by Slow Food USA

Slow Food USA believes that slow food, as in cooked from scratch, shouldn’t have to cost more than fast food. They decided to put their philosophy to the test with The $5 challenge. September 17th was the day to take back the “value meal” by cooking a meal from scratch that costs no more than $5 per person. My twist on the challenge was to use one chicken as the basis for three meals that each feed four people, with each meal costing no more than $5. That gives me $1.25 per serving to work with.

Herb Roasted Chicken Legs & Vegetables served over Garlic Polenta

Starting with a Washington-grown free range chicken from Trader Joe’s costing $6.95, which breaks down to $2.32 per meal, I had $2.68 of creative wiggle room per meal to work with. Here’s my menu:

• Day 1: Herb Roasted Chicken Legs & Vegetables served over Garlic Polenta.
• Day 2: Chicken Soft Tacos on Homemade Tortillas served with Brown Rice & Black Beans
• Day 3: White Bean & Vegetable Soup

This 4.11 pound chicken is the basis for three meals.

First things first, Chicken butchery. Not a difficult thing at all as long as you think finesse rather than brute force. With a little practice, it’s a task that can be knocked out in nothing flat. The key is learning to slip your knife between the joints rather than trying to cut through bones. Take on a whole bird and you’ll be rewarded for your DIY prowess at the register because the cost per pound of a chicken you cut up yourself is significantly less than buying pieces-parts.

The rewards for DIY butchery don’t end at the cash register. Just like a box of Cracker Jacks or the coveted secret decoder ring hiding in the dark depths of a cereal box, there are surprises in your chicken if you’re lucky. Plunge your hand into the bird’s cavity and see what you pull out. A neck? Score! Liver? Score! Heart? Score! There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the bonus parts, but it’s exciting when you do because it’s more good stuff to work with.

The third big reward for going with a whole bird, is the carcass. You have the bones to simmer for stock…don’t click away at the first mention of stock making, hear me out. The reason you always hear that homemade stock is far better than anything you can buy is because it is, but as I recently learned it doesn’t need to be the big production that it usually is. I’ll explain shortly.

Whole chicken portioned into three meals.

Here’s how I decided to parse out my chicken, the thighs and drumsticks will be roasted with veggies for meal one. The breast meat, separated from the bone, will become shredded chicken filling for tacos on day two. The bones and remaining parts will be gently simmered in water to form the basis for soup on day three. (Gently simmering the bones in water is actually all there is to stock. No big production, I promise.) I was lucky and found good bonus-parts surprises hiding in my bird. The neck goes in the soup pot and the liver in the roasting pan.

Chicken bones in water is a flavorful start on a pot of soup.

I’ve been reading Michael Ruhlman’s new book, Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto. In it he presents twenty core cooking skills that once learned set you up to be able to make just about anything, recipe or not. I especially like his treatment of stock as a sub-technique in the chapter, Water: The Unrecognized Miracle in the Kitchen. He rightly points out that most people are intimidated by the perceived effort of making stock. I make stock enough that it’s become a routine process, but when I find myself short admittedly my first thought is to head to the store for a can. Ruhlman has effectively removed that thought from my mind for good.

“Pour water over meat and bones and vegetables, heat the mixture and eventually all the flavor from the meat and vegetables and all the protein from the bones and cartilage will wind up in the water. It’s simple and easy, and is probably the single most important difference between restaurant cooking and home cooking.” – Michael Ruhlman in Ruhlman’s Twenty

The simplest Stock, done.

“Where did we get the notion that stock making requires giant pots and huge amounts of time?…The carcass of a roasted chicken makes about 4 cups of an amazing stock. You don’t even have to use a whole carcass, just parts. Let the water do it’s magic on a single piece of chicken if you want. It’s beautiful.”  – Michael Ruhlman in Ruhlman’s Twenty

With my $5 budget I didn’t have the money to buy an onion or carrots or celery for the stock. I trusted Michael Ruhlman’s argument that a homemade stock of just chicken bones without all the areomatics would still be better than than stock from a can. I simply covered the bones and miscellaneous chicken parts with about two inches of cold water, tossed in a bay leaf, a few peppercorns, and the ends of the carrot I’d cut up to be roasted. I set the pot on a low heat and let it come up to the barest simmer. Not letting it boil or even fully simmer keeps the liquid clear and beautiful. You know what? That Ruhlman fella is right. I started my stock right after cutting up the chicken  and let it simmer while I went about making, eating and cleaning up from dinner. About 3 ½ hours later I had just over four cups of clean fresh tasting beautiful stock. No big pots. No need to set up rows of storage containers to be filled, labeled, and wrestled into the freezer. No fuss. My soup for day three’s recipe is already well underway.

Homemade chicken stock, the minimalist way.

