What We Spent, March 4 - 10

It was another quiet week on the home spending front, and that's a good thing.  :)  

We purchased some fresh veggies, milk, and gas for the car.

I had a coupon for a free package of pre-washed salad greens so on Monday night I treated myself to a big salad for supper.  There were enough greens leftover to make my lunches for most of the rest of the week too.

We were given a buy one/get one free burger coupon on Friday, so we took ourselves out for dinner.  The burgers were really big so we skipped the sides and soft drinks, choosing water for our beverage instead.  After redeeming the coupon and including taxes, our dinner came to $8.95;  a pleasant and inexpensive change in our routine.

Here's what we spent last week:

Date	Item	Amount
Mar 4/13	454 g/1 lb prewashed salad greens	$4.99
	4 liters skim milk	$4.42
	1.43 kg/3.15 lbs beets	$3.12
	Gas	$41.26
Mar 6/13	2 heads coloured cauliflower	$5.00
Mar 8/13	Supper out - burgers	$14.74
	Total Coupons Redeemed	-$11.94
	TOTAL EXPENDITURES	$61.59

What We Ate, March 4 - 10

We spent the early days of this week fighting a 'flu that sneaked in and grabbed us at the end of last week. My fella was so sick that I was seriously worried about him and ended up taking him to the doctor.  He's better now, thank goodness, but our meals were mighty light for a while.

Once he felt like eating again, my guy was pretty cranky about the winter vegetables we see so much of at this time of year so I tried to change things up a bit from the usual fare.  Fortunately, there were a few more options available to us this week.  Thrifty Foods had coloured cauliflowers in stock (purple, orange, and bright green), we bought some more lovely asparagus, and I brought home some young nettle shoots from my first foraging walk of the spring.

Here's what we ate this week:

Monday, March 4:

• Breakfast - Poached eggs and whole wheat toast for me.  Nothing for my fella.
• Supper - A salad of mixed greens with shredded carrot, beet, radish and honey mustard dressing for me.  Cheese toast for me.  Dry toast and tea for my guy.

Tuesday, March 5:

• Breakfast - Oatmeal and applesauce.
• Supper - Chicken vegetable and rice soup, cheddar corn muffins.

Wednesday, March 6:

• Breakfast - Leftover corn muffins, apples
• Supper - Ham, cheddar, and asparagus quiche (made using this recipe), roasted cauliflower and carrots.  Chocolate orange sandwich cookies for dessert.

Thursday, March 7:

• Breakfast - Homemade granola and homemade yogurt
• Supper - Pizza bianco with a homemade garlic and rosemary focaccia crust, caramelized onions, blanched nettles, thinly sliced red bell pepper (from the freezer), and homemade ricotta.  Homemade orange sorbet for dessert.

Friday, March 8:

• Breakfast - Leftover pizza
• Supper - We went out for burgers.

Saturday, March 9:

• Breakfast - Almost-whole-wheat pancakes with warmed, home canned peaches.
• Supper - Pork and vegetable fried rice, vegetable spring rolls, ginger crinkle cookies

Sunday, March 10:

• Breakfast - Eggs baked on a bed of fried rice, leftover from Saturday's supper.
• Supper - Roasted asparagus and cheddar quesadillas on homemade wheat and white tortillas, carrot, raisin and apple salad with orange dressing.  Home canned cherries for dessert.

Baked Egg Stuffed Potatoes

I enjoy a twice baked potato.  They make a good, quick meal and they're a great way to stretch small amounts of leftovers into a meal for the two of us.  I like them so much that, whenever I'm baking potatoes, I bake extra just so that I can plan on serving twice baked potatoes soon after.

Baked eggs are big on my list of good things too.  They're simple to make, infinitely variable, and you can easily make enough for just a few people or enough for a crowd in the same small amount of time.

You can imagine, then, how taken I would be with the idea of a baked egg cooked inside a twice baked potato.  

When Dor from La Difference Catering shared the idea on Jams'n'Pans' Facebook page a while back, I knew I had to give it a try.  I made some for supper that very night and we both liked them a lot. 

With nothing more than a simple salad on the side, these baked egg stuffed potatoes make a complete, satisfying, and frugal meal.  I'm sure they'll be appearing on our table again and again.

