Tag Archives: cheese

Roasted strawberry, goat cheese & black pepper soufflé: $1.49/serving

Yep. More strawberries. Unfortunately, my stomach is now too big for me to bend over and pick them myself, so I have to rely on B., who not only works 12 hours some days, but is also saddled with the myriad other tasks I’m now unable to do. (Weeding, picking up dog poop, et al.) Needless to say, we’re still getting them, just not always before time and the sun have taken their toll. I admit this recipe is something of a work in progress; I’ve noted changes I’d still like to institute for next time, and tinkering at all levels is welcome…just let me know what you did and how it turned out. It should be served with salad and a lot of balsamic vinaigrette to pour over both the soufflé and greens.

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Farfalle with bacon, goat cheese, rosemary & arugula: $1.77/serving

As I’ve mentioned before, pregnant folks are not supposed to eat soft cheeses—goat cheese, blue cheese, Brie, et al.—due to the risk of contracting listeria. Never mind that most commercial soft cheeses available in grocery stores are made from pasteurized milk, and that the listeria danger comes chiefly from unpasteurized milk. It’s kind of like the alcohol thing…yes, studies show a beer or a glass of wine here and there isn’t going to cause any harm, but WHAT IF? It doesn’t matter how irrational the claim. If you’re pregnant, you’ve been told not to do something, and you’re even the slightest bit neurotic to begin with, there’s no way you’ll be able to bring yourself to do it. And so it is with me and eating goat cheese that hasn’t been cooked. This means any consumption of goat cheese (and there can’t not be consumption of goat cheese; I’ve given up a lot of things, but that’s not going to be one of them) must be worked into an existing dinner somehow, like the cheese-stuffed mac ’n’ cheese pie, or this pasta, which I admit I was kind of obsessed with even before I went and got myself knocked up.

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Gorgonzola- and prosciutto-stuffed chicken breast with strawberry-balsamic sauce: $1.94/serving

The garden strawberries! They just won’t quit! In my zeal to use them, I even broke one of my personal rules against meals consisting largely of one big ol’ hunk of meat. And it was chicken breast, at that. (I usually prefer thighs, as they’re more flavorful and less prone to dryness, but in this case breasts were easier to stuff.) However, this is the best savory use for strawberries—outside of salads—I’ve ever found, and I’ve been making it for years now (pre $35-a-week, of course) to great acclaim. If you want to get real fancy you could even convert this into a roulade, which would make for a much prettier picture than the one above. The sauce also doubles as a salad dressing; feel free to add a mess of spinach leaves or other greens to the other half of the plate. (As I did after this picture was taken.)

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French onion soup with bacon: $1.52/serving

For some reason I’ve been really craving French onion soup this week. Trashy French onion soup—extra-cheesy, extra sweet. It’s been hot (read: not soup weather), but as anyone who’s been pregnant knows, once there’s a craving, it doesn’t ever really go away until it’s fulfilled. The budget obviously precludes going out and ordering food at a restaurant like a normal person, so my only solution was to spend part of an 80-degree day sweating over the stove. Thankfully, it was worth it. This is a much different take on the French onion soup I made a few months ago; sweeter, with a little smoke from added bacon. (In the past I’ve complained that bacon overwhelms the soup, but this time I only added a tiny bit and it was perfect.)

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Roasted carrot & thyme risotto: $1.19/serving

We buy 10-pound bags of carrots at Costco (only 50 cents a pound!) for juicing, so since they’re always around, I find myself on a neverending quest for creative and delicious ways to use them in meals (see: carrot ragout, carrot ravioli, carrot soup, carrot pickles, carrot muffins, carrot sauce for pasta….). This time up, I decided to use one of my favorite blank templates for flavors: risotto. I simply roasted the carrots with some olive oil, salt, pepper, and thyme from the garden, processed them with a little cream until creamy but still slightly chunky, and stirred them into risotto with some Parmesan to highlight their sweetness. I have to say, it was pretty darn good, especially for only costing less than $2.40 for the entire pot.

