Mr. Cook Local is back again, and he’s ready to talk to those of you who don’t consider yourselves cooks.

Valentine’s Day is coming up and, really, who wants to go out to the restaurants? Prices are jacked up (well, some do), places are busy and none of that really impresses your significant other.

I talked to the Mrs. and we thought a series of recipes that you could use to put a fantastic, beautiful dinner on the table, that would (hopefully) impress that wonderful other.

Much of this meal will be prepared the day before. Hopefully, everything you’re going to be cooking with will be something you have already.

So, lets start with the menu:

Short ribs braised in Porter Ale with Maple-Rosemary Glaze (or Macaroni and Cheese)

Honey Roasted Beets

Sesame Brussels  Sprout Saute

Cheese and Garlic Cornbread

Bread Pudding with Grand Marnier Sauce

To make these dishes, we’re going to need a couple different items to cook with:

• 10-12 inch cast iron skillet (for the bread pudding)
• 4-6 inch cast iron skillet (for the cornbread)
• Large skillet (for the Brussels sprouts)
• Pyrex dish (or a cookie sheet) (for the roasted beets)
• Dutch oven/braising pot (or any oven safe covered stew pot type) (for the shortribs)
• Two small sauce pots

My goal, over the next few days, will be to walk you through these recipes, giving you tips for how you can really impress, but not stress yourself out doing it. Believe you me, I’m not the cook in this couple, and I’m going to take this as easy as possible.

Now, the ingredients are a little messy right now. I’m going to throw them below here, but, I’m not sure we can call this finalized. I’m going to do the best I can to keep the list below be final, but, some of the recipes may need some last minute tweaking. Continue reading Valentine’s Day Prep

Now here’s the time in the challenge when I get a little negative. You see, as this challenge has progressed, I’ve come to realize that it really isn’t all that it should be. In some ways, it’s a game. Give a bunch of food bloggers a limited budget and see what they come up with. It’s not real. For all of our nutritious meals this week, and our calorie reduction from the norm, and our lack of any interesting spices, we knew that come Saturday morning, it would all be over. We could handle being hungry for a couple of days because we knew it would end soon. There are many people who are hungry all of the time. There are parents who go to bed hungry so their kids won’t. These are all problems that we just cannot understand only doing this challenge for 5 days. It’s fine for us to sit in our warm house with full freezer and canning pantry and talk about hunger, but all we did was really go on a diet for five days. We haven’t lived the life of someone truly hungry.

Now I’m not saying that I’m not glad we did the challenge. I’m not saying I’m not glad it exists. Anything that raises awareness of the problem of hunger in the world is helpful. We’re thankful that so many folks participated and we’re happy that we got to be a part of it. But in some ways this challenge goes too far (the no pantry rule) and in many ways it doesn’t go far enough (only 5 days).

We spent $60.68 for 5 days. We had food leftover. However, if we were on food stamps long term (or even short term, like a month), we’d shop differently. We’d eat differently. In fact, we’d eat a lot more like we do normally and a lot less than how we did for this challenge. We’d use some of our canning from the summer. We’d bake bread with our homemade sourdough starter and we’d forage. Our side yard is full of chickweed and dandelion greens perfect for a fresh salad. We’d buy butter, olive oil, and vinegar in bulk, we’d freeze extras of soup and casseroles so we wouldn’t be eating the same thing three days in a row, but instead would have leftovers for another meal in a few weeks that we could then just defrost for variety. We’d have purchased a lot more spices and flavorings from the bulk bins. Heck, even if we’d done the challenge for seven days and had an additional $24, we’d have purchased olive oil, more spices, butter, and more protein. We would have baked bread, had some different vegetables, and would have even possibly made crackers to go with our cheese.

We are lucky that we have the time to cook. Even though we both work full time jobs, and have the additional nearly full time job of Cook Local and Seasonal Cornucopia, we still make time to cook (though to be fair, cooking is part of the job of Cook Local). If we were working two jobs each, and didn’t have the flexibility of working at home or working some odd hours here and there, this challenge would have been harder.

The other part of this challenge that bothered me was that I actually had a couple items in my fridge go bad because I couldn’t use them due to the rules. Sure, I should have planned a little better and made sure the fridge was empty of perishables before the challenge, but that isn’t always practical.

So now that the challenge is basically over (we’ve already had dinner tonight), I’m glad that we participated. I’m glad it’s done. It’s helped us realize that we probably do need to cut down on our eating a little, though not as much as we did here due to marathon training (it is nearly impossible to train on 1300 calories a day). We also need to be better about eating as healthy as we did this week. We had a lot of veggies this week, which while common on our table, are not quite as much of a star as they should be.

We’re going to take the spirit of the challenge and run with it. Look for more farmers market price comparisons here quarterly, as well as at least two recipes a month that will serve dual purposes (like the roasted chicken that turns into chicken soup the next day). We want everyone in the Pacific Northwest to be able to cook local, no matter what your income level.

Green and Red Lentils

We’ve really missed our spices this week. Not only do we have a drawer of spices built up from a year’s worth of purchasing, but we are growing a lot of our own spices. Rosemary, in particular, is incredibly easy to grow and can live in almost any conditions. Our rosemary bush cracked under the weight of the snow last year and even that couldn’t kill it. Our state food assistance program allows you to buy both fresh foods as well as seeds to start your own garden. Planting a small container garden at your home, even if all you have is a small porch, sunny kitchen window, or postage stamp back yard is a great way to get more variety in your cooking for very little money.

Now here’s where I confess to you that we broke the challenge today. Long before we signed up to participate in the challenge, we pre-paid for an oyster dinner. The dinner was $20 per person, and it totally breaks the budget for the challenge. So what we decided to do was to make sure we had enough food for the entire challenge, plan out a dinner for Thursday, and then eat it over the weekend as one of our meals. Is that completely fair? No. You see, we ate more calories tonight at our dinner than we would have eaten had we been eating at home. So tomorrow, when we are finishing up the challenge, we’ll start out with fuller bellies than we would have. But, we’d already paid for the dinner, the tickets were non-refundable, and so skipping it wouldn’t make sense.

That dinner, however, gives us a great excuse to talk about something that I haven’t mentioned yet. Dealing with surprises. If we had truly been on food assistance, and had just a few dollars left for the week, we might make a few adjustments here and there. For example, Dick’s offered two for one burgers on Tuesday afternoon. If I had $2 in my pocket, and was living on food assistance, I’d probably have gone down and gotten two burgers. I’d have done it for a couple of reasons. First, luxury. That fast food hamburger, while not all that healthy and not a complete meal, would have made me feel, for a moment, that I wasn’t on food assistance and sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. The food that wouldn’t have been eaten because of the burgers would have been saved for the next day.

Continue reading United Way Hunger Challenge – Day 4