Chicken with waffles: a theory of meat and bread

So, the other night my partner and I were talking right before sleep.  For some reason he was telling me about chicken with waffles.  Despite living in the South for several years, he has only recently tried them, and waxed quite poetically about them.

Something about the warm crispness of the waffle, the meatiness of the chicken, and the delightful crunch of the fried part, tied together perfectly with only the lightest of syrups, syrup that would be totally out of place on the fried chicken by itself but seems integral to the chicken-with-waffles experience.  (Yes, you eat the chicken and waffle at the same time, he says, the chicken is on top of the waffle, syrup on top of that.)

This lead us to discuss what seems to be a hierarchy of breaded products and meats.

Beef we eat in Roast Beef sandwiches, or in a pot pie.  It stands up well to rye and hearty wheats.

However, pork needs a lighter touch, but still more dense than waffles.  Think bacon and sausage with pancakes and syrup.  Nom.

Waffles with chicken we have already discussed, and their part in the breaded meat hierarchy should have been an obvious missing link.  Someone would have had to invent it if it hadn’t already been invented.

Then, of course, we have the most delicate meats of all– seafood.  Obviously we have those in crepes.  (Assuming we’re sticking to wheat products.)

Are you a fan of meat and bread combinations?  What are your favorite?

What do you have for breakfast?

The idea of getting things done (besides the standard morning ablutions, maybe getting dressed) before breakfast doesn’t really fly at Casa Grumpy.  We tend to, you know, want breakfast.  And breakfast is a good thing to do– it’s correlated with being a healthy weight, it helps start your day, etc. etc. etc.

Here’s our current routine:

#1:  These days I’m having yogurt with granola.  Sometimes Whole Foods Cheerios in milk.  When I’m in a hurry, a larabar and a banana.  Second breakfast is generally a larabar or piece of fruit, though occasionally I’ll dip into lunch and have to find something else for first lunch.

#2:  Bagels & cream cheese.  Frozen waffles.  Microwaved sausage.  Always coffee!  Sometimes cold cereal.  Sometimes instant oatmeal.  Occasionally, leftover pasta.

What else do folks have for breakfast in the grumpy nation?

Mental load and menu planning

Sometimes the biggest problem with weeknight dinners is figuring what to make when you get home from work.  Generally you’re somewhat hungry and exhausted from making too many decisions at work and an additional decision, even of just what to have for dinner, puts you over the edge.  Even adults can have low blood sugar melt-downs.

Now, to fix this problem, you could do what one set of our friends does and have the same thing to eat every week.  Monday is chili night.  Tuesday is Spaghetti night, and so on.   (Wasn’t there a commercial about that?)  Problem solved.

We need more adventure than that, however.  Otherwise I might have to take up skydiving, and nobody wants that.  So that means new and different meals that can be made quickly on weeknights with minimal advance planning.  Pantry meals.  Or meals with ingredients that will last between weekly grocery store trips.

There are online services out there that will give you a weekly menu plan complete with grocery list, taking the thinking out of the process.  We tried a couple of these at various points, but they always seem to call for exotic ingredients that we can’t get given our lack of Whole Foods, take much longer than the 20 min we have for making dinner (if the cookbook is called, “20 min meals” it is LYING), and end up leaving mostly unused jars of ingredients in the fridge to rot.  Alternatively, they focus on pouring can of Campbell’s X over Pillsbury Y, which is not only unhealthy but doesn’t taste great if you’re unused to so much processed stuff.   So, a great idea in theory, but in practice they seem to be unworkable.

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to cobble together your own menu plan with minimal mental effort using one or two cookbooks by the mother-son team of Nancy and Kevin Mills.  If there are 1-3 people in your family, use Help! My apartment has a kitchen!  If there are 3-5 people, use Faster!  I’m starving!  Obviously you can use your own cookbooks, but we like these because they are actually accurate in terms of preparation time, they use simple healthy and inexpensive ingredients that work well with a pantry, they have a nice variety of cuisines, and the meals are darn tasty.  For non-meat eaters, Kevin Mills married a vegetarian before writing Faster!, so that book has more suggestions for making the meals veggie-friendly.

Open up your book of choice.  Go to the first section (possibly salads, maybe appetizers), pick the first meal from that section (or the first meal that sounds good).  Write it down on one sheet of paper (or used envelope) and put the ingredients that you do not have on your grocery list.  Then move to the next section (chicken, for example), and pick the first meal from that section, adding its ingredients to the grocery list.  Continue until you have 5-7 meals listed on the paper.  Then go grocery shopping.

When you get home from work on Monday, instead of wondering what to have for dinner, just pick the first meal off the list and ~20 min later it should be ready to eat.  Get the partner and/or kids involved too, if applicable.

