The Super Salad

BEHOLD. The Super Salad.

It contains all things good and delicious:

Spinach

Bacon

Hardboiled eggs

Avocado

Tomato

Carrot

Celery

Kalamata olives

Olive oil

Vinegar

It is the world's best and easiest-to-make dinner, if you make the bacon and eggs ahead of time. 

EVEN BETTER with pepitas, parsley, peppers, and broccoli--but that's the beauty of the super salad. 

Friday: Chicken Vegetable Soup with Brown Rice

As we draw to the end of the week, I feel like I've been doing pretty good on my grocery haul. Thanks to some scary flu symptoms I downed several gallons of chicken bone broth yesterday (seasoned with ginger and lemon) and I feel infinitely better. I still have three eggs, two lemons, some ginger, some olives, a handful of salad greens, half a head of broccoli, one carrot, four stalks of celery, one tupper of cooked chicken, half a jar of chicken juice, and one unopened carton of blueberries in the fridge. The goal is to "spend down" all the perishables every week, so we're doing ok. But after today, I think we'll be in better shape, because I'm making SOUP.

When I was growing up my grandma always used to collect any uneaten salad from family gatherings and take it home to make a soup. The thought terrified us kids. While I don't hope to go quite that far, I like to think this soup draws some inspiration from her thriftiness.

Leftovers.

Ingredients:

1 carrot, chopped finely
2 stalks celery, chopped finely
1 tupperware of precooked chicken meat
2-3 cups chicken juice from roasted chicken (note: salty!)
1/3 cup frozen corn
1 head broccoli, chopped
Handful of salad greens and parsley
Bay leaf
Peppercorns
1/2 cup brown rice

Instructions:

1. In a large pot, bring chicken juice, 6-8 cups water, carrot, celery, chicken, frozen corn and brown rice to a boil. Add bay leaf and peppercorns, reduce heat to a simmer.
2. Throw in chopped broccoli, salad greens, and parsley. Cover and set timer to 20 min. After 20 min, remove cover and simmer for another 10-15 min or until rice is done.
3. Serve, with croutons if that's your thing, and eat.

Optional: drop an egg into the bowl before serving; add more salt & pepper & parmesan to taste.

FACTS AND FIGURES 

Prep time: <10 min. 

Servings: 4-6
Agony rating: 3/10. Cooking needs watching/multiple steps.
Taste and stuff: It's a little bland, but light, and surprisingly filling.

*COSTS OF STUFF I HAD TO BUY SPECIAL*

Again, it's hard to parse out the cost of the ingredients since these were all remnants from other recipes this week, but it's mostly about the cost of the chicken. $10? $12? $15? I have no idea. 

Now, what to do with the leftover blueberries and ginger? (Edit: solution found.)

Sunday: Green and Red Bell Peppers with Sausage and Celery

This week's grocery haul, for $99.33:
-3 green bell peppers
-3 red bell peppers
-1 bag celery
-1 bag organic carrots
-1 bunch parsley
-1 head broccoli
-5 tomatoes on the vine
-1 box prewashed baby spinach
-1 bunch bananas
-1 carton blueberries
-1 jar pitted Kalamata olives
-Small bottle of low-sodium soy sauce
-1/2 lb roast chicken and 1/3 lb pepperjack cheese from the deli
-3 Fage yogurts
-4 cans Sixpoint Sweet Action Ale
-2 bags tortilla chips
-1 whole organic chicken
-1 package (5 links) pork sausage
-1 box instant oatmeal, variety pack
-1 can unsalted roasted peanuts
-6 organic eggs

I carried it all home on my back, like a sherpa. I'll probably need to get more salad greens later in the week, along with ginger, lemons, and anything else I forgot.

Yesterday's dinner was pretty slapdash, as in, I made it up on the fly, but I'm happy enough with how it turned out.

Green and Red Bell Peppers with Sausage and Celery

Here are the ingredients:

Ingredients:

1 pack sausage
2 red bell peppers
2 green bell peppers
2 stalks celery
1 16 oz can diced tomatoes, unsalted
Rice (5-6 cups cooked)
Not pictured: canola oil, pinch cumin, pinch oregano, pinch cayenne, salt and pepper, hot sauce, chicken stock

Instructions:

1. Cut sausage links into small pieces. I like slicing quarters. Brown in large saucepan in a neutral-tasting oil, like canola.
2. Chop celery into small pieces. Add to sausage, stir, and let soften.
3. Chop green and red bell peppers into small pieces. Add to the pot, stir. Wait 2 minutes.
4. Add can of diced tomatoes and 1/4 cup water. Add spices as you like.
5. Make large amount of rice using leftover chicken stock.
6. Serve with hot sauce.

