Five Frugal Dinner Recipes, #2

Continuing our series of main dishes that feed two or more people for less than $10...much fun can be had with packaged rice mixes. More advanced cooks work out their own recipes for spicy rice mixes, but here are some easy recipes to get beginners started.

Each of these recipes costs less than $10. You can afford to add at least one of the options suggested in the recipe. If feeding a multitude, add another box of rice (it could be plain brown rice) and add all the options; this will cost more than $10 but it's still a frugal way to give everyone a rich, hearty meal with some recognizable meat on the plate.

Frugal Dinner Recipe #6: Sweet & Savory Rice 

1. Great Value Canned Chicken Breast is actually canned chicken; in some cans you get mostly dark meat. Pick this out, along with the visible fat, and give them to your pets. While your pets are eating outside the kitchen, close the kitchen door and proceed. Put the chicken and its broth ($2 to 2.50) in a saucepan.

2. Stir in 1 box of Zatarain's Pineapple Coconut Rice mix. Sometimes I substitute Cilantro Lime or Yellow rice mix. Each of these costs $2 or less. Stir well and turn on the heat.

3. Open 1 can of Del Monte Pineapple in Heavy Syrup. If you're a baby-boomer you will note right away that it's not heavy syrup, which was viscous and tended to scorch. It is light syrup. Anyway, drain the syrup into the pan. If you have bite-sized pieces of pineapple, dump them in. If rings, cut them into bite-sized pieces, then dump. Add water and/or fruit juice and/or fruit soda to make a total of 2 cups of liquid. (If you don't know what that looks like in your saucepan, drain the chicken broth and pineapple juice into a measure and fill it.)

4. Time cooking for 20 minutes after it boils.

5. Pass salt or soy sauce. Great Value canned goods tend to be undersalted. 

6. You can substitute leftover chicken or turkey from your own cold roast, if you have one. Depending on how local the suppliers are you may be able to get fresh chicken or turkey, or chicken or turkey sausages, for $2 to $2.50 

7. You can add an onion and/or bamboo shoots, horsechestnut slices, or sliced radish or jica fama for a more savory meal, and/or a can of mandarin oranges, peaches, or pears, a little fresh peeled or preserved ginger, kumquats if you have a tree, and/or almonds, cashews, or litchis, for a sweeter meal. 

Frugal Dinner Recipe #7: Spanish Rice

1. Start with about a cup of cooked, boned, defatted meat of whatever kind appeals to you. In Spain it could be a leg of lamb or goat kid, hare or rabbit, pork, or beef, probably more often than chicken, which is what I usually use. Pick it off the bones of a rotisserie chicken, or use a can of chicken chunks as above. You could also press, marinate, slice, and fry some extra-firm tofu for a vegan meal. Or use a can of mackerel or tuna. Depending on your protein, add it to the rice before cooking or cook separately.

2. For the rice heat 1 pound of Great Value canned tomatoes and 1 cup water, or a 24-ounce can of tomatoes, as available (or use tomatoes from your garden).If using meat cooked in water, add that water, which has now become broth, to the tomatoes. Stir in 1 box of Zatarain's Spanish Rice mix. You can also chop in an onion, shallot, or a spoonful of garlic, and/or any parsley or cilantro stems you have lying about, and/or olives, either sweet or hot peppers, a carrot, even celery if you have some celery that you know is unsprayed. Heat rice and vegetables.

3. When it boils, cover the rice and cook for 20 minutes. Spanish Rice is supposed to be on the soupy side

Frugal Dinner Recipe #8: Packaged Rice and Beans

1. You may have noticed how many recipes advise you to rinse and drain canned beans. Do this if you are on a low-sodium diet. Otherwise, it's not necessary. Bean broth thickens slightly as it cools. This thicker liquid contains protein and nutrients from the beans and is safe to eat in dishes where, like this one, it soaks into the rice anyway. Measure 2 cups of bean broth and/or leftover meat and/or vegetable broth from the refrigerator and/or plain water.

2. Stir in 1 package Tony Chachere's Red Beans & Rice mix (under $2). 

3. Add 2 to 4 cans Great Value beans (less than $1 each), depending on how many people you want to feed and/or how many servings you want to freeze. If using a large enough pan you can chop in any clean carrots, celery, peppers, and/or tomatoes you want to add, and garlic and/or onion to taste. Chop carrots as finely as possible so they can cook in 20 minutes.

4. Let it simmer for 20 minutes after it boils.

5. Pass chopped sweet onions, parsley and/or cilantro and/or other herbs from the garden, tomatoes, chives, radishes, even cucumber slices, as available, with bowls of hot rice and beans. 

6. Rice and beans are a complete protein but you can serve meat with them, on the side fresh from the grill, or reheated and simmered in with the rice and veg, if you really want to.

Frugal Dinner Recipe #9: Dirty Rice 

1. Zatarain's Dirty Rice mix is seriously "dirtied" with pepper and spices and must be cooked with meat and vegetables, I think, to be edible. Tony Chachere's is milder but still benefits from cooking with meat and veg. Pick a package. Either one costs about $2.

2. Pick a protein. In the same way Spanish people eat Spanish Rice with almost any protein, Cajuns eat Dirty Rice with almost any protein. If using Zatarain's rice, read "plain ground meat" for sausage--it will absorb salt, pepper, and sage from the rice mix. If using any meat that is not fully cooked leftovers, brown until all red or pinkish color is gone.

3. Stir in 2 cups of water, the rice mixture, and any tomatoes, sweet onions, sweet bell peppers, clean celery, or other savory vegetables you might want to use up.

4. Let it simmer for 20 minutes after it boils.

5. To feed extra people or freeze extra portions, serve small bowls and fill up with fresh cut lettuce, onion, tomato, cucumber, radish, sunflower seeds, pecans, parsley, cilantro, wild garlic, or other raw vegetables and/or nuts as available.

Frugal Dinner Recipe #10: Poverella 

1. This web site is not going to advise eating any freshwater or saltwater shellfish, although a quick harvest of just a few of each kind that is locally available is traditional in Spanish paella. Many people like shellfish and they're often loaded with nutrients; they're also susceptible to bacteria and parasites. It's your choice, If you don't want to worry about shellfish, buy a can or package of fish and flake it. A can of tuna or mackerel costs about $2.

