Pantry Challenge Week 4

I meant to put this up yesterday, but family and friends come before blogging.
Grocery spending last week:

• Whole wheat hamburger buns- $2.45

• 2 cans pinto beans- $1.08

• 2 gallons milk- $4.25

• package of tortillas- $1

• package of pretzels- 50 cents (after coupon)

• package of Yoplait- free (after coupon)

• can of Carnation Instant Breakfast- $3.70 (after coupon)

• Bountiful Basket (apples, bananas, pears, oranges, cauliflower, broccoli, kiwis, pomegranates, lettuce, corn on the cob)  + bread pack that I split with my mom- $12

Total- $26.36 after tax
Total for the month so far- $79.36

Now I have to admit that I cheated. My family was visiting from out of town and we took them to lunch. Lunch for 5 adults and 2 children came to $59. Not really compatible with the $100 challenge. But I'm not going to be a bad hostess just because I'm doing some crazy pantry challenge. And I did make them eat food storage experiments for their other meals, which actually turned out pretty good. And I never got around to making the BBQ beans because I had too many other leftovers.

Menu Plan:
Breakfast
oatmeal
cereal
yogurt
fruit
smoothies

Lunch
leftovers
Ramen noodles (my kids love them)
shells and cheese
sandwiches

Dinner
BBQ beans
leftovers
Whole Grain Vegetable Lasagna*
Mac & Cheese with Cauliflower
Cream of Vegetable Chowder If you want to add chicken, be my guest.
Taco Salad

Sides & Snacks
Corn on the Cob
salad
roasted vegetables
fresh fruit
homemade bread and jam

*If you live in the Utah county area there is a Stouffer's thrift store near the plant in Springville, UT. Anything that isn't perfect goes to the thrift store. This could mean that they messed up the product, but most often it means that the package is under or overweight. Recently when my mom was there she found frozen Whole Grain Vegetable Lasagnas for $1.99 each, so she brought a few down when she came to visit. They tasted great. Hope that helps someone who is trying to get dinner on the table for less without spending their lives in the kitchen. :)

Food Storage Friday: Reuben Pinto Burgers

I found this recipe in the newspaper last Sunday. My burgers don't look as pretty, but they were very tasty, and really that's all that matters. (Ok, they are healthier than a standard burger, and I suppose that matters for something too.) If you are not fan of sauerkraut, you can easily change the toppings to make it whatever burger tickles your fancy.

Reuben Pinto Burgers
Food Storage Ingredients:
2 cans (15.5 oz)  pinto beans, liquid drained, 1 can mashed with a fork
1 can (14.5) sauerkraut, drained
1/4 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon ground pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 cup light mayonaise or Miracle Whip
2 Tablespoons of chili sauce

Fresh Ingredients:
1 & 1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
2 eggs, lightly beaten
6 thin slices Swiss cheese
6 whole wheat hamburger buns

1. Mix beans, bread crumbs, eggs, pepper, and garlic in a bowl. Form into six patties (Roughly 4"). 2.Mix chili sauce and mayo, set aside. 3. Place a slice of cheese on each half bun. Toast at 300 degrees F for about 5 minutes. 4. While toasting buns, heat oil in a large skillet. 5. Cook patties in hot oil until crisp on both sides (8-10 minutes total). 6. Assemble burgers with sauce on each side of bun and sauerkraut on top of patty.

Notes: The recipe I read said to drain and reserve liquid from canned beans, then add it to patty mixture for moisture. I found them to be plenty moist without it. I'll have to try this recipe with cooked dry pinto beans and with various burger toppings. I made my bread crumbs by toasting a couple of smashed freezer burnt Kaiser rolls that I found buried in my freezer and added a dash of Kirkland's organic no-salt seasoning. I highly recommend. I also used Monterrey Jack instead of Swiss, because that is what I had in my fridge. Still good.

Pantry Challenge Week 3

Did you have a great holiday with your kids? We did. House cleaning and blogging didn't happen, but we had fun. So Heather had dreams of books I was going to review and various prizes I was going to give away this month, but I was forgetting 'I am a mother of three now'. I never have as much time as I am hoping for. And things always come up. Anywho, moving forward.
 Here was my grocery spending breakdown for last week:

• Cilantro, a pepper and green onions- $1.90
• milk- $2.89
• greek yogurt- $3.59 ( I used it to make tzatziki sauce out of my cucumber. That recipe was a failure.)
• bread- $2.34
• ice cream- $2 (It was a prize on the chore chart.)

So that's roughly $13.

 No complaints from my family yet on using the things that we have. Of course the kids just finished the last of the chicken nuggets and I'm not buying anymore before February. We'll see how that goes. I still have a fair amount of fresh produce including a squash that's been in my fridge since before Christmas, so I'm trying to use up those things.