The Herb Roasted Chicken and veggies require nothing more than tossing the veggies and chicken with a bit of oil, vinegar, and seasoning and letting it roast in the oven for 45-50 minutes. Making polenta is just as easy involving only boiling, stirring, and simmering. This meal requires very little tending to during the cooking process. For this minimal effort a dinner so satisfying with great flavor, texture, color and nutrition is your reward. 

Chicken and veggies ready for the oven.

As easy as these recipes are, it did make me realize that there is one important element to the success of slow food over fast food, and that’s cooking skills. Would someone who has never cooked before know the difference between simmer and boil? Or ever consider buying a whole chicken with no idea how to cut it up? Cooking skills matter and it’s the reason I’m so passionate about volunteering for Share Our Strength’s Cooking Matters program. It’s a free six week cooking and nutrition class for low income families. All the recipes we use in the classes are targeted to cost about $1.68 per serving so families receiving SNAP benefits can afford to make them. With low cost recipes and cooking skills, slow food can win out over fast food even for families living below the poverty line. I’ll grant you that it takes time and effort to shop and plan meals, but the return of taste, nutrition, and quality family time spent preparing and sharing a meal together is, as the saying goes, priceless.

Herb Roasted Chicken and Vegetables with Garlic Polenta. $5 total and serves four.

If you have the means and are interested in further developing your core cooking skills I highly recommend the Rouxbe Online Cooking School. Like Ruhlman’s Twenty (which I also reccomend), Rouxbe focuses on technique and uses recipes as a way to practice core skills. TableFare is an affiliate site for Rouxbe and we are thrilled to be able to offer a free 14-day membership to their site so you can test drive their cooking school. If you do buy a month or year membership 100% of our affiliate commission is donated to Share Our Strength to help end child hunger and fund great programs like Cooking Matters. Here’s a little taste of a partial lesson from Rouxbe’s online cooking school. Of course you can also always donate to Share Our Strength directly too!

My Herb Roasted Chicken and Vegetables served over Garlic Polenta was delicious and turned out to be enough to actually feed four people. If you aren’t limited to $1.25 per serving, adding a few more veggies and a nice green salad would round out the meal nicely. A little cheese or butter stirred into the polenta before serving would be a nice decadent touch, but certainly not necessary. Though this recipe is about as stripped down as can be, the flavor is there and I wouldn’t hesitate to serve it to dinner guests just the way it is. 

Here’s how my budget broke down. I made the decision to consider pantry staples like oil and seasonings freebies and not break out the cost per bay leaf or teaspoon of salt; that  just seemed like too much minutia. I did, however, leave a little spare change in the budget as a good faith effort toward the cost of these unaccounted for staples.

1/3 whole chicken   $2.32
1 yellow onion         $0.69
1 medium carrot      $0.25
½ lb. broccoli          $1.13
2 cloves garlic         $0.08
¾ cup polenta         $0.40
Total cost              $4.88
(Spare for staples $0.12)

I hope Slow Food’s $5 challenge will inspire you to embrace the joy and satisfaction that  comes with creating meals for yourself and people you care about. The only thing fast food really has going for it is that it’s fast. With some planning, I contend the food you cook can be just as fast when necessary, but there is something deeply satisfying about letting food happen in its own time and just enjoying the process. The meals for day two and three will be separate posts that I will link to once they are up.  

I’d love to hear what kinds of low-cost meals you like to make, please share in the comments.

Recipe Links:

• The $5 Challenge Herb Roasted Chicken Legs and Vegetables
• The $5 Challenge Garlic Polenta

Someone overseeing the great lima bean empire realized there was a perception issue with lima beans and took action. Today, April 20th is Lima Bean Respect Day!

Lima beans

I realized I have completely ignored this ingredient my entire adult life, and with good reason. All that has changed and I have a new found respect for this misunderstood bean along with three great recipes to share with you.

Sauteed Lima Beans with Coriander Seed and Fresh Herbs

Do you cower at the thought of lima beans? Do you suffer from bad lima bean related childhood memories? Well there’s hope because lima beans really can be a culinary delight. Check out my guest blog post on Girl Power Hour along with some great recipes.

Butter Bean Puree

Read my blog post on Girl Power Hour

Recipe Links

• Sauteed Lima Beans with Coriander Seed and Fresh Herbs
• Butter Bean Puree
• Lima Bean Soup with Swiss Chard and Mushrooms

We have two new recipes added to our site that I just wrote about in my guest blog post on lentils for Girl Power Hour.

Braised Chicken with Lentils and Yogurt

The recipes take advantage of two great spice blends. Garam masala is used in the Braised Chicken with Lentils and Yogurt, and the Spicy Red Lentil Stew gets its kick from berbere.

