Ask the Food Fairy!

Happy post-U.S.-Thanksgiving, everyone

I just finished creating the meal plans for this week and I am excited! The basic box has a garlic theme: roasted garlic and olive oil plate, pasta with garlic and parsley, lemony-garlicky scrambled eggs, and roast potatoes with garlic aioli. Yeah… it’s plenty of garlic! Great for your immune system, right? And just enough to make you smell deliciously garlicky in a good way.
And the premium box is designed to help people use up leftover turkey!  First you’ll make patties out of it and wrap them with garlic bacon to get the turkey super-moist and flavorful. Then you’ll use some to stock up the Amish Bean Soup, so you don’t get bored of eating bird. And to make turkey sandwiches exciting, we’ll punch them up with gorgonzola, proscuitto, and arugula, much in the way that Food Blogga did last year! Plus for the first time, there is some variety in the breakfasts (and NO TURKEY) some days it’s a fantastic pumpkin soup with bacon-flavored whipped cream, and some days it’s gluten-free coffee cake! (That one’s store-bought – I am sure many of you will be tired of cooking at that point!)

Seriously, I am drooling here. I’ll try to get the meal planning kits with these recipes up by Monday too, so that everyone with turkey has some interesting and easy options for using it up! And I’ll be sharing my own experience with that pumpkin soup soon, because it is AWESOME.

Another rescued vintage post, from November 23rd, 2007

If you celebrate the American Thanksgiving and are among the millions of turkey-cookers this weekend – or if you just like making your own stocks and demiglaces – the San Francisco Chronicle had a neat article a few weeks ago about what different local chefs advise when you use up those bones, and why. I love kitchen science articles: it’s so neat to learn about the effects of simmering versus boiling, adding mint instead of rosemary, or cutting up the vegetables before adding them to the stock.

The article also, awesomely, has information about how to make vegetable stock. I’ve been reading a lot of Jeffrey Steingarten lately – in this same kitchen-sciency-researchy vein – and he has a certain amount of very stern things to say about how vegetarian cuisine in the United States is often treated more like medicine than good food, how it’s a lot harder to prepare vegetables well than meats and fruits and such. So the more articles there are that say things like “don’t just throw all your leftover vegetables into water and boil them, think about the balance of flavors,” the better.

Another rescued vintage post, this one from November 29, 2007

Last week winter squash was on sale – Whole Foods tricked me into thinking that it was a huge savings, but I’ll talk about them separately! So I explored the wonderful world of winter squash with spaghetti squash, acorn squash, and delicata squash. I’ll share those recipes separately too – right now I just need to figure out what to eat this week. After all those squash adventures, I’m feeling like some good down-home familiar flavors. I want some chicken! I have a ton of apples that my mom gave us for Thanksgiving; maybe I should make some more Chicken On Fire!

I also want to make chicken under a brick. Hey: apparently I can get a free-range chicken, have the butcher cut it in half, and brick it. I’ll call it bricken! And then I could use the bones from that to make chicken stock, which I would then use to make the chicken a la Normande. I wonder if I could bricken some legs without boning them (as a Chez Panisse recipe told me I should do). Everything2.com seems to think I could! I have cooked many good things from there with great success, so.

“What are you doing this weekend?”
“Oh, I thought I’d do a little brickening!”

Plus, there are actually bricks in the backyard. Use what you’ve got, that’s what I say! So… perhaps I could budget $8 for the chicken, $3 for the creme fraiche, and 60 cents for the onions. And we have carrots that a lovely friend brought by as she is packing to move (is that why she gave us carrots? I’m not clear on how this worked). That should end up being like $11.60 for 8 meals.

And for breakfast… let’s splurge. It’s supposed to be the biggest meal of the day, after all. How about a cranberry-orange bread and this breakfast “sundae”? About $3 for a bread mix, $3 for a big tub of yogurt, and maybe $1 each for hazelnuts and a pomegranate, and I think I have cacao nibs on hand.

That leaves six meals, $19.60 spent so far. And I need vegetables! Maybe some grapefruit and avocado salad? Say fifty cents for the avocado, a buck for the grapefruit, a buck for the arugula. And then… rapini! with olives! and bell peppers and some artichokes with that! Here are my guesses: $3 for half a pound of rapini, $2 for good dark herby olives, a dollar for a bell pepper, fifty cents for a jalapeno pepper. And $1.50 each for three organic artichokes. That’s $30.60 and that is all I need to do!

Grocery list:
~At Trader Joe’s~
Cranberry-orange bread mix $3
Organic yogurt $3
A ton of sustainably raised chicken $8
Creme fraiche $3
Three organic artichokes $4.50
~At Berkeley Bowl~

Organic pomegranate $1
1/2 lb. organic rapini $3
Organic bell pepper $1
Jalapeno pepper 50 cents
Olives $2
Organic onions 58 cents
Hazelnuts $1
Organic avocado 50 cents