Weekly Cooking Thread ~Recipes~ June 11, 2011

FreeRepublic Cooks | June 11, 2011 | libertarian27

[libertarian27]

Welcome to the 27th installment of the FR Weekly Cooking (Recipes) Thread.

Looking for something new to make or made something new that came out great? Please share a 'tried-and-true' recipe or two - or all of them:)! for fellow FReepers to add to their 'go-to' Recipe Stack of Family Favorites!

Here's the place to share and explore your next favorite recipe.

[illiac]

Here is one my dearly departed brother used to make.

Unfortunately it was also in his head, but I have come close to the original.

10 Diced green tomatoes
2 diced red (purple) onions
2 cans chopped jalapenos (the small cans)
2 tablespoons minced garlic (I buy it minced in the store)
2 tablespoons green tabasco sauce (more if you like)
1 Bunch chopped cilantro
1 bunch chopped parsley
1 Finely diced tomatillo
Salt to taste

Just mix it all together and enjoy. This is also a recipe we can so we always have some on hand. Will always have anice fresh taste.

He also used to make a red salsa and used fresh jalapenos that he canned with fresh tomatoes....it really spiced up the tomatoes.

[yorkie]

I love green tomato relish. Here is one my ancestors made for years - and the card is very hard to read, now. (Hope I get it all right, as it is delicious!)

1 peck green tomatoes
15 medium onions
5 green peppers
5 red peppers

Chop fine and put through coarse food chopper

1 handful salt (maybe a tablespoon or two?)

Cover with boiling water boil a few minutes and drain

6 T. cornstarch
1 quart cider vinegar
3 pints sugar
1 med. bottle of French prepared mustard

Add this to vegetables, and cook until thick, stirring constantly. Use sterile jars and seal with parafin.

[rightly_dividing]

Thanks, we like green tomato stuff so much that I will have to force myself to let some tomatos ripen. In the past we had problems with some disease getting them before they ripen, so we picked them green and fried them. Here in Texas, we are looking forward to having a crop of hopefully ripe tomatos this year, if we don’t pick all of them green.

[EQAndyBuzz]

In my never ending quest to get healthy, (in preparation of Obamacare destroying my medical coverage and forcing me to pay more for my pills then for my mortgage) I have been creating recipes that are low calorie, low sodium, low cholesterol and mst importantly, cheap.

I found a farmers market near my house. The veggies are inexpensive and grown locally.

This recipe I brought in for under $2.00 a person and less than 200 calories a serving.

Chicken and Mushrooms

1 lb chicken breast, boneless and fat trimmed $2.50 at Price Choppers
1 lb whole wheat rotini, $5.00 from the farmers market
1 onion $.25
1/2 lb mushrooms $1.00
1 sprig parsley $1.00 got whole bag, only need a bit
1 12 oz can evaporated milk $1.75
1 tsp corn starch
Olive oil, I added a couple of cloves of garlic to mine. Get good flavor from it
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat pan, add olive oil, sliced onions and cook till opaque (love that)
Slice up chicken and add to pan. Add a bit of water to the pan. Cook for a couple of minutes and then add mushrooms. Stir a couple of times then add 1/2 can of evaporated milk. Add cornstarch to other half of can add stir till smooth. When liquid is about 1/2 way cooked down, add the parsley and stir. Add other 1/2 can and cook till thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Poor over cooked rotini.

Since it is just me, I made 5 bags, dated them and tossed them in freezer. When I am ready to use them I toss them in boiling water for a few.

Desert is now frozen strawberries and blackberries with whipped cream. I buy them by the 2 lb box, wash them, cut them and freeze them in individual packets. They are sweet, gives you some crunch and are low in sugar and calories. 12 services for about $.45 a serving.

Enjoy

[Flamenco Lady]

Your recipe sounds good. With a little planning ahead you could make it for even less per person.

I pay .99 cents per pound for Chicken breasts with the bone in them. I cut them off the bone myself and throw the bones in a separate freezer bag to use for making soups another time.

If you watch for boxed pasta to go on sale at your local grocery store, you can often pick it up for $1.00 lb. or less. Add a coupon and double it when you can and sometimes you can get it for free!

Stock up on onions when they are on sale cheap. Onions are 10. cents each or less when I buy them this way.

Evaporated milk is on sale a lot too, I never pay more than .99 a can for it, and often less if I have a coupon for it.

Just doing those four things would save you at least $6.42 off the cost of the entire dish.

[EQAndyBuzz]

You are absolutely correct. Just by doing those things you create a good, nutritious meal for under a buck a serving.

I swore off white flour and I haven’t found a good box whole wheat pasta. The pasta I found at the market is pretty good and it is fresh. I am having the same problem with bread. There is an Amish family who brings their bread to the market. I sampled it and it is delicious. But you know those whacky Amish.

