The Mindy/Julia Project

Last night I watched Julie/Julia. The food was divine, Meryl Streep as Julia Child was divine, Amy Adams did a good job with a character, who, considering her blog which I am only today discovering, sounds nothing like her inspiration.

Leaving me to wonder if Julie Powell got rewritten for the book.

I don't know. I have the blog and the movie, I'm good.

By the way, The Julie/Julia Project blog is here. It's funny. It's worth reading:

http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/09/05.html

(first posting is in August of 2002, use calendar to navigate around)

So far in the blog, it's a lot of cream, butter and roast chicken. In honor of the movie and the blog, I decided to toss 4 whole chicken legs in the slow cooker with onion, garlic, thyme and potatoes and set my house to smelling good.

(This is why I don't understand scented candles that smell like cinnamon oatmeal. So much nicer to make real cinnamon oatmeal and save the cost of the candle.)

I just finished reading a blog post in which Julie Powell mentions that people don't eat cooked carrots much anymore. Ain't that the truth? I rediscovered them recently, which seems ridiculous, considering how much I cook. I stopped eating them because somewhere along the way carrots became 'bad' as in 'too much sugar' for weight-conscious people.

Carrots.

Leaving me to wonder why, after years of avoiding carrots, I failed to achieve the slim, svelte contours to which surely G*d wants me to become accustomed.

Could it be the cake? The ice cream? The donuts? The bread? Could it be crazy-a$$ diets that leave out whole food groups, demonize ingredients historically considered healthy and involve pre-made shakes?

Which is not to say that I've mended my ways and now eat only well-balanced, calorie-counted meals. But maybe, someday...

Not actually a stockpile post...

I'm in Kansas hanging out with a chick named Dorothy and her annoying little doggie - TuTu or Toe-Toe or Ta-Ta or something like that. Aside from all the yip-yapping going on, having a really nice time. Kansas is a really pretty state. Today I ate the best pastry I have ever eaten. It was a peach turnover made by a lady named Rose of Rose's Pastries and purchased at a place called Yoder Meats in beautiful downtown Yoder, KS.

If you ever get to Kansas check this place out. It's a central site for the surrounding Amish community to sell some of their wares. I picked up some sausage, some cheese and some dried beef (not beef jerky, dried beef, it's different) and those wonderful turnovers - not overly sweet, full of the luscious peaches, light crust...

I've decided something.

I'm going to learn to make a good turnover because life is too short to waste on bad pastry.

Considering I'm on a diet that supposed to avoid bread, this should be interesting.

P.S. - In keeping with my previous post about eating out of grocery stores when on a road trip - we ate the meats and cheeses for lunch and dinner. And the pastry for dessert. Sort of. The pastry was mostly gone by the time dessert rolled around.

Eating cheap while on a roadtrip

Toured a candy factory and a distillery today. On my way to Branson tomorrow for a few days. Have decided that even if you throw away half the food you buy, the cheapest way to eat on vacation is out of grocery stores. Go ahead and buy the fancy deli trays even though you could do it cheaper with packaged lunch meats. Don't compare it to making the food at home, compare it to eating out at a restaurant, or even comparing the quality to the dollar menu at fast food places. Grocery stores are way ahead of both in both price and quality.

We've been eating tons of fruit, grape tomatoes, orange juice, some soft drinks, milk, and deli stuff like cheese and meat trays, baked chicken, meatloaf, potato salad etc. I don't keep leftovers of the deli stuff, even if I have a fridge and a microwave. I just toss the leftover chicken or whatever and buy fresh the next day.

Special bonus - no waiting around for wait staff and no worries about leaving tips. All the hotels we've stayed at have offered some kind of free breakfast with the room, from continental to full breakfasts. If I'm staying several days, I book places with kitchens so I can cook. I'm been trucking around a box of salt, some pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, Italian seasoning and cinnamon (for my coffee). That takes care of most of our seasoning needs.

Personally, I prefer grocery store food, or cooking my own. I like knowing what's in my food.

Stockpile post is next.

Monday Ramblings

Milk, butter, eggs, flour, sugar, nuts, beans, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, herbs, spices, yeast, grains, baking powder, baking soda, cornstarch, honey, molasses, coffee, tea, potatoes, lemon juice, onions, apples...

Hmmmm....what else?

Meats, fish, poultry, fresh seasonal produce...

Not a big list, right? But with that list you can feed yourself and your family forever. These are the basics everything else in the grocery store is made from.

Everything.

Like Suddenly Salad from Betty Crocker.

Don't get me wrong. I love the stuff. But did you know it's basically spiral pasta dosed up with salad dressing? Chop some ham into your own freshly made noodles (thinly rolled out dough made from flour, water and salt, then cut into strips and boiled a few minutes), steam some frozen peas, and toss both with extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and some dried basil - Voila! A wonderful meal. And no preservatives.

