This past week has been a pretty bad week for us, cooking-wise. Soooo many activities in celebration of Todd's birthday, what with seeing "How To Train Your Dragon" in the theater on Tuesday, attending Pajama Storytime at the library on Wednesday, cleaning up on Thursday in anticipation of possible company on Friday, and then being too beat on Friday to do anything but order pizza. Add a weekend of going out and doing little excursions over town, and the whole week was shot.
Even tonight's dinner was only half-planned. The Trader Joe's chicken was thawed in the fridge, but how to cook it? And what to do for veggies? I decided to cook up some of the veggies that *really* needed to be cooked ASAP.
At 5:00, I went home, cut up onions and tomatoes and stir-fried them with a bag of bean sprouts in the wok. I had just enough time to remove the fat from the chicken, cut it into small pieces, and coat it in salt and pepper before I had to rush out the door to the hairstylist. I left the chicken to sit in the spices while I was gone.
I returned a half hour later, dumped the veggies into a bowl and stuck them in the microwave to keep warm, and fried up the chicken pieces.
Dinner was served true Asian-style: everything tossed into a bowl and mixed with rice. Easy to eat!
Approximate total cost:
3 chicken thighs: ~$3
2 tomatoes: ~$1
Bean sprouts: $0.49
Add up the onion and rice, and the total comes to around $5. Not bad! ;-)
A while back I bought a 2.5-lb bag of individually frozen chicken thighs from Trader Joe's. I liked that they weren't all stuck together and that I would be able to take out individual pieces to defrost. Since we get a lot of frozen fish (Albertson's has some nice bargains like 2-lb bags of individually-wrapped salmon for only $9) we'd been eating mostly fish lately.
After my little bounty of manager's specials from Ralphs exactly one week ago, I thought I'd try my luck again today. Didn't come away with much except for a sale on cherries and... a 49-cent package of presliced baby bella mushrooms. They obviously needed to be cooked right away. So I mulled over my choices, and decided on a standard chicken-rice-and-veggie fare.
- 6 oz baby spinach (also from Trader Joe's)
- garlic
- 1 package sliced mushrooms
- 3 chicken thighs
- rice
The preparation and cooking was pretty simple. Fried the garlic, mushrooms and spinach in a wok with soy sauce for flavoring. The chicken I coated with salt and pepper, and covered with flour before frying. Mixed-grain rice cooked on the side in the rice cooker, and voila! A simple, yet tasty meal.
And I have to say-- those chicken thighs are delicious! They were so easy to thaw-- I just took three frozen pieces from the bag at noon and set them on a plate to thaw. By the time I got home from work, they were ready to cook.
Here's a shot of the food. The color looks a little strange, must've been poor lighting, so it looks a little duller than it actually was. Of course, it didn't help that the chicken wasn't really browned well. Better luck next time, eh!
Last night I was inspired by a recipe I came across in Better Homes and Gardens for garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas). I knew I had a can in the pantry, and had long wondered what I could do with it. It called for stir-frying some carrots with the beans and serving over couscous.
As mentioned in my earlier post today, I got a bonanza of different veggies at Ralphs. Since I knew most of them had to be cooked sooner rather than later, and since I knew the carrots we already had would hold longer than the bargain veggies, I decided to try one of them instead. I picked the butternut squash, since it was sweet and full of vitamin A, just like carrots.
Ingredients:
- 1 can garbanzo beans
- butternut squash, diced
- onion, diced
- baby spinach
- quinoa
- cumin
When the butternut squash was almost done (softened but still somewhat firm), I added spinach and cooked till it shrank. Turned off the stove and threw in the can of garbanzo beans to warm them up a bit. Served the whole mix over a bed of quinoa. Voila:
Total cost?
1 can garbanzo beans = 99 cents
1 pack squash = 99 cents
baby spinach = $1
1 cup quinoa = $1.25
1/2 onion = ~25cents
Grand total = $4.48 for a nice, filling and vegetarian meal!
I like the idea of supporting our local farmers, I really do. The concept of CSAs (community supported agriculture) is really neat. One of the nearby ones delivers a bag of freshly-picked produce to our company for $22/week. I got a chance to see it for myself when a co-worker received his bounty and posted pics. Looked delicious, but not nearly enough for a family of 3 to last a whole week. In the meantime, it's grocery stores to the rescue...
Today during my lunch break, I went to Ralphs for some much-needed grocery shopping. We were running out of staples, and the weekly ad in yesterday's mail showed a few nice produce sales, particularly strawberries (my favorite). I thought I'd get the berries and some broccoli and that would be it. But once I got there, I was amazed at all the things marked down in price as "Manager's Special"-- i.e. stuff that needed to be sold and consumed pretty quickly. Before I knew it, I had stuffed my cart with all sorts of goodies, including vegetables I'd never bought before. Amongst my finds:
a pack of seasoned brussels sprouts: $0.99
a pack of cubed butternut squash: $0.99
a bag of bean sprouts: $0.49
2 packs of sliced mushrooms: $1.49 each
roma tomatoes: $0.99/lb
broccoli: $0.99/lb
3 1-lb clamshells of strawberries: $0.99 each
Combined with some of the other stuff already in our fridge (spinach, carrots and onion), we have enough to last us a week, veggie-wise.
Not a bad deal! Now we just have to plan our meals accordingly and use up all the marked-down veggies before they go bad. Hmm... now we just have to figure out what to do with them... any ideas? :-)