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Baked orzo with beef & mushrooms: $1.21/serving

Nothing particularly brilliant or groundbreaking about this meal; I had a little bit of beef sirloin and a small bowl of chopped shallots that needed to be used up, as well as a can of whole tomatoes from the pantry that was already two months past its sell-by date (one of the pitfalls of buying in bulk at Grocery Outlet). It would’ve been easy to just grind up the beef and make a simple sauce to serve over pasta, but I added mushrooms and orzo and chose to bake it for something a little different. If this sounds like it might be up your alley, feel free to experiment with different kinds of ground meat, different mushrooms, and even different cheese (I used Parmesan because it’s what I had), as your budget permits.

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Parsley-walnut pesto: $1.12/serving

Apologies for the dearth of posts the past few days; we had company over the weekend, and while I did try and cook at least some of the time, I wasn’t keen on interrupting the day’s activities to sit down and write about it. But I’m back now, and with a surplus of parsley growing wild and neglected in the Aerogarden. I’ve had reasonable success growing parsley outdoors, but WOW this stuff loves growing hydroponically. I can hardly keep up, which is exactly why this pesto might soon be in the regular rotation. Even if you don’t grow your own parsley, a bunch is usually less than 50 cents at the grocery store as opposed to $1.99 or more for half that amount of basil, and it works wonderfully with inexpensive walnuts instead of $26.99-a-pound (yes, that’s what they cost at my grocery store…IN BULK!) pine nuts. B. and I both think it tastes just as great as “regular” pesto, plus it gets dinner on the table in less than 2o minutes and makes excellent lunch leftovers.

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Rotelle with roasted-carrot sauce: 97 cents/serving

It may sound boring, but this rich and flavorful sauce is anything but. In fact, if given a choice, I just might choose it over tomato-based sauce, if such a choice were to present itself. That’s how good it is. (B. agrees with me, so this isn’t a completely biased opinion.) I needed to use up an old bag of carrots in the crisper, so I fashioned this dish based on the filling for roasted carrot ravioli, with butter, sautéed shallots, Parmesan, and a little bit of nutmeg. I had originally intended to top the pasta with toasted pecans, but it turned out I didn’t have any. If you have some, I highly recommend it, as a subtle crunch would’ve put it over the top. Some coarse toasted bread crumbs would’ve been a welcome addition as well. Surprise yourself!

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Cheese-stuffed mac ’n’ cheese pie: $1.26/slice

I suppose I should preface this post by stating the obvious, given the meal: I’m pregnant. Four months pregnant, to be exact. (For those who’ve seen me in person and wondered how I managed to get quite a beer belly* from eating bread, fruit and mostly vegetarian meals, now you know.) Am I still making it on $35 a week? For the most part, yes. I’m still espousing the principles, baking all my own bread, growing my own food, and making all my own meals, I’m just eating a little more of them, and occasionally making things like this. It basically takes care of all the pregnancy cravings in one go: pie, macaroni and cheese, caramelized onions, and, to top it all off, goat cheese. (As anyone who’s been pregnant recently knows, listeria danger precludes you from having soft cheeses like goat, blue or brie unless they’re heated, leaving very few opportunities for one to get her fix.) In a way, I’m a little sorry I brought something like this into existence because, pregnant or not, I could eat it every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner and never get tired of it. I’m sorry I brought it to your attention as well, because once you try it, your life will never be the same.

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Sorrel and onion panade: 60 cents/serving

Although I’m pretty used to baking bread by now, given that I’ve been doing it twice a week for the past nine months or so, occasionally I’ll turn out a loaf that’s just not up to par. The final dough temperature wasn’t warm enough, for instance; the bottom got burned; or, in the case of a particular loaf I made on Thursday, I didn’t dust the proofing basket well enough and half of it stuck to the bottom. Normally I’ll just make bread crumbs out of the most disastrous parts of the bread, but if an entire loaf is a problem, I like to make a panade, which is part bread soup, part bread pudding, and cheap, not to mention addictive—the bread kind of melts into a silky, spoonable bowl of heaven redolent with cheese and caramelized onions, almost like a thickened French onion soup.  Any kind of greens would work, but this time I chose to use the rest of the sorrel from the garden, since it usually bolts once the weather starts getting hot.

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