100 DOLLARS A WEEK - PROLOGUE...

If you follow this blog and/or my food albums, I hope it's evident that while I'm a big believer in frugality, I am also as big a proponent of eating well. And when I say well, I mean delicious, varied and balanced whole foods prepared with care, with healthy servings of fresh produce, and judicious but guiltless sides of indulgences.

Just...

Between that, some threads on discussion boards, and conversations with friends, I've been inspired to share my food budget with you because while I know there are folks who are pretty inspired and creative with even smaller budgets, I also know that there are a lot of folks struggling with how to maximize or even decrease much bigger food budgets while still feeding their families in a way they can feel good about.

...some of...

My goal for the remainder of this week is to use up the last of the perishables so that I can start fresh this Saturday (which is my usual grocery shopping day) with nothing but spices, seasonings and condiments, so I can show my true food expenses for a month straight and how I navigate that month on a budget of roughly $400 for two adults full time, plus two pre-teens part time.

...the stuff...

A quick acknowledgement before I get into details: Notwithstanding the fact that I am formulating a primarily web-based food-related business model from home, I am essentially a housebiatch (or, as the Man so wisely corrects me - a *domestic goddess*) for the time being. I have ALL DAY, EVERY DAY to cook EVERY. SINGLE. MEAL if I so choose. Some of you are in the same boat, but likely, most of you aren't. Even if you aren't, I hope I'll be able to offer something of value to you over the course of the next month or so, because while much of the savings is admittedly in the preparation, there are also savings to be found in what you buy, how you buy it, and how you choose or plan to use it.

...we eat...

I'm not much of a coupon clipper, but that has more to do with the fact that I buy primarily whole (unprocessed) foods for which there are few coupons available than it has to do with any aversion to clipping or presenting coupons.

...on 100 dollars...

Before Saturday rolls around, there are a few other general concepts I'd like to share with you, but washing a mess of dishes and a few other domestic goddess-esque activities await me.

...a week.

Back later,

shinae

FIVE DOLLAR LUSH - La Parra Loca 2010 Sauvignon Blanc - Verdejo

I've had wine that people who are supposed to be in the know consider to be great, wine that people who are supposed to be in the know wouldn't dream of drinking to save their cellars, and a lot of stuff in between.

I think the right kind of wine can benefit many a meal, but I think there are many meals that don't really benefit from wine, too.

I won't even try to front that I know anything about wine except for what tastes good to me, what it tastes like to my palate, and how it goes with certain food from the perspective of said palate. I do know that I don't care for stuff like Boone's Farm and Arbor Mist because it's a little too fruity and watered down tasting for me in general, but I certainly would not turn down a glass if I were at a party at which that was all the liquid happy that was being served.

And barring a compelling reason not to, I think everyone should benefit not only from the flavor sensation of a good food and wine pairing regardless of the price range, but also from the lovely and stress-free respite from life that a nice, affordable weekday glass of wine can provide.

That said, as there is no shortage of wine pundits in the $10 and up range, and as I'm the kind of gal who doesn't mind drinking a few bottles of two dollar lighter fluid to find a surprisingly good three dollar bottle of stuff that actually qualifies as wine, this is where I'll tell you about how to get a decent wine buzz (or how to avert turpentine throat) for five dollars or less.

As I'm a realist, and as we're dealing with cheap, CHEAP wine, the rubric is more about whether it's easy enough to drink, whether it's worth a try, and whether it's worth buying again than it is about the more esoteric aspects of wine judging (which I'm not qualified to do anyway).

So with no further ado, my first Five Dollar Lush wine:

LA PARRA LOCA 2010 SAUVIGNON BLANC - VERDEJO
(SOHveenyohn BLAHNK BvehrDEHhoh)

For the past several months, the Man and I have been getting cheap shits and giggles from trying *VERY* inexpensive wine. While a few have been absolute swill unfit for sober human consumption, most have been surprisingly serviceable. If we couldn't get to the bottom of the bottle, the rest became cooking wine, if we could barely manage to get to the bottom of the bottle, we considered it a pass, but if we agreed that we would buy it again, we considered it a *WIN*.

