Frugal Feasts

Cookbook Giveaway: Vintage Potluck Recipes from Helen Corbitt!

2011-09-05T08:15:00.006-04:00

This week's column is about Potluck Suppers....leave a comment on the Facebook fan page for a chance to win a SIGNED copy of this classic! And look for this week's column Wednesday morning on the Concord Monitor website.

Pot Luck

2011-09-04T17:36:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Kitchen.com for this great photo

But where are the crockpots?

I'm writing a column this week on potluck suppers. All great/awful/memorable ideas and recipes welcome!

I'm not quite an expert but I loooooove the research.

redrum

2011-08-28T12:44:00.002-04:00

Maybe it's the sleep deprivation.

I just looked out into the hallway of our new home--faculty housing that looks NOTHING like a caretaker's apartment--and watching Hayden explore the empty hallways on his battery-powered mini cooper that looks NOTHING like a big wheel--made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.

So far no sign of the twins, but I'm staying the eff away from the elevator.

Fiercest Shoes Ever, with Sincere Apologies to Christian Siriano and His Payless Line....

2011-08-11T10:11:00.004-04:00

Here is what happens when one spends five days in freezing cold rain on the Island of Prince Edward.

Thank the good Lord above that I am here with my parents, and their ridiculously generous spending habits.

I might not be able to walk in them, but my staggering around should certainly pull focus from my old face.

New Frugal Feasts Column Today!

2011-08-10T09:00:00.006-04:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Sometimes a topic is just too important, too provocative and far too urgent for one Fru Gal to tackle alone.

It’s sort of like when NBC drags Tom Brokaw out on camera to assist with a breaking news story; Robin just had to come back and weigh in on this week’s column topic: the amazing progression of maternity fashion over the past twenty five years. As a nation we have gone from dressing ourselves in flowered dresses that looked like duvet covers from the Queen Mum collection to today’s mommies-to-be who seem to favor a wardrobe primarily made up of tiny bits of skin tight spandex.

About a month ago we saw pictures that David Beckham has posted on the internet of his wife Victoria, nine months pregnant and rocking a tiny string bikini. Had our husbands posted photos of us pregnant and bathing suited online we’d still be behind bars serving out our sentences for justifiable homicide.

The photos of Posh Spice got us to thinking about how happy we are to be done having babies, and how grateful we are that Facebook didn’t exist when we were in the family way. The Fru Gals started having babies in 1984 and didn’t stop until 2003. And while we could debate the relative intelligence of all that, none of these kids are going back where they came from so we might as well just move on to how ridiculous we looked during our combined 13 pregnancies. Picture if you will Robin in 1984, sporting a pink floral Laura Ashley dress with giant puffed sleeves and intricately pleated bodice, giant sash tied in a bow around her ribcage.

One good gust of wind and she’d have been airborne.

It seems hard to believe that in the same year that Cyndi Lauper won the MTV best Video Award for Girls Just Want to Have Fun the ladies were feeling ashamed of their delicate condition, but how else to explain the whole “more is more” esthetic—as in having more belly means we need more fabric and more lace on the giant white pilgrim collars so that no one will notice that the woman drowning in chintz is pregnant?

Suzanne had her first two babies while leasing commercial office space in Washington DC and she had to look relatively professional five days a week. The summer of 1990 was hot and sticky and Suzanne was forced to wear wretched polyester maternity “suits”. The quotes are necessary because these so-called suits were all one piece—from the front they looked like a blouse and a jacket and a skirt, but from the back they were a barn-sized rectangle of cheesy gray polyester with a giant zipper running up the middle. The bread loaf-sized shoulder pads were ridiculous but at least they kept the sticky fabric off Suz’s skin.

For casual wear during that decade pregnant moms turned to the fabulous combination of stirrup pants and voluminous sweaters. By the time the baby was ready to pop the pants were pilled beyond belief and there was a band of dribbled food stains along the equator of the sweater front. At least the garish patterns (think Bill Cosby in a pudding pop commercial) helped hide the spots.

By 2000 or so things got a little better. Robin can recall Suzanne wearing a raspberry floral stretchy skirt with beaded trim that she paired with one of her husband’s starched white button-downs to host a reception for Tipper. According to Robin, Suzanne was gore-jus. From the front anyway-our Suzanne was never one of those lucky gals who didn’t look pregnant from the back. She looked like a whale. Maybe two.

Oh should we have kept going with the babies? We are always all about the fashion, and today’s maternity clothes are so much cuter than when we were waddling around. Young moms-to-be are adorable in their little stretchy tops and the new maternity jeans that are indistinguishable from any high end ones on the market—no more hideous fabric panels at the top of the pants that required a sail-sized trapeze top to cover them up.

And there are so many options for pregnant women these days. All we had was a maternity store in the mall that only sold over-priced and ugly get-ups. Target has snagged Manhattan favorite Liz Lange to design affordable and chic separates and even Old Navy has come up with a fresh-looking maternity line that avoids big arrows on the belly and Disney character screen prints. It’s all pretty cute, but there is, or should be, a limit to how tight these new fashions should be worn, at least to our aging sensibilities.

We saw a young woman on Main Street the other day and we are fairly certain we could tell the sex of her baby right through her yoga top.

Robin’s daughter-in-law was the picture of cuteness this past year while carrying the Broadbent’s first grandchild. Stylish dresses right off the rack, with high waists and skirts with a little fullness in the front to sweep attractively over her growing belly. She was truly the belle of the ball—but it isn’t just her. Every woman can decide how to dress while doing the saintly work of growing a person— frills if she wants them, a more classic silhouette if that’s more her style.

We only wish it could have been that way when we were performing miracles.

It’s summer and raspberries are both abundant and reasonably priced which means the Fru Gals try to use them as often as possible--it makes bypassing them in January a little easier. The cake would be perfect for your next special event-- a baby shower perhaps? And the salad is great on a night when you just don’t feel like heating up the kitchen by turning on the oven. It is nutritious and delicious, and pretty to boot!

Chocolate Raspberry Show Cake

Jhuzh up a regular chocolate cake with pirouette cookies and a couple of tubs of raspberries to make a special dessert that is easier than it looks. A nine inch cake serves 12. To achieve this adorable look with a larger cake just buy one more container of cookies and one more pint of berries for each additional inch in cake size. This cake is a showstopper with a 12 inch cake, but boy is it heavy. You might want to put it on the dessert table before adding the berries. And if you are going to make the 12 inch version, we suggest using mixed berries unless you want to take out a second mortgage for a 100% raspberry version.

Feel free to use a box mix and canned frosting if you wish. Or heck, you could just buy a chocolate cake in the grocery store when you go to get the cookies, we’ll never rat you out. If you are feeling especially adventurous, you can find the Fru Gal’s favorite homemade chocolate cake and frosting recipe on our Facebook fan page.

1 nine inch chocolate cake, frosted with chocolate frosting
2 containers Pirouette cookies with dark chocolate filling
2 pints fresh raspberries or a mixture of raspberries, blueberries and strawberries
Decorative ribbon—enough to wrap around the cake and make a fairly large bow. Wired ribbon is great for this—the bow will stay perky all evening.

Place the frosted cake on a cake plate. Gently press the cookies into the frosting one at a time until the entire perimeter of the cake is enclosed. The cookies will stick up about an inch and a half above the top of the cake. Use the flat of your hand to press the cookies evenly into the frosting. Wrap the ribbon around the cake at about the midpoint and tie into a bow. Just before serving fill the top of the cake with the berries. Remove the ribbon to serve.

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Chicken and Raspberry Dinner Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing

For the dressing:
¼ cup cider vinegar
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
Fresh ground pepper to taste
1 tablespoon finely minced onion
2 tablespoons poppy seeds
¾ cup vegetable oil
Put the sugar and the vinegar in a jar with a tight fitting lid. Shake until the sugar has dissolved. Add the remaining ingredients, close the lid tightly and shake until the dressing is thick and emulsified.

For the Salad

8 ounces fresh baby spinach or mixed baby greens
4 cooked chicken breasts, cut or shredded into bite sized pieces
8 ounces sugar snap peas, steamed just until bright green, then rinsed in cold water to cool
1 seedless cucumber cut lengthwise into quarters and thinly sliced
½ pint fresh raspberries
Large handful of crispy tortilla strips or croutons
Toss together all of the salad ingredients except the crispy tortilla strips in a large, shallow salad bowl. Vigorously shake the dressing and add about half to the salad. Toss to coat and add additional dressing to taste. Top with the tortilla strips and serve.

New Frugal Feasts Column Today--Dessert Caveman Style

2011-07-27T05:04:00.005-04:00

If it weren’t for the extremely limited choice in footwear, I think I would have made a great cave woman. Being from New Jersey, leopard prints and crazy-big hair are in my blood. I enjoy cooking over an open fire, and I’d love to live one slab down from Betty and Barney. The one quibble I have with the ladies of Stonecave Road is instead of Stony Curtis, I’d just about die to meet Mark Bittman. I’m not sure how he’d do dancing in a movie with Ann Margrock, but Bittman’s ability to come up with innovative food ideas and simple, family friendly recipes makes me swoon. Why else would I have amassed a collection of ten of his cookbooks?

For the uninitiated, Mark Bittman is a New York Times columnist, food blogger, cookbook author and a true pioneer in the effort to get more Americans to eat less animal products. What is so great about his approach on this fraught issue is that Mark admits he really enjoys a good steak, he just knows that eating steak (and eggs and dairy) less often is the best way to create a sustainable food supply for our planet. Possibly even better, this plant-heavy approach to eating costs less and could even lead to weight loss. What’s not to love? His book, Food Matters came out in 2009 and is the least overwrought, most humble guide to conscious eating around. And that is a bold statement because I am not sure humble is the first word that pops into mind when perusing some of his other titles like How to Cook Everything and The Best Recipes in the World. See what I mean? He is all cattle and no hat though, because he’s won every kind of award there is, including the top cookbook prize from both the James Beard and Julia Child foundations, plus whatever sort of award one gets for traveling through Spain on a foodie quest with Gwyneth Paltrow and not killing her. Food Matters is all about simple choices and easy steps towards getting your family to eat plant based meals, but just some of the time. So have a burger, slather it with cheese and mayo, but balance that with a nice lentil stew. Your body and your pocketbook will thank you, not to mention the animals.

But even an unreformed, mastodon-leg gnawing caveman would love all Mark Bittman’s cookbooks. His recipes are simple, easy to follow and he is just about as happy to throw things onto the grill and hope for the best as any Fru Gal. In fact, if he would ever answer his emails, Robin and I would make him an honorary member of our club. On the exact same day that the first Frugal Feasts column was published on July 2, 2008 (grilled brats and a ridiculously complex leek and orzo recipe) Bittman ran a piece in the New York Times detailing 101 great picnic ideas including grilled baby quail and a slew of great salad recipes. Our column took us about 40 hours to hone and perfect, and even then probably no one made the orzo. Bittman probably dashed that piece off in twenty minutes, and guess which one is still in my recipe folder?

So far I’ve yet to come across a Bittman recipe for frozen steak on the grill. But his ideas for grilled fruit are just about as big and as pleasing surprise as some other Fru Gal favorites like the grilled pizza we’ve featured in this column. To make the sundaes in the photograph, all I did was brush a little melted butter onto some halved peaches that were ripe but still firm and had Mr. Flintstone throw them on the grill for a couple minutes on each side, just until they were softened and a little charred. We served them with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of jarred fudge sauce, they were heaven. To quote one of our guests “I am so full but this is just too good not to finish”. Even better is his recipe for grilled pineapple salsa, perfect with fish or simple grilled chicken breasts. For a photo of that recipe, and links to more recipes from Mark Bittman, please visit frugalfeastsblog.com.

And now, just because the thought of packing one more thing is unbearable in this heat, I’m giving away my copy of Food Matters and The Minimalist Entertains to one lucky reader. Just leave a comment on the Frugal Feasts Facebook fan page and I’ll pick a winner at random.

Hot Fudge Sundaes with Grilled Peaches
Makes 6
Adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman

If you have more peaches, grill them up! Leftovers are great mixed into plain salsa along with a spoonful or two of chipotle pepper sauce--smoky, spicy and wonderful with chips.

3 medium sized peaches, ripe but firm
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1 quart vanilla ice cream
1 12 ounce jar hot fudge sauce, warmed
12 Pirouette cookies for garnish (optional)

Cut the peaches in half lengthwise and discard the pits. Brush all sides with the melted butter. Grill over medium heat for 2 minutes or so each side, just until softened and slightly charred. Scoop the ice cream into six individual serving dishes. Top each with a peach half. Drizzle with the fudge. Garnish with the cookies, if using.

Photo courtesy of markbittman.com

Grilled Pineapple Salsa with Onion
Adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
1 pineapple, peeled, cored, and cut into thick rings (canned rings, drained of excess juices, are also okay)
1 large red onion, cut into thick slices
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon minced fresh hot jalapeño pepper or to taste, or hot red pepper flakes or cayenne, to taste
2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint leaves
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat a charcoal or gas grill fire to fairly low heat Brush the pineapple and onion slices with the olive oil; if you’re worried about the slices falling through the grate, thread them on soaked wooden skewers. Cook, turning once or twice, until soft and slightly charred, about 8 minutes total. Remove the slices as they finish cooking. When cool enough to handle, discard the skewers and chop into bite-sized chunks, saving as much of the juices as possible.
2. Put the pineapple and onions in a medium bowl with the hot pepper, mint or basil, and lime juice. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and stir to combine. Let sit for about 5 minutes, then taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more hot pepper, lime, or salt as needed. Serve immediately or refrigerate for up to an hour.

Here is another great grilled fruit recipe, from last summer: Grilled Pork Chops and Peaches

When Moms Get Sick...life and dinner go on!

2011-06-15T08:57:00.006-04:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Have you seen the Man Cold video on Youtube?

A British guy lies on a sofa, to weak from his sniffles and slight fever to even call out for help. As he attempts to convey the extreme tragedy of his condition to his wife, paramedics burst in and give her a bell so she won’t be late with soup and soothing pats. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so true. When Dads get sick they get coddled. When Moms get sick, we get nothing.

Well, not nothing exactly, because we do get to continue with all our regular duties. Can I be the only mother whose children have bypassed a perfectly healthy father on their quest to find someone to tie their shoes and find their library books, no matter if that someone is crouched in the bathroom in the throes of a particularly nasty stomach bug? It’s nice to feel needed and all, but seriously, fathers have opposible thumbs too, and eyes that can sometimes be used to locate things—not the ketchup in the front of the fridge of course, but surely the backpack that is hanging on a hook in the mudroom.

I’m always waiting for that Hoarders show to stage an intervention, only to discover that the poor woman inside the home isn’t actually a hoarder, simply a Mom whose been hit with the flu during a school vacation. It could totally happen. I know this because I recently took to the sofa with strep and in the four hours I was supine, I’m surprised the Board of Health didn’t condemn the kitchen. When I came downstairs to get a drink I found every single cabinet open, as well as the microwave and the fridge. A half-melted Popsicle had been abandoned on the counter, along with the open jar of peanut butter which was spouting 3 butter knives like a modern-art take on a vase of flowers; I briefly thought about naming it Still Life with Skippy and trying to sell it to a wealthy collector. The sink was overflowing with dishes and cups as well as a cookie sheet that appeared to have been used to melt crayons. I can’t confirm that because I was too weak to open the oven, but the curly, multicolored shreds of paper on the floor were a clue. Until I entered the kitchen that day I would not have considered it possible to have one’s slippers make both a crunching and a sticky vrrrripping sound at the same time. If you don’t believe me just invite your children to set up lemonade stand without your help or supervision: the spilled mix crunches and the lemonade that gets sloshed sticks. It took me two days to recover from the actual strep infection. The recovery from the two days when I wasn’t completely focused on cleaning up after everyone took much, much longer.

The next time you get sick, and everyone at your house still expects dinner on the table, try this recipe. It combines frozen chicken breasts with a few key ingredients from the pantry to make pulled chicken so delicious, someone might actually bring you a nice cup of tea. Serve the chicken on rolls or in taco shells alongside some coleslaw, and if you are too sick to make it yourself, beg your hubby to swing by KFC and grab a quart of theirs. Better yet, get him to take everyone out for dinner so you can gather your strength for the recovery from your recovery.

Sweet and Spicy Pulled Chicken
Makes 6-8 sandwiches, twice as many tacos

1 28 ounce can diced tomatoes, well drained in a colander
1 medium onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped, or 1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/3 cup prepared mustard
1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
½ cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons liquid smoke
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper, more or less to taste
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
6-8 frozen chicken breasts
Hamburger rolls or taco shells for serving
1 quart coleslaw for serving (optional)

Mix together the first nine ingredients in a medium sized saucepan and bring to a simmer over low heat. Place the frozen chicken breasts into the bottom of a large crock pot. If the breasts are frozen solid and won’t fit easily, run them under hot water for a few seconds and then separate as needed with a big knife. Pour the hot tomato sauce over the breasts and set the crock pot on high. Cook for 8-10 hours until chicken shreds easily with a fork. Remove the chicken to a large bowl. Use a slotted spoon to scoop out all the tomato and onion and toss with the chicken. Moisten the chicken with about a cup of the cooking liquid and discard the rest.

Serve on rolls or in taco shells, garnished with the coleslaw.

Here's the video.....

The Buddy System: Farewell Fair Robin

2011-06-01T09:29:00.005-04:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

We learned three things from the swimming lessons we endured in the early 1960s:
* pink gingham bikinis are shockingly see-through when wet
* mandatory swim caps were both ugly and painful, especially when tugged on over pig-tails
* never venture into the deep end of the pool without a buddy

These days, when we wouldn't be seen in public in even a dry Spanx brand bathing suit, we still rely on the buddy system. And it isn't just us. Would Lucy have ever made it onto the stage at the Tropicana Club without Ethel there to egg her on? Would Roseanne have opened the Lanford Lunch Box without Jackie's help (and her cash money)? Would Louise have stomped on that gas pedal if not for Thelma and her rebel yell? For good or for bad, women always seem to get more done when there is a buddy along for the ride.

When Suzanne came up with the idea of writing a food column for families struggling to stay on budget, she knew she needed someone to be Rachel to her Monica. Robin was right there, bringing hot coffee, frank honesty and a flawless nonsense detector to the partnership. The fact that she can make a dollar out of fifteen cents doesn't hurt either, especially when the only credentials Suzanne brings to the writing of Frugal Feasts is a 25 year old English degree and five hungry children who seem to expect dinner on the table every single night. Without Robin, Suzanne would have been running recipes for all sorts of complicated sauces that no one would ever make (including Suzanne). Without Robin, you folks wouldn't know that Wishbone Italian Dressing is the secret to perfect lasagna, chicken marinade and the good life in general. Without Robin, there would undoubtedly be less snorted coffee around Concord-she is damn funny and always comes up with the perfect paragraph ending quip. She's always got a last good nerve to share, along with a shovel, a dish towel and a drill sergeant's knack for keeping things on schedule.

When Robin decided it was time to hang up her Fru Gal apron to focus on her first grandchild and her daughter in law, both of whom have moved in while her son completes his Air Force basic training, Suzanne completely freaked out. Maybe not as bad as the time we had to drive our gingerbread shoe over to the Monitor for the infamous gingerbread battle of '09 (suck it Tim O'Shea) but pretty darn close. There were tears. There was wine. There was a lot of hugging.

And just like Season 4 when Bethany and Jill Zarin had to find their own paths, Suzanne is going to try to write the column on her own. That is a terrible analogy. Robin doesn't even ice skate and no one would ever call Suzanne a skinny girl. It would be better to compare us to Rhoda and Mary, once Rhoda moved back to New York to ride the subway to her wedding because Phyllis forgot to pick her up, but we can never seem to agree on which of us is the Mary and which is the Rhoda.

Robin will make guest appearances from time to time; look for her Thanksgiving stuffing recipe this November when we tussle again with Tim O'Shea, and any other time Suzanne needs a little inspiration and a firm hand to guide her away from recipes with more than 15 ingredients. Please just make sure to continue to scrutinize her cart when you run into her at Market Basket. She loves it when people comment on the cartons of Ramen noodles and diet soda.

Suzanne and Robin have been quite a pair (of what we won't say). Another good pair is rice and beans. Together they form a complete protein, and while much less snarky than The Fru Gals, are still pretty awesome. This recipe, adapted from the Moosewood Simple Suppers Cookbook, is a lot like us: colorful, hearty and yes, cheap!

