Frugal Feasts: Fit for Royalty

Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Some day our prince will come.

We used to picture him riding in on a fine white horse, but these days, if someone just vacuumed out the fine white minivan and got the seat heaters fixed, that would be royal treatment enough for us.


The last time the Fru Gals were this excited about a fairy-tale wedding we were dewy- eyed nineteen year olds with plenty of royal potential (if you squinted hard enough) and a nagging feeling that our “parents” had stolen us away from our true lives as Princesses. Diana, despite her slim thighs and perfect skin never made us jealous—we just wanted to be her, and if not, we would have totally settled for being Gayle King to her Oprah. How could we not love Diana, a girl our own age and shoe size who was whisked away from her job as a kindergarten teacher to become a fashion icon and BFFs with Sir Elton. OK, maybe she wasn’t the brightest diamond in the tiara, but she sure could rock an outfit.

Diana had more cute sweaters than ten years of Talbots catalogs and a hat collection to rival the Easter Sunday congregation at a Baptist church in Birmingham.


Her prince turned out to be more chump than charming, but we didn’t know that on July 29, 1981 when she stepped out of a glass carriage in what still stands in our minds as the most beautiful wedding gown ever. Forget the simple, strapless sheathes that have become de rigueur for brides sized six to sixteen. It’s the wedding dresses of the nineteen eighties that really brought the drama. Who can forget the sleeves so puffy the wedding party had to enter the chapel sideways? The butt-bows that made the bride look like some sort of taffeta shark? The horizontal headpieces that only ever looked good on an Indian elephant or the lead singer of Loverboy?


In 1981 we set our clock radios for 4:30 and huddled around the console television in our floral Lanz nightgowns, drinking mimosas with our mothers, sure as anything that we were watching the wedding of the century. How weird and wonderful that our own marriages have lasted far longer, on far fewer resources than Charles and Diana, who had everything but love.


We will eventually get over our disappointment that The Monitor denied our request to cover William and Kate’s nuptials this week. We know that both our readers would have loved to hear about the food and the fashion, and we’d have been happy to share a frugal tip or two with the Queen. What we’ll never get over is our fascination with the women who drag forty miles of satin down the center aisle of Westminster Abby. Kate Middleton seems like a nice young woman with a pretty smile and killer fashion sense. Rumor has it that she and Wills plan to live simply and without servants.

Sure they are.


This time around we’ll be watching the royal wedding from the comfort of our stadium seats at The Red River Theatre where they will be screening the spectacle live on the big screen. Come join us. We’ll be the teary-eyed twosome in the back.
If getting up and dressed for 4:30 am on Friday is more than your queenly self can bear, whip up a batch of our cranberry orange scones. This recipe is so easy you’ll be able to give the cook the day off and maybe the butler too.

Cranberry Orange Scones
Adapted from allrecipes.com
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, frozen
1/2 cup dried cranberries, chopped
1 teaspoon orange zest, finely grated
1/2 cup sour cream
1 large egg

For the glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar
3 tablespoons orange juice
½ teaspoon orange zest, finely grated

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Stir together glaze ingredients and set aside, covered.

Directions:

In a medium bowl, mix flour, 1/3 cup sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Grate butter into flour mixture on the large holes of a box grater; use your fingers to work in butter (mixture should resemble coarse meal), then stir in chopped cranberries and orange zest.
In a small bowl, whisk sour cream and egg until smooth.
Using a fork, stir sour cream mixture into flour mixture until large dough clumps form. Use your hands to press the dough against the bowl into a ball. (The dough will be sticky in places, and there may not seem to be enough liquid at first, but as you press, the dough will come together.)

Place on a lightly floured surface and pat into a 7- to 8-inch circle about 3/4-inch thick. Sprinkle with remaining 1 tsp. of sugar. Use a sharp knife to cut into 8 triangles; place on a cookie sheet (preferably lined with parchment paper), about 1 inch apart. Bake until golden, about 15 to 17 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes and glaze. Serve warm or at room temperature.

New Frugal Feasts Column: Spring Chickens

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Wouldn’t it be nice if spending the winter in houses as cold and damp as a crisper drawer at least kept our faces as dewy and fresh as the apples in our fridge? No such luck.