La Parra Loca 2010 Sauvignon Blanc - Verdejo

Price:  $4.99 on sale

Where:  Fresh & Easy

Tasting Notes:  a predominantly generically green grape-y flavor with a hint of the candied element of muscat; a nice, light and balanced sweetness; crisp and mildly tart

Goes With: simple fish and seafood preparations, including sushi, IMO. I think it would also go well with lighter Southeast Asian fare.

Buy again?  YES

I won't lie. I was a little taken by the colors and the
gold fluorishes on the label...

The roast chicken we had with it. Perfect pairing.

Salud,

shinae

FAST FOOD - Naan Pizza...

For the past week or so, I've been awakened by the smell of autumn in the air early in the morning. And though the crispness that comes with it has historically been an olfactory pep pill for me, I've noticed that it's also been bringing me a mild sense of anxiety. And I've subconsciously been reaching to understand why.

My first naan pizza - a Margherita.

But just now, sitting here in the darkness of too early, in the stillness of everyone else's sleep, and with the windows open, I took a deep whiff of that smell and realized that while it smells of the impending coolness and briskness I love so well, it's also the harbinger of the time of year I like to call *Holiday Clusterfuck*. A time of year that I have long decided to decide is no longer for me.

On another day, chorizo, red onion and basil for the Girl...

- Kids wanting to buy fifty dollar costumes that they'll wear for all of three hours while they're running around trying to get candy in a neighborhood that seems to prefer not to celebrate Halloween;

- you thinking about how you're going to prepare a bird you don't even like to eat for the one holiday you can actually get behind while having it ruined for you because you're subjected to Christmas carols wherever you go so you'll subliminally begin the Zombie Shopping Apocalypse Countdown in your mind like the good sheeple they want you to be;

- everyone around you trying to figure out how they're going to pay for all the crap all the grabbing hands around them want to be given on a day of the year that's supposed to be all about a little swaddled babe you don't even worship sent to bring peace, love, and compassion to Earth...

It's enough to make a holiday hating binch want to hibernate til February if I didn't love autumn so damned much.

What the Girl had plus sauteed mushrooms and
pickled jalapenos for me and the Man...

What in Hell does this have to do with naan (nahn) pizza? Consciously, nothing but the fact that it was a revelation that presented itself at roughly the same moment it occurred to me to post about my latest happy kitchen accident. But on a subconscious level, it may very well be the synthesis of writing about a good and fast meal idea on the verge of a time of year when a lot of us feel like there are so many demands made of our personal reserves that we can hardly come up for air much less make dinner.

NAAN PIZZA

I've been very blessed this year to be able to spend as much time as I care to in the kitchen, so my recipes are rarely suited for busy workday dinners. But other limitations such as budget sometimes coax my hand into making something that, by its nature, cannot take a lot of time.

A few days ago, too hungry to wait until dinner to eat and left with one frozen hunk of animal protein that needed to be saved for another day and some other odds and ends that needed to be used up lest they should go to waste, I pulled:

- the last piece of naan,
- 2 half-used and withering Roma tomatoes,
- 1 stray clove of garlic,
- a leftover chunk of Monterey Jack with a tiny growth of mold on it (I'm no stranger to excising mold from cheese), and
- a few leaves of basil,

and I made myself a surprisingly good thin-crust Margherita-esque pizza. While the storebought naan as naan was just serviceable as compared to the good and fresh stuff you get at a good Indian restaurant, it turned out to be a superior palette for making a quick homemade thin crust pizza as compared to the usual shortcut options of either Boboli or even Trader Joe's raw pizza dough, which I find to be salty, dense and overworked.

A closeup of the grownups' 'zza...

Since we're using storebought bread as crust, there's no real recipe here, but a few guidelines:

- Preheat your oven to 425F.

- As naan can be more porous than Boboli or pizza dough, give the upside a light brushing of olive oil and a thin layer of cheese before saucing to keep it from getting soggy, then give it the usual sprinkling of cheese.

- As with regular pizza, if you're using multiple toppings, try not to layer them one on top of the other, and rather spread them out in a single layer. Stacked toppings make for more steam. More steam makes for more sogging.

- As these are individual pizzas and bake in as little as 8 minutes, it's better to cut the toppings into smaller or thinner pieces. (The only reason the mushrooms on that one are so thick is because I bought them pre-sliced for another purpose.)

- Tossing raw vegetable toppings in a little bit of oil helps to cook them faster in the oven and also keeps them from leaching too much water.

