Menu Mondays: The Back to School Edition

I'm headed out the door in ten minutes to bring Stella to school (she goes every morning this year!), I'm applauding myself for getting Alice to the bus stop in time and I'm typing one-handed because I have a cranky, teething 13 month old on my lap. But Menu Mondays are back, after a summer hiatus!

My menus lately reflect the changes that we've made in our family over the past month. You see, Henry and I have some serious financial goals that we need to tackle, so we've cut every aspect of our budget including the grocery budget. Remember my post on buying in bulk? That is one strategy I've employed in grocery budgeting. The other is planning meals that are inexpensive but nutritious and filling. Whole chicken was on sale at Whole Foods last month, so I've got a bunch of birds in my freezer. Besides roasted chicken, I've made stock with the bones. This week, I'm boiling up a chicken to use in my stir fry. I keep my eyes peeled for other deals that I can use without coupons, because I'm just not a clipper...

Here are some links for this week's menu:

The "meatballs" are actually lentils! Don't tell the kids. I want to see if they'll be able to tell the difference. http://www.goop.com/recipes/dinner/lentil_meatballs

Spanish tortillas have become a mainstay in the house. All the kids will eat it and it packs well in lunches the next day.  http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2007/09/tortilla-de-patatas/

I think everything else is self-explanatory. If it isn't, ask me in the comments!

And don't forget, the MO+M carrier discount code is good until the end of the month! Get the discount code from this post: http://realnani.blogspot.com/2014/09/babycarrierdiscount.html

Menu Mondays: Meat on Special Edition

1. Meat on Special? It just means that a local supermarket, a very fine one, was having a sale on ground chuck (yes, I'm aware of the recall! We were not affected by the recall, no worries) and Bell and Evans chicken. So, I bought more than I usually would and threw it in the freezer. 
2. What is a crepesdilla? I'm still in love with those masa crepes from Deborah Madison and I've decided to make quesadillas with them, instead of buying tortillas. Cheddar cheese was on sale, so I bought two blocks--one for mac and cheese (for lunches) and the other for the quesadillas. 
3. Pasta was also on sale, so I bought a few different kinds. I already made spaghetti and meatballs last night. I bought pork sausage for the meatballs and I have some left, so I'm thinking penne with sausage and broccoli. 
4. The little dude is starting to eat some food, so I've been roasting up sweet potato sticks for him, and he's had some of my oatmeal a few times. Very exciting times! 
5. My girls love granola bars and so do use grown-ups, so granola bars tend to be a pricey purchase, since a box doesn't go far. I found a recipe for Nature Valley-style granola bars and it's pretty good! The website is ugly but don't let that scare you. Mine actually didn't come out that crunchy, I think, because I made my own brown sugar, and I was out of butter so I used oil instead. I also added flax seeds and cinnamon. http://www.budget101.com/scratch-recipes-storebought-items/honey-crunch-granola-bars-3421.html

Menu Mondays: Kid Edition

1. The kids chose this week's meals, with the exception of Friday. Pretend Soup, by Mollie Katzen is a great little cookbook for kids, even if some of the recipes are weird. Not the pizza, though. The pizza is totally normal and Alice even wanted to use zucchini, as directed in the recipe, so we'll see how that goes. 
2. On Saturday, we went to an International Festival at Alice's school. The Spain table was serving Spanish tortilla and Alice loved it so much, we decided to make it for dinner. 
3. Do you read The Poor Man's Feast? I read Elissa Altman's book, spun off from her blog, last Fall. Great book... I highly recommend. Anyway, she wrote a post this week about fish and since I have a cod fillet in the freezer, I decided to make it the way she describes it at the end of the post. 
4. The roast chicken will be from Whole Foods, as per Alice's request. Apparently, one time I made chicken, and it was dry. [insert eye roll here] But whatever, that chicken *is* good and it saves me some cooking. 
5. A funny story: At the supermarket yesterday, after hauling a ten pound bag of flour into my shopping cart, another woman, middle-aged, very attractive and kind of prim, also took a bag of flour and examined it, then decided to put it back. She eyed the bag in my cart and asked if I'd checked the expiration date. October 2014. No problem. But she didn't like the expiration date and I thought maybe in her head she was reading it as 2013 or something. Before I had a chance to say anything, she counted off the months on her fingers and asked me, "you'll use all that flour by October?" I had to laugh, so I did and said that I could use all that flour in A MONTH.  Her eyes went wide as she gave me an astonished "Really?!" Funny lady. I might've been exaggerating about how quickly the flour will get used but yes, I can definitely finish a ten pound bag of flour in less than seven months! 