2. Boil water to cook 1 package of Zatarain's or Mahatma yellow rice (less than $2). While the water boils, cut up onion, garlic, tomatoes (you can use tomato juice as part of the water), drain a can of black beans (less than $1), and shell or open a can of green peas (less than $1), as wanted. 

3. Add rice, veg, and fish to boiling water, Cover and cook about 20 minutes after it boils.

Grandma Bonnie Peters' Gluten-Free Recipe: Garbanzo Salad, Soup, or Spread

Garbanzos are most often planted, in the United States, as cover crops in between wheat growing seasons. Because wheat is the hardest of all crops to weed, the one that gave people the idea of trying just to poison the field so weeds couldn't grow, garbanzos tend to be loaded with pesticide residues. 

Before glyphosate many people formed a prejudice against garbanzos, thinking they were allergic to these "chick peas" themselves. Since 2010 a different set of people may have thought we were allergic to garbanzos and to so many other things. The good new is that the majority of those people aren't even allergic to wheat. They have been reacting to glyphosate. 

When garbanzos have not had chemicals sprayed on them, and not grown in chemical-poisoned soil, they've always been a good healthy food, full of nutrients, to which very few people are allergic. They do need to be fully cooked, which takes a few hours, and used in a diet that includes plenty of water. Like all legumes they react with the acid in our bodies to form gas bubbles that are harmless, but annoying, if we're not well hydrated.

Grandma Bonnie Peters started cooking gluten-free vegan food before 2010, and never adjusted to the horrible new reality that the diet that had restored her health had become toxic in its own way, with glyphosate. All the vegetables in this recipe tend, even today, to be full of glyphosate. 

We still need a ban on this poison. Chemical companies are still fighting tooth and nail to prevent our getting one. We need to fight back. Identify farms that use glyphosate. Publicize where those farms are located, so that everyone can refuse to buy anything from those farms. In the local area, everyone should also avoid speaking to, or touching, or working with, or trading with, or meeting in any social group, the farmers who are still bitterly clinging to glyphosate. If people agree to do this consistently there will be no need for violence or for additional government regulations. 

The Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate are not decent human beings. We stop treating them like human beings. They have become things--walking vats of toxic waste. They have no place in human society. Make them know it, and within a year they should be begging people to accept payment for holding their "farms" for the seven to ten years the land will need to recover from the Vicious Pesticide Cycle, while the Bitter Clingers move to basement apartments in cities and do menial work that feels penitential to them, and pray daily that people will show more empathy toward them than they have shown toward other people. 

If and when this strategy works, then this recipe will stop being a sad memory and become an actual recipe we can use, as it used to be.

Gluten-Free Vegan Garbanzo Salad, Soup, or Spread all begin with the same ingredients:

2 heaping cups cooked garbanzos (2 15-16-oz cans)

1 bell pepper

2 carrots

2 celery sticks

2 T chopped parsley, or more

½ cup chopped English walnuts

Optional seasonings: salt, pepper, lemon juice, onion, garlic, etc., as you like, but taste the dish before seasoning. It’s flavorful all by itself.

Method for Gluten-Free Garbanzo Salad

Clean and chop the raw vegetables. Toss with nuts and garbanzos. Serve on plates lined with lettuce. Garnish with radishes when they’re in season. Pass salt, pepper, lemon juice, and/or mayonnaise. 

Alternatively, break up green leaf lettuce, romaine, or other salad greens; toss them with the salad, and serve in bowls.

Method for Gluten-Free Garbanzo Soup

Heat the garbanzos in a generous amount of water and/or broth, adding the chopped peppers, carrots, and celery while bringing the liquid to boil. Simmer until the vegetables are soft. Sprinkle in parsley and nuts.

Method for Gluten-Free Garbanzo Spread

Cook the garbanzos, but leave the other vegetables raw. Grind everything, including the parsley and nuts, with a few spoonfuls of broth in a blender or food processor. Season as you like. Lay a piece of rice bread or corn bread, or lettuce, on a plate. Carefully spread the vegetable mixture thickly over the bread, and eat with a fork.

Truly gluten-free bread, by definition, doesn’t make the kind of sandwiches you can hold in one hand and eat while doing something else. Some gluten-intolerant people can use bread thickened with potato and tapioca starch; some breads of this type can be used for sandwiches. Gluten-tolerant people can, of course, spread the mixture on wheat bread. 

 

GBP advertised vegan meals, and she herself was one of the people who thrived on the no-added-fats school of vegan cuisine. She would never have added even a teaspoon of oil to any of these dishes. I don't think they need oil either, but some people might  want to add a teaspoon of flaxseed oil for essential fatty acids or sesame oil for flavor. Some gluten-free people might even spread this vegetable spread on a piece of boned and flattened chicken.

Five Frugal Dinner Recipes, #1

Yes, you can make dinner--for two!--for less than $10. This ten-part series provides actual recipes for the main dish. For side dishes you can...

* heat up a can of vegetables 

* cook or reheat some brown rice

* bake or fry some cornbread

* eat some fruit for dessert

...while staying inside our $10 limit. The best way to have good, cheap, clean fruit and vegetables is to use the ones that grow on your property. You may be able to raise and freeze corn and beans; you may need to learn to use wild plants that tolerate less sun or less rain than corn and beans require. It's good to learn the nutrient properties of your local wild plants. Some are similar to supermarket produce; some are much richer in certain nutrients, and some may contain a different balance of nutrients. When you know what is safe to eat and where it fits into your overall diet plan, you can save a lot of money by eating the "weeds" as well as the "crops" from your garden.

However, wild plants are usually seasonal, so this series will not rely on them in main dish recipes. This series will imagine that you eat wild plants as side dishes when they're available.

For maximum accessibility, these recipes use foods sold at Wal-Mart because that's the biggest US chain where most people will be able to get the same things for the same prices. Substituting alternatives you can get from locally owned stores, including convenience stores, is recommended but will probably raise the cost of the main dish. 