- Give your baking surface a generous brushing of olive oil to help crisp the edges and bottom. If you like really brown and crisp edges, brush the top edges with a little extra olive oil too.

And finally, bake for at least 8 minutes, and up to 12 or 13 minutes for really crisp crust in a PREHEATED 425F oven, and enjoy.  :)

Bah humbug,

shinae

In Cheap Vino Veritas...

"Don't cook with wine you wouldn't drink."

pot roast made with $1.99 shiraz cab that didn't
make for the best drinking, but made a
damned fine pot roast...

How many times have I watched a cooking show where the host tells you to cook *only* with wine you would drink? If they meant not to use that stuff actually labeled *cooking wine* which really is the nastiest swill ever, and salty to boot, I would heartily agree. But since *wine you would drink* is a pretty subjective thing, I think the implication is fairly clear:

Don't buy wine, either for drinking or cooking, that doesn't cost at least as much as whatever arbitrary minimum pricepoint makes you feel or look like you're not being cheap.

Now, how much do I wanna bet that most of those same tv "chefs" couldn't taste a qualitative difference between coq au vin using a five to seven dollar bottle of red and a twenty or even fifty dollar bottle?

This is not to say that there aren't people out there who can taste the difference. But it is to say that I think we are often discouraged from trying to make a great meal, or from feeling our meals are great, because a lot of network-anointed foodpundits have decided that we need to use "only" and "of course" extra virgin olive oil (which often doesn't even go with the food they prescribe it for), "good" wine, organic produce, free-range meat, and the list goes on... without any real philosophical or technical integrity to back it up.

It's a kind of snobbery that, at the very least, serves to tell people who can't or won't shop for the *best* (read: *most expensive*) their money can buy that their food choices are inferior. I'll even take it a step further and say it's a cynical marketing tactic that encourages us to make icons to be emulated out of shills who can chop, talk, and smile at the same time, so we'll spend money on whatever gadget, ingredient or lifestyle they're shilling.

I'm not saying we shouldn't opt for locally and/or organically grown food if the option is a reasonable one for us given our constraints. I'm not saying extra virgin olive oil should never be used, just that we shouldn't be ashamed of using corn oil because Rachael Ray can't seem to make anything without her beloved *EE-VEE-OH-OH-EXTRA-VIRGIN-AHHLIV-OIL*. I'm not saying that we shouldn't enjoy more expensive wine, either cooked or drunk, if it really brings us pleasure. And I'm certainly not saying we shouldn't try to make conscious and conscientious decisions about the origins of the food we choose to eat.

I am saying that we can and should make healthful and delicious food choices that work for us and our families without being subliminally browbeaten into aspirational consumerism. It's more than ok to make your coq au vin with 2 Buck Chuck and non-organic produce from a big box chain, and it's ok to cook it in an old RevereWare Dutch oven you bought at a thrift store instead of an aubergine colored Le Creuset from Williams-Sonoma.

I'm saying that it is totally ok to make the best of what we have and what we can reasonably afford without regard for what they're trying to sell us, and to feel good about it.

And I will also say this - if you give me a case of Barolo, you can be sure that every last drop of that shizz is going straight down my gullet and not into a pot of marinara.

shinae

Nuoc Cham aka AP Fish Sauce...

I shared this recipe on my guest post over at Opera Girl Cooks, but enough people have asked me how to make this stuff that I thought I should share it here, too.
__________

If you've ever had cha gio (jchah ZUH) (deep fried spring rolls) at a Vietnamese restaurant, you've likely gotten a bowl of nuoc cham (noohk JCHAHM) to go with it. Nuoc cham is that sweet and salty fish sauce based dipping sauce that seems too watery to be considered a sauce in the context of most other cuisines but somehow works beautifully with the crunch of the roll, the savory of the filling, and the crisp of the lettuce and herbs you're supposed to wrap around the roll (which I notice a lot of people don't - I think they're missing out).

