It was as if an ark ran aground in my kitchen and debarked jars — in pairs of two! Now I have two liter, one liter, and half liter jars plus a twelve pack of Ball jars.

This is a lot of jars.

As you can see I’ve filled a couple with my three types of bourgeois popcorn and two types of flour. They look really splendid on the shelf. The reduced clutter in my pantry is great: no more boxes of this or saggy plastic bags of that. I’m also looking forward to my brown sugar not drying out.

The problem is that not everything comes in quantities that fit exactly in a French-made hermetic glass jar. This means I now have a jar of flour as well as a bag of flour, which is a sonofabitch. So I’m looking for solutions. Any ideas?

Things I’ve but in jars so far: two types of flour, three types of popcorn, brown sugar, regular sugar, raisins, bread crumbs, and cornflakes. I know, wtf, cornflakes. There is an excellent way to use these darn things, I am sure of it. The idea is floating, out there, amongst the aether waiting to be caught and exploited. Someone smarter and more organized than myself figure it out and let me know.

Oh also, I need a good labeling method.

This is really going to be useful to Richmonders only (and Richmonders who shop at Kroger Carytown) (and Richmonders who read this) (meaning Ross), but since I look at the Kroger weekly ad every Sunday morning and pick out things that are on sale that look like they could play a part in my upcoming week of health-conscious meals, I thought maybe The People might be interested in knowing about it.

A tip before you go - I’ve noticed that a lot of sale prices that say in the ad that they’ll expire in a week actually last an extra week at least.

The People’s Sale Items for 4/13/08-4/19/08

This week is a light week for Kroger shopping - lots of produce, very little meat. This works out for me, in a coincidental way that you don’t care about, because I happen to be both in possession of a freezer full of leftover chicken, steak, and turkey burgers and also, I am broke.

But enough about me.

Check out:
Mushrooms (packs of whole or sliced for $2)
English cucumbers ($1 each) - I made Cucumber-Radish Slaw recently, and I recommend it. Easy, healthyish side.
Strawberries (both regular and organic are on sale, $3.33/pack and $2.50/pack, respectively
Avocadoes ($1 each) - I’ve been thinking EVERY SINGLE DAY about these Beef Tacos with Radish and Avocado Salsa that I made last week. Also a good way to use up extra steak and those radishes I made you buy for the slaw
Tomatoes ($2/lb)
Bartlett pears ($1/lb) - I plan to make Pear with Honey and Pecans, even though what I really want to make is Custard Pie
Texas sweet onions (69c each)
Cantaloupe ($1.50 each)
Tyson 100% all natural giant whole chicken (49c/lb) - I don’t know what to do with this except feed eight people, and since I only am responsible for feeding two people, I’m going to pass, but you might be interested…IN INVITING ME OVER.

Nothing else is good enough for you. Defrost some meat and get cooking.

Get that slaw into you!

(Also for those unable to give up the habit, Diet Coke is on sale for $3.33 a 12 pack.)

This is the single best thing I buy at the store each week: a giant box of baby spinach. Each week hundreds of spinach babies are plucked from life, from their mother’s leafy wombs, and packed into a cold plastic coffin destined to my refrigerator. From there I consume their pure stainless souls.

Take note, this is a different product than the frozen rectangular prisms of spinach you may be used to buying.

Four excellent things about baby spinach in a box

• This stuff keeps forever, literally. No, not literally, figuratively. But still, it keeps in my fridge for about a week. When was the last time a mere bag of leafy greens kept that long?
• Spinach is a superfood! — whatever that means! Listen, The People, I am not a nutritionist or a dietitianist. I do, however, know several and hope that when I say something stupid they will mock me until I cry. Regardless, NutritionData.com can drop some spinach knowledge on you. Spinach is great at: Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and iron. Iceberg lettuce sucks at everything.
• It is, relatively, cheap! A box, depending on the sales at Kroger, costs between three and four dollars.
• The box it comes in is made from corn? This actually might be terrible considering … [insert boring corn/ethanol diatribe].

The uses for that box of spinach are innumerable, countless, infinite! I use a good bit of it making side salads to go with our meals: spinach, walnuts, cheese, raisins, balsamic vinegar. You can also substitute spinach for anything calling for crappy ol’ lettuce. Or, just throw it in whatever you’ve got going on in your skillet, it’ll cook down and taste delicious.

Tofu looks disgusting. See:

Let’s be honest, pressing coagulated soybean curds into a lumpy misshapen block is never going to yield something worth looking at. But, luckily, just like anything else: add some green things, cover it with enough sauce, and you’ve got something deliciously appetizing — to both eye and tongue (just like your mom!).

Two good things about tofu

First, tofu is “chock full” of protein. Using the bad ass Nutrition Data website you’ll see that tofu is about 16% protein. Compare that to chicken breast which is 31% protein. Not too bad for a block of mush that sits in a bin of liquid at Ellwood Thompson.

Second, tofu is cheap, dawg. At Ellwood Thompson — where tofu lives in the aforementioned tub of fluid — the stuff goes for 1.29$/lb. Try to get the flesh of a dead animal for that price. I DARE YOU UNLESS IT IS HORSE OR MAYBE A DOG.