Here's the meal plan for this week:

Breakfast:

Upside Down Cranberry Cake- If it turns out well I'll put it up here.

cereal

oatmeal

Lunch:

leftovers

sandwiches

shells and cheese

stir-fried veggies with brown rice and plum sauce

Dinner:

Reuben Pinto Burgers- Another new recipe

Hippie Tacos (Vegetarian style)

BBQ Beans  (Again, sans meat)

Squash Quesadillas with Apple Salsa- Looks good, going to give it a whirl

Cream of Mushroom soup- good ol' standby

Green eggs and Spam- The green eggs are made with pureed spinach. My daughter is a big fan of sauteed Spam; it tastes like thick bacon. I'm not so much.

Snacks

More tangerines, pears and apples

muffins

yogurt

Homemade bread (universe willing)

What fun things are you eating? And how are you trying to use what's in your pantry?

$100 Challenge and Menu Week 1

Happy New Year everyone!
 So it's a new year and one of my resolutions is to organize (and maintain) my pantry. In order to do this I need to clean it out, which from what I've read is something that you should do once a year anyway. So I'm going to try to live off my pantry this month and to make it slightly more realistic I'm giving myself a budget of $100 for groceries (food storage meals go down easier with some fresh produce). So this month I'll give you a rundown of how much I'm spending and what we're eating. Hopefully it will give you some ideas to use your own food storage and save some money. And there will be prizes!
 So here's what we're eating this week. (I have to have multiple meals sometimes because my husband is a vegetarian and I have my own dietary restrictions.) On weekends and holidays, I tend to make big batches of breakfast foods like waffles and use the leftovers throughout the next week. This week I'm also focusing on using a lot produce that's in my fridge.

Breakfast
Pumpkin Waffles
Baked Apple Pancakes
granola
cold cereal
oatmeal

Lunch
sandwiches
leftovers
mac and cheese (for the kids)

Dinner
BBQ Chicken and Wheat Salad (without the chicken)
Stir-fried Green Beans & Brown Rice and Tropical Sweet Potato Casserole
Hawaiian Haystacks
Red Pepper Pesto and Pasta
Taco Soup (Vegetarian style)
leftovers

Snacks
Wheatberry Salsa and chips
fresh apples
canned peaches
smoothies
crackers and cheese

Now for this weeks giveaway: I'm going to give away a copy of I Dare You To Eat It by Liesa Card. This is my favorite food storage book. If you have no idea where to start with your food storage, this book is a great starting place. It's full of tips and ideas that make using your food storage feasible. Here's what you have to do to enter:

1. Be a follower of Secrets of Mom (required) and comment on this post.
2. Join the $100 Challenge and comment.
3. Share your favorite food storage recipe.
4. Share this post on twitter.

The winner will be chosen using a random number generator. The giveaway ends at midnight on Sunday January 8, 2012. The winner will be announced Monday morning. Keep checking for more recipes and giveaways throughout the month.

Food Storage Friday: Raspberry and Spinach Pasta Salad

I created this recipe with my extremely limiting dietary restrictions in mind using things I happened to have in my fridge and pantry. So if you aren't married to a vegetarian and you aren't breast-feeding an infant with moderately severe reflux, feel free to add some grilled chicken strips, mandarin oranges, feta cheese and/or chopped kiwi fruits. I actually can have kiwi, I'm just out.  You can serve it as a side (I had mine with grilled fish) or eat it as a light meal. Whatever floats your boat.

Raspberry and Spinach Pasta Salad
Food Storage Ingredients:
3 Tablespoons toasted almonds
2 cups cooked pasta
2 teaspoons of olive oil
1/4 cup raspberry vinaigrette dressing (I used Private Selections from Smith's because it doesn't use soybean oil.)

Fresh Ingredients:
handful of fresh raspberries, torn in half
1 Bartlett pear, chopped
1 large handful of baby spinach

1. Coat cooked pasta with olive oil. 2. Toss all ingredients together.

I love this because a) I'm allowed to eat it, b) it's healthy, c) it's delicious and satisfying and d) it's super quick and easy to make. We have a winner! If I were in a situation where I was using only my food storage I could use reconstituted dried raspberries and canned pears and probably just forgo the spinach. The fresh is better, but I could make do without.

Food Storage Friday: Plum Sauce

 Several weeks ago we found ourselves with a surplus of plums from our Bountiful Basket. I remember when I was growing up my mom and grandmothers canned plums and I thought that they were gross. But I decided that there had to be something delicious that I could do with these. The answer: Asian Plum Sauce.  Now this recipe itself calls for both fresh and food storage ingredients, but the real beauty of it is that once prepared it makes preparing quick and healthy meals  with food storage a snap. It goes well over stir-fried vegetables and rice.