To make Baked Egg Stuffed Potatoes, you'll need:

• 1 large russet potato, baked, with the insides scooped out and the skins reserved
• 1 cup of grated cheese (I used sharp white cheddar)
• 1/2 cup sliced green onion (scallion)
• about 2 Tablespoons of ranch dressing (I make my own using homemade yogurt, a little milk, and this homemade mix from Tara Cooks)
• 2 eggs

Place the reserved shells from the cooked potato on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Transfer the flesh you've scooped from the potato into a large-ish bowl, and mash it.  

Mix in the grated cheese and green onion.

Add enough ranch dressing to moisten the mixture so it holds together, but not so much that it becomes too loose to hold its shape.

Portion the filling back into the potato shells and shape it into a cup.  The filling will sit well above the edges of the potato skin.

Crack an egg into each prepared potato half.

Bake the assembled baked egg stuffed potatoes on the middle rack of a 350F oven until the eggs are cooked as you like them.  (We like ours medium, which took about 20 minutes.)

Serve the cooked potatoes as soon as they come out of the oven.  

What We Spent February 25 - March 3

With the previous week's expenditures in mind, we worked hard to keep our hands out of our pockets this week.  We bought very little at all.  

Thank goodness for a well stocked pantry and freezer!

Here's what we spent last week:

Date	Item	Amount
Feb. 24/13	4 litres skim milk	$4.42
Mar 03/13	Gas	$40.90
	750 grams/1.65 lbs frozen lima beans	$2.98
	1 kg/2.2 lbs frozen peas	$2.98
	1 kg/2.2 lbs pitted prunes	$5.98
	Total Coupons Redeemed	-$4.20
	TOTAL EXPENDITURES	$53.06

What We Ate, February 25 - March 3

Our week was pretty uneventful this week, until the weekend.  

On Saturday, some folks renovating an apartment downstairs from us decided to varnish their floors.  They closed the apartment windows up tight (I'm assuming because they were worried about dust) so the fumes from the varnish, having nowhere else to go, made their way into the common hallway and then into the apartments above, including ours.  We woke in the middle of the night violently ill.  

My husband was already sick with the 'flu and we clearly couldn't stay in the apartment, so we bundled up, turned off the heat, opened all the windows, and left the apartment.  We wedged some towels along the bottom of the door as we left, hoping to prevent more fumes from entering.

We were fortunate that Sunday was a beautiful sunny day, and quite warm.  We spent the day driving around like tourists and by the time we got home the air in our suite was breathable once more,

Our sick tummies put a big hole in our weekend meal plans.  Neither of us ate anything much at all on Saturday.  (Thank goodness for restorative cups of tea and dry toast!)  

I was sufficiently recovered to eat on Sunday but my fella is still not on solid food.  I'm going to try to get some soup into him tonight.

Here's what we ate last week:

Monday, February 25:

• Breakfast - Homemade granola and homemade yogurt
• Supper - Pinto beans and rice, green salad with honey lime vinaigrette, raisin pie leftover from Sunday's supper

Tuesday, February 26:

• Breakfast - Boiled eggs, wholewheat toast, homemade peach jam
• Supper - Stir fry of onion, broccoli, cabbage, red pepper, carrots and some cooked pork shoulder roast (from the freezer) in a sauce of homemade pork stock flavoured with black bean sauce, served over soba noodles.  Ginger crinkle cookies for dessert.

Wednesday, February 27:

• Breakfast - Peanut butter, marmalade, and raisin sandwiches on toasted whole wheat bread
• Supper - Twice baked potatoes stuffed with cooked, crumbled Italian sausage, sauteed red bell pepper, sauteed onion, and mozzarella cheese, roasted broccoli, tomato and onion salad with balsamic vinaigrette.  Tapioca pudding for dessert.

Thursday, February 28:

• Breakfast - Apples and sliced cheddar
• Supper - A hash of potatoes, mushrooms, onions, cooked crumbled Italian sausage (leftover from Wednesday's dinner), with eggs "nested" into the hash and then baked.  We topped the dish with chopped fresh tomatoes, and had oranges for dessert.