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Menu Mondays

{Don't forget to enter the giveaway for a free copy of The Good Mother Myth! See that post here: http://realnani.blogspot.com/2014/01/GoodMotherMyth.html}

1. I was inspired by my friend Sovina to put flank steak on my menu this week. She makes skirt steak but the flank was cheaper and looked better than the skirt that was available at my supermarket. 
2. The millet and falafel patties are so good, and come from Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook. There are a lot of great recipes in the book, and a whole kid-friendly section though there are a few recipes in the other sections that my kids like. 
3. In case you didn't notice, Wednesday's dinner is based on leftovers from Monday's dinner. See what I did there? 

Skillet Chicken Pot Pie

Chicken pot pie might be the ultimate comfort food-- filling without being too heavy, creamy, and carb-a-licious. It's also a great way to use up languishing veggies, though I made a classic version here. And the skillet? Well, I used to have a Corningware round casserole but I probably gave it away when we moved into our rental, because of the teeny-tiny kitchen with limited storage. I've made do with just a few essentials and one of them is this skillet. I wish it were bigger, but it has served me well! My idea was to make a one-pot chicken pot pie, quick and easy, because three kids really starts to feel like THREE KIDS when the witching hour arrives. I googled around for inspiration, knowing that a skillet pot pie could not possibly be an original idea. A lot of the recipes required various pots and pans, but I eschewed all that in favor of making everything in one skillet. Report from the 5 year old: "I like the chicken pot pie. Can I have more, but with no crust?" The crust, by the way, is delicious but I happened to have given birth to a kid that doesn't really like carbs. [I don't know how that happened...]

Two things:

1. The chicken: I encourage you to buy a whole fryer, and use the parts in various ways. If I'm not roasting the whole chicken, I poach the chicken in a pot. This week, I used the dark meat in chicken soup, I reserved the white meat for this pot pie, and I used the poaching liquid as the base for the chicken soup. The chicken carcass went into the freezer for future stock making. Also, if you leave the whole chicken in the pot after cooking and stick it in the fridge, you can skim the fat off the top the next day, otherwise known as schmaltz, aka your Jewish grandma's preferred cooking fat. 
2. The crust: You can buy a pie crust at the store. In this case, I had made pate brisee earlier in the week for a pumpkin pie. The recipe yielded two crusts, so I used the other for the pot pie. After putting the crust on the skillet, trim off the parts that hang over, roll it out again and bake yourself some crescent rolls! Just cut into triangles and roll the dough  up into a crescent shape. Bake it in the oven while the pot pie is cooking. 

Skillet Chicken Pot Pie

serves a hungry family of 4, with leftovers for lunch

Ingredients:

• Two large chicken breasts, cooked and chopped or shredded
• Two carrots, peeled and diced
• Two stalks of celery, diced
• One large onion, sliced thinly, then chopped
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 2 tablespoons of AP flour
• a little bit of chicken stock (I didn't measure this but I probably used 1/4 c, maybe less)
• a little bit of whole milk (again, I didn't measure but it was probably 1/4 c, maybe less)
• Thyme, dried or fresh
• Half a package of Frozen peas
• One pie crust, rolled out. 
• One egg, beaten. 
• salt and pepper, to taste. 

