It was so good that I forgot to take a picture of it.  Doh!  Since I can’t supply you with pictures, I’ll provide you with instructions to recreate it.

Here’s what I had:

• Roasted Portobello Mushroom
  • Roasted with just a bit of balsamic vinegar and dried oregano in the cap at 400 degrees for 5ish minutes.  Removed, set toaster oven to broil.  Topped with tomato and red bell pepper slices, panko breadcrumbs and broiled for 2-3 minutes.  Topped with Munster cheese and broiled for another minute or so.
• Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Mash
  • Leftover roasted vegetables simmered for a minute or two with some soymilk and leftover mushroom stock.  Mashed.
• Spinach Salad with Feta, Farmers Market Tomatoes, & Annie’s Brand Goddess Dressing

• Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale
  • I was being seasonal?

****

So yeah.  Tasty.  Make it.

Why do I think I can talk to the wide world of the internets about grocery shopping on a budget?  Let’s just say that 3 years of private law school education isn’t even remotely cheap.  I’m also on a fixed income (can you call it income if it’s actually debt?) so I know a thing or two about stretching a buck.

Instead of droning on and on about this, I figured I would just lay my tips out in a list.  Here we go:

1. Learn how to cook.  Like, really cook, not just opening a box of something and adding water.  It can be really fun, eating at home is cheaper, and the quality of foods is likely to be better.
2. Buy fresh vegetables and fruit at a farmers market.  If you can’t afford organic, buy local!  It’s cheaper (less miles traveled) and it’s better for the environment and your community.
3. Skip convenience/prepackaged/prepared foods.  Most are (by definition) heavily processed and contain gross chemicals and additives.   If you follow tip #1, you don’t need them anyway!
4. Buy in bulk.  I’m a big fan of oats for breakfast, and I like granola in my yogurt, so I buy tons of oats from the bulk bins for a great price, and make my own cereals for wayyyyy less than packaged cereals cost.  Oats are really cheap anyway.
5. Learn to like and make oatmeal.  It’s good for you, the organic version is not much more money, it’s quick, and cheap.
6. Have a plan for the things that you buy. Just because something randomly looks good doesn’t mean you should buy it.  If something does catch your eye at the store and you would like to try it, decide what you will make with it and pick up the ingredients while you’re at the store.  That way, there’s less of a chance of it spoiling or collecting dust in your cupboard.
7. Skip most of the middle aisles.  Sure you can find some canned beans, canned tomatoes, etc. in the center aisles, but you also find cookies, crackers, chips, and soda.  I think this might be the #1 place where I save the most money.  It’s not that I never buy these things, but granola bars, tortilla chips, and oreos are super expensive and give you next to nothing in terms of nutrition.  90% of the time it’s not worth it to me.  (The other 10% of the time I really frickin want those chips and salsa!)
8. Frozen foods. If you’re a sporadic cook, buy frozen vegetables.  Fresh is definitely better, but if you don’t have a plan for using all of the portion you buy in a week or so, they will spoil and it’s a waste of money.  Frozen vegetables can be really cheap, too.  Also, if you like a certain bread and it goes on sale, stock up and place the extra loaves in your freezer.  Bread keeps really well in the freezer.
9. Take advantage of sales. The grocery store where I normally shop doesn’t always have the best sales, but the quality of the food is good, and the prices on a lot of the things I like to buy are usually cheaper than other stores.  But today I hit the jackpot and there we’re a billion little sale signs out so I picked up some extra bread, sushi and arborio rice, and flour.  They weren’t on my list (gasp!) but they would be within the next few weeks, so since they were on sale, they went in the cart.
10. Go to the store on off hours, if possible. Avoid Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Nuff said?

On top of my “meh, I just don’t know what I want to eat/make” attitude, I’m trying to use up a lot of the ingredients that have consumed my cupboards lately.  And I missed the farmers market yesterday.  In order to use up ingredients which I’ve had on hand for months, I need the be creative, and that just isn’t there right now.

I’m determined to get myself out of this rut today! Here is my game plan:

• I hope to at least make a big batch of granola, which always seems to make the apartment smell awesome which makes me hungry, which makes me want to cook more.  I hope to post an approximation of the recipe I generally follow real soon.
• I have several cookbooks that I don’t open nearly enough.  While I hardly ever use a recipe when I’m cooking, in my opinion it is a great source of inspiration when you are in a cooking rut.  I’m going to try something new today!