What if you don’t feel like that day’s scheduled meal?  That shouldn’t be a problem, just pick a meal further down the list– you should have all the ingredients from all meals on hand.  We usually just have a list of meals, generally one or two more than we’ll be making before we next get to the grocery store.  The default no-think option is the top one, but if that doesn’t sound good, we move to the next.  Also we will often have one night that’s just leftovers (if not all of the leftovers have been eaten as lunches), or people can have leftovers instead of the planned meal.

The idea is that this kind of planning is more flexible than a strict menu plan and also takes less thinking than other forms of deciding what to have for dinner.  There’s a default option for each day each week that is a pretty good option.

Is figuring out what to make for dinner stressful for you?  Have you found ways to cut down on the mental load?

Food and DC2

Long-term readers of the blog may have come to the realization that #1 and her partner are kind of hippy-dippy parents.  Or lazy parents as they think of themselves.  They tend to let nature take its course, even when that causes them to deviate from the more stress-inducing mainstream.   Things other parents tend to complain about, #1 and spouse do a little research on and then usually realize they can avoid the thing causing the stress.

One of the potentially stress-inducing baby situations to rear its messy head is that of introduction to solid food.  Some parents force it on their kids and get very frustrated when it doesn’t go down.  Some parents freak out about perfectly made fresh organic purees, lovingly frozen in ice cubes.  Obviously perfectly made fresh organic purees are great, but if they freak one out…they can be skipped.

So in our lazy parenting strategy, we wait for the “signs of readiness”.  These are things like the baby being interested in food, the baby grabbing your food from you, the baby swallowing the food rather than pushing it out with hir tongue, and so on.  DC1 did not get these signs until ze was around 8 or 9 months old and rather dramatically stole a banana from me.  Because DC was so old and was pincer grasping, we figured we could just skip the puree stage entirely, so we did.  Research on “baby-led weaning” backed us up on it.  (Weaning being the British terminology for introducing foods.)

DC2 has shown the signs of readiness much earlier.  The day after hir 4 month appointment, in fact, it became pretty well impossible to keep food from hir at the dinner table.  So we didn’t try to keep it away.

DC2 gets table food, just like DC1 did.  We give hir little non-chokable bites.  Ze eats things that are naturally mushy with a spoon (split pea soup for lunch today).  We have been keeping wheat away because we’re still a bit worried about allergens.  And DC2 did have a small allergic reaction to *something* in San Diego, but we have no idea what, possibly naan (this, of course, being the reason the pedi says to introduce only one food at a time in 3 day intervals… something hard to do with a grabby baby on vacation).

Other forms of baby-led weaning suggest mesh baggies or just giving entire chicken legs or soft carrot sticks… but we’re still too lazy for that.  Ze gets what we’re eating.

And it seems to be going just fine, though we could have lived longer without the stinkier diapers.  Still, if you limit to whole foods, the diapers still aren’t as stinky as they could be.  (We remember the results of DC1′s first foray into processed food… the experience out the other end cut processed food out of all of our lives.)  We also understand bibs in a way that we missed with DC1.

Now, does that mean that more traditional methods of introducing solids are wrong?  Probably not.  We’re just lazy and take the least stressful way out.  It seems to work so far.

So if you don’t want to bother with purees, we at grumpy rumblings give you permission not to.

Cookbooks we have loved

My maternal grandma got a copy of The Old Fashioned Cookbook by Jan Carleton McBride for my father as a wedding present.  It’s full of wonderful American recipes from appetizer to dessert.  The cake section is especially amazing– I did not like cake at all before trying this book.  When my mom went to a low-fat diet, I was able to obtain ownership for our copy.

Another favorite from my parents’ is The Victory Garden Cookbook by Marian Morash. This fantastic book goes in and out of print all the time and has gone through a few editions and updates (now with microwave technology!). My parents would not part with theirs so we bought our own copy. If you belong to a CSA or have a garden of your own, you must get a copy of this book. It answers the question of, “What on earth are we going to do with all this X?” from basic preparation to elaborate recipes. And the recipes are delicious.

The New Laurel’s Kitchen book is fantastic if you’re trying to eat healthily and/or vegetarian. The recipes in it are creative and tasty, even though they only contain healthy stuff.  It’s a fun read too.  But very hippy-dippy.  What else would you expect from a cookbook coming out of a commune in the Berkeley area?  Additionally, if you want to bake with only whole grains, their bread book is not to be missed.  There are different techniques for baking with whole grain flour (which is “thirstier”) and The Laurel’s Bread Book covers them.

We’ve already talked about this duo of cookbooks from son Kevin and mother Nancy Mills. These are fantastic quick recipes for weeknights. We love them all.

The Cake Bible.  It is as advertised.

Baking with Julia. This cookbook encourages you to master a few basic recipes and use them with an array of different recipes. The weeks my partner spent mastering pie dough were wonderful indeed.