One bad thing about tofu

Tofu might give men dementia?

A mildly simple recipe involving tofu

Things you’ll need:

• 2 teaspoons cornstartch
• 1 1/2 tablespoons rice vinegar (or any vinegar at all)
• 2 tablespoons rice wine (or white wine)
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• a bunch of broccoli
• some tofu

Mix everything but the tofu and broccoli together in a bowl. Cut up the tofu into whatever shape you find appealing — I like long skinny pieces. Cut up the broccoli in pieces small enough to fit in your mouth. Dump all of the tofu into your bowl and make sure to coat each piece with the sauce.

Put about a table spoon of olive oil (or however much looks right) in the bottom of a pan. If you’re feeling crazy throw some minced garlic in there. Now dump the tofu in and pan fry that bitch until it starts to get brown (about 5-10mins). Once you are thoroughly satisfied with the brownness of your tofu add the broccoli and the rest of the sauce. You did keep the sauce didn’t you?

BE VIGILANT!

The sauce, due to the cornstarch, will star to thicken instantly. Stir everything around to coat it with the now thickening and bubbling sauce — try not to break up the tofu. After the broccoli is cooked to you’re liking, your done.

Easy enough.

When I make dinner I usually spill about a third of it on the counter and a third of it on the stove top. This, understandably, pisses Valerie off. Before, back when the bright ray of environmental knowledge had yet to light upon my life, I would grab about six hundred paper towels and valiantly sop up whatever I could. This cost us a lot of money and, more importantly, the souls of a thousand trees.

So we bought a billion towels! My mom picked up 60 white cotton towels at Costco for 16.95$! That’s 0.28$ per towel! Those Seventh Generation paper towels can cost as much as .02$ per towel, and they only last once. You can reuse these cotton towels hundreds of times.

Of course a modern urban socialite like yourself doesn’t need 60 towels. Splitting a pack of towels like this with three or even six people would leave everyone with plenty for only a couple of bucks.

Sharing bulk packages like this is the way to go.

No! Not chocolate chip cookies! Meringue cookies are what the People need! They are easy, cheap, and this recipe’s cookies only have 23 calories each!

23 calories!!

Do you understand how little that is? That is like a carrot stick. Sure, they are empty calories that don’t do anything for you at all, but either something like this is around the house, or your resistant “I’m used to buying packaged crap” significant others will buy something that is sure to give you cancer. Plus, we’re in a recession, jeez. Why pay to get cancer?*

MOCHA-CHIP MERINGUES from the “light” issue of Everyday Food (Jan/Feb 2008)

These took no time to get together, and if you bake at all, you will have this stuff in the house, with the exception of maybe the instant espresso powder, but hey get rid of it if you want, then you’ll just have chocolate-chocolate-chip meringues, and that sounds good to me too. Unfortunately, a stand mixer might be necessary.

makes about three dozen

Ingredients:

1/4 c. sugar
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
3 large egg whites, room temperature (don’t cheat on this part)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder
2 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup (approx) semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper, set aside.

2. In a small bowl, whisk together sugar and cornstarch, set aside.

3. In a large bowl, use an electric mixer to beat egg whites and salt(with the whisk attachment if you’re using a KitchenAid) on medium speed until very frothy. Beating constantly, add sugar mixture 1 tablespoon at a time. Beat until stiff, glossy peaks form, 6 to 8 minutes total (scrape down the bowl halfway through). [This took me a lot longer, but I think it’s because I put the sugar in too soon.]

4. Add espresso powder and cocoa, beat until well blended. With a rubber spatula, fold in chocolate chips.

5. Drop batter in rough tablespoon sizes onto prepared sheets. Martha and company have perfect little half domes, but they cheated and piped it with a pastry bag, I can tell. Who cares how they look, they will be eaten in like five seconds.

6. Bake until crisp, about 40 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through. Cool completely on sheets, about 20 minutes.

Store them in a container. Just do it.

(Not the People’s cookie.)

*I don’t actually know that Fig Newtons will give you cancer, but they are so delicious and artificial tasting, that they are probably not great for you somehow.

I have these really nice steel All-Clad pans that are a pleasure to work with; they were a wedding present and probably cost 1B dollars. I assume that if my stove was not a piece of shit I’d have lots of pleasant memories of gently sautéing this or that. But truth is my stove slants, the burners suck, and my life is filled with other similarly first world problems.

Also, did you know that Teflon® is a health risk when heated to over 500°F? Not that you are going to ever cook anything at that temperature, unless you suck at cooking, but still.

Plus the afore mentioned All-Clad frying pan is like 14 inches in diameter and is really way to big for when you want to fry an egg. So many problems. Solution: I bought a cast iron pan. It cost 17$.

AND IT TOTALLY ROCKS!

Listen people. First, if you care, the cast iron distributes the heat so evenly that my shit stove no longer burns bacon on one side. Hurrah!