These are the quicker and easier recipes that came to mind. Some frugal recipes take time and labor; not these. At most you have to keep things simmering for an hour or less.

Main Dish #1: Chili Bean Stew 

* Heat 1 can Southgate chili beef (usually under $2) in a saucepan. 

* Stir in 1 can Great Value Spicy Chili Beans (under $1).

* Stir in 1 can Great Value tomatoes (also about $1).

* Let it boil for about 1 minute, stirring to prevent scorching, and serve on about 1/3 of a bag of Great Value corn chips (the bag costs about $2).

* Top with sliced green onion (or wild garlic) and/or chopped fresh herb leaves to taste. 

Main Dish #2: Basic Chicken and Rice 

* Drain liquid from 1 can Great Value chicken chunks (about $2.50) and add water to make 2 cups. Bring this liquid to the boil. You can add salt, pepper, or spices as available.

* Add 1 cup Great Value brown rice. (under $1.50). Cook as directed. "Instant" rice is more expensive but, once boiled and cooled, it's done. "Unconverted" rice needs to come to a full boil and then simmer for most of an hour, so it's a good deal if you have steady heat and want to heat the kitchen. 

* Optional: Chop in 1/2 to 1 mature onion now, or wait and add sliced green onion, wild garlic, and/or herbs later. A mature onion costs about 50 cents, in season, alone or in a bag. 

* During the last five or ten minutes of cooking time, pick over and add the chicken meat. You can also add raw, or drained thawed, or drained canned vegetables if you can get clean ones. 

* When clean, raw green vegetables like lettuce are available, line plates with them and top with rice and chicken. 

* Top with sliced green onion and/or herbs, or other raw vegetables like tomato, cucumber, or celery as available. 

Main Dish #3: Fish Cakes 

* Pick out inner skin, if any, and flake 1 can fish (tuna, mackerel, salmon) ($2-3) in its liquid.

* Add 1-2 eggs (under $0.50) and mix in with a fork. 

* If you can squeeze in the juice of a lemon and sprinkle in some tarragon, the house won't smell like fish the next day. 

* You can also mince in 1/2 to 1 onion (about 50 cents) if you like.

* Add self-rising corn meal (about 50 cents worth out of a $4-5 bag) and/or corn chip crumbs ($1-2 worth out of a $2 bag) to make a thick stiff dough.

* Oil a skillet, heat until it sizzles, shape the dough into patties, and fry until both sides are brown and crisp. This usually takes ten or fifteen minutes.

* These go well with warmed-up green beans, or with just about any raw vegetables, or both.

Main Dish #4: Turkeyburgers 

* Oil a skillet and heat until it sizzles.

* Shape a 1-pound package ground turkey (less than $5) into patties the size of hamburgers. You can season them at this point if you like, or wait and add seasonings later.

* Pan-fry the burgers slowly on medium heat until they are done all the way through. This usually takes about fifteen minutes, depending on how thick you made your burgers. Be sure they're done; some people like rare beef but I never heard of anyone liking rare turkey.

* Slice a supermarket tomato or cut up a home-grown one (less than $1), mince an onion (about $0.50 but most people use less than half an onion on a burger), and mince some other herbs if you like.

* Serve the burgers in burger buns if you really like that tradition, or go gluten-free and eat them between a couple of green leaves on either side. 

Main Dish #5: Vegan Lentil Pottage 

* Cook 2 cups lentils as directed. They usually need to be simmered in an equal volume of water for 20 to 40 minutes after they boil. Cost of lentils is below $2.

* Cook  1 cup brown rice as directed. They usually need to be simmered in the same way the lentils do, and you can usually cook them together in one pot if you don't want to bother cooking them separately. Cost of rice is also below $2.

* While they hold their shape, but have become tender, combine rice and lentils. Taste. Most people add salt, which is adequate (I think) to bring out the flavor of the main ingredients, but you can add other spices if you have them. Oregano and rosemary are traditional.

* You can cook a chopped onion with rice and lentils, or mince in green onions or wild garlic shoots after cooking. Many people also like to cook a chopped carrot and/or celery stick with lentils, which will add flavor and nutrition if you can get clean carrots and celery. You can also add a tomato before or after cooking lentils, and top them with any fresh minced herbs available.

Social Cat Family Like Pepitas

This post is a rerun. It went down for a while because Serena didn't like pepitas. Diego, Drudge, and Dilbert like pepitas.

Pepitas are the flat, crunchy green seeds of pumpkins. As a snack they were most popular in Mexico, and, when sold in the U.S., they're usually identified by their Mexican name. What's packaged as "pumpkin seeds" are usually still in their white outer shells, for which I personally don't care. But I do like shelled pepitas, and so do the resident cats at the Cat Sanctuary.

Pepitas have a mild, nutty flavor that I find pleasing with or without salt. The cats like them without salt.

One reason why the cats may enjoy these seeds is that cats and dogs inevitably tend to pick up intestinal parasites, and eating pepitas apparently helps the animals expel these parasites. I'm not an expert, but I have seen scrawny, wormy-looking animals gain strength and weight after they developed a taste for pepitas.

Pepitas also contain vitamins, minerals, and protein, and have a lower fat content than nuts. They can be considered a healthy snack. I hesitate to mention this because I'm turned off any food or drink by any other person trying to tell me that it's "good for me" and suspect other people feel the same way, but pepitas are nutritious for humans or animals.

When I share a pot of rice with the cats, I started mixing in a few pepitas when I didn't have chicken. (Back then I often made a cheap meal of brown rice mixed with a package of ramen noodles, which were of course flavored with meat "extracts.") I learned that some cats liked pepitas and would eat plain rice, mixed with pepitas, without any meat flavoring.

Grandma Bonnie Peters uses pepitas in some of her vegan concoctions; she buys them in bulk and often sends a package of cracked or ground pepitas to the cats. Heather, Irene, and Ivy are pepita enthusiasts.

"The web site hasn't heard from you for a while," I said to GBP. "What do you want to post? What does the web site need?"

