I know - 9 months without a single post - simply inexcusable, work and other distractions notwithstanding. But as I sit in my office, wishing the A/C was working, I found myself dreaming about the cold cantaloupe soup I first had one night on Cary Street in Richmond, Va. It was so refreshing and flavorful that I went out the next day, bought the ingredients and made it for Robby and me and a guest. It was such a hit that I made it again on Mother's Day for my kids and Lea's family, and again, it was a big hit. Make it yourself - it will make this most recent spate of humid heat bearable, I promise. And you won't have to even look at the stove.


Cold Cantaloupe Soup


1 lusciously ripe cantaloupe, peeled, seeded and cut into small pieces
1 whole lime - zest and juice
some flavored seltzer - lime or mandarin orange or plain are best
a teaspoon or more of honey, to taste


Puree the melon using your hand held stick blender in a large pitcher. Using a zester, scrape the zest of the lime into the pureed melon, then cut the lime open and add its juice (use a reamer to get it all out). Add seltzer until it is a soupy consistency. Add a bit of honey and chill before serving.


While it chills, pour a cold glass of seyval blanc from Clinton Vineyards, put your feet up, and dream about tropical breezes. 

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.

It's Not Sacriligious to start the Jewish New Year without Chicken Soup!

What says "Jewish Holiday" at mom's house more than a rich chicken soup? Redolent of dill, sweetened with carrots and parsnips, enriched, perhaps, with some flanken in the broth? Add a few matzo balls and my family and friends are in Jewish-mother heaven.

But this year, I'm thinking like the Parsimonious Gourmet, and the PG is thinking thusly: how much meat does a body need to welcome in the New Year? I'm serving a choice between brisket and roast chicken for the main course, and that's far more meat-based protein than I typically serve in an entire month! Do we need the added expense (not to mention saturated fat and calories) of a chicken soup?

The first time that I made a non-chicken soup for a Jewish holiday was a couple of years ago on Pesach. I was tired of serving Emily and Mariah (my vegetarian girls) canned vegetable broth with a matzo ball, while the rest of us dined on rich chicken soup and decided to make an asparagus soup instead. Nobody complained, and my friend Bev even applauded the lighter, more-appropriate-to-Spring first course. Asparagus was in season, so it was fairly inexpensive, and the soup was light, virtually fat-free and 100% delicious.

As I plan my menu for Wednesday night, I'm thinking that my family and friends would enjoy a white bean soup to usher in Rosh Hashana. I already have soaked and cooked white lima beans in the freezer, so on Wednesday afternoon, all I have to do is put the beans in a stock pot and add some water and Osem pareve bouillon powder, or otherwise, some Trader Joe's vegetarian stock. Some carrots and celery are always nice, and the soup will taste even better when I saute some chopped garlic and onion in oil until golden and add it to the stock pot. When the vegetables are cooked, I will puree the soup with my immersion blender, and toss on some chopped dill or parsley before serving with a few grinds of the pepper mill. Fast, easy, yummy, and as always, parsimonious.

Shana Tova to all my readers!

Before You Go

Anticipating a vacation or other type of journey is fun, but for the Parsimonious Gourmet, a plan for cooking your way through the perishable food that remains in the fridge achieves the goal of not having to toss any spoiled food upon your return. Before I went away for long weekend Thursday, I took a survey of the food on hand and strategized how to use it up and leave with a fridge empty of everything but yogurt, condiments and eggs, all of which would certainly keep until I returned.



Some eggplants and tofu were the first to consider. They needed to be made into something that would be consumed at once, since neither freeze especially well. Since the eggplants weren’t especially fresh, I cubed them, placed them in a colander and laid on a heavy layer of coarsely ground salt. This eliminates any bitterness that occurs as eggplant ages; it’s not necessary when your eggplant is very fresh. After half an hour, I rinsed off the salt, and squeezed the eggplant dry in a dish towel. The tofu was placed between two plates and weighted down while the eggplant salted. A splash of canola oil heated in a wok, and I then added some garlic, ginger and the eggplant. (make sure the eggplant is good and dried off, or you’ll get splattered with hot oil). I stir fried the eggplant until soft and browned and then added slices of sweet onion and the tofu, cut in cubes. After continuing to stir fry until the onions were cooked, I ripped off some basil leaves from my plant and added them in the pan. A spoonful of hoisin sauce, a splash of fish or soy sauce, and I served it over brown rice for a quick dinner the night before I left.


A bag of carrots begged to be used before they perished in the vegetable bin. I scrubbed them clean (peeling is a waste of time and nutrition), cut off the ends and cut them into chunks which I tossed in a stockpot along with an old apple or two and a piece of peeled ginger. You can brown all of this in some oil, if you have time to bother. Add vegetable broth or concentrated bouillon and water, and let it cook until soft. Using my immersion stick blender, I pureed the soup. It was still rather thin, so I cooked it down until it thickened and was creamy. I could have added a potato if I’d had one, but with only carrots and a faint hint of apple, it tasted startling pure and carrot-y. A pinch of sweet curry, and I ladeled it into containers for the freezer. Now I’ll have some carrot soup to come home to, or for a cold autumn night.


A quarter of cabbage and a green pepper posed a bigger problem. With the eggplant,tofu dish for my last meal at home, I didn’t need a salad. I shredded the cabbage and pepper together in my Cuisinart (but you can use a box grater if you don’t mind risking your knuckles), and put the shredded slaw in a Ziploc container, and added a spoonful of brown sugar (but you can use white), a quarter cup or so of apple cider vinegar (but you can use rice wine vinegar or even white vinegar), and splash of soy sauce. This sat in the fridge while I was away and pickled. If you want to channel kim chee, add some raw slivered chilies. You can serve it with a few chopped peanuts as a side to almost anything. And now you see how easy it is not to sacrifice food to a few das out of town.


The remaining tomatoes went on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and roasted while I did everything else. Those hit the freezer to be used some day I nthe future for sauce or soup. You can’t make everything at once, but preparing ingredients that will otherwise spoil for future use is a more parsimonious strategy than throwing out perfectly good food.

Beyond Banana Bread

Is it ever possible to buy exactly as many bananas as you need, or should we assume that every week, we're going to either toss brown bananas or make banana bread?

While there's nothing wrong with banana bread now and then (my late Uncle Ben, a skilled baker, made the most superior banana bread I've ever tasted - moist and rich-tasting. He did pass along his recipe to me, but I've lost it, so if any of you have a proven recipe to share, please post it in the Comment section).

When now is not the time for banana bread, follow this simple Parsimonious Gourmet habit: put the entire overripe banana in a Ziploc bag and freeze it. You can keep adding to the bag as you accumulate more bananas.

What, you ask, do I do with a bunch of frozen overripe bananas? Let's say you're making sour milk pancakes. Take a frozen banana, remove the peel and squeeze the pulpy fruit into your batter. The pancakes will be extra nutritious and banana-y. In fact, you can add a frozen banana to any baking; just replace some of the liquid with banana pulp. Craving a smoothie? One frozen banana is the best smoothie base. Just add plain yogurt or milk and some other fruit, if you like. I add a tablespoon of flax seed for its omega 3 & 6 rich benefits and fiber.

If you want to go all out, The Silver Palate has a rich and fattening banana cake flavored with bourbon on page 99 of The Silver Palate Goodtimes Cookbook,Workman Publishing, 1984. Warning: high calorie count and not especially parsimonious, but every now and then.....