Second, and more importantly, you just wipe the pan out when you are done. That’s it. It is actually against the rules to use soap/detergent on a cast iron pan. If, by some chance, you forgot to flip your grilled cheese because you were enthralled in The Wire and now it’s formed a molecular bond with the bottom of your skillet, WORRY NOT. I just boil some water in the bottom of the pan*. Boom, problem solved. Read more about caring for cast iron cookware.

Cheap, reliable, easy to clean. What more could you ask for?

* Don’t pour cold water in a hot pan, you’ll crack it.

There are three things that I need often enough to buy in their awkwardly sized packaging but don’t need often enough to use the whole thing before it spoils. You can pat yourself on the back for finding tomato paste for $0.99, but if you only use one teaspoon of it and have to throw the rest of it away, just to spend $0.99 on it again when you need the next teaspoon, you are doing yourself and the environment a disservice that is EASY TO RECTIFY!

Shall we begin? (Before we do, stop reading this and go buy some ice cube trays if you don’t have some already. They are hard to find now, but your grocery store should still have them.)

1. Tomato paste - buy in a handy, resealable tube, as pictured. Tomato paste can be stored indefinitely in the fridge in said tube, and you can buy a bunch at a time on Amazon (for less than $2 a tube) since one tube at a time is a little pricier (between $3 and $4). Alternatively, you can buy tomato paste in cans on the cheap, stick teaspoon-sized dollops on a sheet of wax paper, freeze it, stick in a plastic bag, store in the freezer, and thaw when you need them, but that seems like a lot of work to me.

2. Chicken/vegetable/beef stock - I hardly ever need the four cups that come in the nice cardboard box of organic stock, and since it’s pretty pricey to buy that box, I like to make sure I’m not buying it every five seconds. Use five days after opening??? Please! Freeze that stuff in 1/4 cup increments in an ice cube tray, pop them out when frozen, stick in a bag, store in the freezer.

3. The ice cube tray method is also my favorite way of getting rid of basil, since I’m sorry, I don’t grow my own. I live in a tiny apartment with two cats who will immediately eat anything green, and my Kroger for some reason only sells giant packs of basil at once. Also lucky people with gardens tend to foist a ton on me during basil season. Make pesto according to your favorite recipe (use walnuts instead of pine nuts for a cheaper, more stable version), spoon into the ice cube tray. Then when you are especially broke, you pry one out, sit it in a bowl while you boil some pasta, toss with the pesto and a spoonful of the pasta water, and you have a meal. Single serving cheap goodness.

4. Buttermilk - I bake a lot - biscuits and pancakes and that kind of thing are super cheap, easy breakfasts to make. A lot of the time they require buttermilk, but buttermilk is always sold in huge things that expire in like a week. Also, that means it’s never around when you spontaneously need it, and who PLANS to get up on a Sunday morning and make biscuits. My mom gets around this by adding a tablespoon of acid (i.e. lemon juice or white vinegar) to a cup of milk and letting it sit for a few minutes. I’m not convinced this actually works as well as actual buttermilk (it certainly doesn’t smell as tangy), and the whole point of buttermilk is some sort of chemical reaction. Therefore, I believe Cook’s Illustrated when they tell me that powdered buttermilk works just as well if not better than store-bought buttermilk, keeps indefinitely, and will be around when you randomly decide to make Irish soda bread (below). You can get it in bulk at Amazon, and you might have to since it’s kind of difficult to find (although my friend Kelly just emailed me to say she got it at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart!! Who knew!), but it keeps forever and will save you money. Don’t confuse it with buttermilk blends - those are mixes for pancake making, etc.

I am obsessed with tips like these. I collect them like they are Hummels. Cook’s Illustrated magazine is chock full of them, if you are interested in that kind of thing. They told me to let my bread rise in a crock pot insert. And now I do. I feel like an idiot admitting that that excites me.

Val loves Doritos. But, let’s be completely honest everyone loves Doritos. To be utterly honest, I love anything that’s got brightly colored packaging and xtreme slogans. The problem with food like that, other than it completely fatifies you, is that it cost 3 – 4$ a pop. Too much for my meager budget, I’ll tell you that right now. (PS. It is really meager).

Here are two things I make that are absurdly cheap — like, third world cheap — and delicious.

Hummus

Hummus is da bomb, yo. It is so easy, forgiving, and — most importantly — cheap. You can eat it on practically anything: pita, stale bread, fresh bread, vegetables, chicken, or anything you can scoop with. It is versatile, comrade. A big tub of hummus, the good stuff, costs around five bucks. You can make your own for under one single greenback. I follow this recipe as a starter and add whatever tickles my fancy — tonight it was cumin. Seriously, it takes about ten minutes.

Two things. First you’ll need some sort of automated food chopping device — either a blender or food processor. Second, tahini is going to cost you. Sure it’ll run you 6 – 8$, but you be able to make your weight in hummus with it.

Popcorn

Did you know Orville Redenbacher runs the world’s largest corn racket from the bottom of his icy cold grave? There is no reason you should ever pay more than 0.25$ for a giant bowl of popcorn. Buy popcorn — like, the kernels — and pop it your damn self. It takes ten minutes, and you can pour REAL BUTTER AND SALT on it. It seems fairly obvious to me.

For a super fun time put some paprika on the finished product and call it a day.