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Black Beans and Yellow Rice with Pickled Red Onions Adapted from Moosewood Simple Suppers Serves 4

Pickled Onions
2 medium sized red onions, sliced into thin rings
3 cups boiling water
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon vinegar
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce, or more or less to taste

Place the onions in a heatproof bowl and cover with the boiling water. Set aside for 10 minutes. Whisk together the remaining ingredients in a small bowl. After 10 minutes drain the onions well and toss with the salt and sugar mixture. Stir occasionally until ready to serve. These keep for weeks in the fridge.

Yellow Rice
1 1/2 cups white rice
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 1/4 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt

Heat the oil in a medium sized saucepan and stir in the turmeric and the rice. Cook on medium heat for a minute or two stirring constantly then add the water and salt. Lower the heat to a gentle simmer, cover and cook undisturbed for 12-15 minutes until rice is tender and all the water is absorbed.

Black Beans

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons dried oregano
Handful of chopped cilantro (optional)

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the garlic, cumin and oregano and cook together over medium heat for a minute, making sure not to burn the garlic. Add the undrained beans and bring to a simmer. Serve over the rice and under the onions, garnished with the cilantro.

Frugal Feasts: Fit for Royalty

2011-04-27T08:43:00.002-04:00

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

2011-04-20T04:58:00.002-04:00

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!

2011-04-18T11:01:00.011-04:00

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!

2011-04-17T21:20:00.005-04:00

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!

2011-04-06T05:23:00.007-04:00

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.

Opinions please....

2011-03-26T07:44:00.003-04:00

Just ordered this skirt from Modcloth.com because despite having the poors, I really need a couple new outfits for the spring dog and pony show down at The Brewery-- a two week event during which I don't have to wear my smock OR my hairnet.

Plan to wear it with a crisp white shirt and a pair of wicked pointy sling-backs.

Question: Cute or crazy?

Frugal Feasts: Spring Break

2011-03-23T08:45:00.006-04:00

Image courtesy of Not Worth Mentioning.com

Spring break is over and our college students have returned to their distant campuses, suitcases crammed with their sibling's pilfered clothes and pockets stuffed with our last twenty bucks.

Just between us, those weren't tears of sadness we were dabbing from our eyes as we waved goodbye.

It's not that we don't love them, or want to spend time with them; it is just that all the book learning seems to have pushed the common sense right out of their heads, and we are exhausted.

Try spending 10 days with a sophomore philosophy major having metaphysical arguments about what exists (beer cans under the pool table), and how to understand what exists (how the heck did college sophomores even get beer, and why aren't they smart enough to stuff them into the recycling bin before we find the little boys playing a game called Liquor Store and start yelling?).
You'd be weeping too.

August seems so very long ago. We dropped them off in their nice dorm rooms, so happy that they liked their roommates and their newly declared majors. We were so proud they were gaining knowledge (which is now used to condescend to us), learning new games (named for exotic locations like Beirut) and honing their time management skills (staying up all night writing papers because they spent the weekend long-boarding in traffic). We, and they, were in a very, very good place.

And then...college break, woo hoo! We know it is hard for them-they've been off on their own, managing pretty well, as they're quick to remind us, and now they've got to deal with our suburban reality. Since we are not vampires, we'd like it relatively quiet after midnight. Since our bathrooms do not have a big drain in the middle of the floor, we'd like most of the water to stay in the shower. Since we are not running a cafeteria, grill and/or a coffee shop, we are not interested in providing food and beverages whenever a hunger pang pops up. And since there is no soapy conveyer belt and Mom is the only underpaid food-service worker, please bus your own table.

You can try the "my house-my rules" thing and it might work out for you-we have found it to be a losing battle. They are pretty good kids, they've kept their grades up and their scholarship money intact, so what are we going to do, throw them out? Make them feel uncomfortable in their own homes? We'd prefer to save that for when they bring home a daughter-in-law we don't like.

When our darlings return for a little R and R they always request the same family favorites, and we are happy to oblige-at least the first night. At Suzanne's it is her One Hour Beef Stew, served the French way on top of garlic-rubbed baguette slices. And yes, it is ALWAYS made with organic, family-farm raised beef; this one was named Stanley, thanks for asking. At Robin's it is her Creamy Chicken Enchilada Nachos-a wacky crock pot recipe that uses both tortilla and tortilla chips and is positively addictive. It also keeps warm for hours, great for feeding the family at 6pm and then (bonus!) the college students with the 2am munchies.

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Suzanne's One Hour Beef Stew
Makes 8 Servings

The key here is to cut the stew chunks in half or quarters so they cook quickly. If you'd prefer to keep the chunks larger, and have the time, toss the whole thing into a crock pot after browning and add the vegetables for the last hour of cooking.
8 servings
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon cracked black pepper
2 ½ pounds chuck for stew (not lean)
4 tablespoons olive oil (approximate)
1 large onion, minced
5 cloves garlic, 4 roughly chopped, 1 cut in half for serving
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
1 bottle dry red wine
6 carrots peeled and sliced on the diagonal into 1 inch pieces
1 pound package frozen pearl onions
¾ pound page frozen petite peas
Flat leaf parsley for garnish (optional)
16 1 inch slices baguette for serving

Cut the stew meat into pieces no larger than 1 inch on any side. Sprinkle well with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper.

Heat half the olive oil in a large, covered Dutch oven or heavy stew pot over medium heat. When oil starts to shimmer, scatter some of the beef over the bottom of the pot. None of the pieces should be touching or they won't brown. Allow the beef to cook undisturbed for 3-4 minutes to create a nice brown crust. Stir, cook for another 3 minutes, and remove with a slotted spoon. Continue browning all the beef in small batches. Add more oil as needed, and watch the heat so that the bottom of the pan doesn't blacken.

When all of the meat has been browned, add the onion and garlic and reduce the heat to medium-low. Cook, stirring constantly, for about 2 minutes until the onion is fragrant. Reduce the heat as necessary to prevent the garlic from browning. Add the bottle of wine and stir with a wooden spoon to release all the browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Add back in the beef, along with the bay leaves and the thyme. Cover and bring to a simmer. After about 45 minutes the beef should be nearly tender. Add the carrots, stir and cover. Cook for another 7-8 minutes and then add the pearl onions and the peas. Let cook until the vegetables have warmed and the beef is tender-another 5-7 minutes.

To serve, rub each of the slices of bread with the cut side of a garlic clove. Lay two slices into the bottom of 8 shallow bowls and pour the stew over the bread. Garnish with the parsley.

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Robin's Creamy Chicken Enchilada Nachos
Serves 8

3 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
1 large (26 ounce) can condensed Cream of Chicken Soup
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups sour cream
1 7 ounce can diced green chili peppers
12-15 slices pickled jalapeno peppers
2 teaspoons ground cumin
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (more or less to taste)
12 small flour tortillas
3 ½ cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese
Sliced green onions
1 large bag tortilla chips for serving

Place chicken thighs in a large pot and cover with water by 2 inches. Bring to a simmer and cook slowly until the thighs are firm and no longer pink, about 10 minutes. Drain, shred and place in a large mixing bowl.

Stir together the soup, garlic, sour cream, spices, green chilies and the jalapeno slices. Pour over the shredded chicken and mix well.

Lightly spritz a 5 quart crock pot with cooking spray. Layer 4 tortillas across the bottom of the pot, overlapping as necessary. Top with half the chicken mixture and one third of the cheese. Repeat another layer of tortillas, chicken and cheese. Top with the remaining tortillas, and then the remaining cheese. Cook on low for 4-6 hours.

Serve on top of tortilla chips, garnished with the green onions.

Boycott Perfection...perfect

2011-03-20T05:00:00.002-04:00

I just had to steal this, it made my day.

I have never been a perfectionist.
I have days when I wish I were perfect, or at least more driven, or more concerned with my appearance....but I'm not.

So when I saw this terrific blog, Be More With Less, life on purpose on my friend's Facebook page, I had to steal it.

It justifies me (and all my imperfections)

10 Reasons to Boycott Perfection

Perfect people are boring.
Perfect people are tired.
Perfect people are anxiety ridden.
Perfect people are passionless.
Perfect people are obsessive.
Perfect people are not spontaneous.
Perfect people are too precise to be forgiving.
Perfect people are too exhausted to be grateful.
Perfect people are not good with change.
Perfect people are not perfect.

When perfection is your goal regardless of what you are doing or being you miss what you set out to do, or be, in the first place.

And who needs that?

My Ears are Bleeding

2011-03-18T05:24:00.004-04:00

Happy Friday...

This is the musical equivalent of Sandra Lee's Semi Homemade Kwanzaa Cake.

I'm not sure if it's the look or the idiocy of the lyrics:

Yesterday was Thursday (Thursday)
today it is Friday (Friday)
We, we, we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards

Or the combination of three head and massive hair,

but

Rebecca Black:

might just be Teresa's long lost daughter....

What He Said....

2011-03-13T08:50:00.006-04:00

In 1939 the British Ministry of Information created this poster. The intent was to fortify the public's resolve in the face of coming war, and the crown was used to make it seem like the King had issued the proclamation.

According to Wikipedia (huge grain of salt taken, thanks) it was never used--it only became public in 2000 when a copy was found in a used bookstore and turned into posters, dish towels and tote bags by some enterprising entrepreneurs.

None of which dilutes the message.

It's become my mantra.

Chance of getting a new position down at the brewery diminished by the fact that I am not a girls varsity soccer coach? Keep Calm and Carry On.

Struggling to fulfill the endless requirements of the mortgage company to get a restructured loan? Keep Calm and Carry On.

Income taxes due in a Month and no money left? Keep Calm and Carry On.

Hair grayer and skin wrinklier today? Keep Calm and Carry On.

Roped back into lacrosse scheduling to get a discount on the season fees? Keep Calm and Carry On.

Ah well, whatever the outcomes, it's a far better plan than my old one.......

The Fru Gals Take One for The Team!

2011-03-09T06:01:00.009-05:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

The team dinner is a terrific idea; get the entire squad together for a pep talk, some carbo-loading and a little bonding the night before a big game. We’re talking about the Moms here—though we’re pretty sure the athletes enjoy it too. Is it the good manners that we’ve tried to pound into their skulls that compel our children to raise their hands and offer us up as hostesses at least once a season? Or is something darker at play—perhaps payback for all the times we’ve dragged them on marathon quests to find wallpaper and window treatments? Let’s go with good manners, shall we?

We like to grumble, but we honestly feel the same way about the team dinner as we do about driving the carpool—the inconvenience is far outweighed by the priceless opportunity to observe the group dynamics—it’s like John Hughes’ entire opus come to life. At every team dinner you’ve got the seniors who are as cool as Ferris Bueller and just as ready to jump on a float and grab the microphone. Next come the underclassmen, solid and loyal, and about as unappreciated as Ducky in Pretty in Pink. And then there are the freshmen. Oh how we love them, full of unearned swagger and confidence; a whole tribe of Farmer Teds looking to make a name for themselves even if it means convincing one of the good girls to lend an undergarment to the cause. Never mind the fact that we are older than the Griswolds were when they finally made it to Wally World; in our mind we’ve got just as few candles in our cake as Molly Ringwald had in 1985.

The goal of the team dinner is to get everyone in, fed, and out again with a minimum amount of collateral damage to your budget, your house and your last good nerve. An easy menu of pasta, salad and bread is clearly the way to go here. Most of the other parents are so grateful it isn’t their turn they are happy to supply desserts and drinks, so with a little work in advance the team dinner is a snap, even on a weeknight.

While there is nothing wrong with a crock pot full of meatballs and five pounds of spaghetti, we like to make two or three big lasagnas for team dinners. They can be made in advance and popped into the oven, leaving plenty of time for a sensible glass of wine to fortify you for the onslaught. We’ve run our favorite tomato sauce based lasagnas before; you’ll find a link to them on our facebook page.

Today we are featuring mushroom lasagna. Yes it does involve making a white sauce, but the results are heavenly—perfect for those dinners when you’re expecting other parents to attend—or if you’d like to butter up the coaches. And if you really cannot bear the thought of making the sauce, crack open a couple jars of Alfredo sauce and use that instead. The bread recipe is a keeper—it’s from our new favorite cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks—we’ll be featuring more recipes from this book, and a giveaway in our next column. The cupcakes speak for themselves.

Mushroom Lasagna
Makes one 13X15 inch pan, or about 20 small but rich servings

2 1-pound boxes lasagna noodles

For the white sauce:
1 stick butter
½ cup flour
1 quart whole milk, warmed
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon nutmeg

For the mushroom layer:

3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 pounds sliced mushrooms
4 cloves garlic, minced
8 ounces cream cheese
2 cups shredded mozzarella
2 cups shredded Monterey Jack
2 1 pound boxes lasagna noodles
Chopped fresh parsley, for a garnish (optional)

Cook the noodles according to package directions. Drain and lay flat on clean, damp kitchen towels; cover with a layer of plastic wrap or a couple damp kitchen towels to keep moist while you work on the rest of the dish.

Make the white sauce: Melt the butter in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and whisk for 1 minute to cook the flour, reduce heat as necessary to keep flour from browning. Add the warm milk and whisk until the sauce is smooth. Keep whisking until the sauce bubbles and thickens, about 3 minutes. Add the nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste. Remove from the heat and set aside, whisking occasionally to keep a film from forming on the top.

Prepare the mushrooms: Heat the butter and oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the mushrooms and turn the heat down to medium low. Saute, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms have browned. Add the garlic and sauté for one additional minute. Reserve about ¼ cup of the best looking mushroom slices to use as a garnish. Add the cream cheese to the rest of the mushrooms, turn the heat down as low as it will go and stir until the cream cheese melts and makes a smooth sauce for the mushrooms. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

To assemble the lasagna:

Ladle about ½ cup of white sauce into the bottom of an oiled 13X 15 inch lasagna pan. Cover with a layer of noodles, overlapping slightly, and cutting as necessary to fill the pan. Spread with half the white sauce and half of the shredded cheese. Top with another layer of noodles. Spoon all of the mushroom sauce over the noodles and spread out into an even layer. Top with another layer of noodles. Ladle the rest of the white sauce over, spreading to cover the whole top. Sprinkle evenly with the remaining cheese. Cover with oiled aluminum foil and bake at 350 degrees for an hour if the lasagna is at room temperature; 1 ½ hours if it is right out of the refrigerator. Remove from the oven and let sit, covered, for another 20 minutes to firm up. Garnish with the reserved mushrooms and serve.

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Cheesy Olive Bread

A new favorite adapted from The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Makes 1 loaf of deliciousness

1 14 ounce jar pimento stuffed olives
1 15 ounce can black olives
2 cups Shredded cheese – Monterrey Jack and/or Cheddar
½ cup mayonnaise
½ stick butter at soft room temperature
1 teaspoon hot sauce, more or less to taste
1 large loaf soft Italian bread

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Drain and roughly chop the green and black olives and place in a large bowl. Add the cheese, mayo and butter and stir well to combine. Add the hot sauce and stir again.

Slice the bread open along one long side, making sure not to cut all the way through. Lay the open loaf on a double layer of foil that is about 6 inches longer than the loaf of bread and slather with the olive mixture. Grasp the foil and gently slide the loaf into the oven. Bake for 15 minutes until the cheese is bubbly. Carefully remove from the oven and cut into one inch wide slices—a pizza cutter is perfect for this.

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Spaghetti and Meatball Cupcakes

Ridiculously easy—from the awesome book Hello Cupcake—and the perfect dessert to send along to a team dinner that you dodged hosting!

Please check our facebook page for step by step instructions

24 vanilla cupcakes baked in white wrappers
2 cans vanilla butter cream frosting, NOT whipped frosting
12 Ferrero Rocher hazelnut chocolates
½ cup seedless raspberry jam
1 quart size Ziploc bag

Spread each of the cupcakes with a very thin layer of frosting—about a teaspoon each. Group the cupcakes together on a serving platter or in a large, shallow pasta bowl so they are bunched tightly together.

Stir the frosting well—it should be very creamy and soft—if it seems a little hard, nuke for 5 seconds to soften up. Fill the Ziploc bag with the frosting and snip a very small hole in one corner—take off less than a quarter inch of the bag. Squeeze the bag for a second or two over a plate to make sure the hole you’ve cut allows a spaghetti-sized squiggle of frosting to come out. If the squiggles are too skinny snip off another tiny bit of the bag. If the hole is too big, get another bag—having the frosting look like pasta is the key here. Using a very free flowing motion, squeeze long draping squiggles of frosting all over the cupcakes. As the frosting piles up you should be able to easily bridge the gaps between the cupcakes. Continue until it looks like a typically messy bowl of pasta, making sure to allow some of the frosting to go over the edge of the cupcakes.

Scoop the raspberry jam into a small bowl. Thin with a teaspoon or two of hot water and stir until smooth. Add the candies and stir to coat well. Use a spoon to artfully place the jam and the candies on top of the pasta. Place one of the candies on the side to make it look like it rolled off.

Another Beginning

2011-02-27T07:49:00.005-05:00

Moments like these are the ones we treasure ,

The ones that happen on a cold winter night in a beautiful city.

On a bridge in the park when a son asks a beautiful lady to become his wife

Oliver and Marisa are embarking on a great journey.

They will now go forward facing life together and as they make room for a child, they will hold on tight...to each other and to those around them, they will learn new things about themselves and they will look to us for reminders of how it is done. How to laugh when you want to cry. How to keep going when you want to give up, and how to love with all your heart, ALWAYS

It's the love, the hope, and the faith in their young faces and in their smiles, in the joy of new beginnings, that makes us all remember our own.

We are starting on the journey with them so...........................

we eat and drink , we cry tears of joy and laugh until our bellies ache.

We share stories of our own journeys and revel in the promise of theirs.

It will be bumpy and the road will not always be easy, but together they will see it through

They have each other and all of us beside them cheering them on.

Because these are the memories we treasure most.............

The ones that happen on a cold winter night in a beautiful city.

On a bridge in the park when a son asks a beautiful lady to become his wife

New Column Exclusively Today in The Concord Monitor

2011-02-23T07:10:00.001-05:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Frug Eye for the Cheap Guy

It was probably the exhaust fumes. What else but near asphyxiation could explain the TV show we dreamed up as we both sat outside Rundlett Middle School on a recent frosty afternoon waiting for our Nordic stars to emerge from practice?

We were convinced that all of America would tune in to watch us share the secrets of zhuzh (pronounced the way the Gabor sisters would say shush) which is the ancient art of spiffing up all the plain, boring, inexpensive things that form the basis of suburban existence. Well, our suburban existence anyway. Carson Kressley might have been the first to use the term but the Fru Gals have been zhuzhing up our lives since Carson was getting stuffed into his middle school locker for wearing his blazer with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, shirt cuffs akimbo. In our little day dream Oprah was airing The Frug Eye for the Cheap Guy on her new network and we were rich and famous.

All it took was one little glance in our rear view mirrors to realize that the two of us are pushing our luck with a newspaper column and a two year old photo.

Maybe it’s a combination of the countess bland pairs of khakis, the endless casseroles of brown food and the hundreds of beige towels that we’ve had to endure through our years of motherhood, but something in us is always striving to make things look better than the price tag might suggest. The rich may have cash, but the Frugs have zhuzh.

Decorating Zhuzh

No time or money for a paint job? Grab a couple bunches of the fresh tulips from the grocery store and jam them into a pretty teapot or pitcher and place it squarely in the middle of your kitchen table. The bright burst of color will draw your eye away from the dinged moldings and the lacy shreds of cobwebs. We like to sit and have a cup of coffee and just stare at the tulips. We can’t help but feel that spring is on its way, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Has the great old quilt you’ve loved forever now become thread bare in spots? Throw it over your kitchen table, figure out which area is in the best shape and trim the rest away. Stitch or glue on some trim (or just fold the raw edge over and sew it up). The quilted fabric and pretty patterns make a wonderful spring tablecloth. So what if your kids think it’s creepy, remember that these are the people who think a Star Wars poster is high art. Trust us, you will garner compliments from everyone who walks in the house. And now that you’ve got an unused tablecloth that is likely stained in a few spots, why not turn that into a new bunch of napkins. The internet is full of DIY directions and videos for making a killer fringed hem on a napkin.

School Project Zhuzh

It didn’t take us long to figure out that most school projects get a check mark from the Concord teachers. While this must be unbearably disappointing for those overzealous parents who used a skill saw and 15 varieties of wood to create accurate topographical maps of Mount Washington, it is just perfect for weary parents like us. We’ve been known to zhuzh up a project from the archives (as we like to call our attics—and if anyone needs a Mary Baker Eddy report, we are your gals). With just about 50 additional toothpicks, Fort #4 can become one of the more rustic buildings at Strawberry Banke.

The Seventh grade cell model project is another good time to break out the zhuzh—why make the model out of clay or colored paper when with very little skill you can bedazzle a box mix sheet cake with leftover Christmas candy to make an awesome and edible model, one that won’t wind up in the archives.