My Reading List for Today

——–

I will now show you a few things that I’ve eaten recently that have been super tasty.  Good looking food should help me get in the cooking frame of mind, right?

Whole wheat mini bagel, hummus, grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, fresh (homegrown!) basil, mixed olives, and grapes

If you read the caption, I’m pretty sure you don’t need me to tell you how this tasted.  Nom.

I also ate some crack salsa made by the person who introduced me to the stuff.  Amazing.

And finally, I made bruschetta for the same party where the salsa was consumed.  I bought the tomatoes from the farmers market the day of the party, and boy oh boy were they tasty.  Since I’m a sweetheart, I’ll give you this very complex recipe for bruschetta.  Aren’t I the nicest?

Bruschetta

Ingredients:

• Tomatoes
• Basil
• Garlic
• Olive Oil
• Salt
• Balsamic vinegar (optional)
• Crusty Bread

Directions:

1. Chop upsome seeded tomatoes.  Throw them in a bowl.
2. Pour in some olive oil, enough that it coats the tomatoes and some pools in the bottom of the bowl.
3. Chop the basil, don’t get fancy with the chopping, just rough pieces, and add to the bowl.
4. Slice a few cloves of garlic in half and put them in the bowl as well.
5. Season with salt and the vinegar, if you want, and set aside for an hour or so.
6. Slice the bread into 1/2 inch or so pieces (don’t freak out, it doesn’t really what size/shape, just big enough to hold the tomatoes and not too thin that it gets super crispy, and not too thick that all you taste is bread).
7. Spray on some olive oil, and put them in a hot oven for a few minutes.  You don’t want toast, you want very lightly browned tops.
8. Slice another clove of garlic in half, and rub it over the bread.
9. Top with the tomato mixture.
10. Consume.

*****

Yup, definitely feeling the inspiration coming back now.  :)

First up: A Green Smoothie

Green Smoothie

I bought a bunch of spinach at the farmers market (an entire plastic grocery bag full!) and decided to use some up in smoothies before it went bad.  Green smoothies are great, just add everything you usually like in a smoothie and chuck in a handful of spinach!  You can’t taste the spinach at all.  This one had banana, yogurt, soymilk, and some blueberries.

Next up is a typical breakfast.

Oatmeal with half a banana mashed in and homemade granola, yogurt, blueberries and flax seeds on top.  It’s getting a bit hot out for oatmeal these days though.  More recently I’ve been having cereal or yogurt.

Some weekends I really make an effort to make a bunch of food to take for lunches during the week.  Here’s photo documentation of it   First I made Spaghetti and Bean Balls from the vegan bible cookbook Veganomicon.

I topped the bean balls with some shredded vegan mozzarella cheese.  I’ve tried a bunch of vegan cheeses, and I have to say that I’d rather just go without rather than eat “fake” cheese.  The texture and the flavor are just not satisfying at all.  I thought I’d swoon over Teese and I was disappointed, and FYH was a little bit worse.  Bummer.

I’d show you the final product, but the pictures came out pretty bad.  Basically I cooked some whole wheat pasta, topped it with some of the red sauce, some of the bean balls, and a bit of sauteed zucchini.

I also took advantage of my oven space, since it was already on and made some Chickpea Cutlets, also from Veganomicon.

Chickpea Cutlets

These are awesome to make in advance, and are great on top of salads, pasta, or in sandwiches during the week.  My favorite way to have them is to reheat them in the toaster oven, slather them with Franks Red Hot, and chow down with some yogurty dipping sauce.  Who needs chicken wings??

Local Strawberries

I made vegan biscuits from scratch, using a recipe from Vegan Explosion (I made half of a batch).  Homemade biscuits are essential for good strawberry shortcake, and they are so so easy to make.  You don’t even have to measure most of the ingredients, which is my favorite part   To make biscuits vegan really the only substitute you need to make in any recipe is to use Earth Balance margarine instead of butter.  I use Earth Balance anyway, so this was an easy sub.  You can use any biscuit recipe you like

Vegan Biscuits

The strawberries were hulled and macerated with a wee bit of granulated sugar and some maple syrup.   I tasted them after 45 minutes or so and they were still a little too tart, so I added some more maple syrup.