Asian Plum Sauce
Food Storage Ingredients:
3 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon canola oil
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 cup brown sugar
1 Tablespoon cornstarch + 1 Tablespoon water


Fresh Ingredients:
3 lbs plums, pitted and chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 oz ginger
1 small onion, minced
2 cups water
1/4 cup lemon juice

1. Puree fresh ingredients. 2. Combine all ingredients except cornstarch and Tablespoon of water. 3. Bring to a boil and simmer 30 minutes. 4. Mix water and cornstarch, add to sauce and simmer until thickened. 5 Can in a water bath according to canner directions. (The recipe I found said 10 minutes, I felt more comfortable with 20.) Makes 4 pint jars

I served this over brown rice I had prepared in my crockpot and four cups of chopped and stir-fried mixed veggies. My husband added some stir-fried tofu to his, but you could just as easily stir-fry some chicken or pork and add that.

Homemade Salsa Revisited

 You may have noticed that my posts have been a little more sporadic lately. I'm still here, still buying and using food storage, still trying to do my small part to make the world a better place. Having a third child has sucked away all of my free time, even if she is my easiest baby yet. And in addition to sucking away my time and energy, she has also sucked away all of my pregnancy weight, so it's not all bad. So believe me I still have plenty more to say, I just don't have as much time to do it.
 Along with everything else that has been happening I found myself in possession of two boxes of beautiful tomatoes from my parents' garden (they tried to give me more than that.) After giving a bunch to the neighbors I decided that newborn or no, I really had to make salsa. I just did it crockpot style. That way I spent about 45 minutes chopping & rinsing ingredients, let it simmer for 6 hours and processed it for 20 minutes at the end. Totally doable.

Aren't they beautiful?

There is something so satisfying about home canning. It makes my house smell good and it means that I'll have yumminess in my pantry for quite awhile. 3 dozen tomatoes made 12 pints canned, plus 3 more pints that are in the fridge. (And I still have plenty of tomatoes.) For the recipe I used go here. Although instead of jalapenos I used the red Anaheims from my garden, and instead of the green Anaheims I used some green Hatch chiles from my thirty pound monster bag of a couple weeks ago. This made for spicier salsa than usual. That's ok, I like spicy food. Unfortunately we have discovered that baby really doesn't like it when I eat anything remotely spicy, and lets me know by giving back any tainted meals that she is given. Speaking of which I have laundry to do. ttfn

Food Storage Friday: Storing Water

 As I have mentioned before I live in a dry hot climate. At no time has this been more real to me than now being 34 pregnant and finding myself drinking 3-4 liters of water a day. (If I don't drink that much I find my throat parched and I wake up in the night because of terrible Charlie horses.) So I find myself thinking, do I have enough water stored for an emergency? (The answer is probably not.)

WATER—Water is more essential than food in sustaining life.  Store a minimum of seven gallons of water per person for drinking and food preparation.  Store an additional seven gallons per person of the same quality water for bathing, brushing teeth, and dishwashing.  Use heavy plastic containers with tight-fitting lids.  Metal containers, which may corrode, tend to give water an unpleasant taste.

    If you have any doubt as to the bacterial safety of stored water, you may purify it by boiling vigorously for one to two minutes or by adding chlorine bleach (5 percent sodium hypochlorite solution).  Generally, half a teaspoon of bleach will purify five gallons of clear water, and one teaspoon will purify five gallons of cloudy water.  If you store it away from sunlight in clean containers, and if it is safe bacterially at the time of storage, water will remain pure indefinitely. EPA water treatment recommendations are for 1/2 teaspoon bleach per gallon of clear water.- The First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints January 20, 2002

So that means that for my family of (soon to be) 5, for a 2 week supply of water. I need to store 140 gallons of water. That is a bare minimum. That means we're all a little on the dehydrated side, we're not bathing everyday and we are staying out of the sun. Yet, 140 gallons of water still sounds like a lot. Where do you put 140 gallons of water? Not to mention that containers that large can be expensive.The answer is a little at a time.

One of my favorite food storage stories happened to my aunt. She lives outside of Seattle. At the time she didn't have money to invest in food storage, but she wanted to be actively working on it. So she started storing water in rinsed out soda and juice bottles. Her friends and neighbors thought that she was insane. The Seattle area is never going to have a drought, she was never going to need the water that she was storing. Then one winter they had a very hard freeze and every one of her neighbors' water pipes broke. Because she had water stored she was able to share with them and help them in their crisis. (And it helped that her water pipes happened to not break.) So you can't say that you and your family don't need to store water, because you never know when you will need it.