How long does that take?

Which part?

Dough takes a little practice, but once you have it, it only takes a few minutes and it's virtually free, especially if you pick up the flour near the Baking Holidays (Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah). I know people who make their own fresh pasta all the time. They don't even think about it.

No, I'm not one of them, but I'd like to be. I settle for the dried whole-wheat pasta I pick up for free or near free with coupons. Point is, if I didn't have the coupons, I'd have the means to make the meal so long as I had some whole wheat flour and the other ingredients listed above.

Cooking is easy. It just requires DOING. Forget recipes with 15 ingredients and 16 steps. Life is short, dinner is daily. Stock the basics, get a cookbook filled with simple recipes and GO MAKE IT.

P.S. If you're desperate to get something, anything on the table, so desperate you don't even care about the preservatives, you can often get the Suddenly Salad for free with coupons, also. In fact, this week (until tomorrow, anyway) you can get it for about 30c. You still have to add your own oil and it's only about half the pasta in a the free box of pasta you can get with coupons, but it's still cheap and tastes good and certainly beats a big mac with fries.

If you want to know about the 'free or almost-free with coupons' thing, sign up for CouponSense and tell 'em Mindy Likes to Coupon sent you. It's only 4 bucks for the first month. Don't worry, you'll get back the investment many times over.

How to know when Mindy is dieting

Whenever her stockpile posts involve lots of 'no so good for you' food.

I just read my post from yesterday, something I forgot to do while writing it, and realized that after going on and on about healthy fruits and tomatoes and whole wheat pasta for so long, I told y'all to go out and buy cake mix and sausage.

Here's my caveat - it's good to treat yourself once in a while.

I know cake mix can be made from scratch and one of these days I'll find a good one to post, but I like mixes because there are lots of different flavors and most of the work is done. You add water, egg and oil/applesauce, stir, pour in pan and bake and you have a cake just as good as those $30 sheet cakes people keep buying at the grocery stores. Cakes are pretty scientific and measurements have to be correct or they don't always come out right, so I'm all about the mixes.

Now muffins are a different story. Muffins are forgiving and a basic muffin mix is easily adjusted to circumstance. Also, I find that the commercial muffin mixes I've tried, besides being stupidly expensive, even with coupons, are way too sweet.

I don't have time at the moment to go into the magnificence of homemade muffin mixes, but here's one to get you started (it starts about halfway down the page). As usual, I substituted half wheat flour to my basic recipe.

There are several mix recipes on that page. I've tried most of them and really like them.

Cheap Joe

I knew a gal who drank Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. She purchased it a pound or two at the time, brewed it at home and brought it to work in a thermos. When co-workers commented more than once regarding her champagne tastes vs. her beer budget, she'd ask, "How much do you think you're paying a pound for that cup of Starbucks?"

Do the math. At 5 bucks for a cuppa Starbucks Joe, the others were paying the equivalent of a hundred dollars or more a pound (32 cups x 5 bucks a cup less cost of the milk or flavoring or whatever).

Okay, I'm guessing re: how much the milk, etc costs. Let's just say that it's way more than the $35/or so a pound you'll pay for a good quality Jamaican Blue.

This is baby stuff, I know it. That's the first item listed in any 'How to be more frugal' article.

1) Brew coffee at home and take to work in thermos.

(Number 2 is usually something like: "Bring your lunch instead of buying it." Followed by, "Group your errands so you aren't using as much gas.")

Frugal is all in how one looks at it.

I used to buy the flavored sugar-free syrup. It's a frugal solution to what could be an expensive habit. If you use coupons, you can get those International Creamers for a song. But have you looked at the typical list of ingredients?

Da Vinci Gourmet Syrups - Water, Natural And Artificial Flavor, Cellulose Gum, Sucralose (Splenda® Brand), Sodium Benzoate (Preservative), Citric Acid, Caramel Color.

Coffeemate International Creamers - Water, Sugar, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oil, Sodium Caseinate (a Milk Derivative) (Not a Source of Lactose), Dipotassium Phosphate, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Polysorbate 60, Natural and Artificial Flavors Carrageenan, Beta-Carotene Color.

I'm sure Dipotassium Phosphate isn't in the least harmful, but I have to wonder why I need it in my coffee.

So one morning, I'm searching my cabinets for something to make the morning coffee extra special and my gaze falls on the obvious: cinnamon and vanilla extract.

duh.

Cinnamon sprinkled in with the coffee grounds, a tsp of vanilla extract added to the brewed pot. Add half and half or milk and Splenda and I've got a frugal solution that makes the frugal solution look expensive.

All my epiphanies should be so obvious.

Random Musings - Tuesday

Today, I found an article on stockpiling that said grocers operate on the theory that most American families have a three day supply of food on hand.

That would last about a day and a half in my house.

I'll be back tomorrow with a stockpiling list.