Outfit Zhuzh

It’s February. We’ve been wearing the same four turtlenecks and the same sad pair of yoga pants and ratty fleece vest since what seems like Halloween. So how do we keep it fresh and our hubbies interested? Scarf zhuzh. We have loads of soft and colorful scarves that we tie insouciantly around our necks. You can find a good scarf nearly anywhere—Marshalls, Yankee Swaps and even, if you are very lucky, in the dress up box a friend keeps for her visiting grands. Not only are our outfits interesting, you can hardly see how crepey our necks have become.

Food Zhuzh

Box mix brownies for the buffet? Again? A bag of chocolate chips is the perfect zhuzh. Fill the bottom of a rimmed platter with a couple handfuls of chips, add the brownies and scatter another handful of chips over the pile. Cute and yummy.

Another great zhuzh is to use glass jars for leftovers. Save the big pickle jars and the jam jars with the colorful lids, run them through the dishwasher a time or two to get the labels off and voila – your left over soups and tuna fish will be all classy and retro looking. Some would say healthier too, as opposed to storing them in a warped old plastic tub that came filled with butter spread.

This week’s recipe is for a simple cabbage soup with Italian sausage. Delicious yes, but kind of sad looking. We zhuzhed it right up by hollowing out a nice little round bread loaf and ladling in the soup. Our children clapped with glee and gobbled it right down, cabbage and all. The bread bowl is also the perfect zhuzh for chowder and beef stew.

Cabbage Soup with Sausage
Makes 6-8 servings
Ingredients:
1 pound sweet or hot Italian sausage
½ cup water
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 large onion, roughly chopped
½ cup crisp white wine
2 carrots, peeled and sliced into thin coins
½ half medium sized head of cabbage, tough core removed, sliced into thin ribbons
8 cups chicken broth
1 28 once can petite diced tomatoes
1 parmesan rind (optional but adds wonderful flavor)
For serving:
6-8 small round bread boules hollowed out for serving
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Directions:
Prick the sausages with a fork and place them in a large, heavy dutch oven or stock pot.
Add ½ cup of water and bring to a simmer over medium-low heat.
Cook until sausages are no longer pink and water has just evaporated, 7-9 minutes, turning occasionally.
Remove the sausages and add the butter and the olive oil to the pan.
Add the onion and sauté over medium heat until the onion is limp and glossy.
Add the wine and scrape the bottom of the pan to release the browned bits.
Add the broth, carrots, sausage and Parmesan rind to the pot and bring to a simmer.
Place the lid on the pot and let simmer for for 20 minutes until the carrot and the cabbage are tender.
Slice the sausages and add back to the pot.
Continue to simmer for another 10 minutes to warm the sausages and to blend the flavors.
Fish the Parmesan rind out if you used one and ladle the soup into individual bread bowls or into wide soup bowls.
In either case garnish with freshly grated Parmesan and if you didn’t use the bread bowls, serve a loaf of crusty bread for dipping.

Something I Had to Share...perspective I say

2011-02-19T18:30:00.001-05:00

Why Parents Go Crazy

A father passing by his son's bedroom was astonished to see that his bed was nicely made and everything was picked up. Then he saw an envelope, propped up prominently on the pillow that was addressed to 'Dad.'

With the worst premonition he opened the envelope with trembling hands and read the letter.

Dear Dad:

It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you. I had to elope with my new girlfriend because I wanted to avoid a scene with Mom and you.

I have been finding real passion with Stacy and she is so nice.

But I knew you would not approve of her because of all her piercings, tattoos, tight motorcycle clothes and the fact that she is much older than I am.
But it's not only the passion...Dad she's pregnant.

Stacy said that we will be very happy.

She owns a trailer in the woods and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter.
We share a dream of having many more children.

Stacy has opened my eyes to the fact that marijuana doesn't really hurt anyone.
We'll be growing it for ourselves and trading it with the other people that live nearby for cocaine and ecstasy.

In the meantime we will pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so
Stacy can get better. She deserves it.

Don't worry Dad. I'm 15 and I know how to take care of myself.

Someday I'm sure that we will be back to visit so that you can get to know your grandchildren.

Love, Your Son John

PS. Dad, none of the above is true. I'm over at Tommy's house.

I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than the report card that's in my center desk drawer.

I love you.

Call me when it's safe to come home.

Community Cookbook Cuisine: Oven Roasted Cioppino

2011-02-14T17:56:00.008-05:00

Have I mentioned how much I lurv community cookbooks? Oh so much, the more cream of mushroom soup the better.

Real cookbooks from real chefs typically have a handful of excellent recipes and a lot of filler. Wolfgang Puck made his reputation on a couple of high end pizzas, and then his editor prolly demanded a hundred more recipes and so his cookbooks are filled with silly dishes NO ONE would ever even try.

Breakfast Steak with Red Bell Pepper Relish anyone? Anyone? Buehler?

Community cookbooks are the exact opposite.

Home cooks share their best recipes--their go-to recipes for family gatherings and potluck dinners--the ones that never fail to get gobbled down--the ones that all the other ladies insist on getting the recipe for--the ones of which they are most proud.

How can a busy mother not love these books? I've got to get dinner on the table for seven most every night of the week, and I do not live in Alaska and I cannot go out after an easy day of pontificating on the Fox News and shoot a moose or two, so I am typically looking for a recipe that is quick and will pacify the hungry hordes.

This cookbook comes from my parents' Florida tennis community of Sea Oaks, aka Boca Vista Del Mar Phase III.

The first recipe that caught my eye was for a recipe for Cioppino that cooks in the oven--about a million years ago I made a Cioppino recipe for my husband and my inlaws when then came to visit our first home, and it took 3 days and a hundred bucks--and even back then, when I had three days and a hundred bucks that recipe was not nearly worth the effort and I've never made it since.

This recipe was more than worth the wait.

Next time I make this, and there will be a next time, I'll add a thinly sliced bulb of fennel and a couple of diced carrots to the vegetable mix, but otherwise it was perfection.

Oven Roasted Cioppino
Adapted from the recipe by Abby McInnis
Sea Oaks Serves
A Community Cookbook

To serve 6

3 ribs celery, diced
1 large onion, diced
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 cup olive oil
4 cloves garlic
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup seafood stock or bottled clam juice (LOVE the Bar Harbor brand)
grated rind and juice of 1 orange
1/2 teaspoon seasoned salt (Lowry's)
4 cloves minced garlic
3 pounds chowder fish (the bits and ends from the fish counter)
or 3 pounds of a combination of cod, haddock, scallops and shelled shrimp
Handful of fresh parsley, minced

1 loaf of crusty bread for sopping

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large, covered dutch oven or soup pot saute the celery, onion and red pepper in the olive oil for 2-3 minutes over medium heat until the vegetables are limp and glossy.
Add the garlic and saute for another minute, being careful not to burn the garlic.
Add the white wine orange zest and the clam broth and bring to a simmer.
Add the fish and return to a simmer. Cover the pot and place it in the preheated oven for about 30 minute, until the fish is cooked through.
Squeeze the orange juice into the pot and garnish with the minced parsley.

Serve in shallow bowls with crusty bread.

Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T08:55:00.002-05:00

Cupcakes + jummies + lollies + spearmint leaves = easy Valentine's Day treat.

La La Lemon Bars

2011-02-11T07:43:00.001-05:00

Looking for something to nibble on this weekend? Nothing beats the winter blahs like a nice tart lemon bar. Lemoncello is also nice.......

Lemon Bars Deluxe

Recipe from What's Cooking in America

Crust:
1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup powdered (confectioner's) sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
Extra softened butter for greasing pan

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Adjust oven rack to middle position. Lightly butter a 13- x 9-inch baking dish and line with parchment paper or wax paper allowing edges to come over the sides.
Pulse flour, powdered sugar, cornstarch, and salt in food processor. Add butter and blend, 8 to 10 seconds, and then pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal. Sprinkle mixture into prepared baking pan and press firmly into an even layer with slightly raised sides to hold in the filling.

Refrigerate for about 30 minutes and then bake until golden brown, about 20 to 30 minutes; remove from oven, place on a wire cooling rack, and let cool slightly. After crust is finished baking, reduce oven temperature to 325 degrees.

Lemon Filling:
4 large eggs, beaten lightly
1-1/3 cups granulated sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons finely-grated lemon zest (from two large lemons)
2/3 cup freshly-squeezed lemon juice, strained
1/3 cup whole milk
1/8 teaspoon salt
Extra powdered (confectioner's) sugar to decorate finished bars

While crust is baking, make the lemon filling: In a medium bowl, whisk eggs, sugar, and flour; stir in lemon zest, lemon juice, milk, and salt to blend well. Pour mixture onto the pan on top of the warm crust.

NOTE: You may set prepared Lemon Filling aside until crust is finished baking. When ready to pour on warm crust, re-blend Lemon Filling mixture and pour into the warm crust.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until the filling feels firm when touched lightly. Remove from oven and transfer the pan to a wire cooling rack and cool for 30 minutes. After cooling, grasp the parchment paper and carefully lift the bars onto a cutting board. Cut into serving size squares or bars, wiping your knife clean between cuts if necessary.

Sieve powdered or confectioners' sugar over bars and serve. NOTE: The powdered sugar will start to be absorbed into the lemon filling after several hours, but it can be reapplied before serving.

New Frugal Feasts Column Today Exclusively in The Concord Monitor

2011-02-09T07:51:00.004-05:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Just about the only similarity between the Fru Gals and mother tigers are the chin hairs.

We have even less in common with the Tiger Mothers detailed in that book that is scandalizing parents across America. Mothers are in a tizzy about the Chinese parenting style that creates math wizards with Ivy League degrees and perfect pitch. We’ve read The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and our question is this: How can we write the next book that will make us rich and everyone else miserable?

For some reason—probably the chemicals leaching to our bottled water ( we read that book too) we American mothers love to feel horribly guilty about our choices and are happy to shell out twenty bucks to learn precisely what we are doing wrong. When the Fru Gals were pregnant those What to Expect books shamed us into eating brown rice and laying off the chips and ice cream during the only time in our lives it would have been socially acceptable to have a tummy. There we were interviewing pediatricians and looking up baby swing safety ratings in Consumer Reports as our mothers regaled us with tales of all the cigarettes they smoked and cocktails they tossed back while they were pregnant with us and restricted to gaining 10 pounds by their doctors. Come to think of it, this might explain why we didn’t make it to Harvard.

And now Amy Chua has detailed why another generation of Broadbents and Ellinwoods will only be in the stands of the Harvard/Yale football game if they are selling hotdogs. There have been other books that have irritated women over the past couple decade but we can’t remember one that irked as badly as this tiger mother thing. We will admit that Amy Chua seems to have succeeded in raising two daughters who towed the line and turned out okay but we’d like to see what would have happened if fate had given Amy a busy little boy or two. It’s hard to imagine getting three hours of piano practice out of a child who needs to be strapped into his chair in order to stay seated for a 15 minute family dinner.

In some ways, the things that Tiger Mothers ban actually make their lives easier. No play dates or sleepovers? How simple. What we wouldn’t give to get back the minutes we spent making homemade play dough and the hours we spent scraping it out of the rugs when the preschool set came over for the afternoon. And we probably wouldn’t look nearly as haggard if we had not allowed endless ‘tween slumber parties with giggly midnight fashion shows and 3 am pizza feasts. The simple truth is that if one is going to spend 5 hours a day monitoring piano practice and math worksheets, there is no time for anything else—no outings, no family dinners, no carpools--not even the one to Carnegie Hall. Apparently the key to success is sitting in the living room for hours on end plus yelling. The yelling part we get; it’s the sitting part that must be what smartens the kids right up. If yelling worked we wouldn’t be able to see out of the rear window of our cars, it would be so full of prestigious decals.

The one thing that we have learned over our 45 combined years of parenting is that nearly everything we are doing is wrong. But we don’t need a $25 book to tell us that, our kids are happy to let us know what isn’t working for them on a daily basis. Our mothers too. So far no one has made it to Harvard, but no one is an axe murderer either. We’ve never thrown a homemade birthday card back at anyone either—if looking forward to an “I love you Mom” scrawled in brown crayon on a folded sheet of notebook paper is wrong, then we don’t want to be right.

We might not spend hours drilling our kids on fractions and Bach’s concerto in D, but we do spend loads of time in the kitchen and we love to cook with our kids. And since it looks like jobs in food service might be all they are qualified to do after 20 years of western parenting, it’s probably a good thing that they learn their way around a recipe or two.
This one is easy for the 8-11 year old crowd. And here is one more thing we know: kids usually will eat food they help to prepare, and if the food is cute, so much the better. So make a big pan of these roll ups together, and pile up the parenting books to help them reach the counter.

Pepperoni Roll Ups
10 servings

2 boxes no-bake lasagna noodles
2 28 ounce cans crushed tomatoes
1 6 ounce can tomato paste
1 teaspoon kosher salt
16 ounces part skim ricotta
2 eggs, slightly beaten
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon fresh ground pepper
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 4 ounce package sliced turkey pepperoni, sliced into thin shreds
4 cups shredded mozzarella, divided

Lay the noodles in a deep roasting pan. Pour in boiling water to cover and set aside for 10 minutes to allow noodles to soften.

While noodles are soaking make the sauce and the filling.

Quick tomato sauce:

Stir together the crushed tomatoes, paste and salt in a large bowl. Taste and add more salt if needed. Pour about a half cup sauce into a 11X15 inch baking pan and set aside.

Pepperoni Noodle Filling

Stir together the ricotta, eggs, garlic, Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, Parmesan, pepperoni and 2 cups of the mozzarella in a large bowl.

To assemble the roll ups:

Lay a clean dishtowel on the counter. Remove one noodle from the water and place it on the towel. Scoop about 2 tablespoons of the ricotta mixture and mound it up at one short end of the noodle. Roll the noodle up and place it, seam side down, into the baking dish. Continue filling and rolling until all the noodles are used up or you run out of filling, or the pan is full. You should wind up with approximately 20 roll ups.

New Frugal Feasts Column: Exclusively in The Concord Monitor

2011-02-02T07:17:00.008-05:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

We knew we liked Michelle Obama, but when we saw her menu for last week's state dinner, we nearly swooned. Finally, we can say we have something in common with our first lady. Her menu of rib eye, twice-baked potatoes, creamed spinach and a nice apple dessert is almost exactly our go-to menu for special guests. Of course our portions of steak are a little smaller, not to mention the size of our kitchen staff, but it is a start. Besides, who knows where this could lead - we can feel our arms toning right up as we write this column.

We'd also like a crack at her closet. We have a first lady who knows how to mix Jason Wu and J Crew and we are jealous. Not that we don't love living and shopping in Concord, but it is hard to cultivate a look of eclectic elegance when the two biggest women's clothing stores are owned by the same company and everyone you know shops there. Of course, even if we could get our greedy hands on an Alexander McQueen gown, we'd have to wrap up in a pashmina to shield our back fat from the cameras.

Oh to entertain with such ease. Michelle always appears so cool and calm we suspect she doesn't spend the last 20 minutes before the doorbell chimes fighting with her husband and stuffing clutter into anything that closes. Either of our husbands could be the leader of the free world - we'd still have to send him out for more ice and upstairs to change his shoes.

We do have one small thing over Michelle - living in the White House means she will never know the joy of opening a cupboard and discovering a missing math book, the dog's leash and that reminder postcard from the dentist for appointments that miraculously are tomorrow and not yesterday.

The White House must have an amazing mud room - and the Obamas' guests must know to use the front door when they are coming to a party, because we did not see a giant plastic tub of sporting equipment in any of the photos of arriving guests. Neither Anna Wintour nor Barbara Streisand had to maneuver around four lacrosse sticks, a full set of hockey goalie pads and the two pairs of slalom skis that Malia promised some boy she would tune and wax before morning. Of course, someone probably shovels and sands the front walk at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., so the mudroom door isn't the only one that is passable from December through March, but still.

We try to keep that bin out of sight but it always seems to creep out in the open, looking like a cross between the dumpster behind the Goodwill and a very small parade float depicting boys' sports.

President Obama keeps telling us to put aside our petty differences and celebrate the things we have in common. We have created a frugal feast based on the meal served to Hu Jintao last week, and we are going to try our hardest to not be jealous of Michelle Obama. She is a working mom, trying to raise her children well in a difficult world, just like us.

Steak

We can't afford rib eye, but we do love a steak called beef chuck eye steak, first cut boneless. It comes from the smaller end of the rib eye and is always less than $4 a pound. Keep the portions small, add a lot of veggies and you won't break the budget. We typically get about 3 small servings per pound, so for six people we would buy about 2¼ pounds.

This time of year we like to cook these on top of the stove in a ridge grill pan. Season with salt and pepper before throwing them on the preheated pan that has been spritzed with some Pam. Grill for about 4 minutes per side for medium rare, longer if you prefer.

Twice Baked Potatoes

7 baking potatoes, scrubbed, pricked with a fork and baked at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes, until dry and crackly on the outside and soft on the inside.
1 cup shredded cheddar
4 scallions, roughly chopped
½ cup light cream or whole milk,
½ teaspoon salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Use a paring knife to carefully cut a large oval opening in the top of six of the baked potatoes to make sort of a boat shape. Carefully scrape the insides out of each of the opened potatoes into a large mixing bowl, leaving about a half inch of potato attached to the skin for stability. Season the potato shells with salt and pepper and set aside.

Peel the seventh potato and add it to the bowl of scraped potatoes. Mash with a fork and add the cheese, scallions and milk or cream. Mix well. Taste and add more salt, if needed. Carefully spoon potatoes into shells and smooth tops.
These can be wrapped and stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 days. When ready to serve, reheat in a 300-degree oven until hot and puffy.
Serve garnished with additional chopped scallions. Makes 6 potatoes.

Creamed Spinach

2 pounds fresh spinach, washed and with tough stems removed (see note)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ cup finely chopped shallots or onion
1 teaspoon minced garlic
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
freshly ground pepper to taste
½ cup heavy cream

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the fresh spinach and cook for 2 minutes. Drain well, pressing with a slotted spoon to release as much water as possible. Finely chop the spinach and set aside.

Melt the butter in a saute pan over medium heat. Add the shallots and the garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until limp and glossy, about 2 minutes. Add the spinach and cook for a minute or two, stirring well. Add the heavy cream, salt and pepper and let simmer until the cream is reduced by about half. Serve immediately.
Note: Feel free to use two 8-ounce packages of frozen chopped spinach in place of fresh.

Thaw, drain well and proceed with the second part of the recipe.

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Baked Apples

6 Cortland or Granny Smith apples
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water
1 large slice lemon peel
½ cup raisins
½ cup chopped walnuts
whipped cream or ice cream
Combine the brown sugar, water, lemon peel and raisins in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Let simmer for 5 or 6 minutes, until the syrup begins to thicken and the raisins are plump.

Remove from the heat, cover and let sit while you prepare the apples.
Core each apple, but leave the bottom skin intact. A pairing knife and a melon baller are perfect for doing this properly: Cut a circular wedge out of the top of the apple around the stem and then use the melon baller to remove the rest of the core. Slowly work your way down to about a half inch from the bottom.
Place the cored apples in a shallow baking dish. Use a slotted spoon to fill the cored holes with the raisins and then pour the sugar syrup over all the apples. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, basting once or twice with the syrup, until the apples are soft and slightly wrinkled.

Let cool to warm room temperature and serve, garnished with the nuts and whipped cream or ice cream.

Noodles in Broth with Swiss Chard and Romano

2011-01-29T07:04:00.001-05:00

Soup--simple and delicious
That is what I want on these long, cold New England days.

If it is easy I'll do it and if it tastes good too that's a bonus

Everyone lucked out on this one because it was both!

3 1/2 cups chicken broth
2 inch piece of Romano or Parmesan rind plus 1/4 cup shaved cheese for serving
8 ounce package of egg noodles
1 bunch Swiss Chard,ribs and stems removed, cut into one inch slices
lemon wedges for serving (optional)

In a medium sized soup pot bring broth,rind and 3cups of water to a boil.
Add noodles and cook according to package instructions.
During the last minute of cooking,add chard and simmer until tender.
Remove the rind and serve soup with shaved cheese and lemon wedges.

Cakes Baked

2011-01-25T14:57:00.010-05:00

I am still baking the white cakes and they are soo good looking on the outside...

two white cakes

The sad thing about cake is you really don't know if it is any good until it is too late,
and you watch some one choking it down, smiling as they try to tell you it is delicious.

There is a way out...

quickly let them know your 9 year old helped on this one

Well he did!

My Not So Beautiful Launderette

2011-01-23T10:28:00.005-05:00

Flickr photo from oldohioschools

So my dryer broke on December 16th.

Well, was broken is more accurate.