So where do you put all of that water? Well, you get creative. Before I lived in the home I do now, we owned a townhouse that was not designed with storage space in mind. We didn't have a garage, our pantry was small and the closet space was insufficient. We did however, have a space under the stairs that you had to crawl over the washer and dryer to get to. There was no lighting and the space was tiny and awkwardly shaped. It was totally impractical for storing anything that I intended to use on any kind of regular basis. But instead of letting that space be wasted I filled it with water in old juice bottles. And at the time it held enough water for my family. When we moved I dumped out the water, gave away the containers and started over.

 Now I wait until bottled water goes on sale for less than a dollar a case, (and it does if you watch for it) and I stock up on that. My husband mocks me and my habit of buying bottled water, but I only buy it when it is cheaper than the price of the bottles themselves. And when Powerade goes on sale for $5 a case I buy several of those. My husband drinks them after his bike rides and I save the bottles to refill with water. Over the past couple years I have acquired a substantial supply of water bottles.

What ways have you found to store water?

Daikon Radish Pickles

Awhile back I got a few daikon (Japanese for "large root", and  they also made me think of "the radish spirit" in Spirited Away) radishes in my Bountiful Basket. When I saw it I thought "What is this and what in the world do I do with it?" I let them set in my fridge for almost a month before I forced myself to do something with them. Most suggestions that I found involved turning into sweet pickles or some sort of sweet pickle salad. I hate sweet pickles, so I kept searching. I found a recipe on Root Simple, that involved  cutting them into strips and pickling them.
 Now when I say pickling, I mean really pickling. Not the cold pack preserving that we Americans of the 21st century think of when we think of pickles, but letting the naturally occurring bacteria multiply and produce lactic acid. This lacto-fermentation is the same process that is used to make sauerkraut, Swiss cheese  and sourdough bread. This is the way that dill pickles are traditionally made.
  So I thought I would give it a whirl with a few minor modifications of my own.

Daikon Radish Pickles
Daikon radishes (I found that one and a half large radishes filled a jar, roughly 2 lbs)
2 small heads of garlic, peeled
1 teaspoon dried dill
2 Tablespoons sea salt (It is very important that there is no iodine in the salt.)
1 quart water

1. Mix salt and water. This will be your brine.  2. Cut radishes into small strips. 3. Stuff garlic and radish strips into a very clean quart mason jar. (I sterilized it just to be safe.) 4. Add dill and cover with brine. Make sure that all of the vegetables are covered with the brine, if they are exposed the entire jar may spoil. 5. Let set for 1-4 weeks depending on how strong you want your pickles to be.  Oh and your brine is supposed to get cloudy. That's how you know it's working, and if you put your jar through a hot water bath it will kill the bacteria that are doing the lacto-fermenting.  Refrigerate after opening.

When we opened them they popped a fizzed quite a bit, but tasted like pickles, only with a different texture. When I chopped up the radishes there was some leftover, so I ate a few raw. It kind of reminded me of a cross between jicama and a radish. Chopped a few into a salad.

Book Review: Canning & Preserving

 Recently I won Homemade Living: Canning & Preserving with Ashley English from The Morris Tribe. I have to say that I really enjoyed this book. It is full of recipes and tips for canning your harvest and is written in such a way that makes me totally excited about spending hours in my kitchen preserving local produce.  The way she describes it, it's more than food storage, it's an art form. I loved that the author included stories on the history of canning and explained the chemistry behind keeping your canned goods from spoiling.
Here are some of the tips that it included:

• "Know why you are [canning], and be honest with the work it will require. This ain't no disco!" 
•  "Always cook small batches, and always use a wide pan. Also only use the best fruit for preserves."
• "Strawberry jam foams. A lot. No, really, a whole lot."
• "Grocery stores are a convenience, but there is nothing better than homegrown or homemade food."
• "Always remove the rings from my jars when storing; if anything spoils, the lids will come off. Food that is good will hold its seal."
• "Can because you enjoy it, never make it a job or task."
• "Keep your food preparation area clean, and always sterilize your jars well."
• "Canning provides a means of dealing with an abundance of fresh produce. It tastes good, is healthy and saves money. It's the only way to eat certain foods."
• "Always prep extra jars and lids. Yields can very according to the water content of the fruit or vegetable and how tightly they pack into jars."
• "The canning process sometimes dictates it's own time line. You should have a meal plan that simple and easy and have some snacks nearby."

I'm not a total rookie to canning. I own my own canner and I can make some fantastic salsa and apple pie filling, but I have to say that I learned a lot from this book. After reading it I feel better equipped and more energized about canning. I recommend it to any one who is new to canning, anyone looking for a good canning reference or someone looking for a few new good ideas. (I'm excited to test out her recipe for peach lavender butter when peaches are in season.)