Spicy Red Lentil Stew

Lentils are such a great ingredient to work with becuase they give you all the great nutriton of beans, but cook in the time it takes to make rice. If you are looking for some  hearty dishes to cook as summer winds down, I hope you’ll give these a try. The Spicy Red Lentil Stew is quick and easy to make and costs less than a dollar a serving!

Links

• Braised Chicken with Lentils and Yogurt
• Spicy Red Lentil Stew
• Girl Power Hour guest blog post, So Edible: Land of Lentils

Have you crunched into a crispy kale chip? So light and crispy they shatter and crumble in your mouth and have a salty earthy flavor that is a completely satisfying snack sensation.

It’s rather astonishing how easy it would be to eat an entire bundle of kale once it’s baked into crispy chips and sprinkled with salt and maybe a touch of spice. I can’t fathom eating that much fresh kale, yet I must ration my kale chips to keep from devouring them in a single sitting.

They are simple to make; a little rub of oil, dusting of salt, spread on a sheet pan and bake for 15 minutes. How can you not give this a try? In addition to the hightly desirable snack qualities of crispy and salty, baked kale has a sweet earthy flavor reminiscent of seaweed, but unlike seaweed it doesn’t get soggy and chewy when eaten. Nutmeg is a great spice with greens, so I added a touch after the chips came out of the oven. Good, but I really liked the batch I made with garam masala; the complexity of a blend of spices is more interesting. The sweet warm flavors of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and cardamom typically found in garam masalas are prefect with kale.

For a great snack duo, bake up some garbanzo beans while you’re at it. Right from a can these little nuggets are as easy to toast up as the kale, though it takes about 60-70 minutes to get them baked to a completely crispy state. Well worth the wait. Sprinkled with a bit of kosher salt and curry powder they too become an addictive little snack, and can pack a punch depending on how spicey your curry powder is. Sort of like corn nuts, only good for you. I have Jaden over at Steamy Kitchen to thank for putting this treat on my radar. I read about them on her blog and got up from my computer and headed right for the can of garbanzos stashed in the pantry. For some really creative flavor treatments check out the list of roasted garbanzo bean recipes the folks over at The Kitchn wrangled from across the web, or just turn to your own spice collection for inspiration.

Both of these will be a hit if you serve them at your next party, or just keep them all for yourself as mid-afternoon nibble that’s packed with protein. I hope you’ll give them a try and let me know what you think.

Now, if you want to swing to the complete opposite end of the snack spectrum, check out this blog I just came across,  www.junkfoodblog.com.

Recipe links

• Crispy Kale Chips with Garam Masala
• Curried Garbanzo Bean Nuts

A crispy layer of bread crumbs adds an element of comfort food to this wonderfully simple vegetable casserole. Pre-baking the eggplant makes it creamy and soft, a beautiful contrast to the zucchini which retain a nice snappy bite.

This dish is inspired by my participation in Share Our Strength’s Operation Frontline program, which is a free six week cooking and nutrition class geared to help low income people prepare and eat healthy meals on a very tight budget. This is a national program implemented by different organizations in every community. In Seattle, I volunteer through Solid Ground.

Can cooking on a budget be delicious? Absolutely! One of the things I focus on in the classes I help teach is developing good cooking technique to draw the best flavor out of the ingredients. It’s hard to beat simple ingredients that are well cooked.

It should be no surprise that my enthusiasm for the value of proper cooking technique comes from my experience with Rouxbe online cooking school. The concept of focusing on skills and technique rather than learning how to make a specific recipe really changed the way I cook, so this is how I approach the Operation Frontline classes.

We made this casserole with a simple polenta the first week of class and talked about how to use a chef’s knife and different cutting techniques. I have shared a video demo from Rouxbe of cutting with a chef’s knife in a past post, so this time I’ll share the video demo of how to cut an onion which we practiced in the class this week.

I love recipes that allow for creative license and the ratatouille gratin is very flexible giving you plenty of room to be creative. You can skip the mushrooms, use a mix of zucchini and yellow squash, double the Swiss chard, add in other veggies, or change the spices without any dire consequences. There are, however, a few key steps that will help to make the recipe successful.  

• Slicing the eggplant and squash evenly is important so the pieces cook in the same amount of time. If the eggplant is too squirrely to make nice slices, trim a small slice off the middle of one side so it will sit securely on the cutting board.
• Give the onions enough time to sweat down over a medium-low heat to develop their flavor. If you hear a lot of sizzling in the pan and they are beginning to brown, turn the heat down.
• Taste the onion mixture before assembling the gratin to be sure it has enough seasoning. It should have a deep rich flavor and be on the strong side because it will be tempered by the eggplant and zucchini.