She said, "Pumpkin seeds." There's no such thing as a vegan cat, although I have known house cats who lived with Seventh-Day Adventists who ate vegan meals in the house and did their hunting out of sight of their human friends. There are Seventh-Day Adventists who seriously try to encourage cats to eat vegan meals.

"Not the cats, the web site," I said.

She said, "Maybe the web site needs pumpkin seeds too."

Well, maybe it does.

Pepitas are not necessarily a substitute for a worm treatment by a vet, but if your cat enjoys the nutty crunch pepitas add to her (or his) dinner, indulging this taste now and then just might extend the time between those pricey (and not very pleasant) treatments.

Ingredients for a Pepita Meal for Cats and Their Humans 

1/2 to 1 cup brown rice

1/4 to 1/2 cup cracked and/or crushed and/or ground pepitas

1 to 2 cups cooked spinach or other greens

Salt, pepper, garlic powder, or other seasonings (humans only)

Method for a Pepita Meal for Cats and Their Humans 

1. Cook the rice as directed.

2. Cook the greens by heating them in the water that clings to them after washing, or use a can of precooked greens.

3. Combine rice, greens, and pepitas. Divide among humans' and cats' dishes.

4. Pass seasonings for the humans.

Variations 

Although this is a nutritious, protein-rich meal all by itself, you can add meat if you want to. Or any of those wheat-and-soy "meat analogs" Seventh-Day Adventists prefer, if you eat them.

Or sunflower seeds.

Or slivered almonds.

Or garbanzos.

One of the Recipes for Grandma Bonnie's Veggie Burgers

During Grandma Bonnie Peters' lifetime, the recipe for her Veggie Burgers was an official trade secret. I don't know whether she wrote it down or memorized it. I know that the Veggie Burgers that were sold in stores were made in industrial quantities and shipped out frozen. So this is not the recipe for the popular sage-flavored version some readers may remember eating. The proportions for a family meal's worth of any recipe are different from the proportions for the industrial version. 

Actually, because it was fresh baked, this version tasted better. Actually, finding the recipe brought back long-buried memories of the fun we used to have, cooking with vegetables, before 2009 when most commercially grown vegetables started to have glyphosate sprayed right on the part people ate. Will we ever be able to trust and enjoy vegetables in that way again? 

These Veggie Burgers were developed specifically for use with a low-protein diet. For me, the key to enjoying them is to recognize that they're "burgers" in name only, or resemble hamburgers only in their size and the ways you could heat up pre-frozen ones. They are a vegetable loaf designed for patients eating a low-protein, low-fat diet. The onion and potato give them a savory flavor people on such diets tend to miss, but in protein and calories they're closer to the bun than to the hamburger. If a low-fat, low-protein diet has not been recommended for you, as it was for the patients who inspired GBP to market Veggie Burgers, you can eat these "burgers" with a bean soup or even a meat stew.

Anyway, this was something close to the recipe for Grandma Bonnie's Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers, in a size you can easily make at home. Some recipes for veggie burgers can be quite elaborate. GBP had worked out a few recipes that were as easy for her to throw together as a vegetable stir-fry or a pan of cornbread.

Ingredients for Family-Size Batch of Sage Veggie Burgers

1 can green beans (a pint-sized can)

2 cups your own vegetable stock

1/2 cup sunflower seed kernels

2 tablespoons oil

2 teaspoons molasses

1/4 cup of a safe soy sauce or Bragg's Liquid Aminos

 

1/4 cup dried onion flakes

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes

1 teaspoon dried basil

1 teaspoon paprika

2 teaspoons sage

1 cup rice flour

1-2 cups Betty Crocker Potato Buds (potato flakes) as necessary to make a dough

Salt

Method for Family-Size Batch of Sage Veggie Burgers

Heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

1. Grind the sunflower seed kernels and finely chop the green beans. This is most easily done in the blender or food processor. Drain the beans, saving their liquid to add to your vegetable stock pot or jar, and put them in the blender container.

2. Measure in two cups of vegetable stock. GBP used whatever vegetable cooking and canning liquids she had. Supermarkets sell vegetable stock, but I don't think GBP ever used it. It tends to contain added salt and monosodium glutamate and may contain glyphosate residues. Carrots and celery are key ingredients of traditional vegetable stock; they also soak up glyphosate like sponges. 

3. Blend these ingredients almost completely smooth. Then combine with the others in the blender or in a mixing bowl. Use enough potato flakes to make a wet but cohesive dough. Taste, and add up to a teaspoon of salt as needed. GBP said salt probably wouldn't be needed if you used soy sauce.

4. Shape patties. You will have six burger-sized patties, which will fit nicely on a baking sheet you can oil or line with your Silpat baking sheet liner. 

5. Bake 20 minutes, then turn the pan and check for browning and doneness. They will need to bake 5 or 10 minutes more.

6. Although people who eat wheat could eat these burgers in buns, the burgers are breadlike and make a very bready sandwich. GBP served them with a hot soup, vegetable, or bread and a cold lettuce-tomato-cucumber salad. 

Is It Safe to Make These Veggie Burgers Yet?

The commercial conglomerates refuse to tell you whether commercially sold vegetables, even the ones misleadingly labelled "organic," have been sprayed with glyphosate or something else that may cause symptoms. You have to be vigilant. Know your reactions and, if you have a reaction to vegetables, don't use that kind again. 

However, people have been complaining about and not using glyphosate-sprayed veg for several years now, and most companies have taken heed. My experience has been that green beans are usually fit to eat these days. Potatoes are riskier, but often safe. Rice and spices are usually safe to eat. If you have good sources of unsprayed vegetables, it's safe to enjoy these Veggie Burgers. Soy sauce is the ingredient in this recipe that is most likely to be contaminated. If you can't find glyphosate-free soy sauce, substitute a a little more vegetable broth and use the full teaspoon of salt.

And if GBP had not clung to the idea that "vegetables are so good for us, we should keep on eating them even if they're poisoned," she might have lived longer. So be careful about using vegetables. I love vegetables and recommend eating them when you can, but stop using them if you find that they contain glyphosate or other poisons.