Smoothies & Frozen Fruit

Last night when my husband came to pick me up from work my daughter had unexpectedly thrown up in the car, and he was looking worse than I have ever seen him. The job of mommy/nurse never ends. After passing out the Zofran, I made smoothies for dinner. Here is my basic ad lib recipe:

Smoothies
2 cups frozen fruit
1 cup fresh fruit
1/2-1 cup juice (depending on how thick you want it)
1/4 cup yogurt (plain, vanilla, flavored, whatever)
As much fresh or frozen spinach as you can get away with (I usually do about 1/8 cup)

1. Blend until smooth. Vary as desired.

Notes: I'm pregnant and I live in the desert, these are pretty much a staple at my house. I find them to be a good way to use over-ripe fruits. Last night's smoothies were a mixture of papaya, mango, cantaloupe, pineapple, blackberry, honey dew, banana, spinach, strawberry and lime. (I read once that papayas are good for indigestion.) I also threw in about 1/4 cup of prepared strawberry jello because we had it in the fridge and it is an easy-to-digest source of added protein. I have found that if you use fruits like mango or papaya, you need to add a little bit of citrus for best flavor. So if you're using one of these and don't have any citrus handy, just add a teaspoon of lemon juice. I have also used canned pineapple in place of the fresh fruit and the juice.

To cut down on the cost of fruit I freeze my own. If I have a bunch of  fruit that's going to turn before we eat it, I chop and freeze it. A couple of months ago Bountiful Baskets was offering a case of 9 pineapples for $14. I bought one and chopped and froze half of them. I've done the same with cases of mangoes, peaches and blackberries. Ok, I didn't chop the blackberries, I just put them in a bag. To freeze fruit I line a cookie sheet with wax paper. Then I chop my fruit into chunks and spread them onto the cookie sheet. Freeze for two hours and then transfer to a plastic freezer bag. This makes it so that fruit isn't frozen into one big clump.

5 Simple Ways of Conserving

I mention recycling fairly often on my blog, but I think that recycling is a only a small part of energy conservation. Don't just recycle, reuse, re-purpose, use less and throw away less. I believe that a big part of it is attitude. 'What small things can I do today to make the world a better place?' Here are some of the things that I do, and yes I am aware that they don't make an enormous difference, but if everyone is doing small simple things to help the environment, it can make an enormous difference.

1. Reusable grocery bags- I love these. They're bigger and easier to carry than multiple plastic bags and they save me money. For every time you use one of these at Target they take 5 cents off your total. Every time you use one of these at Smith's, you get 5 points, which essentially translates to a 5 cent reward towards future grocery purchases.
2. Reuse cooking water- I realize this is not always easy to do, but when I boil pasta or corn I drain the water into a container instead of the sink and pour it on my garden after it cools. I also pour half-full luke warm glasses of water on my lawn instead of down the drain.
3. Save and reuse popsicle sticks- Why should I pay for popsicle sticks for craft projects when I rinse off the hundreds that we go through around here and use those?
4. Reuse plastic grocery bags- Even with using the cloth bags I still get these sometimes. I make a point of not throwing them away. I use them to line the small garbage cans in our bathrooms and the office. I keep a couple in my car to hold trash, or soiled children's clothing. They're also good for wrapping Christmas ornaments or fragile items when moving.
5. Reuse paper- You know those credit card and insurance offers that you're always getting in the mail?  I use the back sides of those papers to print coupons. I also use them to write my to do lists on. I use the envelopes to hold my coupons divided by grocery store. I've printed coupons on the backsides of bills before. I also maneuver it so I always print at least 2 coupons per sheet of paper. Junk mail can also be used for paper mache or for small children to color on.

Here are a couple of other posts I have written in the past about things you can do to help the environment that will also save you money.

Ways to save money that are good for the environment too.


More ways to save money that are good for the environment.

Ways to save money on your utility bills in the summer.

What things do you do to help out the environment?

Portraits of the Fallen

I found a link to this short video on my friends blog.  I love stories like this about people using their talents to help others. Take the five minutes to watch it, it's definitely worth your time. And I dare you not to cry.