I made the mistake of calling Sears to get service on my 2 year old reeeeeallly expensive Electrolux front-load washer because the little drawer that holds the detergent was not closing properly. Nothing a little piece of scotch tape didn't fix--and in the household of my youth, would have been the solution until the thing finally died and was replaced. We had a dryer in my house growing up that wouldn't run unless to took one of Harlie's skis and wedged it between the dryer door and the wall of the laundry room. That's how we ran the thing. For about a decade.

One of the things that happens when you marry a an Upper-middle class Connecticut Yankee is that you always get the extended warranty service plan.

So I called Sears about the silly little door issue.

And a guy came with a tool box and after some futzing determined that he would need to order a new drawer assembly.

Unwilling to put the tool box back in the van without even having cracked it open, he decided to do a little preventive maintenance on my dryer since it is also covered by the extended service warranty. Apparently preventive maintenance is shop speak for mangle.

I have not had a working dryer since.

All y'all know I have five kids, right?

And a Korean exchange student?

And a husband?

All of whom are filthy pigs?

The laundry situation is beyond grim.

Some of these people have actually had to use a bath towel a second time.

Child abuse!

4 more parts ordered and installed.

6 more house calls/unpaid absences from work.

18 calls to Sears to complain, cajole and cry.

5 trips to the laundromat.

And it ain't over.

I'm headed back to the laundromat on Louden Road this afternoon.

Don't forget to honk and wave.

New Frugal Feasts Column: Exclusively Yesterday in The Concord Monitor

2011-01-20T13:32:00.005-05:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

This year The Fru Gals made the exact number of resolutions we will be able to keep: none. Not so much because we think we are perfect it’s really more that we’ve given up. The seven pounds that have been following us around since 1996 are still back there, doing their part to ensure we never encounter an uncomfortable chair. We still plan to watch reality television at the expense of getting through the classics of American literature and the only way we’ll get our five fruits and veggies each day is if we count the grapes in the chardonnay. Besides, it’s the middle of January, so whatever pathetic promises we should have made would already be as forgotten as the treadmills we swore we’d buy last year.
The funny thing is that as realistic as we are about ourselves, we are brimming with hope for the next generation. Despite all evidence to the contrary we continue to believe that with subtle guidance, a firm hand and a lot of yelling, we can get our children to change. Maybe not the empty toilet paper roll and certainly not their socks, but someday in the bright future a tube of toothpaste may be capped and returned to the cabinet. Perhaps a thank you note will be written to a grandparent in the same month a gift was given. A bath towel could be used on a clean body fresh out of the shower, hung up to dry and used a second time.

OK, we know, that is just plain crazy talk.

But seriously, instead of a list of resolutions for Mom, why not a list of resolutions from Mom? Of course if we were seriously interested in having our children actually read the list we’d have to autotune it and post it on Youtube.
First on the list is the bathroom. We resolve that someone other than us is going to do the daily disinfecting. Maybe it would be easier to get someone to take a swipe now and again if we left one of those cute containers of disposable cloths on the tank like in those commercials. Maybe pigs will fly. Maybe we should paint a bull’s-eye in the bowl.

Our second resolution concerns the daily How Was Your Day discussion. We resolve that we will never again accept a one word answer to this daily inquiry. “Good” is never good. “Fine” is worse. A sigh always makes us panic someone got arrested, or pregnant or both. There has got to be a way to tease information out of teens when they first come home and not always at 11 when they’re finally ready to talk and we are ready to drop.

Our third resolution: Wrangling the snow gear. We resolve that all the winter accessories will not be spread out on every available surface so that the sopping mittens, hats and socks will not create an odor that evokes a disturbing combination of blue cheese and wet dog. Nothing quite says January in New England like the smell of hand-me-down boot liners roasting on a radiator.

Our last resolution is diet related: we resolve to get more vegetables into our kids, even if it means more work in the kitchen. This is the only one that will be painful for us. Take this week’s recipes: Snobby Joes and Oven Baked Onion Rings. Certainly more work than cracking open a can of that Manwich sauce and sloshing it over a pound of fried hamburger but surprisingly delicious and pretty healthy too. And the onion rings—a little more effort than tearing open the bag of frozen ones but they were so delicious we had to snatch a few out of our boys’ grubby hands so that Ken would have a few for the picture.

Snobby Joes
This recipe is adapted from one we found at the vegan food blog Post Punk Kitchen (www.ppk.com) that has all sorts of scrumptious recipes for people who want to reduce the amount of meat they are eating but still want to dazzle their taste buds and feed the kids. We wreck the vegan certification with cheese and a schmear of mayo on the bun but that’s just us.
Ingredients to make 8-10 hearty sandwiches
1 pound bag dried lentils, rinsed in fresh water
8 cups water (approx)
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium yellow onion, diced small
3 red bell peppers, blackened over an open flame and peeled, then diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup chili powder
¼ cup dried oregano
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 14 ounce can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 6 ounce can tomato paste
1/3 cup real maple syrup
¼ cup yellow mustard
8-10 Kaiser rolls or sesame buns (optional – for serving)
Shredded cheddar (optional) Sliced green onions (optional)
Mayo (optional)

Put the lentils in a medium sized covered pot and cover with cool water by 2 inches. Cover and bring to a boil. Once boiling, lower heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, until lentils are soft. Drain and set aside.
About 10 minutes before the lentils are done boiling, sauté the onion in the olive oil for about 5 minutes over medium heat, until limp and glossy but not brown.
Add the garlic and cook for another minute, turning down the heat so that the garlic doesn’t burn.
Add the cooked lentils, the chili powder, oregano and salt and mix.
Add the tomatoes and tomato paste. Cook for about 10 minutes until nice and thick.
Stir in the maple syrup and mustard and heat through.
Serve on the buns, garnished with cheese and sliced green onions.

Oven Fried Onion Rings
Because they don’t really cook all the way through, it is important to use sweet onions like Vidalia or Walla Wallas. We got the idea for this from Post Punk Kitchen but had to change the recipe up a little—the original calls for almond milk and we don’t know what that is or where to get it.
Ingredients for 8 Servings
6 sweet onions, peeled and sliced into rings
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
4 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
2 cups Panko (Japanese style) breadcrumbs

Combine the milk with the vinegar and set aside for 5 minutes while you assemble the rest of the ingredients.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees
Line 2 baking sheets with foil and mist with Pam.
Stir together the milk, flour, salt and pepper and pour into a shallow bowl.
Pour the Panko crumbs into a second shallow bowl.
Take the onion rings and dip them fully into the milk mixture and then into the Panko crumbs making sure to coat the rings well.
Place on the baking sheet.
Continue until all the rings are dipped and breaded.
Bake for 15-18 minutes until the rings are browned.
Check after 14 minutes to make sure they do not burn. Serve immediately.

Pepperoni Pizza Casserole

2011-01-19T06:42:00.008-05:00

Snow days and school delays call for a good easy pasta dish.

After a long day of shoveling the snow back outside and loading the dryer, this great meal feeds the crowd and most of these items you should have on hand.

If not feel free to substitute and make this an everything pizza casserole.

Onions, mushroom, cooked ground beef, additional cheese... put those kiddos to work.

You'll be a snow day star....

Pizza Pasta
8 ounces uncooked pasta
1 (14oz) jar pizza sauce
2 ounces sliced pepperoni, halved (about 3/4 cup)
1/4 cup finely chopped green pepper
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1 garlic clove minced
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Heat oven to 375 degrees.
Spray 8-inch square baking dish with cooking spray and set aside.
Cook pasta to desired doneness and drain.
In a large bowl combine cooked pasta, pizza sauce, pepperoni, bell pepper, Parmesan cheese, oregano and garlic: mix well.
Spoon into spray-coated dish and sprinkle with mozzarella cheese.
Cover with foil.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until mixture is thoroughly heated and cheese is melted.

Meatloaf Trick it's in the Bag

2011-01-17T06:23:00.013-05:00

One of the best gifts I received this past holiday season was, a wonderful book from a dear friend. The Best cooking tips from Cuisine at Home, and let me tell you any tips I can get to make my life in the kitchen easier, I am ready, willing and able to try... I was quite happy to find this little meatloaf ditty...

Meatloaf is a big hit at my house, however I am a bit reluctant to make it, I always feel like I am entering meat hell as my hands plunge into the mixture of all things meatloafy.... I am not a big fan of that.

So , from now on I will put on my kitchen finery and bag it.

Bagging the meatloaf.....

To keep your hands clean while making up the families favorite meat loaf, put all the ingredients into a large Ziploc bag. Close the bag, then knead everything together until the ingredients are well mixed.. Drop the mixture into your pan form into a loaf..Cover with barbecue sauce and move on, to some other kitchen task like stirring the pot.....in your Betty Draper dress.
How great is that?

Where I am from

2011-01-13T08:00:00.001-05:00

This job we do--raising a family-- has so many ups and downs, and twists and turns,that I often feel I have lost my way.

Is this work really making a difference?
Does it really matter if I go the extra mile--when I just feel like turning back?

Each day raising a family brings its own challenges, decisions, reactions.
Words and actions that shape us.
All these things make up our childrens' memories.
The long long stories that make up their lives.
They can not remember them all so we can only hope they remember the best.
(but we all know they don't)

My guy Max wrote a simple little piece a few years back that I keep right beside my computer and when I'm ready to say just screw it--it's all just too much work--they could care less....

I read the words this quiet guy wrote:

Where I come from

I am from cuts and bruises,

from church polos and dirt covered t-shirts.

I am from loud, chaotic family dinners.

(laughing and objects banging it sounds like a horrible choir)

I am from the smell of the salty ocean,

the sound of the pine trees swaying in the warm summer breeze.

I am from Louis Armstrong and "big happy families"

from teasing older brothers and obnoxious aunts, and big Ole' Dave,

from new beginnings and never ending friendships.

I'm from Santa Claus and the tooth fairy,

From our father, who art in heaven...

I'm from a small tan house, and too many desserts.

From the big red suburban and yellow bathing suits,

From inappropriate jokes, thanks Dad.

I'm from picture frames on the wall,

From filling that space in each other hearts.

Thank you Max

It Is worth it...

Ham Soup

2011-01-12T14:30:00.009-05:00

Oh the weather outside is frightful, but in here I am making delightful soup from the lowly left over ham bone.

Pea Soup is a favorite of mine , however it does rate very high with the rest of the fam..

So I have devised a plan to trick them...I think maybe green is not the best color for soup so I am using yellow peas, the taste is wonderful and the aroma is filling the house as I write this post.

Let's hope this works

To make this trick soup

Put your ham bone, put it in a large pot, fill with water about 2"inches from the top

Add 1 large onion chopped

2 bags yellow peas

salt and pepper.

Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat ,cook for an hour or until all the peas have softened.

Remove the bone and take off the ham , place the ham back in the soup.

Taste for flavor add a bit more salt and pepper if needed ,top with a bit of sour cream and you are good to go.

I'll be sure to let you know, how this goes

Writing takes team work

2011-01-08T17:55:00.003-05:00

Call me crazy but I could not resist, these babies crack me up....Okay Okay no more babies

White Cake

2011-01-06T06:23:00.002-05:00

The quest has ended..

I have always loved homemade white cake, however white cake has a tendency to be very very dry and although I can make a good looking cake I have yet to make a good looking good tasting white cake.

But undeterred I forge on ,it is usually in the middle of the holiday festivities that I take on my own cake challenge. It is clear, I like to make myself miserable, there is way to much to do and the project has yet to be a success . So this past season, always sticking with tradition, the week before Christmas, I gathered up all my ingredients and went to work, the kids left me alone so I could concentrate on the masterpiece, my first attempt...... almost good a bit dry, slightly overcooked, but the flavor was promising... never having been this close to success, I felt it was worth another try, so I tweaked the recipe and I tried again........IT worked.....

Good looking and Delicious.

So I will share my recipe with you because I am nice and also so I have the damn recipe written down for next year..why re-invent the wheel I say

White Layer Cake with raspberry filling and cream Cheese frosting

21/4 cups all purpose flour

21/4 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

10 tablespoons butter, softened

11/3 cups granulated sugar

4 eggs

4 oz mayonnaise

11/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/1/4 cups of half and half

3/4 cup raspberry jam

Frosting
1 cup butter, softened

1 8oz package cream cheese room temp.

2 cups powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease bottoms of two 9x11/2 inch round cake pans and lightly flour. set aside In a medium bowl, combine flour baking powder and salt set aside. In a large bowl, beat the 10 tablespoons of butter with an electric mixer on medium high for 30 seconds. add mayonnaise and combine,Gradually add the 1 1/3 cup as granulated sugar, beating until combined. add eggs one a time,beating after each addition, Beat in the 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla. Alternately add flour mixture and half and half,to butter mixture, beating at low speed after each addition just until combined. Spread batter into prepared pans.

Bake about 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centers comes out clean. Check at 25 minutes just to be sure the last thing you want to do is overcook.. Cool cake in pans on wire rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pans and continue to cool on wire racks.

Frosting: In a large bowl,beat 1 cup of butter on medium high speed until fluffy add softened cream cheese and beat until fluffy, add 2 teaspoons vanilla, gradually beat in powdered sugar.

Assembly:after the cake has completely cooled. Place one layer on a serving plate, spread jam over the top and place next layer atop. cover with frosting and Enjoy !!!!!

Happy New year to you

2011-01-03T20:33:00.014-05:00

From all of us cold babies in The 'Shire...

Times are tough but we do what we can to keep on going

Laugh a little

Love a little

and for God's sake get naked and jump in the snow...

Photo provided by my crazy little Ellie Broadbent age 12

Happy New Year! Hoppin John in New Hampshire

2011-01-02T07:38:00.010-05:00

Photo Illustration by Jessica Walsh for the New York Times

I sure could use some.

The Ellinwoods are in a very weird place.

On the surface things look perfectly normal--well normal for us anyway--with five boys plus a Korean exchange student lounging around for the seemingly endless Christmas vacation making noodles and building with Legos and tuning skis and sledding up a storm at White Park and texting until their thumbs go numb--and while there is still plenty of laughter at the dinner table and heat and electricity, the truth is we are broke.

I mean really and truly broke-ass broke.

And barring some miracle that I can't even imagine, 2011 is going to be a pretty tough year.

We will almost certainly lose our house. And I'm not sure what happens when you can't pay the taxes that are due in April, but that can't be pretty either.

The odd thing is I'm not too stressed out about our financial collapse.

Somehow, after 49 years of being wound more tightly than Cameron Fry, I've just let go.
There isn't anything I can do to stop what is going to happen--except buy cheaper wine, not get the New York Times at home 7 days a week and stop shopping for anything but food and toilet paper; and since I've already done that, I'm just hanging on for the roller coaster ride and pretending the tingly feeling in my stomach is just anticipation for the climb back up to the top.

Here's the reality check:

I fiercely love my husband.
I continue to believe in his entrepreneurial dream of a green business.
I have five healthy children who will soon be back in school.
I can still write checks to Market Basket.
I have a few good friends.
I take pride in my job even though I think I made more waitressing in college.
I found a white Prada blouse at the thrift shop in my size.
I write a food column with an *amazing* partner that is a dream come true.
I enjoy driving Ken Williams and Robin crazy trying to make endless plates of brown food look appetizing.
I actually get paid for nonsense I think up in my head, and said nonsense gets published in a newspaper.

Everything else , and I mean everything is just stuff.

O.K. it is A LOT of stuff, but so what.

We'll put a bunch of it in storage, sell or give away the rest and move on.

We'll figure something out. We always have.

This might be the longest lead in to a recipe in the history of this blog, and we are some wordy bitches.

The other day I read this terrific opinion piece in the Times about black-eyed peas and the tradition in the African American community of serving them on New Year's day to bring prosperity in the coming year.

The dried legumes were loaded onto slave ships to be used as food during the voyage and by the early 1700s were growing all over the American south. Like so many other African dishes, black eyed peas made their way to the masters' table. They haven't made it too far north--until yesterday I don't think I'd ever eaten them and know I've never cooked them.

As Julia Harris writes,

Whatever the exact reason, black-eyed peas with rice form one corner of the African-American New Year’s culinary trinity: greens, beans and pig. The greens symbolize greenbacks (or “folding money”) and may be collards... The pork is a remembrance of our enslaved forebears, who were given the less noble parts of the pig as food. But without the black-eyed pea, which journeyed from Africa to the New World, it just isn’t New Year’s — at least not a lucky one.

Hopefully the very white, very northern Ellinwoods will find some luck in 2011 with Hoppin John.

I adapted this recipe from Emeril Lagasse. I have no idea if it is authentic, but it was delicious. He specifies using a ham hock but I couldn't find any. The smoked picnic shoulder was cheap and yummy--and a mere half pound, carved from the bone, added a smoky richness to the dish that turned rice and beans into a hearty meal. If I couldn't find the smoked shoulder I think I'd use slab cut bacon, diced and fried--when has bacon ever been a bad choice?

Hoppin John
Serves 8-10 generously

Ingredients

1/2 pound smoked picnic shoulder
1 cup onion, chopped
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1/2 cup red pepper, chopped
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 pound dried black-eyed peas
1 quart chicken stock
1 Bay leaf
1 teaspoon dry thyme leaves
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne or more or less to taste
3 tablespoons finely chopped green onion
3 cups steamed white rice
Hot sauce for serving (optional)

Directions

Dump the dried peas into a large covered pot and cover with cool water by 2 inches. Bring to a boil. After 2 minutes shut off the heat, cover the pot and let it sit for at least an hour.

Cut the pork into bite-sized pieces and fry in a heavy soup pot or dutch oven over medium heat until it is browned and all the fat has been rendered, about 4-5 minutes.
Remove with a slotted spoon.
Add the onion, celery, green pepper, and garlic, cook for 4 minutes.
Add the black-eyed peas, stock, bay leaves, thyme, and seasonings.
Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 40-45 minutes, or until the peas are creamy and tender, stirring occasionally.
If the liquid evaporates, add more water or stock--the dish should be fairly soupy.
Adjust seasonings, and garnish with green onions.
Serve over rice and pass the hot sauce.

All y'all have a happy new year. And try to remember, it could ALWAYS be worse!

Missing Column: Frugal Feasts December 29 2010

2010-12-29T14:42:00.003-05:00

Somehow we missed posting this one.....which is a shame because it contains very valuable advice. And a recipe too....

The Fru Gals Answer Your Financial Questions:

Great recipes, sage advice

For 2011, the Fru Gals serve up deliciously inexpensive meals with a free side of financial advice

Can Christmas really be over already?

We spend months squirreling money away and countless hours shopping, decorating and cooking, and then, woosh, the whole thing is over faster than a 10-year-old ripping the wrapping paper off a 400-piece Lego set.

The only parts of the Fru Gals' Christmas that seem to linger are the pine needles stuck in the fringe of our one good rug and the damn bills.

2010 was no different, but somehow we pulled off another memorable Christmas, even though this year money was so tight it squeaked and we can only grocery shop during vampire-safe hours when we are certain not to run into the checkout girls who go to school with our sons and would be all too happy to report on the decline of our debit cards. We are no financial geniuses but every time a reader expresses surprise that neither Fru Gal has yet filed for bankruptcy and/or moved into a tent down by the Merrimack we wonder if maybe others can benefit from the many years we've spent broke.

It is in this spirit that we start a new series:

The Fru Gals Answer Your Financial Questions.

If you think you can find a better place to get financial advice than the food page, by all means go there.

Now.

Which grocery store has the longest delay between when I write a check and when they present it to the bank for payment?

We have a friend who used to have this down cold. She might not have been able to balance the checkbook, but she determined with mathematical precision that if her husband got paid on Thursdays, she could write a check to Shaw's on Wednesday evenings after 6, Hannaford when they opened on Wednesday mornings and Market Basket Tuesdays after 4.

These days, it's all electronic and we swear checks bounce before the ink on them is dry.

Instead of gambling with overdraft fees, we suggest checking the sofa and the dryer for change. Scrounge up $3 and you'll be able to buy two bags of frozen tortellini and sauce it with what one clever reader fondly refers to as Cream of Crisper Drawer.

The stores where I shop don't offer free gift boxes any more. Can I reuse boxes from past years to wrap this year's gifts?

Absolutely! Save the boxes from nice stores but be prepared for the disappointment on your loved one's face when she sees a birthday box from Coach or Abercrombie and opens up to find a sweater from Walmart. Remind her that it's the thought that counts.

I keep seeing celebrities with blond hair and roots so dark it has got to be intentional. Is adopting this look a good strategy for stretching out the time between hair appointments?

If your roots are dark, we say go for it. Madonna has been setting the style since even the Fru Gals were young.*

* This is not an acceptable strategy if your roots are gray, though - the only celebrity you'll resemble is Lily Munster.