BBQ pork bun, dressed with nuoc cham

It's also the dressing you get when you order a bowl of bun (boohn), whether it be topped with aforementioned cha gio, grilled pork, shrimp, or any combination of the three.

a salad of red lettuce, Persian cukes, red onion, and fresh
mint and cilantro, dressed with a
nuoc cham based dressing

And in my kitchen, it is a mother sauce of sorts. I most often use it to dress bun, but I also modify it to make regular salad dressing or to make a lighter dipping sauce for goi cuon (the fresh summer rolls), and most recently, to dress a Thai style slaw to throw on some jumbo hotdogs. With an extra squeeze of citrus and a splash of oil, it makes a great quick marinade for fish.

our Labor Day dinner of Thai slawdog, the slaw
also dressed with some leftover nuoc cham

And the best thing is it keeps indefinitely in the fridge. You could make some today for your noodle salad, and whatever's left over will taste just as good with the spring rolls you decide to make a month from today.

BASIC NUOC CHAM
Makes about 3/4 cup sauce

- 1/4 cup fish sauce
- 1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons water
- 3 Tablespoons fresh lime or lemon juice
- 1/4 cup + 1 Tablespoon sugar
- 1 to 2 cloves garlic, crushed

Stir or whisk all ingredients together in a bowl until sugar is completely dissolved.

basic nuoc cham

nuoc cham with minced red onion for an added layer
of savory flavor, sliced fresh serranos for heat,
and a splash of oil for extra body

There are so many ways you can dress up the basic sauce. For dressing, you could add a splash more of an acid element like fresh citrus juice and some oil. You can add fresh mint, basil, or cilantro. A dollop of sriracha or chili garlic paste is also a great addition, as are a few slices of fresh chilies such as jalapeno, serrano, or even habanero.

If you have questions or suggestions on ways to use it, please do comment. :)

Off to wash dishes and select more recipes for the book...

shinae

STRANGE GRUB - Stir-Fried Sand Fleas...

I probably should have started with the uni post, but this is the first post in what I *PLAN* (and to know me is to know that *plan* means something closer to *hope against my undisciplined behavior patterns*) to be a regular feature in which I eat what I know other people consider to be weird crap, and then write about it.

Though I am utterly humbled by things like Zimmern eating woodworms in the Philippines and Bourdain choking down poopy wildebeest poopchute in Namibia (I think it was wildebeest, anyway), I have always considered myself a fairly adventurous eater. I attribute a good deal of it to having been born in Korea and being introduced at an early age to a lot of food ideas and flavor profiles that most folks here in the US might consider challenging.

Emerita talpoida
aka sand crab
aka mole crab
aka sand flea
aka sea cicada
aka What's For Dinner :)

When I do eat things that make other people go *ewww*, it's out of sincere enjoyment or hope that I will find enjoyment, and not for sport or novelty. I won't eat things on a dare that I don't think have the potential to be delicious to me by whatever complex calculus I derive that it could. So while I have eaten hot vin lon (the Vietnamese version of balut) and enjoyed it, you probably won't find me eating dog soup because I'm pretty sure my emotional attachment to dogs will keep me from tasting whatever kind of yumminess is to be found in a morsel of canine.

I imagine these posts might really gross some people out, but I'm not writing them so much for the ick factor. I'm writing them because this is the truth, if an occasional one, of the way I eat. And because I think it a worthwhile endeavor to explore the idea that the edibility and deliciousness of a thing is very much a mental, social, and cultural construct.

a big'un - about an inch long

Why will I eat an unhatched baby duck but not a baby dog? Why am I more willing to eat these sand crabs that I'm writing about today, which are essentially the beetles or roaches of the sea, than grasshoppers and earthworms of land? Why do people who eat lips and assholes of cows stuffed into a casing think it's gross to eat chicken feet at a dim sum parlor? It is a strange logic indeed by which we decide which grub is too strange to eat, and which not.

If anything, I hope that this post (and hopefully the ones to follow in this series) serves to open minds, my own included, about the things people do or don't eat, will or won't eat, and why.

SPICY THAI CHILI GARLIC SAND FLEAS

Almost certain to be enough to serve the very limited number of people in your life who won't run away and retch at the thought of eating it.

When I first moved to Oceanside and found these critters washed up alive in the sand at the beach, I was reminded of something I had several years ago in Phuket that looked a lot like them. A couple weeks later, I watched Andrew Zimmern eating something very similar on a re-run of Bizarre Foods - Thailand and determined that if I were to find out these suckers were safely edible, which I did, I'd grab a handful the next time I could, and cook them up. Which I also did.

