Spaghetti Squash and Diced Tomato Casserole

The wife had a hankering for spaghetti squash and came up with this recipe. She also cooks many of the recipes on this blog and comes up with numerous yummy meals for us to try.

You'll need:

One 2-3 lb. spaghetti squash.

Two cans of diced tomatoes, drained.

Dried Parmesan cheese.

About a tbsp of dried Italian seasoning.

2-4 tbsp of melted butter.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Carefully cut the squash in half and scrape out the seeds with a teaspoon. Taking a casserole dish that's large enough to hold the squash halves, add about a half inch of water to the dish and place the squash face down in the water. Place on the middle oven rack and bake for about two hours.(Check about every half hour and add extra water if the water appears to be evaporating excessively.)

Remove from oven and take out the squash and dump the water. Use a fork to scrape the spaghetti squash meat into the casserole dish. Even the squash out and drizzle the melted butter on top. Add the diced, drained tomatoes. Sprinkle the Italian seasoning on top of the tomatoes. Top with about a quarter inch of dried Parmesan cheese. Place back in the oven on the second rack from the top and cook for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

Our son is not a big veggie fan, but he enjoyed this dish. Cost for the squash, the two cans of diced tomatoes, butter, seasoning and Parm was about $6.00. Serves 4-6 people.

Non-Fried Chile Relleno

Kids may not like this dish, but it is a nice side and relatively easy since it isn't fried or otherwise coated with batter.

I used four large Poblano peppers. You'll also need about 12-16 ounces of the shredded cheese of your choice. I used Cheddar, but any type of pepper cheese or white Mexican cheese will do.

Also needed are:

An aluminium foil lined baking pan. Extra sheet of aluminium foil.

A casserole dish large enough to hold the stuffed peppers.

Some cooking spray or olive oil.

A steak knife.

Put an oven rack on the broiler level and turn your oven to broil. (You can wait until you have prepped your peppers if you wish.)

Core the stem out of your peppers and shake the loose seeds out--some will be left, you can scrape them off later.

Set timer for seven minutes. Place cored Poblanos on the foil lined baking pan/cookie pan. Put in oven and check after about two and a half to three minutes. The entire side of the pepper should be blistered with some charred patches. Turn peppers over and cook for another three minutes or so. The extra timer time allows for the time needed to turn the peppers. 

Remove the peppers and tightly cover them with the extra sheet of foil for about three minutes. This allows the peppers to steam and it makes it easier to remove the skin. Place oven rack on the second shelf and lower heat to 350 degrees.

The peppers will still be a bit hot, but use the steak knife to scrape the charred and blistered skin off the pepper. Do not worry if you can't remove all of it.

Carefully slit one side of the pepper and then open it so that it is flat. Scrape off the extra seeds if you wish:

Put a handful of cheese on top of the pepper and gently fold it over. Spray, liberally, the casserole dish with non-stick cooking spray and lay the stuffed pepper on its side. Repeat for the other peppers. Spray the tops of the peppers with cooking spray or drizzle some olive over over the peppers but make sure to smear the oil on the pepper exterior top surface.

Place back in the oven and cook for another 20-25 minutes until the cheese has melted.

You can also add sauteed onions to the cheese, but, of course, this will add extra time to the prep. This makes a nice side dish. The cost for the peppers, cheese and the amount of cooking spray and aluminium foil you will use for this is a bit over four dollars and this dish provides a good serving for four people.

Effective Grocery Shopping

               

Most of us go shopping, but how many of us really know how to shop?  Posts on this blog deal with saving money and while many folks hit the supermarket, not everyone may know how to budget shop.

When the money is coming in and there are no economic issues to worry about, most folks just buy whatever they want when they go shopping as opposed just getting the necessities. Budget shopping is an easy way to save some money (and, in some cases, some serious money).

Getting creative with meal preparation also helps. (See the previous post link to Ramen Noodles, for example)

Like anything else, there are always some grocery store scams to watch out for. One of the most common is the buy one get one free scam. I see it a lot with chicken. One week the chicken is $2.29/lb and the next week, during the buy one get one free sale, the chicken is $4.19/lb, so you still end up paying around $2.10/lb. Not a super great discount over the regular $2.29/lb. Sometimes though, buy one get one free deals ARE deals. Bring your calculator and you may score a bargain.

Another scam is the endcap scam. This is where a retailer will have, say, three items on an isle end cap and the top item and the bottom item are on sale and signed as such, while the middle item is regular price, so that you think the middle item must be on sale, while it is actually regular price.

I noticed another scam the other day while at the supermarket. There was a bin of frozen seafood and the sign over the bin said $7.95. My first thought was that the seafood was $7.95/lb, which would have been a good deal. However, upon closer inspection of the sign, the fine print indicated the price was for a bag of a different item entirely and was not a good price, even for the other item.

Another important tip when bargain shopping is to check the net weight of the item. For example, those plastic resealable coffee containers usually contain between 33 and 35 ounces of coffee. The much larger metal coffee tins only contain between 33.5 and 35 ounces of coffee, so the larger container is not the best value.

