Work-a-Day Wednesday: Spinach Soup

Welcome to Work-a-Day Wednesday: Recipes for the Time Crunched or Impaired.

This is a soup that would make Popeye proud.

And maybe it'd make your 9-year-old proud too, if he even, like, knew who Popeye was. Which he doesn't. Because he's 9. And he hates spinach. And he owns a DS. Which makes us sound so unpleasantly all-newmillennium-American that I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. But at least he doesn't smoke a pipe, or have an anchor tattoo, or an excessively skinny and helpless girlfriend, or eat canned spinach (like, seriously).

My point, if ever there was one, is that this is a very good soup, but that it is also a soup for spinach lovers. It's not going to win over your picky eaters (my own personal picky eater claimed that the mere sight of it made him feel like he was going to throw up--he actually said this in a slightly polite manner, as though to explain his feelings and not to insult the food, leading me to believe that the sight of this food really was triggering his actual gag reflex, so there you go). I'm not even sure that it's a soup that will win over your spinach fence sitters (for that you'll have to go with this), as Kip was not a huge fan either (though he did eat his bowl without gagging or politely threatening to do so). However, if you and yourn like spinach, you should totally make this because it's really good and it's pretty healthy too.

As for me, it was a flash of warm green spring on an brown blue January day. It felt that way on my insides too.

Spinach Soup
adapted from tasty kitchen
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Cost: $1.65
(spinach: .80, butter: .15, milk: .40, cheese: .25, other stuff: .05)

1 Tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
5 oz. baby spinach (about 1/2 bag)
2 Tbsp water
2 Tbsp butter
1/4 of an onion or 1/2 tsp onion powder
2 Tbsp flour
2 1/2 C milk (or 2 C milk and 1/2 C cream for those who missed the fact that it's January and there are things called resolutions in January, right?)
1/2 tsp salt
black pepper
maybe a dash of cayenne too
maybe a dash of chicken bullion granules if you're still not quite feeling it or a bit more salt
1/4 C Parmesan cheese and more for serving (cheddar or goat cheese wouldn't do you wrong either)

In skillet, heat oil. Add spinach and garlic and stir constantly as the spinach wilts. (Even your picky eaters will like how this smells; then they'll see it and say 'gross.' But it still makes you believe there's hope.)

Put this in a small blender with 2 Tbsp water and blend. You can get it super smooth or leave it a little more spinach-y and textured. If you don't have a small blender, just hold off on blending till you have some milk-mixture to throw in there.

Melt butter in saucepan and add onion.. Cook until onion soft (or until onion powder is fragrant). Whisk in flour and cook for 30-60 seconds, whisking all the while. Add milk and whisk it in until there are no lumps. Heat this at medium until it begins to thicken. (At this point, you can add some of this mixture to your spinach if you weren't able to blend it before--now you can puree it in a bigger blender).

Add spinach mixture to milk mixture in the saucepan and heat until it's a thickness you enjoy in your soup. Add salt, pepper, cayenne and then taste. Add more salt or a bit of chicken bullion if it needs it. Add cheese and whisk that in. Taste it and add more if it needs it.

Serve with a bit of cheese served on top and a crusty bread thereby, or some Saltines in a pinch.

PRINTABLE RECIPE

Roast Sweet Potato Snacks

You ready for healthy, cheap, easy, good, but...ugly.

We got you covered. Well, actually my friend Vanessa has you covered, but I stole her idea, so watch your ideas people.

A month or two ago, Vanessa and her husband went on a paleo-style diet where they ate primarily vegetables, fruits, and meat. During that time, we had lunch together once. And by 'had lunch together,' I don't mean 'went to a restaurant.' Silly. (Like, with our kids, it would have been a nightmare.) I mean 'went on a cheap Mommy lunch together where we packed stuff and then ate on the floor.' And there sat Vanessa (and her toddler) sitting there eating turd-looking foods as though they were Go-Gurts (which if you really think about it isn't exactly the aesthetic equivalent of a Van Gogh either). She was eating cold sweet potatoes, skin and all just like that. So were her kids. And I thought, "Gross. I like sweet potatoes and all, but not cold and not the skins. Pass the butter and brown sugar, please." And then a few weeks later we were having another mommy lunch at Vanessa's house and she offered me one. I was still hungry and I'm a little daring, not to mention the fact that I'm not one to say no to free food.

They were awesome. Even the skins. I had another.