All winter we pay frosty homage to Fred Rogers, taking off our outside down coats and donning our inside down vests every time we come home. Shouldn’t we get something out of that besides manageable heating bills?

One day last week the temperature hit 60 for a few sunny hours and we gleefully shed a couple layers and headed outside. We were feeling so young and energetic that we were actually considering tank tops as a viable fashion option. Then we caught a glimpse of ourselves in the reflective surface of a puddle of melted snow.

Spring chickens we are not.

Every year we wear our hair a little shorter and our shorts a little longer. If we were better at math, we could draw you a graph, but suffice to say it’s a very delicate balance between youthful stylishness and just plain cluelessness.

Better to go short than to be the lady with the bouncin’ and behavin’ hair who elicits gasps when she turns around because her face is a good 15 years older than her hairdo can support.

And better to go long and put on a nice pair of capris because, as our mothers would say;
Nobody Needs to See That.
Besides, ankles still look good long after the knees go elephanty.

Some things are harder to embrace than others.

Suzanne refused to get reading glasses until the day she put the dog’s ear drops into her eyes because there were two blurry white bottles were on the kitchen window sill. After surviving the intense burning pain and a humiliating call to the poison control hotline, she’s decided to believe the little glasses make her look smart, like Tina Fey, not old like, well, like she is.

Robin still tries to stay up until the last curfew but often finds she’s fallen asleep on the sofa. Our theory is this is nature’s way of preserving a mother’s last good nerve. Nothing good happens in Concord, New Hampshire after 9:00; better to be rested and refreshed and wait until morning to dole out the punishments.

We haven’t totally thrown in the towel. We still wear heels most days and we’d still kill to lose the last of the baby weight, as we like to call the last ten pounds even though the baby is practically a full grown man.

Heck, maybe it’s time to embrace Meryl Streep’s philosophy on weight and aging: after a certain age you’ve got to choose your seat or your face. We might as well choose face; we don’t even want to think about how much more wrinkled we’d be if we were thin and the seat is a lost cause anyway.

We might not be spring chickens anymore but we are learning to be comfortable in our new roles as a couple of high-heeled hens!


The next time boneless, skinless chicken breasts go on sale, buy up a bunch. We like to pound them until they are about a half inch thick and throw them on a heated grill pan for about 4-6 minutes a side, then serve them with a simple sauce. A little rice and some salad and dinner is done!

Marinated Tomato Salsa Cruda

This time of year grape tomatoes are sweet and inexpensive. Turn them into a delicious fresh sauce by marinating them in olive oil and garlic for an hour or two.
For 6-8 servings
2 packages grape tomatoes, halved or quartered if large
1 small clove garlic, minced fine
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
Handful of flat leaf parsley, minced fine
¼ cup best quality olive oil
Mix all the ingredients together in a medium sized bowl. Allow to sit at room temperature for an hour or two so that the flavors can blend and mellow. This is also good as a topping for thin toasted slices of baguette.

Creamy Artichoke and Olive Tapenade
For 6-8 servings
2 15 ounce cans artichoke hearts packed in water, drained
1 12 ounce can sliced black olives
1 clove garlic, minced fine
½ cup mayonnaise
½ half cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Handful of fresh chives
Blitz the artichoke hearts in a food processor for several seconds until there are no large chunks remaining, but do not puree. Add the garlic, mayo and cheese and pulse two or three times to blend. Scrape into a medium sized bowl and add the olives, salt and pepper. Stir gently. Snip the chives with a pair of scissors over the bowl to garnish. Serve at room temperature or heat for a minute in the microwave. This mixture is also a terrific dip for tortilla chips.

Spicy Grape Salsa

For 6-8 servings

2 cups of red or green grapes, sliced lengthwise into quarters
1 cup fresh or canned pineapple, cut into small pieces about the size of the quartered grapes
½ teaspoon fresh jalapeno pepper, minced fine, more or less to taste
2 tablespoons red onion, minced

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and toss gently. Refrigerate for an hour to allow flavors to blend. Serve cold. This is also delicious as a topping for grilled fish.

Cake!

I was going to start this post with something along the lines of
"the creative juices are flowing again"
but realized the thought of fluids, even mental ones, might be kind of yucky in a food post.