Another problem with groceries is the huge price increases coupled with smaller packages. Although we make home made chicken tenders for our son, because you can get boneless and skinless chicken breast on sale in our area for $1.78-$1.89 a pound, we used to also buy the bags of premade chicken nuggets at the grocery store. They used to be $5.99 for a 32 ounce bag, which works out to three dollars a pound; not cheap, but not horrendously expensive either. The situation now is that bagged nuggets are coming in 24-28 ounce packages and cost between $8.99-$9.99/bag. No way is $5-$6 a pound for ground up chicken meat and floor sweepings coated in thick batter a good value, yet, the stores still sell many bags of them. ('cause folks do not do their homework)

Frozen vegetables are also coming in smaller packages now. The 16 ounce packages of some frozen veggies, such as corn and peas, are now being shipped in 12 ounce packages which are selling for the same amount as the 16 ounce packages were. Check your net weights.

                                

One value that I came across Sunday were the 64 oz bags of Kroger PSST brand Crunchy Breaded Fish Sticks. They were selling for $6.99/bag. This translates to about $1.75/lb. Sure it was just minced whitefish, but $1.75/lb for any type of seafood is a good value.

The fish sticks are pretty versatile. You can take a home made cream soup base, add chopped potatoes and corn, cut up some of the fish sticks and voila, a budget fish chowder. You can also chop them up and make cheap fish tacos, or pile them on a hamburger bun with ketchup or tartar sauce.........cheap eats.

If you do not make your own chicken stock/soup, the Mrs. Grass chicken soup mix, pictured in the photo at the top of the post, can save you some money. We always like to keep some chicken soup around in case someone in our family gets sick. In our area, you can find Mrs. Grass, or a similar product, for anywhere from $1.75-$1.99/box. Each box has two packs of soup that each make four cups of soup, so you get a total yield of eight cups of soup. The non-condensed chicken soup usually comes in a 15-19 ounce can and can generally be found for between $1.50-$2.49, so you get an additional six cups of soup using the dried mix as you do buying the premade. The energy cost is about the same since you have to heat both soups.

                              

One food that folks usually do not associate with budget food is sushi. If you make your own sushi and sushi rolls, you can eat classy and cheap. California roll, for instance, just takes some faux crab sticks, sliced in half lengthwise, some avocado, some cucumber or carrots, rice and sea vegetable wrapper. You can make home made California rolls for around 40-60 cents each. You can also do some cheap Nigiri sushi. Just take your hand pressed sushi rice and top with thin smoked salmon slices that you bought on sale, or top with thin slices of vegetable or cooked butterflied shrimp that was also purchased on sale or was on manager's special.

Another thing to do is to buy cheap tough cuts of meat and cook them in a pressure cooker for a half hour or so until they are tender. You can pressure cook the cuts in broth and it will enfuse some flavor.

You can sometimes find basic ethnic staple foods in specialty markets for less than you can in supermarkets that have specialty food sections. It also pays to cook from scratch, but as this is not for everyone and you may have some time constraints on cooking, bargain shopping premade foods is still a way to save money.

Anther scam is the margarine scam and you can read about it HERE.

One thing I also noticed with certain brands of shredded Mozzarella cheese is that some brands do not melt to the stringy gooeyness that I like. I checked the ingredient list and lo and behold:

Potato starch, when used in quantities that make it a filler, will cause your cheese to not melt very well. Keep this in mind when buying cheese for, say, pizza or lasagna.

If y'all find any other grocery scams out there just email me and I'll update this post.

Low Carb Delicious Cheesy Snack

Well, I've been giving the Atkins Diet a try and so far, so good. I enjoy this "snack" and thought it worth sharing.

Grab a non-stick toaster oven tray or small casserole dish. Add 1 can (14-16oz) of drained diced tomatoes. Spread them out on the tray. Sprinkle on some garlic salt and a teaspoon or so of dried Basil leaves or you can use fresh ones. On top of this add about 6-8 ounces of shredded mozzarella cheese and sprinkle on some more dried Basil.

Cook in a toaster oven on 400 degrees for about 12 minutes or place in a preheated regular oven on the second rack from the top for a minute or two longer. This should satisfy your cheese craving and it will cost you about $2.70.

The Margarine Scam

One morning, not too long ago,  I was getting ready to cook some fried eggs. I went to the fridge, got out the tub of margarine and scooped out a big blob and plopped it into the frying pan. After about a minute or so, I noticed most of the "margarine" had evaporated. Wha?

Since oil does not readily evaporate, I had to figure something was up. Sure enough, a look at the margarine lid provided the answer. Toward the edge of the lid was printed: "39% Vegetable Oil".

W........T........F?  The next time I was at the grocery store, I checked the other margarine tub lids and found vegetable oil percentages of anywhere from 39 percent to 53 percent.  I also noted that stick margarine is generally 80% vegetable oil and costs the same or much less than the tub margarine per ounce. Bring a calculator with you when shopping.

Also, the wife does a lot of baking and was not satisfied with the results of using tub margarine and always uses stick margarine for baking. Since she never articulated a reason for the difference in results, I just assumed it was a quirk of hers. Not until I noticed the rapidly evaporating margarine did I realize there was a tangible reason for the different results.