Heating my home is so expensive. What temperature do the Fru Gals recommend for maximum savings and minimum discomfort?

After much trial and error we have concluded that 60 degrees is the breaking point. Any lower and the pipes will freeze and your kids might have a legitimate claim of abuse. On the plus side you'll be able to unplug the refrigerator because meat will stay fresh right on the counter!

Do the Fru Gals agree that switching over to cloth napkins is better for the environment and cheaper, too?

This one really depends on the size of your family. When you've got families as big and disgusting as ours, the napkin supply needed for each day is daunting. We've got boys who use napkins as hankies and boys who use napkins to wipe their golf shoes and boys who wouldn't put a pair of dirty shorts in the proper place for love or Justin Bieber tickets but will wad up a clean napkin and stuff it right in the hamper. Even a relatively dry meal is good for about a dozen and then comes the washing and the folding so they look spiffy in the napkin basket. A jumbo package of paper napkins is about a buck and a half. You do the math. For the record, the second we get all these kids out the door and there are only two people living in our homes, we are going to go 100 percent cloth. We are pretty sure the 50 napkins we each own will then suffice.

Will my wife appreciate a wood stove in the kitchen?

Oh sure. There is nothing like a nice fire on a cold morning. And don't underestimate the benefit of letting your bride feel like she is Ma Ingalls - working hard to keep her family warm while she cooks the meals and folds the napkins. You men folk will buy the wood and stack it neatly by the kitchen door and she will thank you daily for the opportunity to step outside in her robe and slippers to uncover the wood, wrestle a few logs from the frozen pile, lug them into the kitchen, scavenge a match, fill the house with smoke and then get on with her day. She will love it when the women in her office sniff the air suspiciously when she passes by and wonder out loud about what could be burning. And she will be so grateful you didn't "wimp out" and have a gas line run to the stove. You are so right, switches are for sissies.

If my in-laws send a birthday check for one of my children and I cash it and buy shoes for me, will I go straight to hell?

Straight? No, certainly not straight.

Here is a family meal that gets a five-star Fru Gal rating: Cheap, delicious and 100 percent chickpea free.

Bonus meal: When there are just a few pieces of broken sausage left, chop them up into bits and serve the whole mess over pasta; make sure to pass the Parmesan.

Slow Cooker Sausage and Peppers
2 pounds sweet Italian sausage or hot, if you like to live dangerously
3 medium onions, halved and then sliced into thin wedges
6 green and/or red bell peppers, seeded and sliced thinly into strips
4 cloves garlic, smashed
2 28-ounce cans crushed tomatoes
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
freshly ground black pepper to taste
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, more or less to taste
crusty sub rolls for serving
Prick each sausage link once or twice with a fork and cook over medium heat in a heavy covered pan with about a half cup of water until the sausages are no longer pink. Once the water has evaporated, remove the cover, turn the heat down to medium/low and let the sausages brown up a little. Move them around with a pair of tongs so they don't stick to the pot.
Toss the onions, peppers and garlic in the bottom of a 5 quart slow cooker and arrange the sausages on top. Stir together the crushed tomatoes, paste, salt, pepper and spices in a large bowl and pour over the sausages and vegetables. Cook on low for 8 to 10 hours, until sausages are tender and vegetables have softened. Serve on the rolls and top with lots of sauce.
Makes 8 large subs with leftovers.

Down and Dirty Dinner: Cream of Crisper Drawer

2010-12-29T07:20:00.002-05:00

Cream of Crisper Drawer

Thanks to Frugal reader Millie for finally giving a name to a Fru Gal Favorite--pasta topped with a delectable white sauce and whatever hasn't liquefied in the bottom of the fridge.

This is the perfect dinner for those days when you either can't get to the market because you are too busy or because you have flat run out of money.

It is delicious and at least fairly nutritious. And while this version is vegetarian, if you've got some leftover protein, feel free to chop it up and add it at the end.

Cream of Crisper Drawer

To Serve 6-8 starving minions

Ingredients:

1 pound box of pasta, or two bags frozen tortellini, cooked according to package directions, drained and dumped into a warm serving bowl.
6 tablespoons butter
1/3rd cup flour
3 1/2 cups of milk or a combination of milk, light cream and /or half and half, nuked until very warm--I know this step is a pain but it makes all the difference in keeping the sauce lump free.
1 teaspoon kosher salt
fresh ground pepper to taste -- about 6-8 cranks of the pepper mill
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, optional
3 cups mixed vegetables--fresh or frozen or a combination.
If the vegetables are fresh, cut them into very small bits so they cook quickly.
Suggestions: bell peppers, celery, carrots, onions, scallions.
Greens are good too-- spinach, Swiss chard, etc, just be sure to remove the tough stems and finely chop the leaves.
If you want to use broccoli, potatoes or anything else really hard, you might want to nuke them for 3-4 minutes to soften.
If the vegetables are frozen, dump them into a colander and run them under hot water to declump and soften them. Drain well before using.
Suggestions: Peas, carrots, corn, broccoli, green beans (really drain well), pearl onions, mixed veggies.

Directions:

Melt the butter in a large heavy skillet over medium low heat.
If you've got an onion and/or some garlic, mince it and add it to the butter and let it cook for two minutes until the onion is limp and glossy and the garlic is fragrant.
If you are using any other fresh vegetables like red or green pepper or diced carrots or celery, add them and let them cook for a minute or two, stirring frequently and watching the heat. You want the vegetables limp not brown and you don't want the butter to burn. If you don't have an onion, and are just using frozen vegetables, go to step 3.
Add the flour and move it around the pan until it is well mixed with the butter.
Let cook for a minute, turning down the heat if necessary to keep the mixture golden. Don't let it brown, and keep stirring.
Add the warm milk/cream and whisk constantly until the sauce starts to bubble.
Add the salt, pepper and mustard and keep whisking.
Taste and add more salt if needed.
Add about a half cup of Parmesan if you;ve got enough, otherwise save the cheese for passing at the table.
Add frozen vegetables (remember to rinse and drain) and stir to coat everything with the sauce.
Turn down the heat to low and stir occasionally until the whole mess is hot and bubbling.
Pour the sauce over the pasta.
Serve, passing extra Parmesan around if you've got it.

Christmas Hangover

2010-12-28T06:40:00.007-05:00

This cartoon says it all

MERRY MERRY AFTER CHRISTMAS, On to New Years Resolutions

Oh Betty Crocker!

2010-12-23T20:56:00.006-05:00

I was tooling around the interwebs looking for a couple new cookie idea. I saw these totes adorable candy canes at Betty Crocker.com and got to work making the dough. And coloring the dough. And then rolling out and twisting the dough. And baking the dough, and of course, garnishing the dough.

D'oh!

Worst. Looking. Cookies. Ever.

Disgusted, I headed out to run some errands and noodled on how to salvage things. And then I thought "PINWHEELS". Out came the green food coloring, the rolling pin and a jar of sparkling green sanding sugar.

Et voila!

They might induce seizures but at least they aren't sad.

Holiday Appetizer Idea: Hot Pepper Jelly

2010-12-22T11:00:00.001-05:00

Does either of our readers know how to spell Jhuzh? It's that word that sounds kinda Yiddishy that means to spiff up.

Well what all y'all are looking up is a Jhuzhed up some cream cheese, a jar of homemade hot pepper jelly and two sleeves of Ritz crackers.

If you are anti-jhuzhing, you could always just peel the foil off the brick of cheese, plop it onto a plate and pour the jelly over like some sort of vomity mess.

YUM!

Here's how to Jhuzh:

Take 2 8 ounce packages of cream cheese and nuke for 30 seconds or so.
Add a giant dollop of mayo or heavy cream or sour cream and blend well.
Spritz an an open 8 or 9 inch spring-form pan (without the bottom) with some Pam and center it on a serving platter.
Spread the softened cream cheese evenly in the ring.
Refrigerate until serving time.
Lift off the ring, top with an entire 6-8 ounce jar of hot pepper jelly and surround with Ritz crackers, or store brand equivalent.

Double Yum!

You can make your own hot pepper jelly in about an hour. Megan and I made a ton of it last August, but since everything is still available at the grocery store, you could make some now. I was going to link to the post about the pepper jelly but apparently I never did one. Idiot!

On My Christmas List: Simple Times Crafts for Poor People by Amy Sedaris

2010-12-21T19:17:00.006-05:00

LOVE HER and cannot wait to find this book under my tree. I mean, heck, I'm crafty. AND wicked poor to boot!

Let's see what Amy herself has to say about it:

Here is one great idea from the book that I hope my coworkers down at the brewery don't find out about:

Save up the crumbs when you bake cookies and store them in your freezer, and when you have a substantial amount, sprinkle them on a plate, add a card that says, "Enjoy the cookies!" with your name on it, and take them to work. Everyone will think that you were thoughtful and brought cookies without you having to do the work.

Bwhahahahahahaha

Crafting for Fun and Profit: Princess Pine Wreaths

2010-12-21T06:10:00.008-05:00

Just a little foraging in the forests of The 'Shire, a quick trip to the craft store and about 5 milligrams of Adderall and you too can craft your way to adorable little wreaths that look great on mirrors and all sorts of other spots that need a dose of holiday cheer.

Sadly I do not have a photo of me and two of my minions traipsing through the woods of Bow, New Hampshire on our hands and knees with a reusable shopping tote and a pair of Felco pruners, but it wouldn't matter anyway because without audio of Tate and Hayden whining it wouldn't really evoke the spirit of the endeavor.

Anyhoo--get a big bag of Princess Pine--it grows close to the ground deep in the woods and grows about 5-6 inches high--you'll also need a small bale of #22 green wire and a bunch of small grapevine wreaths. I use the six-inch grapevine wreaths -- two for a buck or so --because I like them to look really lush and full. If you'd prefer a leaner wreath by all means get the bigger ones--just keep in mind that the bigger the grapevine, the more foraging you'll have to do.

Spread out on a counter and get to work: Bunch together 4-6 sprigs of pine and wire it leaving long tails of wire on both ends.

Use the tails to secure the bunch to the grapevine and twist the wire to keep the bunch in place.

Keep going...

Use as many bunches as you need in order to fill out the wreath, and when you are done the back should look pretty cool too....

Now comes the fun part....

For this one I tied on two lengths of gingham ribbon and stuffed in two sprays of yellow stars, with the ends of the sprays tucked under the bow. I tried to splay out the stars and have them follow the curve of the wreath but clearly I could have futzed with this one a little longer. It's hanging in my kitchen on the back of a door.

On this one, currently wired to my monitor down at the brewery, has the same ribbon and a bunch of vintage Christmas lights--I just wrapped a long piece of wire to the screw end and tucked the wires under the bow. It looks much better than this crappy photo but I forgot my camera again today and if I wait any longer this post will be totally (as opposed to only partially) irrelevant.

This one is in my dining room on a large mirror--I added nothing more than a double bow of wired, velvet ribbon and then curled and scrunched up the ends a'la Cobblestone Design.

Each one of these takes about 20 minutes to put together, and look so much cuter than anything you can find in the stores. Well, if by "stores" you mean Market Basket and Family Dollar.

Merry Christmas!

The Soup Doctor

2010-12-18T08:17:00.004-05:00

Have all y'all seen the horrible video of Sandra Lee's semi-homemade kwanzaa cake? You know, the one that Anthony Boudrain said the sheer sight of which would make your eyeballs burst into flames?

I am thinking about that horrible video, her ridiculous eyemake up and her insane tablescapes as I write this post.

Because most of this recipe comes out of a bunch of cans. Just like another recent post (and column) on another soup that starts off with a hand cramped from cranking open a bunch of cans.

Have I become an older, grayer, poorer AND fatter New Hampshire version of Sandra Lee?

Probably better than being the office drunk, a title I am sure to win after Thursday night's shenanigans at the holiday party down at the Brewery. If only I'd stuck with a couple bottles of Shotz beer and not have mixed up a batch of Pomegranate Cosmopolitans. And then tried to drown myself with them. But I digress.

So about the Santa Chowder:

Really delicious, really easy and serves a ton of people. It nearly tastes homemade, and there isn't a candle or an acorn in sight. bonus: no exploding eyeballs.

Santa Chowder:

20 Servings

1 cup diced red peppers
1 cup sliced green onions, white and green parts
4 diced medium sized potatoes
3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons dried thyme
9 cans ready to eat clam chowder--store brand is fine
9 small cans chopped clams, liquor from 3 cans reserved, the rest of them drained
1 quart heavy cream

Saute the peppers, onions and potatoes in the butter over medium heat until limp and glossy. Cover and keep on low until the potatoes are cooked through--maybe 15 minutes--stirring occasionally.

Crack open the cans and mix everything together in a giant soup or stock pot. Slowly heat to a simmer over lowish heat. Let simmer for a good 20 minutes or so to blend the flavors. Serve with those disgusting, dry little crackers if you like that sort of thing.

An Ode to Butter: New Frugal Feasts Column

2010-12-15T05:04:00.006-05:00

Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

We don’t know how the first bit of butter came to be but using our own marriages as a framework we can easily imagine the following scenario: Some guy in a good mood decides to swing the milk pail all the way from the barn to the kitchen one morning and sheepishly deposits a gallon of lumpy froth on the counter, hoping against hope that she won’t notice. His wife, who had been waiting and waiting and waiting for the milk so she can serve breakfast and get on with her day, served it right up. Poor guy had no choice but to choke it down.

Butter as a punishment—if only every passive-aggressive marital standoff could end so deliciously.

We love everything about butter. The gorgeous color, the lilting flavor, the mouth-watering aroma. A knob of butter and some gentle heat transforms even the most flaccid of peppers and sprouty of onions into heaven in a pan. Butter has all the sweet, creamy goodness that are lacking in other areas of our lives. Our children may swear, our checks may bounce and our coffee may be weak and lukewarm but butter makes it all better.

Well, possibly not the clarity of our arteries or the size of our thighs, but before anyone starts dialing up the food police we’d like to state that YES we know that obesity is a terrible problem, and YES we understand that olive oil is much healthier, but there are times when only butter will get the job done.

You won’t find us decorating margarine cookies this holiday season and you couldn’t pay us to serve Canola Oil Crunch ice cream on top of slabs of our Gooey Trans-fat Free Spread Cake.

If you seriously Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter we seriously can’t believe you’ve got a single working taste bud.

Butter even sounds good. First of all, how about that sizzle in the pan? We’ll bet you a steak sandwich smothered in fried onions that your mouth is watering right now just thinking about the sound. The goodness of butter is all over the English language.

What do we do when we want something from the boss? We butter her up!

What words do we use to describe the feel of a luxurious fabric? Buttery soft, natch.

And what is it they pump onto the month-old popcorn at the movie theatre? Buttery topping of course.

No one in their right mind would ever say yes if the sullen teen behind the register asked if we’d like a squirt of partially hydrogenated coconut and cottonseed oils flavored with salt, beta carotene and artificial butter flavor on our 5 gallon buckets. Never!

It may seem counter-intuitive, but as our family budgets are squeezed ever tighter, butter becomes less and less of a splurge.

Even on our worst bare-cupboard days, there is always a half a stick of butter in the back of the fridge that we know will transform a box of store brand macaroni and a couple shakes of “cheese” from the green jar into a dinner that everyone will eat with relish.

And we’re not sure any of our little darlings would ever touch a vegetable without a little buttery lubrication—just a pat and even the wrinkly, freezer-burnt peas from the improperly closed bag are gobbled right up.

For once the foodies are with us: Whip up a classic omelet with a few mushrooms sauteed in butter and you’ll have a frugal dish that even Julia Child would serve with pride and better wine.

Speaking of Julia—we loved the movie Julie and Julia and while Merryl Streep’s transformation was incredible and we loved the unfolding of blogger Julie Powell’s New York Times moment; it was when Amy Adams leaves a pound of butter beneath Julia’s portrait in the Smithsonian that we got weepy, not to mention jealous.

We’ve just got to find out where they sell those giant bricks of butter!

For this week’s recipe we’ve taken a Canadian classic from The Joy of Baking and made it even more decadent:

Butter Toffee Butter Tarts
Makes 12 4-inch tarts
We make a sweet, buttery tart crust in the food processor for this recipe, but this filling is scrumptious ladled into pre-made pie crusts too--just cut out circles to fit your pans. And muffin tins work perfectly well for these tarts—we used the small, flat tart pans so Ken Williams would have an easier time photographing yet another plate of brown food.
Tart Crust Pastry (Pate Brisee):
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, chilled, and cut into 1 inch pieces
1/8 to 1/4 cup ice water—measure by putting ¼ cup cold water into a measuring cup and adding a few ice cubes
Put the flour, salt and sugar into the bowl of a food processor and blitz for a few seconds to combine. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs and there are no giant lumps of butter visible. Add a dribble of the ice water and blitz just until the dough comes together. Add another dribble or two of water if the dough seems very dry and won’t clump.
Scrape the dough into a thick disk, wrap in plastic and chill for at least a half hour. Roll out carefully, using plenty of flour, and cut into circles at least an inch bigger around than the circumference of the pans. Carefully press into the pan and let the tart shells chill for another half hour while you make the filling:
Butter Tart Filling:
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 cup light cream or half and half
1/2 cup toffee chips, or raisins if you insist. (optional)

Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy using either a stand or a hand mixer. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well. Add the vanilla extract and the cream and mix well, being sure to scrape all the way to the bottom of the bowl. If using the optional toffee chips or raisins, add about a teaspoon to the bottom of each unbaked tart shell and then carefully pour in the filling mixture, being sure not to fill them any more than two thirds of the way full as the filling will puff up in the oven. Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until the tops are brown and the filling isn’t all jiggly. A scoop of Butter Crunch ice cream would be a totally decadent and unnecessary garnish.

2010-12-12T07:00:00.003-05:00

Just thought you might enjoy this photo my 12 year daughter put together for her facebook...

Crazy Girl, I do hope that her talents don't go undiscovered.

It would be a shame.

I'll Tell Ya What I Want, What I Really Really Want...

2010-12-07T12:08:00.004-05:00

As part of my continuing series of Things that Cost a Thousand Dollars that I Won't Be Getting I offer the Kjus Knight Jacket.

Here's what Lasse himself wrote about this one...

The Kjus Knight Jacket for women will rescue any damsel in distress from cold, wintery weather. With it's waterproof fabric and zips, snow gaiter, removable neckwarmer, and primaloft insulation, this jacket protects like armour. The Kjus Knight Jacket is a 4-way stretch retro inspired jacket with colorful side accents which are sure to flatter any woman's figure. Kjus did not miss a beat with this ski jacket. It's sleek, it's beautiful, it's Kjus. It's not gonna happen.

Instead I'll be spending another freezing New Hampshaa wintah in my long black puffy coat looking like a chubby garbage bag on legs.

Soup in a Snap: New Frugal Feasts Coulmn

2010-12-03T14:48:00.004-05:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Every time we log onto Facebook it's like that scene in Animal House where Pinto is trying to decide what to do with the Mayor's over served daughter: we've got an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other and that poor angel doesn't stand a chance.

Who is going to listen to that goody two shoes admonishing us to close the computer and get started on the pile of laundry in the boys' bathroom that is nearing the size of a small ice floe when that little devil is cooing in our ear "it's been hours since you checked in. Couldn't hurt to just take a peek...."

Oh Facebook. What would we do without you? Well, possibly vacuum with more regularity and not have dust bunnies the size of tumbleweeds, that's one thing. There are probably more things we could accomplish without the time suck of Facebook, but we spent so much time scrolling through posted Thanksgiving pictures last weekend that we had to scramble to meet our column deadline. For those of you who have not yet logged on, think of Facebook as the cyber equivalent of the bar on Cheers-a place where everyone knows your name. And who you are married to, and what swears your children use with shocking frequency, and how well fed your best friend from high school is and who has the ugliest pets. For the record, Suzanne is totally the Diane. Which makes Robin the Carla.

Facebook allows the Fru Gals to indulge in all sorts of shallow emotions. There is petty annoyance-with those friends who sound like their status updates are written in syrup: Up early today...sun is shining...went for a 5 mile walk...life is GOOD. Or how about: Another great day being married to my best friend. GAK! What the heck does that even mean? We've also got envy: Just thought I'd post some photos from our trip to Paris...Walter surprised me with five days in the city of light. Grrrrrrr! And of course there is schadenfreude, our favorite five dollar word that means feeling good about others' misfortune. We find ourselves brimming with schadenfreude when we see less than flattering photos of our Facebook friends and chortle at the computer: ha ha, she sure looks like hell. And those kids? God bless!