- a handful of sand fleas, soaked and rinsed thoroughly, 4 or 5 times, to get rid of all that sand
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 2 teaspoons fish sauce
- 1 Tablespoon brown sugar

- 3 Tablespoons oil for frying

- 1 wedge of lime to squeeze over the sand crabs before eating

1) Rinse your handful of sand fleas well and thoroughly, several times, in order to get the sand off their little sand flea persons.

I think I changed the water about five times... 

...to get them this clean.

2) Put them in the fridge for about 20 minutes so they'll fall asleep. *Zzzzzzzzzzzzz...*

3) Make your chili garlic sauce by mixing the chili garlic paste, minced garlic, fish sauce and brown sugar in a small bowl.

4) Heat your oil in a wok over high heat until it's screamin/smokin hot and throw your fleas in.

5) Stir fry them critters 2 to 3 minutes, or until the shells turn completely orange and have been orange for 20 seconds or so.

6) Pour in your chili garlic sauce and toss them little roaches til they're evenly coated.

7) Serve with a healthy squeeze of lime juice and a lot of frosty cold Singha which most of your guests will likely need in order to be able to choke one of these suckers down.

In all seriousness, they taste a lot like little shrimp crossed with soft shell crab if they were deep fried with the shell on and didn't have a lot of meat. Sweet, spicy, sticky, crunchy. Pretty decent beer food if you're not too skeeved by the idea of it to reframe it as food.

Really, folks. It's just a crustacean. Try getting me to eat a cockroach, though, and that's a whole 'nother story.

shinae

On Trolls, Chickens & Happy Endings...

I've talked before about Faustian bargains, and how I hope I don't succumb to one in a big way. But I've been dealing with some internet community related issues lately that have made me realize that, in some ways, in...

- starting this blog under my real name,

- disclosing some very personal thoughts and facts about my life,

- adding my picture and a link to my facebook in an (albeit successful) attempt to more closely relate with likeminded people (not to mention to test my blogging chops), and

- essentially keeping my web persona very much connected to my real identity,

I have made my own deal with likely a few devils.

The Devil in this latest transaction is the almost always anonymous and apparently deeply resentful, perhaps even emotionally stunted, stalker-troll. Not to be confused with the average troll who stokes flames based solely on the singular scenarios set before them in a given thread or article, the stalker-troll...

- latches on to their victim for some reason that likely has to do with painful and unresolved issues (like never being able to get laid by Asian chicks no matter how much money you spend on those money-grubbing whores),

- digs as deep as the web and the capacity of their creepy stalker minds will allow into the internet presence of their victim,

- fantasizes that they now know their victim so well as to be able to make pointed, scathing, and of course brilliantly snarky observations about their character, and then

- shits in the fora in which their victim participates with their passive aggressive verbal diarrhea - indirectly, but very specifically, and armed with certain and damning (public) knowledge gleaned from their crafty ten-fingered research, slaying their victims - if only in their minds - with ad hominem attacks.

I knew going into this that they existed, and that as an Asian woman, I was likely opening myself up to all kinds of creepy, fetishist shithead shenanigans. But I won't lie. For a few minutes today, I had a bad case of the heebie jeebies and wondered for a moment if I should continue doing what I'm doing.

I don't really have an issue with people making judgments about me based on my writing, my background, or even my looks. It's only human, and gawd knows I do it all the time (sometimes accurately, other times not so much). But some people, apparently overcome with their own internal loser-monologue and the apparent sexual deprivation that is a natural consequence of that monologue, take it a wee too far for a decent First Amendment loving person's comfort.

And possibly the worst thing about what they do is that they do it anonymously, and ultimately, cowardly.

But then I realize that kind of behavior is par for the course for someone who hasn't the balls or the decency to own the self-hatred that propels them to say really rude, uncouth, and downright creepy things intended solely to injure someone else's psyche, all the while hiding behind a screenname. And I'm nothing if not a realist.

So to all you stalker-trolls of past, present and future, I know I can't stop you from choking your mental chickens thinking about ways to victimize people like me who own our sicknesses publicly, but I do hope you'll get some relief for your torture. I hear they offer awesome foot massages for next to nothing in Little Saigon.

And the best part is you don't have to pay for dinner at Mastro's before you don't get a happeee enddingggg!!! ^^

shinae