[Flamenco Lady]

I have no idea what stores are available where you live. I usually buy whole wheat pasta in bulk at a local Winco store, at a Grocery Outlet store, or at my regular grocery store on sale and then use my pasta coupons and try to double them when I can. I have been paying about $1.00 per pound or a little less for whole wheat pasta.

I haven’t gotten any pasta for free lately, but I did get 20 boxes of various shapes of semolina pasta for very close to free rencently.

The boxes were on sale for $1 each on a store coupon, with a limit of 20 boxes. I had 10 manufacturer’s coupons for $1.00 off on 2 packages of that brand of pasta. I was able to double 4 of the coupons, so I ended up getting the pasta for .30 per 1 lb. package.

20 pounds of pasta may seem like a lot, but I am feeding a family of 5 hearty eaters, so 20 pounds of pasta is only about 20 family meals. We usually have some kind of pasta about twice a week, so that is only enough to last us about 10 weeks.

Amish are very good cooks! I haven’t had any in years, but I used to love their friendship bread. It was divine!

[rightly_dividing]

Your gloppy mac and cheese was great. It took me back in time to when I was a kid before creamy mac and cheese came along. Thanks.

[Flamenco Lady]

Glad you enjoyed it! I like it that way too, since it is what I grew up with, but my hubby will only eat the creamy kind. In fact since he grew up on Kraft in a box, it has taken me years to get him to even try home made with real cheese! LOL!

[Grammy]

Your recipe sounds delicious, but I would like to offer one caution. If you add garlic to your olive oil be sure to refrigerate it. Garlic can introduce botulism to the oil and it will grow at room temp. You won’t know it until you need the Obama care, as it will taste fine, and cooking doesn’t kill the toxin from botulism.

[magslinger]

I'm a dad and I have a vegetable beef soup recipe I keep in my head. (OK, what I actually do is recreate the recipe every time, never the same twice, but always good.) It goes something like this:

Dad's Vegetable Soup

6-8 slices bacon or 1/4 pound salt pork, rind removed and cut into quarter inch "matchsticks" (optional, substitute 2 T vegetable oil if you prefer)
1 pound beef, chuck or round, cut into one inch cubes
1 medium onion
1 quart beef broth (add a cup of red wine if you like)
2 japone dried peppers
2-3 bay leaves
1-3 cloves garlic, crushed
3 cups (more or less) diced vegetables (the more kinds of veggies, the better) or 1 pound frozen mixed vegetables
1/2 cup barley (optional, or substitute rice or pasta)

Fry bacon or salt pork in iron dutch oven over low heat until crisp. Remove pork.

Brown beef cubes in bacon fat over medium high heat. A little more. Getting nervous about burning it? Just a little more. Remove beef, reduce heat to low and add onion to bacon fat. If you are using oil, add 1/2 t salt. Sweat the onion until it starts to caramelize.

Add broth, return beef, add japones, bay leaves and garlic. Turn heat to high, bring to boil and lower heat to simmer. Simmer for a couple of hours. If during simmering or until serving it seems to need more liquid, add more broth or water.

Add vegetables and barley (or substitute). Turn heat up. Bring to boil. Reduce to simmer for 20-30 minutes.

The bacon can be crumbled and that or the "matchsticks" used to garnish each bowl of soup.

Serve with a hearty bread that will sop up a lot of broth.

[hattend]

No longer just in your head. It’s on my laptop as well!

Thank You!

[Netizen]

Must be nice. Our stores don’t have double coupons.

Have you seen that show Extreme Couponing?

[magslinger]

Thank you. I took the opportunity to copy, paste and email it to my daughters. Conserving family recipes is important to me. My great grandmother was literate in Finnish but never “got” the concept of recipes. Never used them nor wrote them. She made yellow pea soup a lot during the winter, but neither my mother nor her sisters paid attention to how she did it. Until mom found a similar recipe in a magazine she hadn’t had it for some 50 years.

[TheMom]

Several weeks ago a group of friends were discussing fried green tomatoes. One gentleman asked if any of us had every tried green tomato pie. He said they were quite popular in Alabama. I looked up a couple of recipes online, and it actually sounds like it would taste pretty good.

Sadly, I don’t have any tomato plants this year & it is rare to find a green tomato in the store. Might be a while before I get to try a green tomato pie.

[rightly_dividing]

I grew up in Alabama and lived there until last year. I only heard of green tomato pie recently. Needless to say I haven't tried it. We have always fried green tomatos though. Recently my wife sliced then very thin and that was a great find. They are even better that way. We have often fried eggplant at the same time, and recently, my wife cut up the eggplant into dices and the green tomatos also, and threw in some sliced okras and battered and fried all those at once. That was one good fried medley of veggies. Strangly enough, though, being lifelong southerners, that is about all that we fry! After fresh veggie season we fry no more.