1. Preheat oven to 350
2. In your skillet, heat up your favorite cooking fat, a tablespoon or so, over medium heat. 
3. Sweat the onions, then throw in the carrots and celery. Sauté until softened. Add some salt. 
4. Push the veggies to the sides of the pan to make room in the middle. In that space, melt the butter. When it foams, whisk in the flour. You'll probably end up getting some veggies into the mix-- it's fine. Stir it all up. 
5. Add the milk and chicken stock, and stir everything together. The sauce should thicken as it cooks. 
6. Add thyme and stir. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Let it cook a few minutes to meld the flavors. If there is no liquid, add more stock. You don't want the filling to be a soup but you don't want it to be dry either. 
7. Stir in the frozen peas. Turn off the heat. 
8. Cover the top with the pie crust and cut off any dough that is hanging over. I set my dough just inside the skillet but you can cover the rim, if you want.  Baste crust with the beaten egg. 
9. Transfer hot pan to the oven and bake until crust is golden and puffy, about 30 minutes. 
10. Let the pot pie sit and cool for at least 15 minutes before eating. This is hard, I know, but it will be really hot, for one thing and another, letting it cool will allow the filling to set and become unctuous. 

Borscht Under My Belt

I'm a latecomer to borscht. Growing up, I would see the stuff in jars in the supermarket and think, "Gross!" But the summer I turned 16, I was in Israel, and spent a weekend hosted by a family in Haifa. I was served cold borscht, with a generous dollop of sour cream and a few slice of white bread. I turned a corner then but didn't have borscht again for a long time. Years later, I visited my friend Yelena and her family in Toronto. Her mother, born and raised in Russia,  made a green borscht and packed it up for my train ride back to New York. This was the day of the Great Black-Out of 2003, and I was so grateful for that soup as my train sat in Utica for hours, waiting for electricity. I still think about that soup all the time.

The other day, I got hit with a craving for borscht. I was searching for winter soup recipes online, and saw a picture of borscht. Since then, I haven't stopped thinking about it. I googled around for borscht recipes and discovered that there are as many borscht recipes as there are people. Some of the recipes were incredibly time-consuming and had ingredient lists miles long, in stark contrast to the recipe found in The Book of Jewish Food, which calls for 5 ingredients. I came up with a happy medium, creating the recipe below. Delicious, if I do say so myself and judging by the shout-out I got from my husband on Facebook, it's not just me!

You'll need:

1. 1 box of beef broth
2. 1 bag of shredded cabbage
3. 2 bunches of beets (I had one bunch with small beets on it, and another bunch with medium-size beets. All together, it was six beets.) 
4. 2 potatoes
5. 2 carrots
6. 1 medium onion
7. olive oil, kosher salt and pepper
8. Fresh dill, to taste. (I had frozen dill cubes in the freezer, and probably put about 4 or 5 cubes in the soup.) 

Then, you will: 

1. Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees. Trim and scrub beets, coat with olive oil and place inside a foil pouch on a baking sheet. Bake until beets are soft, about 30 minutes. Let cool to the touch, and peel skins. 
2. Heat the olive oil in a medium or large pot
3. Chop onions into a medium dice, and add to pot once oil is ready to go. 
4. Chop carrots and potatoes to roughly the same size, medium dice. Add to pot. Stir. 
5. Chop beets to same size, and add to pot. 
6. Salt generously, add pepper to taste and stir. 
7. Cook, covered, until the potatoes have softened. 
8. Uncover, add the bag of cabbage, the beef broth and the dill. Stir to combine. 
9. Let simmer, uncover, stirring occasionally until the ingredients have sort of melded together. 
10. Turn off heat, put about half or 3/4 of the soup into a blender and blend for a minute or less--it should still be a little chunky. Then, add it back to the pot and stir. 
11. Serve at room temperature (or cold) with sour cream, and crusty bread. (We had delicious french batard baked locally, in nearby Norwalk, from a wonderful bakery called Wave Hill Breads. My Riverdale friends might wonder if there's a connection. Yes! The owners were married at Wave Hill!) 

Even though borscht is an old-world classic Russian recipe, my grandmother never made it, as far as I know. She did, however, make delicious stuffed cabbage and that is next on my list of winter cravings to satisfy. Yum.