So instead, how about

Now that the double shifts are over at the Brewery until September,
I found four minutes in a row that I could devote to something creative.
My friend Joanie's 60th birthday was as good an excuse as any.

Hell, if I live to 60 all I'm going to eat is cake. And cheese. And the occasional sushi boat from Moritomo. By myself.



Are they totes adorbs or what?

The butterflies and the Happy Birthday sign are nothing more than melted "chocolate" aka candy melts from Chandler's Cake and Candy Supply, drizzled onto parchment and then stuck to the cake with copious amounts of frosting.





Here is a nice little montage I scraped off the interwebs:


Thanks Natalie of Mama Dramalogues who clearly is a more organized blogger than yours truly. Her post is a really terrific step-by-step look at the process.

She claims these are her first attempt at working with melted chocolate, so if she isn't a big hairy liar, you can see how easy these are to make, and how cute they look perched on cake.

So, as Natalie shows us, ya just pencil the shapes onto a piece of paper, cover with parchment or waxed paper (which is cheaper and I think better because there is less chance of stickage), add the melted chocolate and swirl. The nonpareils add a little zhuzh.


These butterflies were about 50 times easier than the ones I've made before using the Whimsical Bakehouse method, and I think they look better.




Thanks to Kavingate for the nice snap--I cannot seem to find a photo of the ones I've made. It is nearly impossible to get the little lines thin enough, and filling in all the little nooks and crannies takes forfrikenever, so I'm totally sold on the new methodology.

One thing: If you are going to make words out of chocolate, always make two because these bitches break like toys from the dollar store.

Headed to Portland, Yo!

Being a dyed-in the wool yuppie, I cannot help but wonder about a city that has this as a protected city landmark.

I mean I did go to college in Gettysburg "gett-issss-burghhhhh" as certain people pronounce it.

So it isn't like I am some sort of culture snob....they tore this down, but still...it was there, towering over the landscape while I was co-eding up a co-ed storm.....




But have you seen this show on the IFC?

Portlandia

Hi-fricken-larious.

And then there is this...

Steve Buscemi

My question is: does anyone think there will be even one cute shoe store in the entire town?

If so, can I have directions?

Frugal Feasts: The Pioneer Woman Cooks!

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

The Fru Gals are ridiculously jealous of a woman who lives on a remote ranch in Oklahoma, miles and miles from the nearest Target, and we are just not sure how that could even be true. It’s easy to see why we are irritated by Jennifer Anniston— she turned a bad hair day in 1994 into a signature look, a movie career and a 40 year old face that is as smooth, tan and shiny as a glazed donut. We suspect even a saint would feel the occasional twinge of envy when contemplating Oprah and her capacity to change lives for the better (not to mention her shoe collection). And don’t even get us started on Michelle Obama and those fabulously toned arms.

But Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman? Why should we be jealous? This gal home schools her children. God bless her but the only way we would even consider getting involved in a home school situation is if Dewey School were turned into condos. Ree lives in Oklahoma. We’re sure it is beautiful in a bleak and windswept kind of way, but it’s the Jefferson’s deluxe apartment in the sky that we covet, not a ranch in the middle of nowhere, thank you very much. She’s not even all that thin. So why does this woman fill us with spiteful envy?

One look at her blog and you’ll get some idea why we just want to hate her. Somehow she has turned a whole bushel of glamour-free, mommy-life lemons into the most delicious lemonade ever. Thepioneerwoman.com blog is nearly perfect.

All of the photos are gorgeous, unlike our blog which usually features some slightly blurry snapshots of badly-lit brown food haphazardly arranged on a wrinkled tablecloth (that we had to take with our cell phones because the camera battery is never charged). Ree’s blog also has a whole section devoted to home and garden projects and beautiful objects. Ranching must be a pretty profitable endeavor--hardly anything she features looks like it came from the Marshall’s clearance aisle. Ree also has advertisers, millions of followers and a remarkable number of expensive giveaways. But what really drives us crazy is The Pioneer Woman’s book contract. And if it weren’t bad enough that Reece Witherspoon is interested in playing Ree in the movie version of her true-life cowboy love story, she just published a cookbook filled with family-friendly recipes and amusing anecdotes about her life. We are as green and as grouchy as the Grinch.