Where I lived in Al. green tomatos cost as much as ripe ones, but were harder to find in the markets. My taste for fried green tomatos developed from having disease forming on tomatos just before they ripened causing us to pick them while green.

[Flamenco Lady]

Yes I have been watching the shows in the hope of learning new things about couponing. None of the stores in my area allow double coupons to that extent either. Only two stores here allow double coupons and I need to cut their coupon voucher for doubling them out of the newspaper in order to do so. One store allows four coupons per week to be doubled and the other three coupons about once a month or so (they used to allow four).

Something I didn’t know originally was that all the stores in my area allow you to use one manufacturer’s coupon and one store coupon together towards the same item. I was suprised even more when I got copies of the coupon policy for these stores. All of them will allow you to combine one store buy one get one free with a manufacturer’s buy one get one free, so you can get two free items instead of just one. Even if stores don’t offer double coupons, you can still save a lot using coupons.

If you have a Safeway store in your area, they probably have vouchers for doubling coupons in their weekly ad. Here in my area the store ads are in the Tuesday Foodday paper that is delivered to every household free if they want to receive it, or if you subscribe to the daily paper the Foodday is included with it as well.

The other store that allows double coupons in my area is called Albertsons. They also issue double coupon vouchers through the newspaper, but theirs are usually in the Sunday newspaper and only there about once a month.

A trick I learned from the show is that often times there is no size requirement on many of the coupons, so you can buy the smallest size item using your coupons and often get it for free that way. Sample sizes, travel sizes, or at least the the smallest size item can often be purchased for free using a coupon.

I also watch for the names of the websites they use to assist with their couponing, and I have found a couple of the websites very helpful for learning how to organize my coupons and how to take advantage of the best deals. etc.

Another great source of coupons is in the stores themselves. Many stores issue a seasonal or monthly coupon book that is only available in the store itself, and often you really have to look for them to find them. Coupons may also be on the item itself, in dispensers throughout the store, or issued to you at the cash register.

You don’t have to devote a lot of hours each week to cutting out coupons and plan huge shopping trips like the people on the extreme couponing show either. I just do it on a scale that I am comfortable with, which only takes me at most an a little additional time each week to cut out the coupons, file the new ones, and pull the ones that match up with that week’s grocery ads for the best savings.

I usually cut my coupons out and sort them for filing while watching TV in the evening, so that part of the process is not really taking any extra time either, since I am still able to watch the TV while I am doing it. It only takes me about 15 minutes each week to file the coupons and pull the ones I want to use that week at the store. Sometimes I am able to do that while watching TV too; I just do that part while hubby is changing channels deciding what to watch or during commercials, since it takes a little more focus to do.

[magslinger]

That reminds of another variation on my vegetable soup recipe. Substitute 8-10 whole allspice berries for the japone peppers. That was the secret ingredient in great grandmother's soup. Mom didn't know that the "black peas" were actually allspice berries.

Allspice matches very well with beef as well as peas. I keep a pepper mill stocked with the whole berries and use it in meat loaves and in rubs intended for beef.

Don't bite down on the black peas, they bite back.

[Netizen]

We use some coupons when we can. I did a search a week or so ago and NONE of the stores in the western half of our state doubles coupons. Just an observation but the western half of our state tends to be conservative. So, why is it that the democratic side gets the stores that will double coupons?

Oh wait, I take that back, I do recall the article mentioning that once a year the major chain did the coupon doubling, but even so, there were severe restrictions. I can remember as a kid that most stores had double coupon days. I’m guessing that abusing it over time has ruined it.

I suspect that show will get more stores to put restrictions on coupons. Even now our stores puts limits on certain sale items. :(

[Flamenco Lady]

All the conversation about the mixed bean soup over the weekend, reminded me that I have a large container of the mixed bean soup all made up in my freezer, so I am thawing that out today and pairing it with corned beef sandwiches tonight for our dinner using the leftover corned beef from last night’s dinner.

I make all batches of my soups in a size that will feed my family for about two dinners. I serve it the first night, and freeze the leftovers, so all I have to do is thaw it out and warm it up the second time around. Having a few leftovers all made up for a family dinner, makes it easy to come up with something for dinner on nights I don’t feel like cooking.

I have lots of other leftovers from last night’s dinner of corned beef and cabbage. I will make a big batch of bean and vegetable soup with the leftover carrots, cabbage, and the liquid from cooking the corned beef. I am also going to try a new recipe I found for mashed potato soup with the leftover mashed potatoes later in the week.