Feeling lonely? Get yourself on Facebook, stat! Within minutes you'll be racking up friend requests like it's your job. Folks from elementary school, people you haven't seen since you hung up your apron at Baskin Robbins in 1978, high school classmates of whom you have only the vaguest recollection, all are on Facebook and they all want to be your friend. Well, your Facebook friend anyway. Which are different from real world friends in crucial ways. For example you'd probably never spend as much time looking at vacation photos taken by your real friends as you do on Facebook, and not just because it would be hard to contain the snarky comments in person.

The speed at which Facebook operates is definitely a double edged sword. Sure it's great to hit "share" and instantly get a photo of the world's most gorgeous turkey out on the interwebs, but it also enables you to humiliate yourself at warp speed. Not to mention any names here (Robin) but some of the worst spellers in the known world are sharing "there idears" daily. Back in the old days of cursive writing it was possible to get away with a certain amount of poor spelling. If you developed an especially loopy and decorative writing style you could run the letters together and fudge things a bit. These days people have to wonder if you're just clumsy or if all your grammar quizzes in high school were adorned with a big, fat, red F. And again, not to mention any names (Suzanne) but wine and Facebook do not mix. It's hard to maintain an aura of cynical worldliness when you turn into a giant sap after a glass or three.

The kids are none too happy about the adult invasion of what they consider their private cyber world. Nothing takes the cool out of a status update faster than having your Mom and her best friends give it a big old thumbs up. We try not to embarrass our children on Facebook but it is woefully hard. Especially given how adorable they looked eating drippy popsicles on the beach in their bathing suits. We are trying to navigate the fine line between ignoring some of the saltier language while still controlling some of the images that we know college admissions officers will take into consideration when reading their applications.

Opt out if you'd like, but for the time being, the Fru Gals are in. Sure we'd love it if the "My Mom's on Facebook" app from Jane Lynch's hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch were actually available, but even without it, we're going to keep reading our children's posts and generally waste time on Facebook. There will still be a pile of laundry at our houses even if we never logged on and besides, when we are feeling fat and frumpy and old, all we need to do is scroll through some photos. Within seconds we can usually find someone who is looking just as bad, if not worse. Maybe a better term is Facebook Frenemies.

Here is a dinner you can pull together in an instant when you finally come out of an especially trance-like Facebook fog and realize that the fam is going to be looking for dinner any minute. The hardest part is opening all the cans, and after 20 minutes at a slow simmer, this hearty soup it tastes like you've been cooking all day. LIKE!

Hearty Hodge-Podge

This recipe has been adapted from an old Good Housekeeping Recipe from the 1970s that Suzanne's mother used to make. It makes a ton, freezes well and is hearty enough to warm up skiers and pond hockey players.

Makes 12-15 servings
1 pound hot Italian sausage meat--or 1 pound hot Italian links removed from the casing
3 cloves garlic, minced
4 stalks celery chopped into small dice
1 medium onion, chopped into small dice
1/4 cup oregano-sounds like a lot but really works in this recipe
5 cans ready to eat Minestrone soup-any brand that doesn't have to be diluted with water.
2 15 ounce can baked beans-regular flavor
2 15 ounce can petite diced tomatoes, undrained Parmesan cheese for serving

In a large stock pot sauté the sausage over medium heat, breaking it up into little bits as it cooks. Adjust the heat as needed to keep the bottom of the pan from scorching.
When the sausage is no longer pink, remove with a slotted spoon and place in a colander to drain.
Remove all but about 2 tablespoons of the oil from the pan and add the celery, onion and garlic.
Sauté for two or three minutes, just until the onion is limp and glossy and the celery is bright green. Add back in the drained sausage and the oregano and stir for a minute or two.
Add the soup, baked beans and tomatoes and scrape the bottom of the pan to remove the browned bits.
Bring to a simmer and let bubble very slowly for 20 minutes to blend the flavors.
Serve hot with a shaving or two of good Parmesan cheese.

Damn It, My Mom's on Facebook

2010-12-01T04:22:00.001-05:00

This is priceless.

Half a Loaf is Better than None. Sometimes.

2010-11-28T07:24:00.007-05:00

I hate to admit it but I am pretty terrible at managing my freezer.

I'd love to sit here and tell all y'all that every fall I go halvsies on a hog and that I only buy meat on sale and then transfer it into freezer paper wrapped parcels that are properly labeled with date and contents, but I'd be lying,

Even more than usual.

This is what my freezer really looks like: lots of Market Basket brand tortellini (dinner in 8 minutes) and Market Basket brand frozen vegetables ($.99 a pound, baby) and name brand veggie burgers (but only because Market Basket doesn't have their own house brand veggie burgers, yet) and half loaves of bread I buy at Market Basket.

Doesn't it all just look so inspiring?

The other night I needed to supplement an especially meager dinner --canned soup and a skimpy salad--so I pulled that pathetic loaf of bread out of the freezer.

It is truly remarkable what some good olive oil, kosher salt and a rub of garlic will do to frozen bread when it spends some time on a hot grill pan....

It was gone so fast that I could barely salvage two slices to photograph.

Hell, you can squint an almost imagine that I am the cook I pretend to be in the newspaper.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T08:37:00.009-05:00

Wishing both our readers a wonderful day
filled with family, food and all our other favorite F words......

If you'd like to try to make these ridiculously adorable cookies,
please visit The Party Animal Blog.
They have easy to follow directions With Photos!, and a template.
The crazy good edible eyeballs came from Chandler's Cake and Candy Supply.

At 24 for less than a dollar, we might just anthropomorphize everything we cook!

Cage Free Fa Sho

2010-11-22T09:04:00.003-05:00

So...yesterday I headed out with my list and my reusable shopping totes to do the big Turkey Day shop at 6:53 am.

When I got to the egg aisle I was pleasantly surprised to find that the cage free eggs were 18 for $1.99--not a whole heck of a lot more than the regular eggs--and certainly reasonable enough to be worth rewarding a chicken farmer who is kind to his peeps--so I loaded a couple of these into my cart.

I was a tinch annoyed that the cage free eggs were in plastic instead of cardboard, but bought them anyway. 7:05 on the Sunday before Thanksgiving is not the time to ponder the relative merits of plastic egg cartons versus cramped chickens. It's a time to power through my giant list and get home before I run into someone I know while I am out in public looking like a homeless person--an especially pathetic homeless person without access to makeup remover.

Anyway I got home and as I was unpacking the bags the fricken egg box sort of bent/crumpled in my hand and 6 of the eggs smashed on the kitchen floor.

Which just goes to show you that no good deed goes unpunished. Besides, how cramped up can those chickens be if they can still squeeze out an egg?

Damn You Gwyneth Paltrow

2010-11-18T19:28:00.008-05:00

When Wes Anderson's movie The Royal Tennenbaums came out I was Gwyneth's biggest fan. I loved Margot, the brilliant, tortured, mink-wearing wife of Bill Murray and I'm still not sure which of her quirks--racoony eyeliner or denial of her chain smoking-- is my favorite.

Somehow Gwyneth went bad.

I blame Madonna. Why do our best blondes have to go to London and get weird?

Have you seen Gwyneth's loathesome website? Mothers don't feel bad enough about the compromises we make every day--we need an underfed, overpaid actress with two spare hours every day to work out, and probably 3 nannies in heavy rotation, to tell us what we are doing wrong.

Thanks Gwennie!

Sure I'm bitter, but get a load of this website and see if you don't agree: Goop

She's also some sort of fashion icon: I'm not sure when this was taken but I'm fairly certain it wasn't on Halloween:

You know, sometimes I don't have the right shoe/sock combi on when I head to the dressing room at Marshalls, but I nearly always seem to remember not to recreate the yoga class footwear look when I head out for a night on the town.

So when this week's episode of Glee came on and it became obvi she was going to be the guest star, I nearly shut off the teevee and went to bed.

And when the opening strains of the radio version of F**K You started up, I decided I had to watch the train wreck.

God do I hate it when my narrow minded, snarky snap judgments of people are wrong.

LOVED this episode.

LOVED this version--which just days ago I was complaining about.

And finally,

LOVE Gwyneth.

I might be losing my edge. Good thing Saturday is my last day of double shifts at the brewery for a while.

2010-11-17T09:51:00.005-05:00

J.K. Rowling is worth every single one of the billion dollars she’s made from the Harry Potter books, movies, action figures, chess sets, jelly beans, board games and 50/50 blend sheet sets she’s sold over the past decade. Anyone who figures out a way to get boys to sit and read nearly 4,000 pages without a single parental bribe deserves to be Oprah rich, and we are happy to have contributed to the effort. Parenthood is filled with surprises but few are as rewarding as discovering that the reason we don’t hear taunting and flesh smacking flesh isn’t that the boys have finally killed each other but because they are engrossed in reading books with big words and long chapters and not a single drawing of a chubby principal wearing his underpants and a cape. The only thing that could possibly have made the Harry Potter books better would have been if Ms. Rowling had worked the multiplication tables into them somehow—Harry Potter and the Nine Times Tables of Doom.

When the first movie came out we were a little sad to think that the wizarding worlds we all had created in our heads were going to be forever changed by Hollywood. We pictured all kinds of tragic casting decisions and cheesy jokes —don’t forget that Hollywood is the place where Jim Carrey turned The Grinch into a nasty pot bellied dog and that odd little Haley Joel Osment made a career out of playing robotic children who see dead people. We’ll admit we came around a bit when we heard that Ralph Fiennes had been cast as Voldemort. Now there’s a dark lord a gal could worship. It’s no wonder Belllatrix leStrange is completely crazy; being that close to Mr. Oh So Fiennes would send us straight around the bend too. Heck, he even looks good with a slitty little snake nose.

It’s not just the eye candy that has us reserving our tickets for Friday night’s opening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One. We are headed to the theatre to get another look at all the magical gizmos that J.K. Rowling dreamed up as she sat in a coffee shop writing books and staving off financial disaster. OK maybe a Nimbus 2000 wouldn’t be all that helpful—what with all the groceries and kids we schlepp around town, but every book seemed to have some nifty little device that would change our muggly little lives for the better.

How about a Marauders’ Map? Imagine how much easier life would be if we could unfurl a piece of parchment and know that no one was lollygagging on the way home from school, or that it was safe to head into the downtown Market Basket without running into that neighbor whose choices you mocked maybe a bit too much on election day. And if we could get the 2.0 version that will also track the location of car keys, dog leashes and debit cards, well, we’d be as happy as Luna Lovegood.

We realize that cloaks of invisibility might be a reach, so we’d be willing to settle for a simple Invisibility Booster like the one Mr. Weasley installed in his flying Ford. A tap on the button on the dash and the car and all its contents were simply disappeared. This feature would be invaluable on the exceedingly rare occasion when one of the Fru Gals steps a little too hard on the gas pedal. It would also help us not look so crazy on those nights when we feel compelled to drive by a house party 30 or 40 times in an effort to see if our teens are participating in any funny business. For the time being we are ignoring our childrens' sarcastic suggestion to have Invisibility Boosters installed on our foreheads so they could make us disappear.

What Mom couldn’t use a Time Turner like the one Hermoine used to attend two classes at the same time? We’re not so much interested in our education as our reputation. If we could put a few minutes back on the clock we’d no longer be the last parent to pick up form sports practices, birthday parties and dance rehearsals. Robin would like to rewind on the rare occasion her husband actually admits she is right so she could hear it a second or tenth time. Suzanne figures she might spend less time with her foot in her mouth if she could go back to the moment right before she opens it.

Since the sky is the limit here in Fru Gal Fantasy land, how about one of those tents that the Weasleys bring to the Quidditch World Cup? Looks like a simple pup tent on the outside, but step inside and there were spacious rooms, a full kitchen and a real bathroom. We might actually consider camping under such circumstances. Might.

And last on our list would be one of those Quick Quotes Quills that Rita Skeeter used to interview Harry. Sure the QQQ tended to exaggerate and yes some of the descriptions were a little overblown, but if you’ve read more than one of these columns, you know that we tend to be a little dramatic. Remember that we are the ones that suggested you make and serve Chickpea Burritos to your family.

Our favorite character in the Harry Potter books is Mrs. Weasley. How could we not identify with a woman with a loving husband, a whole bunch of bright and funny children and a house that is teetering on the brink of collapse? She always manages gets dinner on the table, no matter how many death eaters are circling outside nor how many hungry wizards pop out of the fireplace at suppertime.

This recipe is based on a 1950s classic and seems like the kind of thing you might find on the Weasley’s long and welcoming table. Feel free to use any sort of left over protein you like, just keep the pieces bite sized. The eggs and whole milk make it creamy and the long cooking time means you can pop it in the oven and head out to do the carpool, even without a time turner.

Mrs. Weasley’s Noodle Pie
Serves 8 generously
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
1 pound thick spaghetti
6 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup whole milk or half and half
4 cups shredded mozzarella
2 cups cooked chicken, shredded
1 cup cooked ham or sausage, cut into small chunks
2 cups frozen peas, rinsed in hot water to thaw slightly
Handful of fresh parsley, roughly chopped
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees with rack in center. Generously butter a 10-inch-by-3-inch spring form or regular cake pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper or foil and set aside.
2. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the spaghetti according to package directions just until al dente.
3. Meanwhile, combine eggs, mozzarella, chicken, ham, peas, milk, parsley, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Stir to combine. Drain spaghetti, and add to the egg-and-cheese mixture; stir well. Pour mixture into prepared pan, and cover with aluminum foil.
4. Bake for 40 minutes. Remove foil, and bake until lightly browned and crisp on top, 20 minutes more.
5. Transfer to a rack to cool, about 10 minutes. Run a knife around the edge, and unmold, removing parchment. Cut into wedges, and serve hot.

Fru-Gal Gift Ideas: Sensible and Stylish Wineglass

2010-11-13T05:31:00.006-05:00

Looking for something special to give to all your lady friends this holiday season?

Look no further than this wine glass, which sensibly holds a full bottle of wine.

More stylish than a fish bowl, and when your DH comes home and wonders why there is no dinner and you are lying on the sofa with a bag of chips and the kids are eating cereal out of the box, you'll be able to say with a tone of pure condescension,

Drunk?

Me?

What are you talking about, I only had ONE glass of wine.

Just don't show him the glass.

Cheers!

NSFW: Sorry Robin, But I Simply Have No Choice

2010-11-10T07:24:00.007-05:00

Robin hates cursing. Almost as much as she hates alcohol.

How have we made it this far without breaking up?

This song has been going through my head ever since I heard the wretched radio version yesterday on my way to work.

The original is, hands down, down my favorite song ever in the history of the world.

Here are the lyrics, which are equally as charming as they are profane...

Fuck You

(Chorus)
I see you driving 'round town
With the girl I love and I'm like,
Fuck you!
Oo, oo, ooo
I guess the change in my pocket
Wasn't enough I'm like,
Fuck you!
And fuck her too!
I said, if I was richer, I'd still be with ya
Ha, now ain't that some shit? (ain't that some shit?)
And although there's pain in my chest
I still wish you the best with a...
Fuck you!
Oo, oo, ooo

Yeah I'm sorry, I can't afford a ferrari,
But that don't mean I can't get you there.
I guess he's an xbox and I'm more atari,
But the way you play your game ain't fair.

I pity the fool that falls in love with you
(oh shit she's a gold digger)
Well
(just thought you should know nigga)
Ooooooh
I've got some news for you
Yeah go run and tell your little boyfriend

(chorus)

Now i know, that I had to borrow,
Beg and steal and lie and cheat.
Trying to keep ya, trying to please ya.
'Cause being in love with you ass ain't cheap.

I pity the fool that falls in love with you
(oh shit she's a gold digger)
Well
(just thought you should know nigga)
Ooooooh

I've got some news for you
I really hate yo ass right now
(chorus)

Now baby, baby, baby, why d'you wanna wanna hurt me so bad?

(so bad, so bad, so bad)
I tried to tell my mamma but she told me
"this is one for your dad"
(your dad, your dad, your dad)
Uh! Whhhy? Uh! Whhhy? Uh!
Whhhy lady? Oh! I love you oh!
I still love you. Oooh!

(chorus)

Here's how much I love it:

More than Prince's Little Red Corvette,

More than 10cc's Life is a Minestroni,

More than ELO's Mr. Blue Sky and

And, finally, more than The ENTIRE score of Little Shop of Horrors.

Ha, now ain't that some shit?

It's a combination of the wicked catchy tune, the sassy background singers and the magical way Cee Lo drops the f-bomb.

Also? He kinda looks like the chocolate version of a friend of ours from Hopkinton.

Matrix Meal: Shrimp and Sausage Jambalaya

2010-11-09T07:57:00.004-05:00

Here's another easy dinner idea that comes from The Matrix!

Easy Jambalaya
10 Servings

Ingredients from The Matrix:

Protein: Shrimp, 1 pound medium, peeled
Kielbasa, 1 pound, sliced into coins and then halved, or 1 pound ham, cut into bite-sized pieces
Starch: Rice, 2 cups raw white
Vegetables:
(2) 28 ounce cans stewed tomatoes,
6 celery stalks cut in small dice
1 red bell pepper, roasted and chunked
1/2 a 1 pound bag frozen petite peas
Seasoning: 1 bay leaf
3 cloves of garlic,minced
Red pepper flakes to taste
fresh ground black pepper
Liquid: 1 can chicken broth
Extras: Texas Pete or other hot sauce, for serving
Crusty bread

Cook rice and a bay leaf in a rice cooker or according to package directions. Cover and keep warm.
Meanwhile, in a large dutch oven or heavy stock pot brown saute the kielbasa over medium heat until it has browned and released its fat.
Add the celery to the pan, reduce the heat slightly and cook until celery is tender.
Add the garlic and push around the pan for 30 seconds or so.
Add the stewed tomatoes and red bell pepper and the red pepper flakes and let simmer while the rice cooks.
When the rice is done, add it to the pot and stir well to combine. Add the chicken broth and stir again. Bring back up to a simmer.
Add the shrimp and cover the pot. Let shrimp cook for about 2 minutes. Stir again, correct seasoning and serve with crusty bread.

49 and Still in Trouble with the 'Rents

2010-11-06T12:55:00.007-04:00

You can't make this up.

This is the exact email I received today, with just the names starred out to protect me from further familial harassment:

Good morning,

I spoke with **** last evening and she mentioned that she has been receiving daily texts from *** checking on how she is doing. She did not mention hearing from you and I didn't ask if she heard from you.

Did you not contact her?

Please don't be judgmental.

Just give her a little support.

You don't even have to call her, just send a text.

It breaks my heart to know that when we are gone it will be the end of the family for sure.

I guess we were really lousy parents to have children that can't keep in touch with one another no matter what they are going through.

The what that they are going through is a boob job and a tummy tuck.

so here's a copy of the card I sent....

That should fix everything right up!

Mealtime Matrix: New Frugal Feasts Column Exclusively Today in The Concord Monitor

2010-11-03T06:47:00.004-04:00

There must be something wrong with us.

Every time we start something new we look for role models in popular culture. We’ve spent plenty of time arguing over who is the Mary and who is the Rhoda; not once have we had a tiff over which one of us is the Toni Morrison and which is the Georgia O’Keefe.

So when we both went back to work last year all we could do was sing the terrible jingle from that 1980s Enjoli perfume commercial, the one where the woman in the brown suit belts out a jingle about bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan and never letting him forget he’s a man.

Pathetic, yes, but that jingle is our theme song and it is so corny and yet so catchy that we sincerely apologize if it winds up running through your head for the next week and a half. It’s perfect for a couple of women who are trying to get to work on time with two matching shoes, a reasonably wrinkle-free outfit and some confidence that our houses are not in a state that would trigger an anonymous call to youth services if someone happened to stop by.

We spent too many years and too many brain cells at home raising children and technology has almost passed us by. Back when that commercial was in heavy rotation on all three of the television networks Spam was a Monty Python sketch, on line was how you waited for the next bank teller and no one expected us to be able to insert a pivot table into our spreadsheets. We long for the days of landlines and one telephone number per family.

Not to sound like Andy Rooney here but all of these gadgets that are supposed to make things easier have only made life more complicated. When we fill out emergency contact forms we not only need to remember home/work/cell numbers for us and our husbands, we need them for the three alternative adults who might be cajoled into getting our kids when we forget to drive the carpool. And wouldn’t it be nice if cell phones had caller id so you’d know who some of those cryptic texts were coming from? “What R U wearing?” takes on one meaning if it’s from a friend from the office wondering about an evening work event and a whole different one if it’s from a brother in law who is just curious on a Tuesday morning.

Despite our failings we say, bring it on! We know how to monitor what our kids are posting on Facebook, we are figuring out how to sync our smart phones with our netbooks and best of all, we’ve developed a matrix to get dinner on the table using only the ingredients we have on hand. It’s a nifty device if we do say so ourselves. Maybe not as nifty as an iPad, but much more affordable and probably more useful too. There are no wrong answers here, feel free to substitute ingredients at will—if the only “protein” you’ve got in the house is hot dogs, so be it. Jazz them up with some of the extras on our list, serve them hot and spend 15 minutes having an actual face to face conversation with your family. And when the little darlings push their peas onto their forks with their thumbs, just be glad those digits are being used for something other than texting.