Macerating Strawberries

I topped the cakes with sweetened soy yogurt instead of whipped cream.  They probably would have been tastier with the whipped cream, but I didn’t miss it, and Philip seemed pretty content without it!

Strawberry Shortcake!

I made a very simple sauce of lemon juice and zest, garlic, olive oil, red bell pepper, and sun-dried tomatoes.

Ingredients

The sauce came together in minutes!  It was one of the easiest and most flavorful dishes I have made in quite some time.  You could really taste all of the individual flavors, including the pasta!

Artisan Pasta with Sun-dried Tomatoes and Lemon

[I admit, my pasta plating needs work if I'm going to be taking pictures.]

Usually flavored pastas taste like regular pasta to me, just with a different color–but this pasta was awesome!  It is certainly more expensive than traditional store-bought pasta, but with flavor this good, I’ll definitely be back for some more next weekend.

I had a glass of this Beaujolais with dinner, but it was just ok, I probably wouldn’t buy it again.  It was cheap though

The event showcases local restaurants and the Central New York community via a two day free event that features numerous food vendors and offers free live, local music.  The weather was great, and the entire square (and then some) were packed with people.  I even ran into a few former co-workers!

While the company and scenery were great, I have to say that the food was pretty disappointing.  The beverages, however, were awesome!

We started off with a fresh-squeezed lemonade, which was delicious.

After that yummy experience, we set off to peruse the food offerings.  There were so many to choose from, but ultimately I decided on pierogies from Eva’s and Thai Basil Tofu with Rice from the Little Thai House (at least I think that’s what it’s called).  I don’t have a picture of the Pierogies since I had to eat them while walking through the gigantic crowd, but they were dry and fairly bland tasting.  I won’t let this experience deter me from visiting Eva’s though, my friend Gregg says that the actual restaurant is excellent, and Philip loved his kielbasa from there.

The Thai Basil Tofu from Little Thai House was pretty bad.  The texture of the tofu was fine, but the sauce was just kinda… there.  And slimy.  The vegetables were completely flavorless too.  I was totally disappointed, but the things that keep best in those catering trays for several hours aren’t usually the healthy vegetarian options.  Bummer.

Furthering my finding that the best part of the TOS are the liquids… Behold! Wine Slushies!

We waited in line for quite a while to buy these puppies, and I was getting a little impatient (ME? Never…) so I went to people watch and Philip came back with 2 for each of us, so we wouldn’t have to get back in the line if (and by “if” I mean “when”) we wanted another.  Let’s just say they were delicious and were gone pretty quickly because they tasted like juice!

We came home early because it was just so crowded and we were exhausted.

This morning we decided to engage in some more community involvement!  We headed to the local Farmers Market!  It was (gasp) my first time going to this farmers market, and I have no excuse for that.  I just haven’t gotten around to it before, but that’s about to change.  It was super good, a decent selection of vegetables, a fair amount of fruit, artisan breads, and some specialty cheese shops.  I picked up two red bell peppers, two lemons, four tomatoes, a big container of tiny strawberries (my fav!), and two different kinds of specialty flavored pastas for somewhere around 15 bucks!  I got red pepper fettuccini and spinach garlic fettuccini.  I have big plans for them for dinner tonight!

We took a long walk around Barry Park to poke around at a yard sale (I’m looking for a bookshelf) so continued supporting local food by stopping at the Syracuse Real Food Co-Op.  We planned on just picking up some locally made Stretch Bread and fresh mozzarella, but when I saw that kombucha was on sale, I had to get one.  Kombucha is usually in the $4 a piece range, so it isn’t something I usually buy that often, but at $2.79 we each got one.  He got the Citus and I got my favorite, Grape.

Philip has never made me a meal.  To be fair, I’m pretty sure I haven’t really given him the opportunity, because I love to cook so much.  But today that changed!  He made lunch, and it was perfect.  He poured olive oil on a plate, added a little balsamic vinegar, then topped it with sliced tomatoes, more balsamic, fresh chopped basil, and sliced fresh mozzarella.  Served with slices of the fresh bread, this was the perfect lunch!

This weekend is off to a great start!  We’re going to see Up! tonight, I can’t wait!