Vanessa told me that the trick is to roast them nice and long. She'd done her fairly small sweet potatoes at 400 for about 2 hours. In this way, the potato has plenty of time, not just to roast, but to caramelize around the skin parts. Even if you over-do them, the insides will be yummy. She also told me they were a lot of fun to eat in public with your kids because people inevitably cannot control themselves from commenting in that slightly rude way surprised bystanders tend to have. As in, "What are those things your child is eating!?" Notice you never get those comments when your child is eating an unnaturally blue concoction (that will inevitably turn his poop a funky shade of green) being squeezed from a tube.

But I digress. It took me a while to get to making my own sweet potato snacks. I am the only sweet potato lover in this house and I wasn't sure I'd be able to get to them before they went bad. However, I notice that now that they're around (I made 4), they're the perfect thing for finishing off a meal. They're somewhat sweet and appease that natural desire to finish a meal with a bit of sweet. They're also filling without being overwhelmingly so.

So don't fear the cold weird sweet potato with skins on.

Roast Sweet Potato Snacks
Serves 4
Roast time: 2 hours
Cost: .50

4 smallish sweet potatoes

Roast at 400 for 2 hours. Do put a pan with foil under them as they tend to ooze and it's a pain to clean.

If your sweet potatoes are large, you can roast longer. Or you can cut them in half (cut them short-ways, not long-ways). The cut end will harden and you'll have a smaller snack to enjoy.

Store in refrigerator after they've cooled. Vanessa stores hers in a big Ziploc. She says they can get messy. I just threw mine in the fridge without wrapping at all, though I do think it dries out the skins, so I plan to wrap them up next time.

Note: If you decide you hate these after you've made them, then just mash the insides and serve warm with butter and brown sugar. Or puree the insides and slide them into unsuspecting foods like hamburger (it's so good; you'll be shocked), mac and cheese, or smoothies.

PRINTABLE RECIPE

December Assessment and Cheap Eat Challenge Conclusion

Let me start by saying that December is a tough month to keep track of. Here are the numbers I have. Our total for the month of December was 240.30--that's including the $17.00 for our milk share and the 27.00 for our CSA (even though we received no food this month). That, divided by 29 (I didn't count the 30th or 31st since my sister and her family plus my father and his partner were here and that just messes any cost tallying way up) takes our daily cost to a mere $8.29/day. Which seems really low for the most decadent year of the month.

Here are a few reasons I think this may be so:


1. I didn't count the cost of ingredients I used to make cookies or food given away. That might seem like cheating because you just know we ate some of those cookies (who?us?), but you'll notice above that I didn't give us any kind of entertainment bonus (I usually give us $20-25 for entertaining), so I think it's pretty fair because we really did give a lot away.
2. I didn't count the candy given as gifts to kids or husband. And trust me, they managed to fill up on this plenty.
3. For our church Christmas party, I said I'd make one of the turkeys and I did. The turkey was provided by the church and I got all the leftovers (there were many) plus some ham, potatoes, and rolls. This fed us dinner for 3-4 days and gave us a boost in the leftover department as well. As a matter of fact, I still have about 3 cups of chopped turkey hanging out in the freezer.
4. In addition to this, there were friends who shared food with us.
5. As stated in the first paragraph, I didn't count the last 2 days of the month (which can be pricey days) because my sister and her family plus my dad and his partner were visiting. It's just too much to try to tally, so I didn't. I counted our food purchases up through the 29th.
6. I'm sure I missed a few things here and there, especially things I brought up from food storage in the basement. I'm usually pretty meticulous about getting these things counted, but this month, I'm not so sure; it was easy to get busy and crazy. And yes, double crazy.

Here's the breakdown for you:

Grains: $36.12
Dairy 34.90 plus 17.00 for our milk share- 51.90
Produce: 41.86 plus 27.00 for our CSA- 68.86
Meat/Eggs: 30.73
Nuts/Beans/Legumes: 23.03
Fats: 7.96

Whew! And it's finished. An entire year of eating on the super cheap--shooting for $6/day for our family of 6 for 6 months and then shooting for (and succeeding at) eating on less than $10/day for our family of 6. Am I relieved? Yes, I am. Mostly, I'm just relieved I won't have to keep track of each thing purchased and used each month. It was really interesting for me at first and then, these last few months--well, it's just been painful. I thought you might want to know some of the key things I've learned from this as well as what I plan to continue doing. Here goes.

