What to Eat When There's Nothing in the House

After a few months of relaxing unemployment, I started a new job last week and within hours - literally - was back in the old groove of being so preoccupied with work, deliverables and stress that finding time to run, do yoga and of course, shop and cook healthy and satisfying meals threatened to go by the wayside.
I'm here to tell you that living a healthy lifestyle is not only an important way to be authentic to yourself, but it's also critical to your ability to perform well at work. There may not always be time for a run if you are a woman (you men don't have to factor in time for hair repair and makeup that can add an hour to a woman's schedule). But you can always find 10 minutes to start your day with a few yoga stretches and postures, and establish a mindful outlook for your day.

But, back to eating. Returning from a business trip, I had no time to go food shopping, but I was tired of airport dining (dining? that's a polite way to put it) and craved something nourishing and healthy. Foraging through my freezer, I found a container of cooked brown rice, and some leftover butternut squash. While these heated up in the microwave, I fried an egg in this cute little one egg sized skillet someone gave me, and after arranging the rice and the butternut in bowl, I added some cashews, laid the cooked egg on top and a squirt of Sriracha sauce. Satisfying and healthy, and I was sated until I can go out shopping later.

A Parsimonious Dinner for Two

It's been a few weeks since my last post, but all the recent Jewish holidays have played havoc with my time, diet and parsimony. It's been a non-stop eat-fest and I've been enjoying wonderful meals at Yaakov, Rivka, Lea, Randee and Jane's homes, and now it's time to start eating mindfully again. Fortunately, I have a collection of great 1500 calorie-a-day meal plans from Women's Health magazine that feature well-balanced and delicious meals so I won't suffer too much while losing the holiday weight. I recommend these to anyone who needs a painless method for dealing with holiday excess; ask me, and I will scan and email you the pages I saved from the magazine.

A few weeks ago, I got to make dinner for Mona (and her little dog Lucy). Mona is a member of this blog, and she was happy to see parsimonious gourmet cooking in action. We started with tomato soup made from less-than-salad-worthy tomatoes, garnished with plain Greek yogurt (see the post "Less than Perfect Produce" for instructions). Next, we enjoyed a salad of sliced fennel with sections of fresh grapefruit, served with a few pistachios and pomegranate molasses vinaigrette. Our main course was a dish of whole wheat linguine dressed with a sauce of pureed Italian tuna (this is one of those instances where you spend a little extra for superior quality - buy Italian and buy it packed in oil) and lots of fresh lemon juice with a lot of the rind grated in. Cheese is traditionally not used in Italy in dishes with fish, but if it makes you happy, I won't tell. Toss on a liberal amount of freshly chopped Italian parsley and dig in. A few spears of oven roasted broccoli (again - it wasn't the freshest, but it was certainly great when roasted and dressed with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of Parmesan. Dessert was a deep dish of sliced peaches and nectarine from - you already guessed - the reduced bin, and topped with oats, walnuts, brown sugar, cinnamon and butter before being baked to perfection and served with espresso from my new Aero Press coffee maker.

Chicken Soup for the Parsimonious Soul

This post was inspired by Judy, who is a wonderful kosher cook. We had been discussing my prior post about the reasons I was not serving classic chicken soup for my Rosh Hashana dinner, when Judy announced that she not only never makes chicken soup, but she's not even sure how. While she may have been exaggerating a bit, I think this is an opportune time to discuss making chicken soup in a thrifty and time-saving way.

It's a good idea to always have some chicken stock in your freezer so that freshly made soup is only an hour away. There are two approaches to this. You can collect chicken (or turkey) carcasses in a bag in the freezer by simply putting them, along with any trimmings once you've carved your bird. The other approach, when you can't wait to stockpile enough carcasses to make stock is to buy chicken. But whatever you do, do NOT buy a whole chicken. It's painful for me to think of the waste, since the breast meat adds almost nothing to the stock, and boiling it renders it nearly useless for eating (unless you like mushy, bland,easy-to-chew protein). Instead, the key to great, rich stock is to make it from wings, which are loaded with gelatin. If your butcher happens to have some chicken bones that he's selling for under a dollar a pound, toss them into your stockpot as well.

Now, I can hear all of you mentally tuning out as you consider the Sisyphean task of cleaning the pin feathers off all those wings. Bear with me - you won't have to.

Rinse off your wings and any bones you're adding, and put them in your biggest stockpot. Add cold water and bring to a boil, then let the pot simmer for a few hours, skimming the scum off whenever you think of it. You will have an unappetizing mess of feathery, pallid wings in stock that you'd never consider feeding your family. Or so you think.

Let the pot cool, and fish out all the wings and bones and skin into a bowl. Refrigerate the bowl until its contents are cool enough to touch, and when you can, take out as many slivers of the wing meat as you want to add to the soup later. Toss the rest of the mess,and freeze the slivers of meat separately for future use. Meanwhile, take that fine mesh straining tool I wrote about in an earlier post and run it repeatedly through the stock. You won't believe what is trapped in there...all the pin feathers, for one. Rinse off the strainer after each time you dip it in the pot (doing this next to the sink makes sense). Then, as a final step, pour the stock through the large strainer and the result is the clearest, most golden rich stock you've ever made. Freeze this in individual containers until the day you want serve soup. It is so rich, it will gel.

Bring the stock to a slow boil in a soup pot, and add whatever you like to flavor it. Salt, for one. For my family, carrots and parsnips are a given. Yaakov always adds some savoy cabbage because he knows Deb loves it (me, too). I like leeks, and in the dead of winter, a bit of flanken doesn't hurt (although you'll have to
re-strain the scum caused by adding raw meat). Cook until the vegetables are cooked, and add some fresh chopped dill before you serve with matzo balls,or if you are lucky enough to be at Lea's, her homemade kreplach replace the matzo balls.

There you go; freshly made soup is always an hour away when there's inexpensively made stock in your arsenal.