Food Storage Friday: Winging It

Last Friday morning I decided that I wanted pulled pork sandwiches for dinner. So before my husband left for school I ran to the grocery store for a small pork roast. I didn't get far when I started having car trouble. No funny noises, but a check engine light. I couldn't accelerate very well and could not get up past 20 mph. So I turned around and had him look at it. Fortunately he has one of these babies to diagnose check engine light problems. (Worth every penny)

 Unfortunately the problem was not something he could fix. Fortunately he managed to get it to the closest auto shop. Unfortunately it was not something that they could fix either. It required a part that they didn't have and couldn't even order, only the dealership could. Fortunately it was a part that had had a safety recall. Unfortunately, they weren't able to even look at it before Monday, and as it turns out it wasn't a part that was recalled in the state we live in, so we still had to pay for it. The upshot is there were to be no unnecessary trips to anywhere last weekend. Fortunately I had enough items in my food storage to throw together something for dinner that my family was happy with. And when I say throw together I mean I literally grabbed a few items from my pantry and dumped them in my crock pot in an experimental fashion. Food storage saved the day again. Enjoy.

BBQ Pork and Rice

Food Storage Ingredients:

2 cans (14.4 oz) cooked pork chunks

1/2 of one 20 oz can crushed pineapple, not drained

1 bottle (18 oz) BBQ sauce

1 Tablespoon dried diced red and green bell peppers

2 Tablespoons minced dried onions

4 cups prepared white rice

1. Dump first 5 ingredients in a 3-4 quart crock pot and stir. 2. Cook on low for 2 to 3 hours. 3. Serve over rice.

I served it with fresh green beans that I rubbed with olive oil, seasoned and roasted. (The yellow stuff is an onion vinaigrette.) If you don't happen to have canned pork chunks handy, I'm certain that this recipe would work very well (probably even better) with a small pork roast or boneless ribs, but you would have to drastically increase the cooking time and then shred the meat into the sauce after it is cooked.

Food Storage Friday: Mini Chicken Pot Pie

Baker Chick's pic, not mine

It has been my mission this week clean out the fridge. I have avoided buying 'fresh' produce because I have so much that I need to use. I am hoping by this afternoon there will be enough used up that it will make cleaning out the fridge a little easier. The other day I found this recipe on Basket 411 (originally from The Baker Chick) and decided to give it a whirl because I could incorporate so many things I already had. Plus those little pies are just so cute.

Mini Chicken Pot Pies
Crust:
Food Storage Ingredients:
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 3/4 cup white flour
2 tsp salt
3/4 cup + 3 Tablespoons canola oil

3/4 cup + 1 1/2 Tablespoons ice cold water

Filling:
Food Storage Ingredients:
1 can chicken chunks* (You can drain the liquid and use it as part of your chicken broth)
1 1/2 cups chicken broth (plus a little depending on how much cooks off)
1 cup milk**
salt and pepper
3 Tablespoons olive oil
1/3 cup flour
3 Tablespoons dried onions

Fresh Ingredients:
3 Tablespoons butter
3- 4 cups fresh veggies*
1 tsp mustard
spices to taste

Crust: 1. Sift four and salt in a bowl. 2. Put oil and water in a cup together 3. Make a valley flour and pour in water and oil. 4. Stir with a fork until it sticks together into a ball. 5. Use a little more than half the dough to line 12 muffins cups. 6. Use the rest of the dough to make 12 muffin tops, set these aside.

Filling: 1. Put hard vegetables (carrots, turnips, parsnips, or potatoes) together in a pot. Just cover with chicken broth and boil for 10 minutes. 2. Add other vegetables and cook for 5 minutes. 3. Drain and save chicken broth and set vegetables aside. 4. In pot mix together oil, butter and onions. 5. After onions are soft and translucent, add flour, salt, pepper, mustard and spices (I used a teaspoon of garlic). 6. Slowly add chicken broth and milk. Stir on medium low heat until thick. 7. Stir in vegetables and chicken chunks.

 Fill muffin pies with filling. Pinch tops into place and cut slits in them to allow steam to escape. Bake for 35 minutes at 425 degrees. They freeze and reheat well.

I forgot to cut slits for the steam to escape.

 *I used canned chicken chunks because I was feeling lazy, if you use fresh, use 1 lb cubed chicken and cooks with hard vegetables. For veggies I used  1 cup chopped carrots, 1 cup chopped turnip, 1 cup snow peas, cut in half, and 1 cup chopped yellow squash. When I've made chicken pot pie in the past I have used canned potato chunks, another food storage ingredient that makes this a little easier. Basket 411 used potatoes, cauliflower, carrots, green beans, broccoli, peas and squash. I am certain that dried food storage carrots would work well here, but the point is to use whatever vegetables are convenient.

**Food Storage Milk: I think I may need to write a post just on this topic. Basically I think food storage milk is terrible to drink, but I think it is important to store and rotate. So I try to keep a quart of it mixed in my fridge and use it for cooking purposes. My family can't tell the difference.