What I learned:

1. I learned what we ate. That sounds odd, but it was the first thing I really learned from this. I had these rough ideas in my head about what we ate, but when I really started looking at it, I noticed how wrong I was in certain areas.
2. Along that line, it was easy to see where we needed to improve.
3. The cheaper we ate, the less we wasted. For this, you have to know what's in your fridge and freezer and use it up. Which means you've got to be a little creative with food prep sometimes. Or at least have some tortillas on hand to wrap things up in.
4. Homemade food is almost always always always cheaper than processed stuff. Almost. Motto: Takes more time (sometimes); tastes more better (most times). And all that mumbo jumbo about how eating healthy is so expensive, well, you can probably tell what I think about that. To a very small extent this is true (whole wheat flour is more expensive than white, but sugar is more expensive than both, and a candy bar is costliest of all; and let's not even talk about soda, okay).
5. You've got to at least sort of plan if you want to eat really cheap. A general meal plan is good (I didn't actually find a neurotic meal plan necessary). Possibly even more important is the idea of stocking up a bit on really really good deals (I'm thinking mostly of fresh fruit in the summer and some of the baking items in December, that sort of thing).


What I wish never to return to:


1. Wasting a bunch of food.
2. Going into the store, wandering around, and buying stuff. I've noticed a little slippage here at the end of the year and I hate it. At the beginning of the year, I'd go in with a mission and not fudge and buy impulse-y things. It was so refreshing, so freeing, so...fast. Of course, if there's a really really good deal, you can go for it, but that doesn't happen all that often (at least not when you're surprised about it).
3. Never planning a meal. I was really bad about this before, but it's been fun and nice to be just slightly more organized. Yeah, we still do an ingredient run here or there, but it happens a lot less.
4. Not buying extra fruit in the summer when it's fresh and so cheap. I froze a LOT of fruit this summer and it has been awesome this winter. It's provided some variety for us in our winter eating and I paid about half in the summer what I'd pay in the winter (and that's for the frozen not the fresh stuff).

What 2012 Will Bring to The Tasty Cheapskate:

-I'm not entirely sure, but I know that after the abundance of December I'm ready for some simple, delicious, and cheap stuff.
-I'm also toying with the idea of using Friday as a Food Essay Friday where I write my own essay or link to somebody else's.
-There may be a little less posting than last year. I'd like to do just a wee bit of networking. And I'd like to spend a bit more time writing on things that aren't food. As much as I like eating and writing about food, there are other things that go through this little brain.
-I'd say it's fair to say some chocolate will cross these plates, wouldn't you?
-Hope to put up total costs of monthly food receipts in Costs section, but no more breaking anything down and some months will be notably more expensive than others as they may be months when I'm stocking up.
-I hope to do some blurbs where I show places or ways in which you can get/make expensive foods for cheaper. (For example, right now I'm thinking about cheeses. There are some lovely and expensive ones out there. What would be reasonable substitutions for them or places where you can find them a bit cheaper? And what to do if your city, ahem, doesn't even carry some of them? That sort of thing.)
-I hope to do more recipes for the time crunched--more crock pot recipes and super quickies. I think I'm going to shoot for 1 per week. Maybe, like, Work-a-day Wednesday. What do you think?

A Conclusion/Sermon (If you don't like sermons skip it, because I can't help myself.)

Most Americans live abundantly. I'm not saying we all do, okay. But most of us do. And, frankly, I've started to get a little annoyed every time I hear otherwise. Maybe we don't live as abundantly as the guy next door. But I'm talking about abundance in a historical context and in a world context. The sooner we realize how much we have; the sooner we'll be able to take more control over it and make the most of it. A little gratitude can go a long way. A little remembering what our grandparents ate on a daily basis, and what they went through to get it. A little remembering how food was rationed during WWII. These are things my generation hasn't known (and hopefully won't), but they're really not so far away from us and I think it helps to remember/realize that once they were. And to prepare and consume our food with that sort of mindfulness and gratitude. This might not be easy exactly, but it's very possible--for those with time and for those with less time. Let's face it, most of us waste a good bit of food or spend our money on sodium and high fructose corn syrup more often than we really need to. Maybe I'm just begging to be criticized here because I am at home enough to prepare many of our foods from scratch. And I'm not saying everyone should be me and eat on the super cheap, but a little cheaper, a little less wasteful--it's something most of us can manage if we wish. If we don't wish, I'm okay with that. Just don't look at me all weepy-eyed and tell me how it can't be done. Because for most of us, with a little more preparation, a little more mindfulness, and a wee bit of effort, almost all of us can save a little more money than we do if we have a look around and prepare just a bit. Whether that means breaking out the rolling pin or breaking out the angel hair pasta, there's a cheap hot meal waiting to be on our menu this week.