This royally pisses me off, not just because money is really tight right now, but because I generally consider myself to be a fairly savvy shopper and can't stand it when I find out I got ripped off. Tub margarine IS a rip-off, major league. For the best value for the money buy generic stick margarine, but be sure to always check the vegetable oil content.

When you consider you can buy one pound packages of stick margarine, that is 80% vegetable oil, for as low as a dollar, then you can appreciate the screwing you are getting when you pay over two dollars a pound for "premium" tub margarine that is only around 50% vegetable oil.

Shopper beware...............YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!!

As an aside, we generally use real unsalted butter, but if you must use margarine, buy the one with the highest vegetable oil content.

Leftover Taco Meat

Humans can be very creative, but if you are not feeling in a creative mood and want a quick solution as to how to deal with leftover taco meat, I have a suggestion. It is kind of a bastardized Mexican ranch eggs recipe.

Put your leftover taco meat in a skillet with a couple of tablespoons of butter or olive oil. Heat thoroughly on medium or medium high heat. Add shredded cheddar cheese and scrambled/beaten eggs. Stir.  For a less kid friendly and more adult taste recipe, add chopped tomato and Sriracha sauce.

After plating it up, you can also add sliced avocado. You already have the meat so your total additional cost is between one and two dollars.

It's pretty tasty. Enjoy.

Sloppy Joe Bake

Kids will love this. I say that a lot, but I try to post recipes that are relatively inexpensive yet tasty. I also like meals that are quick to fix and not too complicated, although those will appear on this blog from time to time.

You need:

A large frying pan. 

2 1/2-3 pounds of ground beef.

8-12 ounces shredded cheese.

Two cans of sloppy Joe sauce, or your home made sauce.

Two boxes of Jiffy Mix corn  muffin mix. (8.5 ounce)

A 9 x 13 casserole dish.

Cook the ground beef until browned. Add the sloppy Joe sauce and heat until hot. Pour the sloppy Joe beef and sauce into the casserole dish:

Add the shredded cheese:

Prepare the two boxes of muffin mix according to the box directions and then spread over top of the cheese.  Bake in a preheated 400 degree oven on the center rack for 15-20 minutes.

Remove from oven, plate it up, top it with some sour cream perhaps..................and eat up!

Total cost is around $13.00 and feeds 4, so, about $3.25 a serving. YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Smoked Sausage, Eggs and Cheese

Kids love this and it's fairly inexpensive. You need:

Two 14-16 ounce packages of smoked sausage. (Eckrich works well for this and they make a variety of flavors.) Slice the sausage.

No, I get no advertising money from Eckrich

8-10 eggs, beaten.

An 8 oz package of shredded cheddar cheese.

In a large skillet set to med./med high heat, add about two table spoons of butter. Bring to temperature and add the smoked sausage. The sausage will be cooked, so just brown it. (If you want to use fresh uncooked sausage, that's fine, just be sure to cook the sausage thoroughly.)

Then add your beaten eggs, stir until the eggs are cooked and then add the package of cheddar cheese. Serve when the cheese has melted.

This is another hearty meal, that feeds 3-4 people, which will cost around $10.00. So, at about $2.50 a serving, this is a delicious and inexpensive meal.

Seafood Alfredo

For a quick and relatively inexpensive seafood Alfredo you need:

One 14-16 oz box of Fettuccine noodles.

Two 14-16 oz jars of Alfredo sauce.

One pound of fake crab legs. (Louis Kemp or Kroger brand are good. )

One 14-16 ounce can of diced tomatoes, drained.

In a 6-8 quart pot boil the Fettuccine noodles until they are done to your liking. Drain and return to the pot. 

Add the diced tomatoes, Alfredo sauce and fake crab. Stir until heated through. Serve and enjoy.

If you buy the off brand of ingredients, you can make this meal, that feeds 4-5, for around $9.00.

Adding some ground ginger to this dish kicks it up a notch.

World's Best Apple Pie

Stock Photo

World's best, eh? Yup.

This recipe comes from my boss, it's his grandmother Effie's recipe. It was entered in the National Cherry Festival in the early 1960's. The judges were celebrities who included Carol Burnett. The pie won best at the festival and after that the requirements were changed so that ONLY a cherry pie could be best in festival at the National Cherry Festival. This is the first time this recipe has ever been made available to the general public.

What makes this pie great is the taste AND texture. For this recipe, it is very important that the apples be sliced very thin. A Mandolin (or Mandoline) slicer will work nicely for this.

You'll Need:

A 9 inch pie shell/crust.

4 cups of peeled and sliced Granny Smith apples.

1 egg.

1 cup of sugar.

1 cup of sour cream.

2 tablespoons of flour.

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.

1/4 teaspoon of salt.

For the topping:

1/2 cup packed brown sugar.

1/3 cup of flour.

1/4 cup of room temperature BUTTER.

Mix pie filling ingredients and pour into pie shell. Bake in a pre-heated oven set at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle mixed topping over the pie. Reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake for an additional 15 minutes or so. Refrigerate after baking. Serve and enjoy.