Book Review: Dragons, Coffee, and Poisons

Title: Dragons, Coffee, and Poisons 

Author: Verena DeLuca

Date: 2020

Publisher: Aconite Cafe

Quote: "This secret menu is a list of the forever expanding Poison of the Week drinks at the cafe."

After a long shaggy-dog (or shaggy-cat) story about how some cats are dragons who assume cat form in order to come out of their caves and socialize with other dragons, this short book gives eight recipes for coffee-based beverages. Each one is named after a poisonous plant, but made with normal ingredients that are healthy in moderation. Flame lily suggests cinnamon candies, poisonous berries suggest raspberry syrup, etc. 

Recommended to coffee lovers with a sense of humor, this collection requires you either to have espresso machines and French presses or to befriend a friendly cafe barista (who should have both) to test the recipes. 

If you really enjoy this kind of humor, you will probably enjoy the longer murder mystery novels to which this mini-book was designed to be a trailer, too. 

And you can visit the Aconite Cafe, in cyberspace, at aconitecafe.com.  

Holiday Shopping and Thanksgiving Dinner with Compost

So after Wednesday's trip to Michaels, where I bought three "Pounds of Love" (blanket yarn) with the giftcard because the cotton I wanted was priced higher than it is at the other stores, I did some other things and then cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Having written a short story in which a character serves something similar to my Rice a la Garbage to visitors, I did that. It doesn't seem to have made anyone sicker than we were already. Here is the recipe.

That's not the color I bought. Amazon is not showing a picture of the color I bought. The company call the color chestnut; it's not the color of chestnuts or of chestnut wood. Yarn shoppers now know which color I mean.

Equipment

1. A Dutch Oven type of cooking pot with a nice tight lid. Both sealing in the steam and sealing out the compost are crucial for this recipe. Don’t use the pretty, enameled kind of Dutch Oven for cooking directly in a frugal fire. Plain, heavy metal is good.

2. A secure container for a small cooking fire—either a barrel, or a pit in the ground, or a grill, that allows 6-8 inches (about 20cm) around and below the pot.

3. An average day’s supply of junk paper—junkmail, newspapers, manuscripts, wrappers, etc. About 50 pieces of paper will do. If you use canned vegetables or packaged rice, add the wrappers. One or two pieces of thin flimsy plastic (wrappers, photos, supermarket shopping bags) can help get the paper going in damp weather. Plastic that won't lie flat in a stack of papers burns poorly and releases toxic fumes, so it should be sent in for professional recycling.

4. Dry wood or charcoal: Rice can be cooked over a big fire, of course, but what I’m describing is a frugal little fire designed to get rid of trash and economize on fuel. By cleaning up what your hedge, shade trees, and fruit trees drop on the ground you should have a nice collection of dead wood in your shed. Trees shed lots of twigs and sticks, relatively few logs. For this recipe you don’t need to use up any logs. Take a scant handful of twigs and sticks, about a foot long and not more than an inch thick.

5. Contents of your Sun-Mar toilet, the drier the better. (Remember, you’re meant to put as much dry organic matter as possible—vegetable scraps, garden prunings and clippings, paper, peat—in the Sun-Mar to help soak up and dry out liquids. Even the sand or commercial litter that sticks to cat excrement won’t hurt anything in a Sun-Mar toilet, although it certainly would in an oldfashioned water-flush toilet..) Recognizable food scraps or excrement will dry out and burn slowly, making lots of foul smoke. Burn only well carbonized, peaty looking stuff that will char further and retain heat.

Ingredients

1. Meat, fish, beans, or those soy-wheat “vegetarian meat analogs” if you can eat them, are optional. For this recipe the important thing about any protein you add is that it needs to be fully precooked so that it warms up as the rice does. Grilling over a trash fire? Urgh. So use leftovers from the refrigerator if you have them, or use a can of your protein of choice.

2. Packet of quick-cooking rice. For cooking over a trash fire, Success Rice, Minute Rice, and Zatarain’s rice mixes are ideal. The company has been relatively proactive about glyphosate, so the rice is relatively safe, and the packets take just about as long to cook as an average day’s supply of burnable garbage takes to burn.

3. Water to cook the rice.

4. Vegetables, spices, and nuts are optional. If you like, or don’t hate, garlic and turmeric, they’re rich in trace minerals and good for blood pressure and immunity.

Mix & Match Variations

* Some Zatarain’s flavors are quite spicy (several with turmeric). You can extend meals, add fibre and protein, and also mellow the flavor by combining a packet of flavored rice with a packet of plain brown rice.

* All Zatarain’s flavors go well with canned chicken. If using fish, other canned meat, or “meat analogs,” test to find your favorites.

* All rice, with or without meat, goes well with any member of the Allium family. I like wild garlic in season. I live close enough to Georgia to have access to Vidalia onions in summer; they’re worth paying for.

* All rice, with or without meat, goes well with any kind of beans.

* Zatarain’s Jambalaya Rice goes well with a little extra water and okra, when you have a safe source of okra.

* Zatarain’s Yellow Rice goes well with green peas—fresh, canned, or frozen--when you have a safe source of peas.

* Zatarain’s Spanish Rice positively begs for tomatoes, when you can trust your source of tomatoes.

* Zatarain’s Long Grain & Wild Rice goes well with fish.

* Zatarain’s Mexican Rice with Pinto Beans is better with additional pinto beans, when you have a safe source of beans.

* Wild greens picked out of your garden or pesticide-free not-a-lawn are best, to my taste, when they’re nibbled raw, leaf by leaf until your body tells you you’ve had enough. Non-wild greens go very well with rice and any form of chicken or turkey, but they soak up glyphosate and other nasty residues; I've gone off them.

* Venison is special. Deer are one of those species that nature really seems to have intended us to eat; they will overpopulate, and the consequences of deer overpopulation are nasty. As deer populations are increasing, I'd rather see male deer on a grill than on someone's grille--or beside the road. However, some alarming diseases have been found in local deer. Others ate my share of the venison that was consumed at this Thanksgiving Dinner. After age 80 I plan to eat venison.

