In what I hope will be a boring and tedious weekly post I bring you:

The Weekly CSA Harvest Report

They’ve gone and changed the system on me from last year! Previously, you could wake your ass up at 7.30 on a Saturday morning, drive down to the Bottom, and be presented with a list of vegetables and associated quantities to abscond with. Bleary-eyed, you’d stuff cucumber and squash into your sack and head back home for more sleep.

This year things work like my college meal plan: you start out at the beginning of the semester with a set amount of Veggie Dollars that disappear at the end of they year. Throughout the semester you must budget and use your VD wisely. If you aren’t careful you could end up, stuck, at the end of the year with too many VD’s.

No one wants this.

This week the good farmers at Victory Farms gifted us with:

• carrots
• easter egg radishes
• a nice salad mix
• arugula
• scallions

There were lots of types of greens, some spinach, and some broccoli rabe — of which I chose not to partake. Hopefully later I’ll write a post about why CSA’s (community supported agriculture) are awesome.

But in the mean time, anyone know any good carrot recipes?

I have a fatigue, an extreme tiredness: I cannot seem to call forth, from the deep well of my soul, the desire to painstakingly craft a weekly menu. Typically, I do these things on Saturday and then head to the store — along with the rest of Richmond (Carytown Kroger for life!) — on Sunday evening. Recently, on Saturdays I find myself either sleeping or drinking beer and then sleeping. I wake up on Sunday and imagine my surprise when nary a menu exists!

This is not good! Especially when your pregnant wife is happily eating tater tots every time you turn your back.

You can usually tell the level of my menuetic apathy by the level of side dish complexity.

Side Dish Complexity vs. Apathy*

Luckily, I save all my menus from previous weeks. This makes the process of culling recipes from your mind so much simpler in that you don’t; you cull them from a bunch of text files saved on your computer. This hardly leads to a week full of extravagantly new tastes and sensations, but it gets the job done with minimal work. And while your pregnant wife might yammer on about chicken making her want to barf you can rest assured that your foetus is getting the protein it needs to grow a toe or something.

* it took me about four times as long to make the chart as to write this entry.

I look through the Kroger Carytown Weekly Ad so you don’t have to.

Items of note:

• 1/2 gal of Kroger milk - $2
• but why buy that when you can buy Private Selection organic milk for $2.99!
• Kroger brand frozen vegetables - $1 (I’m not sure this is a great deal, plus they didn’t have artichokes, which I needed, but if you’re low on peas or whatever, go to!)
• Private Selection organic canned beans - $0.66 (make some hummus, best snack ever)
• Various kinds of Hunts canned tomatoes are on sale for various prices, but stop by the natural section also, because a bunch of Muir Glen tomatoes are on sale too, and they taste way better (and are better for you)
• Private Selection “salads” - $3.33 (i.e. those corn-boxes of spinach or arugula that Ross is always on about)
• Ground turkey - $2.50 (there must be a turkey surplus, because this keeps going on sale, but I’m not complaining - I just keep making various kinds of turkey burgers
• A bunch of the Kroger brand pasta is on sale too

Produce:

• Strawberries - $2.50
• Blueberries - $2.99
• English cucumbers - $1 ea
• Avocadoes - $1 ea
• Mangoes again - $0.50
• Bartlett pears - $1 ea

Things I have learned today:

1. Buying the reduced priced Tyson boneless, skinless chicken breast (”manager’s special”) (”buy this now bc the sell-by date is tomorrow”) on weeks when I don’t actually need BSCBs saves me a bunch of money. I just throw it in the freezer and it saves me trouble and cash on my next trip!
2. Firefox doesn’t think “arugula” is a word.

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.

I thought I was being really slick when I hatched a moneymaking scheme last fall. The idea was that I’d buy baking ingredients in bulk and get out all my baking energy* every week by making wonderful loaves of bread for my friends and making them pay for it.

All went well for six months or so, until I got burnt out on it lately and took a few weeks off. Then I got my electricity bill and it was SEVENTY DOLLARS less than the month before!

SEVENTY DOLLARS!!!!

Granted, we have been cutting back in a number of ways, like unplugging the microwave when we’re not using it (turns out we don’t use it as much as we thought), ditto with the giant wedding toaster we have (which we use even less), and other stuff like that. But little things. Not things that should add up to 70 clams. This all makes me want to buy one of those energy meter things (but which one? and is it worth it?) and see how much my baking hobby is really costing us.

While I was pondering these things, I made these:**

It required an oven, yes, but they were really easy?? And used up extra puff pastry I had lying around in my freezer? That’s good, right?

So how else can I save resources? Give me electricity tricks, the People.

*I have that. It’s weird, I know.

**I don’t have jaundice, I had just made something with tomato paste and it stained my fingernails yellow. Not that jaundice is anything to joke about. Because it’s not.

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.

I canceled my Amazon Prime membership yesterday, and it was a sad day, yet a happy one. I’m so committed to trying to save money that I actually banned myself from buying any cookbooks. DVDs and CDs were banned long ago, novels I can get from the library, but cookbooks…I can’t have enough. I figured Amazon Prime enabled me too much, so I canned it. I’d be more upset if I hadn’t really discovered the magic of…

FOOD PERIODICALS!

Here is why I’m convinced they help you save money on groceries:

1. You pay maybe $15 a year (and you can be smart about waiting for a good renewal price to come along) to basically get a cookbook delivered to your house every month. I got a lot of my new periodicals through weird rebate offers (read the fine print) and with my Delta SkyMiles that I will now never use because I need about five trillion in order to get a flight out of it.
2. The issues are timely, so that means they will most likely involve a lot of seasonal produce, which both reminds you what that month’s bumper crops actually are and inspires you to make delicious things out of it.
3. If you’ve been a subscriber for a few years, you can sort through all of the corresponding back issues for that season. This is fantastic for holidays, summer, any month, really. I sort my food magazines by month - all the Januaries, then all the Februaries, and so on.
4. Getting something new in the mail has a refreshing psychological effect on me, I don’t know about you. I am more likely to make recipes from this month’s issue of Everyday Food than I am from the actual Everyday Food cookbook I have. I honestly believe that my various fun food magazines that get delivered to my door save me from going out to eat due to severe cooking ennui.

So which ones to get, you say?

I have gone through a bunch in my time. I’ve gotten Martha Stewart Living for years, canceled recently because I got tired of articles about napping and attaching grosgrain ribbon to my pillowcases, then figured out I could get two free years from Delta. It has some good recipes but isn’t quite for the people. Martha’s smaller, simpler, cheaper, wonderful publication, Everyday Food, is my favorite. And I’m not the only one.

Cook’s Illustrated is fantastic because, while some of the recipes can get labor intensive, they explain everything to you thoroughly, and because they keep telling you the science behind everything, you are becoming a better cook through understanding the process, and will be able to improvise more later on. They also rate ingredients and equipment and have saved me money on many a thing for my kitchen.

I did some research on health-themed magazines and settled on EatingWell. Cooking Light and Prevention are also supposed to be good, but something about both of them gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I used to get Gourmet, and it’s just not for me. It’s interesting reading about people who make soy sauce milkshakes or whatever, but I need to be shown something simple yet interesting, so that I will be motivated to go to Kroger and spend a little money on ingredients. I have enough fancy cookbooks to give me years worth of material when I want a complicated project.

Any good periodicals (or ways to get them cheaply) to pursue or bad periodicals to avoid?