In class we served this over a plain polenta, but here’s a more decadent version from Rouxbe if you feel like indulging. Please take advantage of the free 14-day Rouxbe membership to explore their site. Just click on any of the Rouxbe links from our site to access it. If you love it and want to purchase a membership, you will be helping us raise money for Share Our Strength. We are donating 100% of the commissions we make from membership sign-ups to Share Our Strength.

Recipe Links

• Ratatouille Gratin
• Soft Polenta  from Rouxbe

 It’s been a cold wet June in Seattle. The other morning I couldn’t seem to chase the chill out of my bones and wanted something warm for lunch. The fresh flavor and vibrant green color of this spinach soup delivered a little taste of spring and warmed me right up.

This soup was only partly inspired by my chilled bones the other factor was the abundance of spinach growing in my garden. My little garden was producing faster than we could consume. 

This being a spur of the moment endeavor, the ingredient list comes from what I had on hand at the time.  In an effort to keep my spinach plants in check, I have made this a few times now and settled in on a recipe I consider a keeper. The mild and sweet flavor of the spinach is accented with a lovely bite of heat from fresh ginger and black pepper, and then rounded out with a touch of cream and comforting aroma of nutmeg. Besides tasting great my favorite thing about this soup is it can be made in about 20 minutes and costs next to nothing, especially if you happen to grow the spinach.

As much as I enjoy cooking and consider it to be a relaxing part of my day, I still like to be speedy and efficient about it. Nothing has improved my speed and efficiency more than developing my knife skills. This practice exercise using a bench scraper from Rouxbe Online Cooking School, made such a difference for me.

Cutting up an onion is the most difficult part of making this soup. If you get the hang of using the rolling technique demonstrated above, you’ll be able to knock this soup out in nothing flat.

The herbs are a flexible element. I added a handful of chervil in one batch because it too was getting a little out of control in the garden. I have also used a mix of chervil, parsley and fennel with excellent results. A mix of any mild herbs you might happen to have on hand will work just fine. Next time I’ll try using cilantro.

Spontaneous Spinach Soup served steaming hot with a grilled cheese sandwich is a lunch that will make you happy even if it’s rainy and cold in June. If you happen to be enjoying sunny warm weather, serve it chilled; it would make a nice starter for your next dinner party.

Update: I made this again using cliantro and it was wonderful.

Recipe Link

• Spontaneous Spinach Soup

If you found the Rouxbe video helpful and would  like to check out their online cooking school content for free for 14 days, be our guest!

Click here to get your FREE
14-day membership to Rouxbe!

I had  fun over the weekend doing a cooking demonstration of low cost meals at a community fair organized by The City of Lake Forest Park, WA. They brought together all sorts of community resource agencies sharing information to help people navigate these difficult economic times. 

One of the agencies participating was Solid Ground, an organization I volunteer with. In partnership with Share our Strength, a national anti-hunger organization, Solid Ground runs a free six week cooking and nutrition program called Operation Frontline, designed to help people on a low income build skills to maximize their resources by learning to cook healthy low cost meals

All of the meals in the program are designed to cost less than $1.68 per serving, which is the amount of money a person on food stamps has to spend for each meal. In the demo I made a White Bean and Chicken Chili with Fresh Basil and a Northwest Apple Salad. These are quick and really flavorful dishes that aren’t fussy to make and can easily be adapted to all kinds of variations. These dishes won’t remind you of your starving student days, in fact I wish I had eaten like this when I was a starving student.

The chili is finished with fresh lime juice and basil, which delivers a bright flavor and fresh satisfying aroma.  The apple salad is simply dressed with a little plain yogurt, but of course I turn to spices to take it in a variety of directions. At the demo I had three versions for sampling, one with cinnamon, one with ground fennel, and one with ground coriander. All work great with apple and it was fun to see apprehension turn into delightful surprise as people tasted the different versions. The different spices pull differnt flavors of the apple forward and lend a nice flavor complexity to what couldn’t be a simpler salad.

It might seem like cooking with a variety of spices would be too extravagant when on a limited budget, but I did some research to show that’s not the case at all if you know where to shop. I expected bulk spices to be cheaper, but I didn’t realize how much cheaper, even when buying from a specialty spice store. The difference in cost per ounce is dramatic enough, but when you consider that with bulk purchasing you only buy what you need for a few months, which in most cases an ounce is more than enough, so cash isn’t tied up in large expensive jars of spice that just sit in the cupboard. The jar of grocery store brand cinnamon was priced at $3.89 (1.75 oz.) , whereas buying an ounce of bulk cinnamon only requires  $0.41, or a $1.00 out of pocket.

Share our Strength partners with different organizations all over the country to implement the Operation Frontline classes. Visit their site to see if there is a group in your community you can get involved with. It’s a great program.