A new favorite that we’ve been going through, Madhur Jaffrey’s Quick and Easy Indian Cooking.  It should be called, Madhur Jaffrey’s Quick, Easy, and Delicious Indian Cooking.  Also:  pretty sure it’s healthier than the stuff we get for take-out.

We have a few Best Recipe books, which are good go-to books when something isn’t in the Old-Fashioned Cookbook.  Our favorite is the Best Recipe Make-Ahead cookbook. It is great for making food in advance whether for a party, for someone with a new baby, or for yourself in the future.

What are your favorite cookbooks?

We like nuts

Love nuts!  The nuttiness of the almond, the bitter tannin giving way to the rich meat of the walnut, the sweetness of the pecan, the creaminess of the cashew.

I think my favorite nut is the hazelnut.  There’s just something special about that flavor.

I like them best roasted and lightly salted, though second best without salt.  I miss TJ’s half salted nuts– they had the right amount.  (#2 likes a lot of salt)

Male chocolate chip cookies are my favorite.

Sometimes I will add roasted salted nuts to the ice cream I’m eating.  Nom.

#1: What kind of nuts do you like?

#2: many kinds
cashews. pecans. walnuts. hazelnuts. pistachios. almonds.

#1: hm
I think you will have to add to the blog post yourself
too complicated for me!

#2: hee

#1: and I’m sure CPP will say that our tastes in nuts are plebeian

#2: hehe
I like almost all nuts I have ever tried.

#1: I’m actually not crazy about brazil nuts

#2: I will eat them in with other things

#1: I used to really like macadamia

#2: oooo I forgot those. Those are really good!

#1: and I think I still like small (hazelnut sized) macadamia chunks in double chocolate chunk cookies

#2: I like macadamia

#1: I like to say macadamia

#2: gazebo

#1: exactly

What is your favorite nut?

We love ice cream

LOVE IT.

Also gelato.

#1′s favorite is anything chocolate with nuts.  Though she loves many many other kinds of ice cream.

#2′s favorite is coffee ice cream, with kahlua and chocolate syrup on top.

#1 notes also that she loves real whipped cream.  And chocolate syrup.  Ooh, and she’s been jonesing for a turtle sundae since she left the midwest… at some point she’s just going to have to roast and salt her own pecans.  (Update:  partner is a dream boat and I am the luckiest woman in the world.  Happy satisfied #1.  Sticky syrupy kitchen…)

Do you like ice cream?  What’s your favorite kind?

Radish top soup: and other super-frugal foods we no longer eat

Back when we were just starting out we had no money and very little income.  We also had education debt.  We were frugal to the bone, and we used every edible part of veggies with very little food waste.

Here are some of the things we used to make but no longer do because we don’t have to.  Wasteful?  Well, yes, but also time-saving… and really I’m not crazy about greens.

Radish top soup.  This is actually a pretty tasty mildly spicy green cream soup.  Made from radish greens from the tops of radishes.  You get the radishes, you cut off the tops so the radish doesn’t get wilty, then you use the radish greens right away before they get wilty.  In Radish Top Soup.

Beet greens.  These you cut off the beets, saute in olive oil, and serve with the cooked beets.  These days, I just toss them into compost!

In case you’re wondering how we were able to afford fresh produce on very little money, we’d go to the city’s big open air market near the end when everything was being marked down and get huge bags of fruits and veggies at a dollar each.  As we got more income, we’d go earlier when stuff was fresher and spend more to get less!  Eventually we had enough of a money cushion that we’d walk to Whole Foods and buy from there instead.  (Now we have to drive into the city to get to a WF, so we buy from the fru-fru section at the local chain grocery.)

Chicken leg-thigh combinations.  I would buy these on bulk when they hit 69 cents/lb and boil them for the meat which I would then freeze and add sparingly to future meals.  Clean-up was a PITA.  Now we keep bags of individually frozen chicken breasts in the freezer.

Macaroni and cheese from a box.  Just kidding!  We still eat these, but we no longer wait until they’re on sale, and we tend more towards Annie’s than the store-brand Kraft imitation.  (“We wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinners”  “But we would eat Kraft dinners, we’d just eat more!”)

Leftover cold pizza from department events.  Now I only eat this if it’s from a good pizza place or is a kind that I particularly like.  Or sometimes I’ll have a piece anyway (because, you know, pizza) but not 3 pieces and I certainly won’t take a box home.

Are there things that you used to eat when you had less money and choose not to eat now?  If you still have less money, are there things you are looking forward to no longer eating or doing?