Friday, March 1:

• Breakfast - Oatmeal and applesauce
• Supper - Fish pie (salmon, potatoes, onions, peas, and chopped hardcooked eggs in a cream sauce, topped with a puff pastry crust), steamed carrots and cabbage, baked apples with an oatmeal and maple cookie crust.

Saturday, March 2:

• Breakfast - Pears in brown sugar syrup with ginger and homemade yogurt
• Supper - Roasted cauliflower, beets, carrots, rutabaga, and potatoes 

Sunday, March 3:

• We were sick, so we didn't prepare any meals at all.

Lots of Lists For You

I am feeling like Our Lady of Lists these days.  

I've been in a list making kind of mood and I'm busy compiling some lists that I hope my blog, Facebook, and Twitter friends will find helpful.

My list making started last week, when my Facebook friend Frugal Sally requested recipes friendly to her dietary needs as a diabetic.  I don't write my recipes with a specific dietary requirement in mind, but I do have a number of recipes on my blog that are suitable for folks following low sugar/lower carbohydrate diets, so I made a page on my blog listing those recipes for Sally.  I hope it will helpful to others too.

From there, I started thinking about my on line friends who are eating gluten free so I created a page of links for those folks too.

On behalf of a business acquaintance in Duncan, I also write a weekly list of coming events in our area.  It occurred to me that the events list might be helpful to my on line friends who live in and around the Cowichan Valley.  I've published my first list on A Word From Aunt B today, and I hope to make it a regular weekly feature on the blog.

Since I am still in a list making mood, I'm also compiling pages of links to recipes that are egg free and recipes that use no milk or milk products.  As soon as those pages are completed, I'll post the links on my Facebook page and on Twitter.  If you're follow the blog through Google or through an RSS feed, you'll find the page tabs visible near the top of my blog.  I'll post a note here too, just in case you miss them.

Here are the links to my new pages, and to my calendar post.  I hope they are helpful to you.

Diabetic Friendly/Lower Carb Recipes
Naturally Gluten Free Recipes
What's Up? (A List of Coming Events in the Cowichan Area)

Honey Mustard Salad Dressing

I'm often amazed by how much people spend on bottled salad dressings.  Some of the ones in the grocery store are really expensive!  You can make your own salad dressings at home for a fraction of the cost.

Homemade dressings are free of preservatives, artificial colours, and stabilizers.  They are almost always made with better quality oil than you find in store bought dressings, and they have fresher, more vivid flavours.

Salad dressings are so simple to make that it rarely occurs to me to write a recipe for them, but I've noticed lately that when I post my supper menu on Facebook or my "What We Ate" menu revues here on the blog, I get requests for tutorials.  

This honey mustard salad dressing the first of a series.  I'll be sharing several salad dressings in the coming weeks.

I chose to begin with honey mustard salad dressing because we forage for nettles and young dandelion greens at this time of year.  Both are slightly bitter tasting so a little sweetness is a welcome addition to our plate and, like all greens, nettles and dandelions pair well with mustard.

If you don't forage for greens, you'll still want to try this recipe.  It works well with the spinach or the "spring greens" mix you see in the produce aisle, with radicchio, or as a dressing for cooked  kale, beet greens, turnip greens, or Swiss chard.

To make honey mustard salad dressing, you'll need:

• 3 Tablespoons mild flavoured honey
• 2 Tablespoons mustard (I used a brown, whole grain mustard this time but do use whatever mustard you like best.  This even works with a dijon/horseradish blend.)
• 1-1/2 teaspoons vinegar (I used a peach infused vinegar this time, but I've also used champagne vinegar, homemade cider vinegar, red wine vinegar, and even lemon or lime juice depending upon my salad ingredients.)
• salt to taste

Combine the honey, mustard, and vinegar in a small bowl and mix them together until well combined.  

Test the consistency.  If the dressing is too thick, add a little more vinegar.

When the dressing is the consistency you prefer, add salt a little at a time, whisking after each addition until your salad dressing is seasoned to your taste.

Store any leftover honey mustard salad dressing in a sealed container in the fridge. 
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This post has been shared with the Adventurous Palette Program at The Aliso Kitchen.