Food Storage Friday: Homemade Granola

I love granola. Unfortunately, I feel it is over priced and it very rarely goes on sale. Fortunately it is very easy and cheap to make. It is also very easy to customize to your tastes, just add whatever nuts or fruit please you and your family.

Homemade Granola
Food Storage Ingredients:
6 cups rolled oats
2 cups nuts or seeds
1 Tablespoon canola oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup maple syrup (the real stuff, mind you) or honey
1 cup dried fruit
Optional Ingredients:
1 cup shredded coconut
1 Tablespoon wheat germ

1. Mix oats, nuts, (coconut) and oil. 2. Add cinnamon (and wheat germ) and stir thoroughly. 3. Mix in maple syrup, until well coated. 4. Spread on two cookie sheets and bake at 350 for ten minutes. 5. Remove from oven and stir and re-spread granola so edges don't burn. 6 Bake for another 10 minutes. If you want it to be extra crunchy, bake for another 5-10 minutes. 7. Add dried fruit. Store in the refrigerator.

For my first batch I used almonds, craisins and dried apples, for my second I use almonds, pecans and dried strawberries. Follow your heart or whatever you happen to have in your pantry.

Food Storage Friday: Healthy substitutions from your pantry.

Using your food storage can improve your diet and make your life easier. Here is a list of ways you use ordinary food storage items in place of other ingredients and make your meals healthier at the same time. Now these substitutions don't work every time, but often enough to improve your diet. (This is similar to a post that I put up awhile ago, but I'm putting it up because it was requested.)

1. Wheatberries for ground beef- Less saturated fat, more folic acid and fiber. This works well in Tacos and Enchiladas. I generally use a portion of half ground beef to half wheatberries
2. Wheatberries for lettuce- Why do we eat lettuce anyway? For folic acid and fiber. Wheat has both of those and a much longer shelf life. Not that I am opposed to lettuce by anymeans, but I do really enjoy a couple of salads that use wheatberries instead.
3. Beans for butter- No, you can't fry anything in mashed beans, but it works well in cakes and cookies.
4. Beans for shortening- Same idea. I make cookies with beans, and I promise you can't taste them. My friend calls them my "crazy good cookies", because they taste really good, but have a few surprising ingredients.
5. Beans for sour cream- I tried this for half the sour cream in my chicken enchilada recipe and my family liked it just as much. The texture is a little different, but they were ok with it. I also found another recipe this week that it worked pretty well in, but I want to experiment with it one more time before I put it up here on the blog.
6. Evaporated milk for cream or half and half- Still gives you a thick creaminess in soups and sauces, with much less saturated fat and calories.
7. Chicken broth for white wine- I have yet to find a recipe that this doesn't work in (cocktails excluded.)
8. Oat flour for white flour- To make oat flour, just toss some oats in the blender and press puree. Oats have a lower glycemic index than white flour, plus the soluable fiber can lower your cholesterol and your blood sugar. I don't use it for everything, but when baking I usually use half oat flour every time that it calls for white flour.
9. Applesauce for oil- I find that when I use this in cakes and muffins they come out more moist.
10. Nonfat powdered milk for regular milk- I use this whenever I have a soup recipe that calls for more than 2 cups of milk. When you cook it with other things you can't taste the difference.
11. Wheatberries for wild rice- No, it doesn't taste exactly the same, but the texture is similar enough that you can get away with substituting it, if you are looking for different ways to use your wheat. There are a few good examples in I Dare You To Eat It.

Food Storage Friday: Split Pea Soup

I know it doesn't look like much, but this is the recipe that really got me started. A little over a year ago I read I Dare You to Eat It by Liesa Card. I was in the middle of my third move in 8 months (long story), my husband is allergic to many fruits and vegetables (unless they're processed in some way) and he is aversive to most produce that he's not allergic to. Not to mention that my children are the pickiest eaters I have ever encountered. Despite these obstacles, Liesa had me convinced that I could use my food storage and it would bless my life. Now I was very comfortable with rice, pasta and oatmeal cookies, but  I decided that I would really test my boundaries- Split Pea Soup. So I bought a pound of dried split peas and made it. When my husband came home from work he asked what was in the crock pot. I told him and he responded “I’m excited. I love split pea soup!” “Really?” “Yes, it’s my favorite.” I was shocked. At the time I had known him for 14 years and I never would have guessed that. (His family still occasionally teases him about not anything that was the color green when he was small, not even mint ice cream.) I suppose it had never come up because I never made it, thinking he would never eat it.  I ladled it into bowls and asked my four-year-old what kind of sandwich she wanted for dinner. (At the time I had given up trying to get her to eat the things I normally make for dinner.) She said “I want what you guys are having.” AND SHE ACTUALLY ATE IT. I was so excited I emailed Liesa and we have been swapping food storage stories and ideas ever since. If my family can eat food storage, anyone's can. 