It’s called the Mealtime Matrix and here’s how it works: simply choose one from each category, add in some of the extras and you’ll have a great dinner in the oven in 20 minutes and on the table in 45.

Mealtime Matrix:
Guidelines: Each pound of protein, when paired with two cups of cooked starch plus two cups of vegetables will serve 4 people. Have as many to feed as the Fru Gals? Double the amounts.

OK dear readers, we weren't lying. We really are on the brink of being technological dinosaurs. We don't need to have an IBM Selectric on our desks but sheesh....Suz is at work and can't figure out how to get the Matrix to show up here. She's working hard on converting a pdf to a jpeg so she can jam it in but she is at work and is afraid to download any software onto the Brewery computers. Until she gets home and can work freely on her virus riddled laptop,
please visit The Concord Monitor to see the fabulous Matrix. Le fricken sigh.

Pantry extras to have on hand:
canned or jarred olives--black and green
apricot jam and/or orange marmalade
taco sauce
beans--black, kidney, cannellini, butter
green chilies
chipotle peppers
Worcestershire Sauce
Dijon mustard

Refrigerator extras to have on hand:

refrigerated biscuits and/or crescent rolls
lettuce
tomatoes
green onions
parsley

If you’ve got a couple pounds of ground beef, whip up a nice
Mexican Casserole that can be served over tortilla chips or folded into flour tortillas.
Robin loves it because it’s a good as a taco but with far fewer little bowls to wash.

Ingredients from the Matrix:
to serve 6ish
Protein: 2 pounds ground beef
Starch: bread: flour tortillas or tortilla chips
Vegetable: 1 15 ounce can petite diced tomatoes, not drained
Cheese: 16 ounces shredded cheddar or Mexican mix
Seasoning: 2 packages taco seasoning mix
Extras:
1 15 ounce can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 small can green chilies chopped
1 cup lettuce chopped
2 green onions, chopped
1 can black olives
1 bottle of taco sauce

Directions:
Brown the ground beef and drain well. Add the beans, green chilies,
taco seasoning mix and tomatoes and cook for another minute or two.
Spread the mixture into a large baking dish, cover with cheese and cook at 350 degrees for 20 minutes until hot and bubbly.
Top with the taco sauce, lettuce, green onions and black olives.
Serve on a plate to be scooped up with tortilla chips or folded into soft flour tortillas.

If you’ve got some chicken thighs on hand consider this dish:

Sweet and Spicy Chicken Curry
to serve 6ish
Ingredients from the Matrix:
Protein: 2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
Starch: 2 cups uncooked rice
Vegetable: 2 medium onions, chopped
Liquid: 2 cans chicken broth
Seasoning: 2 teaspoons curry powder, or more or less to taste
Extras:
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup apricot jam or orange marmalade
2 cloves garlic, minced

Directions:
Saute the chopped onion in a few tablespoons of oil until limp and glossy.
Add the curry powder and stir until fragrant.
Place the cooked onions in a large baking dish and add the rice, broth and water.
Stir to combine.
Nestle the chicken thighs into the rice.
Mix together the garlic and the jam or marmalade together in a small bowl.
Use a spatula to smear some of the marmalade mixture onto each of the chicken thighs.
Bake, covered for 45 minutes at 350 degrees until rice and chicken are cooked through.
Remove the foil for a few minutes at the end to turn the jam into a nicely caramelized glaze.

Left over chicken on hand? Make this easy pasta dish:

Italian Chicken and Pasta
To serve 6ish
Ingredients from The Matrix:
Protein: 1 pound boneless breasts simmered until cooked through and chunked
Starch: 1 pound thin spaghetti
Vegetable: 1 can diced tomatoes, undrained
Seasoning: 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning, plus salt and pepper to taste
Cheese: ½ cup Parmesan cheese
Extras:
A couple handfuls of shredded mozzarella would hearty this right up.

Directions:
Cook the pasta according to the package directions.
Meanwhile combine the chicken, tomatoes and Italian seasoning in a large bowl.
When the pasta is done, drain well and add to the chicken mixture.
Toss to combine, add salt and pepper to taste and top with the Parmesan.

Beef chuck for stew in the freezer? Thaw it out and throw together a quick beef stew.
The key to keeping this quick is the cut the chunks of beef into smaller pieces of no more than one inch in size—most packaged stew meat can be cut in half twice to make it bite sized and quick cooking.

Easy Beef Stew
to serve 6ish
Ingredients from the Matrix:
Protein: 1.5 pounds chuck, cut into 1 inch pieces
Starch: 4 smallish potatoes, cut into 1 inch pieces
Vegetables: half of a pound bag of frozen peas and carrots
Liquid: 1 bottle red wine or 4 cups beef broth or some of each
Seasoning: 3 cloves minced garlic, 1 bay leaf, Kosher salt and pepper to taste
Extras:
half of a pound bag of frozen pearl onions, fresh minced parsley

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Season the meat with salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.
Brown the beef in a few tablespoons of olive oil in a large, covered flameproof casserole.
Add the garlic and the wine or broth and bring to a boil. Cover the casserole and place in the preheated oven.
After 45 minutes add the potatoes, cover and return to the oven for another 20 minutes.
Add the peas and carrots and pearl onions if using and return to the oven for 6-7 minutes, just until the vegetables are hot.
Add a handful of chopped parsley if you’ve got it.

Check back here for more Matrix recipes tomorrow and Friday!

That 70s Dinner Idea

2010-11-02T13:02:00.004-04:00

Here's a blast from the past...a thick and satisfying soup that is incredibly easy and delicious and you won't even mind the hand cramp you get from opening so many cans.

We make it for dinner all fall, but love it especially for ski race tailgates.

So warming and so perfect with a cold can of beer.

Petey loves to make a giant triple batch and then reheat it over a Coleman stove. Of course he does--I'm the one winds up soaking-scraping-soaking-scraping the bottom of the pot.

The recipe comes from a 1970s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, slightly updated to add more flavor.

Hearty Hodge-Podge

Makes at least 15 servings

1 pound sweet or hot Italian sausage
6 stalks of celery, diced
5 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 cup dried oregano (yes that says 1/4 cup)
5 cans minestrone soup (plus water if condensed)
1 large can regular flavor baked beans
1 can petite diced tomatoes
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Grated Parmesan for serving

Remove the sausage from the casings and brown in a large covered soup pot or dutch oven, crumbling as you go. Drain most of the fat from the pan and add the celery. Saute until glossy and tender and add the garlic and oregano. Cook for another minute or so, continuing to work on breaking down the bigger clumps of sausage. Dump in the cans of soup/beans/tomatoes and bring to a simmer.

Let simmer gently for 15 minutes to blend the flavors. Serve with fresh Parmesan and lots of fresh ground black pepper.

Welcome to Downtown Bhagdad

2010-11-01T10:50:00.006-04:00

Look, I am just as big a fan of Downtown Concord's efforts to spruce things up as the next person.

I love shopping on Main Street.

I hate the empty store fronts.

I love the giant whiskey barrels filled with flowers.

I think the banners that are sponsored by local businesses are cheery and fun.

But these scarecrows?

Every time I turn the corner and see them trussed and lopsided I can't help but think it looks like we rounded up the opposition and have hung them from the light posts.

Didn't anyone on this committee see Black Hawk Down?

Or see the graphic pictures that ran in the New York Times in 2004 after those contractors were killed?

The ones up high are the worst, but the ones lower aren't much better....

And the ones at street level?

The hell were they thinking?

Can't we just have twinkle lights like every other downtown in the rest of America?

Halloween: It's Not Just Candy I'm Stealing From The Children

2010-10-31T08:32:00.012-04:00

About a month ago, when the long anticipated invite to the Williamson's Halloween party came in the mail I thought it would be hilarious to go as Katy Perry in her dot candy dress and make the cupcake suit for Pete Dog. I scoped out the perfect fabric for his jacket and even bought a pattern--it's supposed to make a pirate coat but I was pretty sure I could cut the tails off and, as Mr. Gunn would say, make it work.

After a couple more six-day work weeks I rationalized that I could still make the cupcake jacket, and Snoop Pete could wear black suit pants. And all would be good.

Yeah, ok. Except I didn't make anything.

Except the decision to abandon the California Gurrrls idea and troll the Martha Stewart website.

Mummies! I could totally make mummies in the time left until Halloween...

Got the long underwear, bought the cheesecloth, invested in the appropriate make up and....all of a sudden it was Friday night. All the crap I'd bought for these costumes are still in the JoAnn fabric bag, in the back of my car, along side the as yet uncarved pumpkins and some LED lights I was going to string in some bare branches that I was going to get and jam into my urns.

Not to mention the fabric to make a Dracula cape for Hayd and some woolly fleece stuff to make a Hippie vest for Tate.

Is it too early to start writing my Mother of the Year acceptance speech?

The only thing keeping me from crying in my chardonnay is the fact that tears would only further water down the cheap stuff that passes for the house wine at Chez Ellinwood.

And then I cracked open facebook. In addition to being a colossal time waster and narcissist enabler of the first order, it can also come in pretty handy when you need to steal an idea or two.

The second I saw this snap of Sophie and the Fabozzi gals on Megan's facebook page, I knew that I could put together a couple of Ooompa Loompa outfits in about 15 minutes.

One quick trip to Wally World, et voila!

Why do I always go for gross/funny and never cute/sexy? Discuss amongst yourselves.

And Happy Halloween....

Apple Cake with Sticky Toffee Sauce

2010-10-30T05:40:00.004-04:00

Smitten Kitchen is my favorite food blog.

Deb Perelman has the time, money and mad photo skills to make every entry a work of art.
Not to mention delicious.

Hate Her.

Mom's Apple Cake is the most moist, most appley, most delicious cake I've ever made; or eaten for that matter. It's also one of those oil based cakes that are fairly simple to make. Well, the third time at least.

Here is what her apple cake looks like:

Gorgeous.

Mine too, eventually....

Here's what I turned out recently:

The issue was trying to figure out how to get the cake out of the tube pan.

Or, more precisely, how to get the tube out of the cake.

The typical, invert-the-pan-over-a-waxed-paper-lined-plate procedure just had the damn cake falling onto the waxed paper in chunks. Undeniably moist and delicious chunks, but not exactly what I was planning on serving at my dinner party.

You can hide a lot of sins with powdered sugar, but even a blizzard wouldn't have salvaged this wreck.

I guess I could have baked the cake longer, or reduced the number of cinnamony apple chunks I folded into the batter, but if I had wanted a dry cake I could have just bought one down at Market Basket. Feh!

The solution was so simple: I cut a hole into a cake round so that I could push it down over the center tube and then gently support the cake as I flipped it over:

The cake slid right out, in one piece....

So get yourself a piece of cardboard, and make this cake as soon as possible.

It is, I ess you not, the best fall dessert recipe ever,

unless you are one of those silly people who like chocolate desserts more than fruit ones.

You folks are on your own.

Still not convinced that this cake is worth your time?

Look at this gorgeous batter:

And tell me your mouth isn't watering thinking about how these apples will bake up?

And just because good enough is never really good enough where dessert is concerned,

Serve this apple cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and a thick drizzle of Nigella Lawson's sticky toffee sauce.

Look, you can eat all the chocolate you want tomorrow night after the little darlings collapse into their candy coma and you can plunder their Halloween bags with abandon.

Kim Chi, aka Korean Salsa

2010-10-27T05:49:00.005-04:00

The Koreans use this like American boys use ketchup.
Kim Chi is spicy and pungent and a little goes a loooooong way.

Follow the good doctor's orders and you'll have the perfect Korean condiment!

Dr. Ben Kim's Kim Chi Recipe
Ingredients:

Napa cabbage - approximately one pound
4 cups of cold water
3 tablespoons of sea salt
1 tablespoon of fresh garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon of fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 tablespoon of fresh green onions (scallions), finely chopped
1 teaspoon of dried red chili pepper flakes (more if you like things spicy, less if you don't)
1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of sugar

Directions:

Separate and wash cabbage leaves. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of sea or kosher salt evenly on cabbage leaves. Place salted cabbage leaves in a large bowl, add 4 cups of cold water, cover with plastic wrap, and place in refrigerator overnight. Be sure that water covers all cabbage leaves - place a plate or other heavy object on top of leaves to ensure that they stay covered with water.

The next day, pour off water and thoroughly rinse cabbage leaves. You can shake them gently in the sink to remove excess moisture.

Place cabbage leaves back into large bowl and add garlic, green onion or scallions, ginger, dried red chili flakes, sugar, and 1 tablespoon of salt. Use your hands to rub seasoning evenly into all cabbage leaves. Be sure to use gloves to do this, otherwise, your hands will burn from the chili flakes. If you are pressed for time, mix seasoning ingredients with about a cup of warm water before adding them to cabbage to allow for easier distribution on cabbage leaves.

Transfer seasoned cabbage leaves into a large glass bottle. Be sure to use firm pressure with your hands to push down on cabbage leaves as they stack up inside the bottle. Transfer any liquid that accumulated during the mixing process into the bottle as well - it will become kim chi brine. Some liquid will also come out of the cabbage leaves as you press down on them as they are stacked in the bottle.

Leave about 2 inches of room at the top of the bottle before capping it tightly with a lid. Allow bottle of kim chi to sit at room temperature for 2-3 days.

Your kim chi is now ready to eat. Use scissors or a knife and cutting board to cut cabbage leaves into 2 inch pieces before serving as a side dish to a bowl of rice, soup, and perhaps a piece of fish. Refrigerate remaining kim chi and take out small portions right before meals. The refrigerated kim chi will continue to ferment slowly in the refrigerator over time, becoming more sour and flavorful with each passing day. So long as you use clean utensils to take out small portions, it will keep for up to a month in your refrigerator.

Frugal Feasts: Ajummas Unite!

2010-10-27T05:12:00.003-04:00

Photo by Ken Williams for The Concord Monitor

Ajummas Unite!

Ajumma is a Korean word that can be defined as a married woman who is so busy raising the children, cleaning the house, paying the bills, doing the laundry and working a menial job to pay off the husband’s debts that she has no time left to keep up with current fashion. Classier than Gluttons for Punishment, more exotic than Haus Frau, we will wear our Ajumma title with as much pride as we do our saggy and faded yoga pants.

While we’d like to say that we ran across Ajumma as we were perusing Atlantic Monthly on our Kindles, you know we’d be lying. We discovered this term surfing the interwebs trying to figure out the incredibly polite, well mannered and deferential new additions to our families, our Korean Exchange students. It’s kind of funny—when folks hear that we have another teenage boy in our houses, the typical response is an anguished groan.

But in all honesty, having one quiet teen in the house, one quiet teen, we’d like to note, who is single-mindedly focused on getting the best possible grades, is nothing short of wonderful. Every Ajumma should treat themselves to one.

In fact, the only problem we are having is what to do with all our excess maternal angst because:

…when we ask our Koreans if they need any help with their homework their answer is no, thank you, because they stayed up all night to finish it perfectly.

…when we ask them if they are hungry their answer is no, thank you because they buy noodle bowls on Amazon.com and then boil them up without help or mess.

…when we ask them if they’d like help looking at colleges their answer is no, thank you because they have already decided where they will apply and have edited the bejezuz out of their supplemental essays.

…when we ask them if they’d like a ride downtown their answer is no, thank you because they actually like to walk.

…when we ask them if we can do some laundry their answer is no, thank you because they wear things more than once, and only send stuff to the laundry when it is actually dirty and not just wrinkled.

Raise you coffee mug if you’d like to help us set up a little South Korean boot camp exchange program for all our needy, messy children for a few weeks of intensive lessons in self motivation and work ethic.

The only problem we foresee is finding willing Korean families. Forget the language barrier—mumbling is mumbling no matter where you’re from—after one week of driving their raggedy American behinds around, our kids would be sent packing.

It has been a revelation to us all to learn the small differences and great similarities that exist between American and Korean society and you can call us crazy but we’d like to hope that living with a teenager who speaks with respect and acts with honor will rub off a little on the natives.
Our kids have loved learning about Korean society and school, not to mention a few choice phrases that are garnering rave reviews in the Rundlett cafeteria.

We hate to get sentimental here, but it has been a wondrous experience to parent a young man that requires only the basics: food, shelter and the occasional load of clean clothes. And the extras aren’t terribly onerous either—so far the list seems to be a smile, a wish for a good day in the morning, hot water for the endless bowls of noodles and maybe a ride when it rains.

So in honor of our most agreeable house guests we’ve been trying to make some of their favorite foods.

Japache
A Korean noodle dish that is hearty and satisfying.
8 servings

2 12 ounce packages Korean Vermicelli or 1 ½ boxes of angel hair pasta
½ pound shitake mushrooms, stems discarded, tops thinly sliced
2-6 tablespoons peanut or corn oil, more or less, as needed
2 medium onions cut into slivers
2 medium cucumbers cut into slivers
4 carrots diced
2 thinly sliced red peppers
1/3rd cup soy sauce
3 tablespoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon honey
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons sesame seeds for garnish

If using Korean noodles submerge them in a large bowl of room temperature water to soften for about a half hour. After soaking, boil for 5-6 minutes, drain and keep warm.
If using regular pasta, cook according to package directions, rinse and keep warm.

Whisk together the soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, garlic and minced ginger in a small bowl. Preheat a large skillet or wok and film the bottom with a tablespoon or two of peanut or corn oil. Add the mushrooms and a dash of salt and sauté until the mushrooms are firm and glossy. Remove and set aside. Continue the process with each different vegetable to help retain their unique flavors.
Add an additional dribble of peanut oil to the pan, add the drained noodles and sauté for two minutes. Add back all the vegetables and the sauce and toss gently until well combined and heated through.
Serve on a flat platter garnished with the sesame seeds.

Bulgogi Marinade
Thinly sliced beef is the protein typically used in this Korean favorite but we tried it with ever so frugal chicken thighs and were thrilled with the sweet and spicy flavors. Try it too on the more traditional thinly sliced round steak or as a glaze for roasted salmon.
8 servings
¼ cup granulated sugar
½ cup soy sauce
3 tablespoons sesame oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or more or less to taste
6 green onions, roughly chopped
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 quarter sized slices of fresh ginger, minced
3 pounds chicken thighs, excess fat removed
2 tablespoons sesame seeds

Whisk together all but the chicken and the sesame seeds in a shallow pan. Add the chicken and turn to coat. Let marinate for at least 3 hours, or overnight. Remove from the marinade, pat dry and grill over medium heat until cooked through. Pour the marinade into a small pan and bring to a full rolling boil to make sure it is well cooked after being in contact with the raw chicken. Set aside and let cool slightly. Arrange the chicken on a serving platter and sprinkle with the sesame seeds. Serve with the boiled marinade and mounds of fluffy white rice.

If you’d like an American take on Kimchi, the salsa of Korea, please visit frugalfeastsblog.com. And don’t forget to annoy your kids by following us on facebook!

EASY Chicken and Rice

2010-10-23T07:43:00.010-04:00

This was a last minute

OMG what is for dinner moment

Orange Chicken

2 packages of chicken pieces

1 jar orange marmalade

3 cups brown rice

6 cups water

Preheat oven to 300

Pour water and rice into 9x13 inch pan

arrange chicken on top

cover chicken with marmalade

place in oven for 1 hour or until chicken is done

serve with a salad or not

Enjoy !!!!!

Wedding Memories

2010-10-17T06:50:00.013-04:00

The First Dance

Photos Forester Photography

http://www.foresterphotography.com/

Don't Think I'm Gonna Make It After All

2010-10-13T13:14:00.012-04:00

Do all y'all remember this moment? When the show started I was 9 and completely dazzled by Mary and her impossibly thin thighs. Not to mention her killer wardrobe. Bitch could knot a neckerchief like no one's business.

I am so totally a Rhoda, and was back then too, but my tween self was convinced otherwise. I saw myself at 30 being just as well-dressed, confident and thin as Mary Richards. And forget Barbie's dream castle. I'd take that third floor apartment with the beautiful windows and walk-in closet over anything I've ever lived in, or could ever hope to inhabit...not sure where I'd stash all the ski equipment, Korean exchange students and all the other boys, and it would be a daily challenge to pick all the Lego bits out of that shag carpet, but damn it, a girl can dream.

Watching the opening credits of the first season reminds me of just how long ago this show began. And I had forgotten that the original lyrics were much less certain of a rosy future for our Mair....Paul Williams sings you might just make it after all, not the upbeat and confident you're gonna make it after all...as well as how damn depressing downtown Minneapolis was in 1970. Is that sun hazy because of smog or the pre-photshop tamerping of some art director? Smog must have been pretty bad if Richard Nixon signed an extension of the Clean Air Act in 1970.