Weird things I eat and don’t: Gluten free whole-grain no sugar fru fru

Things I’ve been eating:

• Stonyfield farm plain yogurt with fruit, trail mix, and crumpled up puffed brown rice from Lundberg farms brown rice cakes.
• Spaghetti sauce … over beans.
• Cream cheese on brown rice cakes.
• Boursin on tortilla chips– this is amazing.  Sadly in a few weeks I won’t be able to eat tortilla chips anymore because they’re not gylcemically balanced enough for third trimester.  (Btw, even though boursin is soft, it should be ok because it’s more like cream cheese than like brie in terms of pathogens.)
• Breakfast burritos on corn tortillas (ditto on the soon unable to eat)
• Cheap brown rice sushi from a place in town that is totally like the Subway Sandwiches of Sushi.
• Annie Chun’s Mai fun brown rice noodles.  In stir-fry!  In soup!  But not with spaghetti sauce as that would be wrong.

Horrific discoveries:

• Most (but not all) of the Mexican places in town put flour in their cheese sauces.  It will be a long time before I eat out at a Mexican place again.
• Many places in town lightly dust fish fillets with flour before grilling.
• Even though buckwheat flour isn’t wheat, I can only eat four bites or so of a 100% buckwheat flour pancake before my body refuses and sends the signal to my brain:  What are you doing?!?!  Are you crazy?  Then whenever I think about pancakes my body tries to decide whether or not to feel queasy, but when I don’t think about it I feel fine, until someone posts on her blog about chocolate chip pancakes and my body starts going hey, shouldn’t we be feeling queasy by now?
• But I don’t have the same problem with buckwheat waffles.
• Most gluten-free pizzas are DISGUSTING.  Also really expensive.  (The pesto one we tried wasn’t so bad though… but not really worth $9 for a personal size.)  Though if there were a Lou Malnati’s in town I’d totes order his gluten-free pizza (formerly his Atkin’s pizza)– sausage crust is awesome.
• 100% buckwheat soba is also pretty gross.
• I cannot reuse the pasta pot without cleaning it first, even if it just boiled spaghetti.
• There’s a local cheesemaker that makes amazing raw cows and sheep milk cheeses.  Or so I’m told by the rest of my family members.
• Ethnic Gourmet only has one brown rice entree left, everything else has been switched to white rice.
• Grocery store just started stocking a tonne of new ben and jerry’s flavors… they ALL either have wheat or they have no fat.  *whimper*

What is a dollar worth?

Min Hus is doing an online YMoYL book club.  Totes check it out. This week they’re on chapter two, calculating their effective wage– the idea of converting the cost of stuff into life energy that’s expended so you have a better idea of whether or not that stuff is actually worth the price.

Economists do this all the time– our effective wage rate includes not only the cost of things you buy in order to get to work, but also the unpleasantness or disutility of the work.  We make assumptions that wage rates are higher when the costs and disutility are higher.  We call these compensating differentials.

But we also value money in terms of how much of one good you have to give up by buying another good.  Money is simply fiat– something that allows you to buy goods and services.  You have a budget constraint and that means you can only buy so much of everything.  If you buy X widgets, you can’t buy as many sprockets as you would be able to if you hadn’t bought any widgets.

Folks who aren’t economists (or who aren’t economists *yet*) also use these kinds of metrics to get at the idea of how much their money is worth– what they have to give up if they buy one thing instead of another.  Specifically, this comment by Debbie M about how she used to measure purchases in terms of how many boxes of macaroni and cheese she could buy reminded me of how I determined whether or not something was worth purchasing during most of my childhood.

I was really into the candy-bar metric.  When I started it was 3 candy bars = $1.  Later it became 2 candy bars = $1.  (My allowance was pretty small by national standards according to my Penny Candy (?) magazine– 10 cents per year of age.  I couldn’t imagine people who got the average allowances worth 10 candy bars/week.  How did they eat all that candy?)  I’m not really sure how much a candy bar costs these days.  :|

Later, through college and graduate school (after we got rid of DH’s debt– there was no need to buy anything because the answer was always “no” until that was gone), my general metric was 1 meal out = $5.  Everything was calculated in terms of a meal out.

These days I don’t really do that anymore.  Pretty much anything I want under $200 I just buy.  (Which makes it sound like I’m a spendthrift, but my natural inclination is not to buy anything, so when it gets to the state where I want it now rather than sticking on my Amazon list, I might as well buy it.  Mainly it means I don’t stress at 3 figure grocery bills.)  I don’t know what I *would* use for an appropriate metric these days.  Maybe time to mortgage payoff (though Debbie M was not impressed with that idea!).  When I was thinking about flying DC’s relatives out here, I calculated how much tuition the flight would pay for (answer:  a full semester at CC), and just put that money in a 529 instead.

How do you figure out how much a dollar is worth?  Do you have a metric like this where you trade off in terms of salary or in terms of other goods you can purchase?  Have you had such a metric in the past (or would it help you in the future?)