Our friend Sue Rubin sent us a copy of the cookbook, and we could barely open it. For days it sat on the t took us a few days to even open it. There it sat on the counter, taunting us with its expensive glossy cover and fancy photographs while we summoned up the courage to peek inside. We’re here to tell you; it’s worse than we thought.

The Pioneer Woman Cooks is, we have to admit, great. The food is honest and good and the recipes are easy to follow, thanks to her step-by-step photographs. These days so many of us are struggling to find the best ways to feed our families without breaking the budget and despite all her money and fame, Ree really keeps it simple, and we have to love her for that. We also love her Le Creuset collection; this woman has more pieces of $200 enameled cookware than the front window of Things Are Cooking.

Not everything is perfect; the Fru Gals would like to point out that the meat loaf recipe is almost identical to Robin’s; it is just missing the garlic. Ree does not feel the need to add half a head to every recipe, silly woman. We are also not fans of her vaguely vintage-looking clip art doodads at the bottom of every page, but why quibble? The Pioneer Woman puts meals on the table that her family will eat and fans will cook. She has filled her book with the things that are important to her and her joyfulness comes through on every page; a good man, a gaggle of offspring, beautiful sunrises and pounds and pounds of butter. Well played, Ree, well played.

Just to prove that we are not driving the bitter bus, we’d like to give away a copy of Ree Drummond’s new cookbook to one of our readers. Just leave a comment on fruglfeastsblog.com or our Facebook fan page and we will pick a winner at random, to be announced in our next column.
Here’s a taste of what Ree’s book has to offer: A simple pasta dish that features frozen shrimp in a rosy cream sauce and a chocolate sheet cake that is moist and tangy, if a little on the thin side.

Penne Alla Betsy
Serves 4-6
Adapted from The Pioneer Woman Cooks
We’d like to meanly note that the “alla” is Ree’s typo not ours!
1 pound penne pasta
1 pound medium shrimp
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely minced
½ cup dry white wine
1 14.5 ounce can petite diced tomatoes, with their juice
1 cup half and half or light cream
½ cup milk for thinning
Handful of chopped fresh parsley
Handful of chopped fresh basil or 1 tablespoon pesto
Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste
Peel the shrimp and set aside. Heat the butter and the oil together over medium heat in a medium sized skillet . Add the onion and cook until limp and glossy. Add the garlic and sauté for another minute, reducing the heat as necessary to keep the garlic from burning. Add the wine and stir until mostly evaporated. Add the tomato sauce and stir well. Reduce the heat to low and add the cream. Bring to a simmer. Add the shrimp, cutting into pieces if large, and stir gently.

Cook at a low simmer for 3-4 minutes, just until the shrimp turns pink and firm. Stir in the salt and pepper, and pesto if using.

Dump in the herbs and the cooked and drained pasta and stir to combine. Add a little milk if needed to thin the sauce.

Serve with crusty bread

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Chocolate Sheet Cake
serves 15-20
Adapted from The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Makes 1 12X18 inch cake
For the Cake:
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup buttermilk
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 sticks butter
4 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder

In a large bowl stir together the flour, sugar and salt. In another bowl mix the buttermilk, eggs, vanilla and baking soda. Mix well with a fork and set aside. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat and add the cocoa powder, stir well and remove from the heat.
Meanwhile, bring 1 cup of water to a boil. Add to the melted butter/cocoa mixture and whisk well to combine. Pour the chocolate/butter mixture into the flour and stir together. Add the egg mixture and stir until very smooth, scraping the bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula to combine completely.
Pour into an ungreased jelly roll pan or rimmed cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes.

While the cake is baking, make the frosting:

2 sticks of butter
4 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder
6 tablespoons light cream at warm room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
16 ounces powdered sugar
½ cup finely chopped pecans (optional)

Melt the butter over medium low heat and add the cocoa powder. Whisk well to combine. Add the cream, vanilla and sugar and whisk well to combine. Add the pecans if using and pour evenly over the warm cake. Spread quickly with a metal spatula. Allow to cool and serve to 15-20 grateful people.