Method

1. Clear fully carbonized residues away from fireplace. Make sure the Dutch Oven has a solid support. If not using a grill rack, put a flat stone, brick, or log in the center of the fireplace and surround it with compost. Compost should not touch the Dutch Oven.

(Important: In Virginia a barrel fire is almost idiot-proof—scraps of paper will occasionally blow out of the barrel on the updraft, but 99% of the time they’ll burn out harmlessly even if they land in the woodpile, because nothing ever gets dry enough to blaze up the way wildfires do in California. Barrel fires are legal even during drought-related bans on outdoor fires, but even on the East Coast we need to have a few jugs of water around a fireplace. Someone should watch a fire as long as flames are visible. I once talked to an old lady who once saw a scrap of paper blow out of a barrel and ignite dry vegetation in the yard.)

2. Wash hands thoroughly, combine ingredients in the Dutch Oven, and set it in its place.

3. If cooking in a barrel, you almost have to use a modified tepee-type fire-lay. Arrange paper, twigs, and sticks in a circle (more or less) around the Dutch Oven, letting them stand up vertically to maximize draft. Ignite. Continue adding pieces of tinder as the first few blaze away. By the time the paper's used up the twigs should be, too, and the sticks should have burned down to ashy coals.

4. If the weather is right you may be able to hear the rice boiling in the Dutch Oven. If not, rice will cook anyway. Know your pot. When mine feels too hot to hold, the rice is hot enough to cook. Once the rice is hot, the tinder is burned up, and the wood is smoldering nicely, leave them alone for 20 to 25 minutes.

5. Carefully remove the pot from the fire. It may or may not still be too hot to hold. It will be dirty. Dust off ashes and wipe off soot before lifting the lid to check the rice. If weather conditions are right it will be perfectly cooked and ready to eat. In cold weather you may need to burn another handful of sticks and let the rice simmer for another 10 or 15 minutes.

Thanksgiving Day was sunny and warm, over 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon. A good time was had by all, apparently including Burr and Samantha, though they didn't contribute anything to the dinner.

Book Review: Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook

Title: Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cookbook

Author: Amy Vanderbilt

Date: 1961

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 765 pages plus 42-page index

Illustrations: drawings by “Andrew Warhol”

Quote: “Many people have said, since the publication of Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette in 1952, that it should be followed by a complete cookbook. For, of course, I can cook.”

Modest wasn’t she? Dutch-American, super-rich, European-educated, and the sort of stickler for usage who insisted that it was Miss Vanderbilt although she was also Mrs. Knopf, Amy Vanderbilt was probably more fun to know than her reputation would suggest.

It would be hard to collect this many recipes and not include something that will appeal to everyone. Vanderbilt wasn’t aware of special diets but she was brought up with that obsession with “balanced meals” that, when followed, guaranteed everyone that almost every meal would include something they could eat. None of the menu plans is vegan but each includes enough vegetarian dishes to leave a vegan guest feeling well fed.

Vanderbilt and her friends had also lived through The War, when shortages created demands for sugar-free, egg-free, wheat-free, meat-free, and similar kinds of recipes. Some people hated the ersatz or “war” recipes. “War Cakes,” which tended to be heavy, egg-free, and sweetened mainly by preserved fruits, gave some Americans a guilt-soothing sense that at least they were suffering along with bombed-out London and the boys in the trenches. Yet War Cakes could be palatable, if they were done right, and became some families’ favorites. My mother taught her children to recognize and bake War Cakes; Vanderbilt’s collection of fancy baked deserts includes a few. The idea of rationing eggs so farmers could kill one another disgusts me, but it did generate recipes suitable for people who are allergic to eggs.

But of course in 1961 the war was over and the Waste Age’s economic bubble was near its fragile height. The appeal of cookbooks like this one was that not only the super-rich, but almost everyone who had a kitchen, could revel in waffles mixed in a blender and baked in an electric waffle iron, in things that had to be refrigerated or frozen to reach the right consistency, in all kinds of dishes that called for special pudding molds and rice cookers and seafood steamers. It was not considered a disgrace for young women who’d quit work to stay home with young children to figure out that rice can be cooked in an ordinary saucepan and cake batter can be whipped up in one bowl with one spoon, but if she didn’t imagine that the mixers and blenders and whisks would make cooking better, and more fun, she might be coming down with beatnik tendencies. And it seemed so, oh, American that Vanderbilt enjoyed canned soup and packaged baking mixes as well as long-simmered stocks and hand-rolled pastries.

So her cookbook is a period piece. Exhaustive though it was, it does not include recipes for several things we cook now. Vanderbilt mentioned arugula at the very end, as “rugola,” in a short list of garden herbs that (surprise!) were edible. She’d heard of pizza, and observed that my generation (then “the teenagers”) liked it, but she made it on a base of baking-powder biscuit dough. Yes. On the other hand, you might agree that her black walnut bread, gingerbread men, turtle candies, eclairs, and ribbon sandwiches deserve to survive.

The copy I physically owned sold in its third hour on display, but you can still buy copies online for $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. This is a thick book; only one more of the same size would fit into one package, or two standard-size books would.

Gluten-Free Recipe: Cornmeal Pancakes

Since I just tweeted that this breakfast/snack is hard to beat, I suppose there ought to be a link for it...How to Make Cornmeal Pancakes That Are Hard to Beat. Classic cornmeal pancakes are gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, and vegan, but many traditional variations add meat and/or dairy products and/or sugar; you can take this recipe wherever you want to go with it.

First start your fire. This is a very oldfashioned camp-style recipe that works well with an open fire. Even if you use an electric stove, it's essential that cornmeal pancakes be dropped into a sizzling-hot skillet. It also works well with a wood, gas, or electric stove, or hot plate, or even a Coleman stove. It's not for microwaving.

Ingredients for Cornmeal Pancakes

1. Cornmeal: As much as the people who will be eating these cakes are going to need. Figure 1/2 to 1 cup of meal per person over about age 10, 1/4 to 1/2 cup per small child. This is a flexible recipe based on proportions rather than exact amounts. The important thing is to get GMO-free, glyphosate-free, natural cornmeal, which can be difficult. +Bob's Red Mill has a good reputation for that sort of thing. The fresher the meal is, the closer you are to the time and place where the corn (maize) was picked and ground, the better the cakes will taste.