If the outfits and Murray's sideburns weren't enough to make me feel ridiculously old, last night I was snuggled in my bed with Tate and Wyatt and Hayden watching episode 4 on my iPad and as the credits rolled Tate expressed his surprise that the show was in color.

I guess I should be flattered that Tate thinks I'm young enough to have had teevee of any sort in my youth--it would be brutally easy to convince them that back in my day all our entertainment was drawn on the walls of the family cave--but I still nearly slapped him.

Episode 4, just so you know, is the one where Rhoda talks Mary into joining a social group for divorcees "The Better Luck Next Time Club" just so they could get cheap airfare to Paris as part of the group's spring charter trip. It being the MTM Show, Mary winds up being voted in as the new Vice President, and when she confesses her single, never been married status, it turns out most of the club was also lying. It was funnier on the screen, trust me.

And one final question: How many of the episodes of this show didn't start with Rhoda talking Mary into some hair brained scheme?

My guess is about five.

Quick Nibbles

2010-10-07T08:24:00.007-04:00

That title sounds a little naughty now that I look at it...

I'm married to Mr. Cocktail Party. He is infamous for inviting a bunch of people over on short notice. Which would be fine any of the following ever happened:

The house was clean
We had more than a bottle or two of supermarket wine
There was any food in the house that wasn't destined to be part of some casserole

After 23 years you'd think I'd have this figured out.

Of course if I had figured anything out after 23 years I probably wouldn't still be married. Or have five kids. And a Korean exchange student. No damn dogs, neither.

Above is a photo of what I was able to throw together in about 10 minutes after Mr. Generous invited two couples over for a Quick Drink.

The best part was I only had to clean the kitchen. About the only thing I like about having dogs is that we have a gate at the kitchen door that thankfully prevented the aforementioned quick drinkers from venturing any further into the disaster zone that is my house.

The White Bean Dip goes together in the food processor in less than a minute and is mighty tasty slathered on Stacy's bagel chips.

The Marinated Red Peppers are spicy and delicious, and theoretically would be something to make with the red peppers you learned how to roast on your stove top in our latest Fru-Tube video. I am using the subjunctive tense because the damn video still hasn't happened.

The Dilly Beans I canned this summer with Megan. How ridiculous is that? Here is a link to that recipe. You could just throw some sour pickles in a bowl too...

The Dry Salami came out of a package from the market.

The Pistachios too.

White Bean Dip

2 cans cannelloni beans, drained with liquid reserved
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon kosher salt
Fresh ground pepper to taste
pinch of cayenne pepper--about an eighth of a teaspoon
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary, or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1/2 cup best quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Place the beans, garlic, salt, black and cayenne pepper and the rosemary in a food processor. Blitz until smooth. Add a splash or two of the reserved bean liquid and process until creamy, adding more bean juice as needed. Add half the olive oil and blitz for a second or two. Taste and correct the seasoning.

Put the dip in a bowl and drizzle with the remaining oil. Garnish with additional rosemary, or not.

Marinated Red Peppers

Roast a couple of red bell peppers until blackened. Let cool, scrape off the charred skin and slice into thin ribbons. Marinate in a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, and a smashed clove of garlic. Refrigerate until serving time. You could put out some toothpicks with these.

Cheers!

Crock Pot Cake..not so bad

2010-10-07T06:29:00.018-04:00

The truth is this cake was not so bad and if for some reason I ever end up with out a stove, I can always make a cake in the crock pot, so the celebrations will not be put on hold ever....

Foil up the pot

Mix up the stuff

Pot it up

Cover and

wallah !!!!!!

Moist and delicious...

not very pretty, so I used the photo from the recipe

you can see the potential

Applesauce cake

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

5 tbs unsalted butter softened

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1 egg

1/4 cup bitter,ilk

1 cup unsweetened applesauce

1. coat slow cooker with nonstick cooking spray. Place 1 long sheet of nonstick foil in the bottom of the slow cooker with ends hanging over handles.

2. whisk together flour, pumpkin, pie spice, baking soda,baking powder and salt; set aside

3. Beat together butter and brown sugar on high speed for 1 minute. Beat in egg, scrape down sides of bowl on low speed, beat in buttermilk ( mixture will look curdled) beat in applesauce. add flour mixture to bowl and beat on low speed until combined.

4. Spread batter into slow cooker. Place a clean dish cloth over slow cooker the place cover on top. Cook on high for 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 hours or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Use foil handles to lift cake out of slow cooker.Cut into slices and serve.

Applesauce Cake in The Crock Pot ?

2010-10-06T08:26:00.006-04:00

Wish me luck....
This recipe involves aluminum foil, applesauce and a few other common ingredients.

The way I figure, it's worth a shot.
Check back on Thursday for the results...
This could be good or very very bad.

Apples: The Latest Harvest

2010-10-05T06:24:00.001-04:00

Apples will have to do until the Fru Tube issue is fixed...damn batteries, never and I mean never can we keep them where they are supposed to be, and then when you find a few..are they any good? Who the hell knows...Well that really is another post altogether. So this will have to do.
The apples are ready for picking So we made our trip to the orchard and we have a ton of apples, so before the fruit flies show up for this harvest. I took on the baking, I wanted try something different so I hit the books

French-inspired clafouti, custard-meets-pastry, where's the pastry? Baked right in :)

Ingredients:
4 cups peeled, thinly sliced apples
1 ½ cups half and half
4 eggs
½ cup all-purpose flour, sifted
¼ cup sugar
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a deep 10-inch pie plate.

2) Arrange the apples evenly over the bottom of the plate.

3) Combine milk and eggs in a blender until smooth. Add remaining ingredients and blend 5 seconds. Pour batter over apples. Bake 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out dry.

If you like custard this is a great recipe. Creamy and sweet with a good tart apple surprise

The Harvest is Over...Got Tomatoes?

2010-10-04T06:11:00.002-04:00

It was a good year for tomatoes; I know this not because Ms. Green Jeans here was very successful. I think out of the 10 plants I purchased for my asphalt garden in the city I reaped about 5 nice mealy orbs...

The reason I know this was a great season is thanks to my friends. They have supplied me with more tomatoes than a family of 10 could eat.

Imagine that.. so I lost my mind right before the big wedding. I refused to throw out the 10 pound bag of luscious, overripe tomatoes that were sitting on the counter staring at me...so I put them in a bag like everything else I could not deal with for the three days I was in the forest dancing.(see post dated 9/29/10 I'm back)

I STUCK THEM IN THE BACK HALL..... WELL BY TUESDAY I COULD NO LONGER AVOID THEM for one more second the fruit flies were on their way en mass. So for the first time in my life I made homemade tomato sauce.

I just faked it until I made it and it worked..... so please bear with me, I did not follow a recipe,( for this post,I did borrow some info from another recipe for the tomato cooking section,) I honestly do not think you would want my rendition. I knew the basics, so it pretty standard for me wing it !!!!

Homemade Sauce.
Ingredients
10 ripe tomatoes (or 40 adjust as needed)

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/4 cup cooking sherry
1small can tomato paste
1tbs instant coffee
1tbls sugar
Directions
Bring a pot of water to a boil. Have ready a large bowl of iced water. Plunge whole tomatoes in boiling water until skin starts to peel, 1 minute. Remove with slotted spoon and place in ice bath. Let rest until cool enough to handle, then remove peel and squeeze out seeds. Set aside, In a large pot , over medium heat, cook onion, garlic in oil and butter until onion starts to soften, 5 minutes. Pour in tomatoes, basil, Italian seasoning and wine. Bring to a boil, add coffee and sugar, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours. Stir in tomato paste and simmer an additional 2 hours. .

It was soooo good..

Fru Tube on the Fritz..stay tuned!

2010-09-29T08:45:00.003-04:00

We'll have video up later today showing how to roast your own peppers.
It's not a question of money for once
it's finding batteries for the Flip Video Camera.....
We should just wrench them out of the gameboys.
We're pretty sure that's what happened to all the batteries that have been stripped from every single remote in our houses.

Bring Home the Bacon New Frugal Feasts Column Exclusively Today in the Concord Monitor!

2010-09-29T08:20:00.004-04:00

Photo by Ken Williams for the Concord Monitor

Did you hear that the recession is so totally 2009? Apparently, leading economic indicators show our economy on an upswing. We say "apparently" because the Fru-gals are scrambling so hard to stay afloat we don't have time to stop and listen to economists pontificating on cable TV. Okay, so we don't actually have cable TV anymore, but if we did, we are more in the mood to watch Mrs. Brady out cha cha Bristol Palin than to try to figure out how the nerd herd has gotten it so wrong. Here's our leading economic indicator: there are cute shoes in all sizes over at Marshall's, not just in sizes 6 and 10, and the dollar store has a line right out the door. Maybe we should be on cable instead of the eggheads. Our show could be a little cooking, a little kvetching and as long as the producers can pull the cameras back to about Cleveland, and borrow that slimming lens from Oprah, we'd be great.

One of the ways we've been cutting back has been to turn meat from the main focus of our dinners into more of a garnish. Our men folk are visual creatures, quick with a knife and a fork, so if we spread a little protein on the top of a giant pile of rice, they are usually wiping their mouths before they realize that they just ate, well, a giant pile of mostly rice. Thankfully they also don't regularly read our column.

If we were less honest, we could simply say that we are eating less meat because it's a choice that is good for about a hundred reasons. Sure, we'll admit that you can load all the good reasons to eat less meat into the basket on one side of a scale and they'd be sent flying by half a juicy steak in the other, but the truth is eating meat is costly in a lot of ways, and maybe we are better off not indulging so often, even when (if?) the economy actually does turn around.

Change is hard and you can expect some grumbling from the masses as you try to wean them from taco Tuesdays and pork chop Thursdays. Here is a handy list of talking points for promoting less meaty meals; if reason doesn't work, you can always crumple the paper up and use it to plug your ears:

• Good for our pocketbooks: Our favorite steak, the first cut boneless chuck steak, is $3.99 a pound. Rice and beans, which together create nutritionally complete protein is about a dollar a pound.

• Good for our environment: According to New York Times food writer Mark Bittman, raising 2.2 pounds of beef releases as much CO2 into the atmosphere as driving 155 miles and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days. It's weird to think about dinner in this way, but raising animals for food uses a lot of fuel.

• Good for our bodies: Less meat means less cholesterol in our bloodstream, which means better health and possibly a longer life. Not to mention more energy for cooking and cleaning for our ever-grateful families.

• Good for Wilbur: Remember Charlotte's Web? Pretty much everyone but Templeton would be happy if the cows and chickens and pigs got to stay around a while.

For this week's column, we take one pound of bacon and use it to provide meaty flavor to three dinners, each serving 6 people. You can get all fancy and get slab bacon, but seriously, any bacon will do.

Pasta Carbonara

1 pound thin spaghetti
5 slices bacon
2 large white onions, chopped fine
2 large eggs, beaten or ¼ cup pasteurized egg product (see note)
¼ cup heavy cream
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons fresh ground black pepper
handful fresh parsley, minced

Cook the spaghetti according to package directions, drain and keep warm. Meanwhile, chop the bacon into 1-inch pieces. Fry in a heavy skillet over medium heat until crisp, being careful not to burn the bacon or the bacon fat. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Add the onions to the pan and saute for 4 to 5 minutes over medium-low heat until limp and glossy.

In a large serving bowl, whisk together the egg or egg product, heavy cream, Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper. Add the cooked and drained spaghetti and toss with salad tongs until the pasta is evenly coated with the sauce. Add the bacon and onions and toss again. Garnish with the parsley. Serve in shallow bowls passing additional Parmesan at the table.

Note: we like to live dangerously and make this with raw eggs. It is much safer to make it with a pasteurized egg product.

Bacon Fried Rice

4 cups cooked rice
5 strips bacon, sliced into 1-inch pieces
2 small zucchini, sliced into bite-sized pieces
2 small summer squash, sliced into bite-sized pieces
6 to 8 mushrooms, thinly sliced
2 eggs, well beaten
6 green onions, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons soy sauce

In a very large skillet or wok, fry the bacon until it is crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Add the zucchini, summer squash and mushrooms and saute over medium-low heat for 3 to 5 minutes, until the vegetables are cooked but still slightly firm. Push the vegetables to the side and add the beaten eggs to the pan. Cook for another minute moving the eggs around with a spatula until they are scrambled. Stir in the rice and continue to cook until the rice is heated through. Add the soy sauce and the green onions and stir until the mixture is well blended. Serve in bowls. Pass extra soy sauce at the table.

Note: Customize this with whatever vegetables you've got on hand. A can of well drained diced tomatoes, frozen peas and or corn and diced carrots would all be excellent choices.

Bacon and Eggplant Panini

1 medium eggplant (see note)
2 tablespoons kosher salt
¼ cup balsamic vinegar
9 strips bacon, cooked until crisp, drained and cut in half
6 slices mozzarella or provolone cheese, or six of each
1 small jar of roasted red peppers
6 whole wheat rolls, cut in half
¼ cup olive oil, divided

Balsamic-Ranch Dipping Sauce (recipe follows)

To prepare the eggplant: Cut the top off the eggplant. Slice into thin vertical slices. Spread the eggplant slices in a single layer on a rimmed cookie sheet and sprinkle with the kosher salt. Let sit for 25 to 30 minutes to draw out the bitter juices. Wipe off the salt and brush each slice with a little olive oil. Spray a ridged grill pan with cooking spray and heat over medium high heat until if feels hot when you hold your hand an inch or two above the stove. Lay the eggplant slices onto the heated pan with a pair of tongs and grill for 2 to 3 minutes on each side, turning once. Remove from the grill pan and place in a shallow bowl. Drizzle with the balsamic vinegar. Let marinate for 15 minutes or longer.

To prepare the Panini: Brush the cut sides of each roll with olive oil. Place one half of each roll - cut-side down - onto the heated grill pan. Top with a slice of cheese, a slice of the grilled eggplant, a few slivers of roasted red pepper and 3 half strips of bacon. Add another slice of cheese and the other half of the roll - cut side up - to each of the six sandwiches. Place a cookie sheet on top of the sandwiches and weight it with a heavy pot or a couple of heavy cans. Cook over medium heat for 3 minutes. Remove the weights and the cookie sheet and flip each sandwich over. Replace the cookie sheet and the weights and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes until the cheese is melted. Serve cut in half.

Note: Not up for grilling eggplant? Substitute zucchini or summer squash, sauteed in olive oil and drizzled with balsamic vinegar.

Balsamic-Ranch Dipping Sauce

½ cup ranch dressing
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced

Blend together all ingredients and serve with panini.

I'm Back

2010-09-29T07:42:00.002-04:00

The last ribbon has been tied

Every I dotted and T crossed

The Dress has been folded with care and put away

The last dance has been danced

The champagne bubble has popped

It has been so hard for me to to jump back in to reality...to bacon three ways, stretching ham out to last for four meals instead of two...checking the check book balance everyday.... saying no to ski passes and hockey sign-ups and a host of other items that are simply unaffordable right now.

For a brief time it was bliss and I paid no attention to the minor details of life...you know...like survival. I just enjoyed each moment, knowing there would be plenty of time on September 26th to worry......

I was a bustling, tearful, joyful mother of the bride. I spent time at the hairdresser, the nail salon and yes, the spa.

My daughter and I laughed and cried, pinched each other with anticipation,
and hugged in amazement of the magic that was happening all around us.

The wedding day was magical. Things that had no business falling into place fell right into place and every single little detail miraculously came together.

My beautiful daughters and my six sons were everything a mom could ever hope for; gracious, respectful, kind, loving...as parents we sometimes feel we can not see the forest for the trees..

This past weekend I could see the forest.... I stood in the middle of the forest and danced the night away .

Um... Robin? Hello?

2010-09-27T14:00:00.005-04:00

Yes it was the most beautiful wedding I've ever had the honor of attending.

Yes it was a day filled with love and laughter.

Yes Catherine and Dan made a couple so adorable they should model for wedding cake toppers.

Yes, watching them be married in the church of Catherine's childhood brought tears to our eyes.

Yes Robin and Dave you pulled it off with style and grace.

Yes, the assorted siblings behaved themselves like little ladies and gentlemen.

Yes the food was delicious.

Yes the wine was plentiful.

Yes the decorations were simple and elegant.

Yes the tent was spectacular.

Yes we danced the night away.

But now it's over.

Get back to blogging.

Petey's Lasagna

2010-09-26T20:28:00.004-04:00

The one good thing about working six days a week at the brewery
is that Petey really steps up and makes dinner at least a few nights a week.

Here is my domesticated little minx taking his lasagna out of the oven.

Scrumptious!

Must have been the innovative Old World Italian-Style Recipe

he found on the back of a box of Old World Italian Style Pasta...

at the very Old World Italian-Style Market Basket grocery store in downtown Conkie.

No need to include the recipe here.
You can get your own copy right off the back of the box,
which are currently on special in aisle 4.

Keep your fingers crossed that one day, hopefully soon,
Petey will share his homemade ranch dressing recipe.

Another One of Those Days

2010-09-21T09:22:00.003-04:00

That's it. I'm done with being a snob.

On my way home today I'm gonna get some of those plastic shower curtain rings that come in the nice pastel colors and close with a satisfying snap over the rod. and then I'm going to take the stainless steel shower curtain hooks that were 36 bucks at Pottery Barn and throw them right the eff out.

This morning as I was attempting to shut the shower curtain one of those damned ball-topped hooks came off the rod and clocked me in the center of my fivehead and now I have a very painful and ridiculously circular bruise. It looks like I got shot. Or Indian. Not good.

And I'm not stopping there. What has my eternal insistence on nice things ever gotten me but poor, and a sore throat from screaming at my kids when some precious little twee thing gets wrecked?

From this point on I'm gonna be just one of the regular folks who will only buy work clothes that are Wash and Wear. Screw the dry cleaners. Screw the iron too. And cute heels? You are dead to me. Ima get me a pair of those nurse shoes.

Plastic slip covers might be next.

Wedding Count Down eleven more days....

2010-09-14T06:33:00.011-04:00

Eleven Days and counting.....The wedding is consuming much of my time these days. My first born child is getting married, my youngest child just turned 9 so in between, wedding prep , birthday bashes, and 6 other children my blogging has been a bit lax.

For some reason I have not had time to document all the wonderful meals I have been preparing for my family these days, all the good and funny things that grace my day..

So here is a bit of what is going down..

These two couples will become part of a brand new family in Eleven days. A new family that consists of our children and possible grandchildren to come, a whole life of ups and downs, in and outs and all things that life will send thier way... we are tired ...but ready fore the challenge if we can just get through he wedding.....

This lovely young lady will soon become a wife, a kind , supportive, loving wife to Dan, and her wonderful friend Nicky(pictured here as well) will help her along the way as she prepares to become the wife....Nicky has the job of saying things like.. It will be fine...things will work out...no you can not control the weather....OK, OK if you want to repack the box..we can do that...

Thank you Nicky

Here is Harry's birthday cake, My Baby turned nine, right smack dab in the middle of the wedding home stretch, can you believe that? ...This Ice cream Sand which Cake for my nine year old was the result of 140 birthday parties in 26 years with 8 children...My response to this request..."you want Ice cream sandwiches for your birthday dinner ?" Can do little man Happy Happy Birthday to me no pans to wash....no mixer involved.....perfect ....Thank you my little Harry for being you .....for accepting that the wedding has taken over everything .........for eleven more days

Here is a crowd of happy Party goers, nestled among the wedding stuff the boxes and boxes of centerpieces, the seating chart, the vases , frames and all the details that make for a perfect day, all the things that live in my dining room ...for eleven more days.....

tuxes have been fitted
the flowers ordered

limo

venue

planes tickets

hotel bags

favors

cookies baked

ribbons tied

dresses fitted

music chosen

programs printed and at last the day is almost here, The tears come very easily these days it seems for no reason at all, a glimpse at my daughter , a song on the radio, a memory, a breeze it all makes me cry, 25 years of loving, guiding, caring nurturing, it is hard to let go.

Oh but I will in eleven days...so wish me, luck hopefully my sobbing will not over take the church as this some kind of pre-menopausal mom lets go of her little girl and welcomes home a brand new family.

Stay Tuned

Off The Grid

2010-09-13T09:01:00.003-04:00

I've been pulling double shifts down at the brewery and it's taken a sorry toll on the rest of my duties, wifely and otherwise.

I spent the weekend off the grid, and my under eye bags are sadly none the better for it.

If we can put a man on the moon, can't we figure out how to get another 3 hours between 5 and 8 am on weekday mornings?

Please?