Allez Cuisine!
My extended period of underemployment has made me look at food in a whole new way. Being short on cash means I have to get a little more creative to feed myself in the style to which I am accustomed. It's like Iron Chef, where the secret ingredient is $5 a day. It sounds daunting, but it really isn't all that hard. I've been doing pretty well so far. Pumpkin soup with jalapeño-cheese cornbread and spinach salad, $5. Baked mac'n'cheese with homemade apple compote and broccoli, $4. Red beans and rice with andouille and steamed green beans, $4. Butternut squash risotto with mixed greens, $3. Roast chicken with potatoes and peas, $5. BAM!
The key is to make stuff in big batches to capture the returns to scale, and to think of meat more as a flavoring than as the foundation of a meal. And the ultimate flavoring meat is bacon. Bacon is proof that God really does love us after all. It's cheap, it's flexible, it keeps well, and it doesn't take very much of it to get that amazing bacony goodness. It goes in soup, in salads, in sandwiches, in omelettes, on baked potatoes, everywhere. Breakfast, lunch or dinner. I'm also fond of ham and sausage, other worthy members of the pork family. And when I have a couple bucks left over, I can make dessert. It's amazing what confections you can put together from pennies' worth of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, plus a little something for flavoring.
So I'm eating pretty well, despite my restrictions, though it is very important that I not go into a Whole Foods under any circumstances for fear of walking out with $100 of stuff I don't really need. Sure, every once in a while I wish I had a nice sirloin or some scallops, but whenever I feel weak I have a nice crispy strip of bacon. That usually clears it up pretty well.
The key is to make stuff in big batches to capture the returns to scale, and to think of meat more as a flavoring than as the foundation of a meal. And the ultimate flavoring meat is bacon. Bacon is proof that God really does love us after all. It's cheap, it's flexible, it keeps well, and it doesn't take very much of it to get that amazing bacony goodness. It goes in soup, in salads, in sandwiches, in omelettes, on baked potatoes, everywhere. Breakfast, lunch or dinner. I'm also fond of ham and sausage, other worthy members of the pork family. And when I have a couple bucks left over, I can make dessert. It's amazing what confections you can put together from pennies' worth of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, plus a little something for flavoring.
So I'm eating pretty well, despite my restrictions, though it is very important that I not go into a Whole Foods under any circumstances for fear of walking out with $100 of stuff I don't really need. Sure, every once in a while I wish I had a nice sirloin or some scallops, but whenever I feel weak I have a nice crispy strip of bacon. That usually clears it up pretty well.