2. Leavening: If you have buttermilk, use baking soda. If not, use baking powder. Figure 1 teaspoon per cup of meal; beyond 1 cup of meal and 1 teaspoon of baking powder, ignore extra fractions-of-cups.

3. Salt is optional, but traditional. (These are like fluffy tortillas, not tea cakes. No sugar!) If somebody is on a low-sodium diet, sprinkle a saltshaker over other people's cakes while they're cooking. The traditional method was to stir in 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of salt for each cup of meal.

4. Cornmeal pancakes are supposed to be crumbly, but you can make them a little easier to handle, and more nutritious, by adding a little flaxseed meal to the dry ingredients. If you don't have flaxseed meal, a traditional alternative is to beat an egg or two into the batter. Either flaxseed or egg will add some nutrients and an extra layer of flavor to the pancakes. Either is optional.

5. Liquid: You need enough liquid to make a thin batter that will spread out flat when the cakes are dropped into the hot skillet. If you use water, you can heat it to just below the boiling point for faster, fluffier pancakes. If you use milk or buttermilk, you'll get some extra flavor and calcium, and since you'll need to use cold liquid you'll have time to add eggs if you want to add eggs. (If you use broth, stock, fruit or vegetable juice, you're creating a variant recipe, not classic cornmeal pancakes.) The precise proportion of liquid to dry ingredients is generally almost, not quite, one-to-one. Since the weather and the freshness of the meal affect this, it's better to calculate by the actual consistency of batter than rely on predetermined measurements.

6. Oil, butter, margarine, meat dripping if you've been cooking meat: Cornmeal contains its own oil, but you do need a thin film of hot oil to coat the skillet. The hotter the oil, the less fat you add to the cakes, which is generally a good thing. A teaspoon of canola oil to start the first batch, and another teaspoon if the skillet starts to dry out between batches, is plenty for me. However, some people rave over the flavors bacon dripping, chicken schmaltz, or fresh country butter add to their cornmeal pancakes.

Method for Cornmeal Pancakes: 

(Start heating the skillet first of all. In a camp situation this will give you plenty of time to do other things; if you're using an efficient electric stove, you'll have just about as much time as it takes to mix the batter.)

1. If using hot water, heat it. If using milk and eggs, beat them together.

2. Combine dry ingredients. Film hot skillet with oil.

3. Combine dry and liquid ingredients. Do not overmix.

4. Drop a few drops of water into your hot, oily skillet. They should sizzle and skitter across the pan.

5. Drop generous tablespoons or extra-large-mixing-spoons of batter into the skillet. They should spread out flat and puff up almost simultaneously. When the bottom of each cake has cooked and dried out, the top will show bubbles, and it will be possible to slide a spatula under the bottom, turn the cake, and cook the top side light brown.

Serve hot or cold with any accompaniment you like.

Traditional Accompaniments for Cornmeal Pancakes: 

* Bacon

* Other thin portions of meat that cook quickly and leave a film of rendered fat in the skillet

* Fried or scrambled eggs, or omelets

* Cold milk or buttermilk. (Kids traditionally crumble their cakes into the milk and eat with a spoon, as in panada. Many adults like to do this too. Yogurt would also work.)

* Applesauce or apple butter

* Sorghum molasses

* Extra butter, for those who like butter

* Fruit

* Ripe tomatoes. (For my father's favorite version of cornmeal pancakes, you need home-grown, vine-ripened organic tomatoes, which are much softer and juicier than the supermarket kind, and need to be "sliced" into a rimmed plate or bowl. This is another way to eat pancakes with a spoon.)

* Cooked green vegetables

* Cooked dry beans

Less Traditional Accompaniments for Cornmeal Pancakes: 

* Immediately after pouring them into the pan, top cakes with precooked sausages--links, patties, soybean sausages, hot dogs, Vienna Bites, whatever.

* Or bacon bits

* Or dried fruit

* Or blueberries

* Or chocolate chips

* Or chives

* Or a thin slice of Vidalia onion. (Onions won't cook as fast as the cornmeal batter, so if they're not Vidalia onions they'll taste awfully pungent. Vidalia onions will taste crisp and sweet.)

* Use a can of fish as part of the liquid. (Canned fish is flaky enough to melt into the batter.)

* Or a can of tomatoes

* Or one or two mashed bananas

* Or applesauce

* Or other fruit puree, if you want sweet and fruity cakes

* You can even add sugar (or honey, molasses, syrup, etc.) directly to the batter. The cakes will be a little trickier to cook without scorching and will not be traditional, but they will be good.

* You can also mix in any kind of "flour" or "meal" you want, including ground nuts, wheat flour, rye flour, oatmeal, etc. Wheat flour will definitely make the cakes easier to handle and, of course, not gluten-free. Ground dried beans or peas were added to cornmeal cakes by Confederate soldiers, at least one of whom famously described the result as "miserable." (However, you can use fully cooked, mashed beans or peas for the liquid; this is known as Bean Bread, and it's heavy but not bad.)

* You can use cooked or canned vegetables for the liquid if you want to. I happen to like cornmeal pancakes made with a can of greens as the primary liquid. A can of carrots would also work.

* You can use cooked grits as the batter base. Grits are made by eliminating niacin-blocking corn bran from corn, which can offer a real benefit to anyone on a low-protein diet.

You can buy the skillet on Amazon.

New Book Review: The Guilt-Free Gourmet

Title: The Guilt-Free Gourmet

Author: Vicki B. Griffin

Date: 1999

Publisher: Remnant

ISBN: 1-891041-25-8

Length: 400 pages

Quote: “What is found within the pages of The Guilt-Free Gourmet is accurate, well researched health information and recipes that are almost totally free of harmful excitotoxins and other adulterating additives….a balance of nutrients that not only prevent disease but promote health and longevity.”