I served this after a hefty Super Salad (spinach, celery, olives, tomatoes, carrots, parsley, olive oil and vinegar) and it made for a quite satisfying, almost-too-heavy meal.

FACTS AND FIGURES 

Prep time: 20-30 min. Chopping, chopping, watching football, chopping.

Servings: 4
Agony rating: 3/10. 
Taste and stuff: 7/10. 

*COSTS OF STUFF I HAD TO BUY SPECIAL*

I, um, threw away the receipt by accident, but the sausage was $5.99, the can o'tomatoes $2.99, so it's safe to estimate the total cost was no higher than $14 including the vegetables (and that's aggressive) or $3.50/serving.

This afternoon I'm making bone broth in the slow cooker, with a freezer's worth of leftover chicken and turkey bones. At the recommendation of a Ukrainian friend, I removed the bones after 24 hours and pounded them with a meat hammer (er, really an ice cream scoop) to let some of the marrow out. Then I put them back in. Eventually I'm going to add some bay leaves, peppercorns, etc but I don't want things to get bitter.

At some point I'm going to slow roast a whole chicken in there, to give us meat for the week... and more bones!

Meal plan for the week:

Breakfast: Bananas and oatmeal (him) broth, berries, and yogurt (her)
Lunch: Sandwiches (him) ??? (her)
Dinners: Peppers and Sausage with rice; Superveggie salad with roast chicken and hardboiled eggs; Use leftover rice and chicken to make chicken and rice soup (with lemon and ginger?) or egg drop soup

Dinner Under $2: Red Beans and Rice

The onion and red beans (and who knows what else they put in that Carolina mix) make this one bad for no-FODMAP folks, but it's otherwise a good bet.
The inspiration was a Hunts can of tomato sauce with onion, celery, and green pepper. These three ingredients, often known as the "holy trinity" of Louisiana cuisine, are the foundation of any good jambalaya, gumbo, etc.

Ingredients:

12 oz sweet Italian sausage
16 oz Hunts Diced Tomatoes with Onion, Pepper and Celery
8 oz Carolina Red Beans and Rice mix
1 tbsp butter





First, slice and brown sausage. I used butter.

While your sausage is cooking, make your rice & beans. Add tomatoes and sausage at some point near the end. It might be a little liquid-y.









Serve with hot sauce and smiles. It tastes just fine. I wish it stretched a little further, and also didn't contain enough salt - between the tomatoes and the red beans mix - to dissolve a football field full of slugs. But for a meal that took under 30 minutes to prepare, I'm not complaining.






FACTS AND FIGURES
 
Prep time: 40 min. Heat the pan, cook the sausage, cook the rice, etc ec.
Servings: 4.
Agony rating: 2/10. Really, just monitoring the sausage.
Taste and stuff: 6/10. Not bad.

*COSTS OF STUFF I HAD TO BUY SPECIAL*

12 oz sweet Italian sausage: $3.99
16 oz Hunts Diced Tomatoes with Onion, Pepper and Celery: $1.34
8 oz Carolina Red Beans and Rice mix: $1.19
1 tbsp butter: marginal cost is essentially free
Servings: 4
Total cost of stuff I had to buy special: $6.52
Cost per serving: $1.63

VERDICT: SUCCESS. Add hot sauce.

Crockpot Chicken Sausage Stew with Peppers, Potatoes, and Mushrooms

So this meal was kind of a fiasco. I made it like a week ago and just got crazed the whole time. Inspiration for this one comes from Stephanie O'Dea's A Year of Slow Cooking, which is an excellent blog that you should read.

OK. Start by going to the grocery on Sunday. Or sending someone else to go. Acquire the following:

Two 6-packs of healthy chicken sausage
Two regular old potatoes
Two green peppers
Two red peppers
One carton mushrooms
*One carrot (Leftover from another recipe)
*Two sticks celery (Leftover from another recipe)
Optional & not pictured: Onions, broccoli, salad greens on the verge

Here's where it started to go wrong.

Chop vegetables into hearty chunks. BUT: Don't do it the way I did it, which was to start with the celery and peppers and then do carrots and potatoes last.

Not like this!

I tossed them in olive oil and, it being a Sunday night, stuck the whole thing in the fridge so that the cooking could commence Monday morning.

Then I woke up on Monday, looked at the recipe again, and realized that I was supposed to layer the vegetables in order of density. Because this is how slow cookers work. So I picked out all the peppers and mushrooms and celery and put them in a bowl. Remember, they are still covered in oil.

First this.

THEN add these.