 Here's my version of the recipe. Last week I threw the ham bone from Thanksgiving in the freezer and used it for the soup, or you can use the ham flavor packet that comes with most one pound bags of split green peas. Not all bags come with it, look closely at the packaging.

Split Pea Soup

Food Storage Ingredients:

1 lb (2 cups) dried split green peas

2/3 cup dried carrots

1/2 cup dried onions

1 12oz can evaporated milk

1 15oz can potato chunks, drained and diced

1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

salt and pepper to taste

Fresh ingredients:

1 cup diced celery

1 cup smoke spiral-cut ham, chopped

1 ham bone

8 cups water

1. Put water, split peas and ham bone in crock pot. Cook on high for 5 hours. 2. Add vegetables and cook on low for 2 more hours. 3. Saute ham chunks in a pan until edges are crisp. 4. Stir Worcestershire sauce, canned milk and ham into soup and serve.

I've made this with fresh carrots, onion and potatoes and they work just as well, but frankly my food storage is more convenient because there is less chopping involved. If you use fresh potatoes it's 2 medium, chopped, carrots- 2 cups, chopped, and onions- 1 small, chopped. I've also done it without canned milk because I spaced it one evening. It was still good, but better with the milk.

Zucchini Souffle

I have lots of grated zucchini in my freezer. I don't even have a garden. I just live in Utah where lots of people grow zucchini and it doesn't take a green thumb to get more zucchini than you can eat. I have been blessed with neighbors who share their surplus, and have been trying numerous ways to use this green vegetable. I found this recipe on The Mom Blog awhile ago; I made a few changes, but it turned out well. I like this because it's easy, inexpensive and is another way to sneak in the veggies.

Zucchini Souffle

1/3 cup canola oil

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp grated Parmesan

1/2 tsp Italian seasoning 

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

3 cups grated zucchini

3/4 cup Bisquick

4 eggs

1/2 cup chopped green onion 

1. Preheat oven to 350. 2. Mix oil, salt, Parmesan, Italian seasoning, onion, and eggs. Mix in Bisquick.  3. Fold in zucchini and cheddar. 4. Bake for 50 minutes.

The picky eaters in our family wouldn't eat this because it had "too much green stuff" to be worth trying. We liked it though. We served it with watermelon and corn on the cob which satisfied the munchkins. 

For more ideas for your zucchini surplus go here. 

Edit 12/11/10: Tonight I made this again, but I used yellow squash instead of zucchini (it was in my Bountiful Basket) and added half diced sweet bell pepper. It was amazing.

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving: Apple Pie Filling

This year will be the first year that we're having Thanksgiving at my place. I'm trying to do as much as I can ahead of time so I actually have a chance at enjoying the holiday. This week I've been putting a little more effort into cleaning the house, bought a new shower curtain for the second bathroom (dinosaurs!), stocked up on a few baking items that were on sale and made apple pie filling. Aside from trying to get ready, with recent apple prices and then my Bountiful Basket we had more apples than we could possibly go through before they go bad. (And that's after I made a few batches of apple sauce.) Growing up my mom made apple pie filling every year, then when it's time to make pies you can just roll out a crust, dump in a quart of pie filling and you're done. Easy as pie. Not to mention it tastes significantly better than store-bought pie filling. This is the first time I have done it myself and I was very pleased with how it turned out. The only problem is that any recipe I get from my mom is not exact. Here was part of our conversation the other night:
"So how many apples do you use?"
"A potfull."
"How big of a pot?"
"A big one."
"How much sugar do you use?"
"Enough"
"How much is enough?"
"It depends on how big your pot is."

Apple Pie Filling

1.One potful of apples, peeled and sliced. I used mostly fujis, but there are a few granny smiths and galas too. I'm guessing around 16 cups of apples.

2. Mix 6 Tablespoons of cornstarch with 3 cups of sugar. If you don't do this you're more likely to get corn starch clumps.

3. Add cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. How much depends on how big your pot is. I used about 3/4 teaspoon of each. Also add 1/4 cup of apple juice to prevent apple from burning to bottom of the pan while they start to cook. Also add 3 Tablespoons of lemon juice. (I also added 1/2 tsp orange juice concentrate.)

4. Cook over medium low heat, stirring occasionally for about an hour. When you're done it should like this:

5. Can according to you canner instructions. (For mine I just boiled it for 20 minutes after I put the filling into quart jars.) Makes about 3 quarts of apple pie filling.

Note: My mom usually only uses 2 cups of sugar and less corn starch, but I tasted it and felt that it needed more. It depends on your apples. But I will say that this stuff is going to make some pretty amazing pie.