Then I sliced up the sausage, threw it on top, turned the thing on low for six hours and ran to work.

Four hours later, I realized that I forgot to add any liquid to the mix. (The original recipe calls for a few cups of wine or water.) I indulged a few fantasies about my house burning down and/or my dog being driven insane by the smell of scorched chicken sausage... but thankfully, that's not how slow cookers work.

I got home and dinner was more or less ready.

Before.

After.

Better yet, the veggies had so much liquid in them that they provided a cup of juice. Crazy.

I served this over rice, with salt and hot sauce. It was filling but unremarkable.

FACTS AND FIGURES
 
Prep time: 30 min. Peeling, chopping, fretting, re-sorting, rice cooking, etc.
Servings: 6.
Agony rating: 3/10. Peeling and chopping veggies takes time.
Taste and stuff: 6/10. Not bad.

*COSTS OF STUFF I HAD TO BUY SPECIAL*

Oh yeah, I also lost the receipt. So here is a guesstimate based on past prices/prices on label.
Chicken sausages: $6.99 ea x 2 = $13.98
Peppers: $3?
Potatoes: $2?
Mushrooms: $1.50
Celery, carrot: acquired earlier
Rice: $1?
Total cost of stuff I had to buy special:~$22?
Cost per serving: $3.67. Maybe.

VERDICT: SUCCESS. Add hot sauce.

Pork Bone and Carrot Soup & Pulled Pork Sandwiches

Remember that children's story "Stone Soup?" Basically it's the culinary version of Tom Sawyer and the white picket fence. Clever hero boils water, adds stone; intrigued neighbors contribute ingredients to flavor the stone soup; stone soup is the best thing everyone's ever tasted, etc etc. This recipe is that, only with a leftover pork shoulder bone from when I made pulled pork over the weekend.

So, iPhone in hand, I get off the subway and tear through the fancy supermarket on the way home like a tornado. What goes with pork bone? Carrot? Carrot and ginger, sure, that's great! But what about lentils? Then I spotted a packet of Bob's Red Mill Vegi Soup Mix and it was all over.

Seems easy. I'll just substitute half the ingredients and quadruple the measurements & cooking time.

 Bob is a real person. I saw him speak at a conference once, and he and his company are awesome. Having the CEO and founder market the company through talks at tech conferences is a pretty inefficient way to get people talking about your product... but it worked on me, so there you go.

Anyhow, so I left the fancy grocery having dropped $20 on carrots, celery, ginger, the soup mix, chips, soy sauce, and some hamburger rolls for pulled pork sandwiches. Not the most value for our money, I guess...

I ran home and started throwing things in the crockpot per Bob's instructions. Bob's recipe was for four cups of liquid to one cup of soup mix. My monster crock laughs at such piddling portions, and so I did this:

16 cups water
4 cups Bob's Red Mill Vegi Soup Mix (for FODMAP free version, skip this part/find an alternative! Rice or rice noodles, perhaps?)
5 carrots, chopped and peeled
5 sticks celery, chopped and peeled
1 leftover pork shoulder
1 teaspoon salt
1 bay leaf

I turned it on low and set the timer for ten hours. Instant dinner for tomorrow.

Then I made our dinner, which was fairly easy.

Yay.

The next day, I woke up to discover that the soup was not looking so awesome. In fact, it more resembled sludge, or someone's breakfast after they're done with it.

Good... morning?

This is because Bob's Red Mill mix contains pasta, and you should not cook pasta for ten hours. Lesson learned.

It tastes inoffensive, which for the low low cost and high resourcefulness (and health factor, if you're ok on pulses) is not an insupportable outcome.

The next night we ate even more pulled pork sandwiches and salad, from the same ingredients I bought last weekend. And they were delicious.

FACTS AND FIGURES
 
Prep time: 30 min. Peeling, chopping, measuring, etc.
Servings: 6-8. But will you want them?
Agony rating: 3/10. Peeling and chopping veggies takes time.
Taste and stuff: 3/10. Blech. Added salt and white wine vinegar to increase palatability.

*COSTS OF STUFF I HAD TO BUY SPECIAL*

For soup:
Bob's Red Mill Vegi Soup Mix: $5.99
Celery bunch:$1.99
Carrot 2.7 lbs at $0.99/lb: $2.70
Total cost of stuff I had to buy special: $10.68
Cost per serving: $1.78 for 6 servings; $1.33 for 8.

VERDICT: MEH. Next time, I won't overcook.


For sandwiches:
8 hamburger rolls: $3.49
Leftover pulled pork: $2.20 per serving, approx
Cost per serving: $2.64

VERDICT: HELL YES. Just needs pickles.