And lots of things to do with tofu that actually make the stuff taste interesting, too...but that’s if you’re gluten-tolerant. That’s the bad news. Vicki Griffin and daughter Gina have put together a wonderful collection of nutrient-balanced vegan recipes based on your ability to digest wheat and other whole grains (and also yeast) as primary proteins. If you did not inherit that ability, a minority of their recipes will still work (and they’ll taste pretty good), but the Griffins’ grain-based diet will not work for you. All bodies are not created equal.

For those who can use a grain-based diet that’s grown out of the Seventh-Day Adventist healing tradition, as taught at places like Hartland and practiced by doctors at places like Loma Linda, this is the ultimate, the best and biggest ever, of the Seventh-Day Adventist “cooking school” cookbooks. This one is so good that even the Griffins have thought it might have been too good a bargain and have tried letting it go out of print in order to market shorter books for similar prices.

Frankly, when I browse through this book, page headings like “Tender Gluten Steaks” and “Cheesy Tofu Scramble” bring a bitter taste to my mouth. Literally—all that whole wheat and nutritional yeast people dutifully munched in the 1970s Granola Period tended to become rancid and bitter very fast, especially in dutifully un-air-conditioned kitchens. And then when I remember how sick all that “health food” made me, and kept me, up to age thirty—how rare, and what a “high,” just not feeling sick all the time used to be in my wheat-stuffed undiagnosed-celiac youth…

Grandma Bonnie Peters bought multiple copies of this book. She gave one to me. I choked on it, emotionally, and rushed it out to the booth in the flea market that used to be the physical home of my bookstore. It sold within hours, to a trusted friend from whom I thought, “Oh well, if I do miss anything in it I can always buy it back”…and he wasn’t a bookseller, or a seller of anything, but a visitor to his home pounced on this book and had to have it, out of his kitchen, for a handsome profit he admitted. GBP apparently lent out her last remaining copy, couldn’t get it back, and started upbraiding and guilt-tripping me for not getting another copy for her, as online prices for this book started to enter the collectors’ range…

Well, finally I found a price I could afford to pay, from a legitimate charity store…in Michigan, y’all. I’m sure some correspondents will appreciate knowing that I was able to buy GBP a copy in aid of an organization that helps disabled residents of Michigan. I’m paging through the recipes again…

Now there is a lengthy section of “Health Helps,” over 100 pages in about the third quarter of the book, that may be read as preaching or nagging. (That, too, would have been found at a traditional S.D.A. “cooking school,” as taught by GBP and by her teachers and their teachers and so on back to Jethro Kloss’s day.) This is a true American Folk Tradition that happens to have developed among literate people, in close correlation with advances in medical science. Whatever your feelings about Adventists may be, their folklore is sociologically fascinating.

But let’s stick to the recipes, which begin without much of a preamble, on page four, with breakfast dishes. Finding the ones that are naturally gluten-free, that I could use as they appear, takes some searching. In addition to gluten, I personally don’t seem to tolerate coconut. I automatically substitute “shredded almonds” for “shredded coconut” in recipes. If you can either use coconut or allow that much substitution, you can use the very first recipe, “Regal Rice Pudding,” which is naturally 100% free from wheat gluten. The next naturally gluten-free recipe, “Almonds Ahoy Granola,” appears on page 13. The first one I personally can use with no editing is “E-Z Almond Milk,” on page 18. The first one that appeals to me is the “Garden Lentil patties” on page 38; the “Perfect Patties” on page 40 have a sweet and/or bittersweet taste, depending on whether you use real sorghum molasses (which I prefer) or the burnt cane-syrup residues sold in supermarkets as molasses, on which I’m less than keen, but I could eat them.

That's what reading this book is like for celiacs, pretty much, all the way through. We have to do a lot of editing.

The good news is that, according to Grandma Bonnie Peters, who is a vegan, it's easy editing. With other gluten-free vegan cookbooks, she says, she has to go to the health food store for things she doesn't normally have on hand. With The Guilt-Free Gourmet, she can use what she has.

She maintains that her "Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers" are her edited version of some of the Griffins' "loaf/burger" recipes. Which one or ones she won't say...I know Veggie Burgers involved pureed green beans, which may give some readers a hint.

I have finally bought her a copy to replace the one I inadvertently sold, using an Amazon giftcard I received for writing on non-book topics at some other site, and here's what I had to say about it on Amazon.

"
Seventh-Day Adventist "cooking schools" are a sociologically fascinating example of a folk tradition that developed among literate people, alongside scientific development. Church ladies would demonstrate cooking vegan, grain-based food for new members of the church and distribute recipe collections along with sweet, edifying thoughts about health and faith. Most of these collections were "published" by mimeographing or on privately printed cards. Over 250 pages of vegan recipes, over 100 pages of reflections (with lots of published references), and lots of nutrient data make "The Guilt-Free Gourmet" the biggest and best collection in this genre. You'll learn the secrets of making fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts taste almost like the savory meats, tangy cheeses, and creamy desserts vegans miss...with minimal salt and no added MSG.

Wheat gluten is the primary source of protein for many vegans. For about two-thirds of humankind it's healthy. The majority of recipes in "The Guilt-Free Gourmet" feature wheat gluten. Nevertheless, I know gluten-free cooks who swear by this cookbook as their primary reference, having found it easy to adapt the Griffins' recipes to suit their requirements. The secret recipes for "Grandma Bonnie's Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers," made with no wheat, corn, yeast, soy, citrus, or animal-derived products, were adapted from loaf/burger recipes in this book. "Grandma Bonnie" herself says that lots of gluten-free cookbooks feature more elaborate, expensive recipes but "The Guilt-Free Gourmet" has more simple, easily used or adapted recipes for things she can make without going to the health food store.
"

Here's another comment on some other things on Amazon. Seventh-Day Adventists traditionally call the products of the Worthington and Loma Linda food companies "health foods." Then they bicker about that among themselves, because Fri-Chik and Choplets and Prime Stakes and Big Franks and Bolono and Wham and Prosage and so on all contain lots of MSG in addition to the wheat gluten. All of these "vegetarian meat analogs," the ones sold in tins on Amazon and the frozen ones sold only in real stores, are tasty and low-fat, but...if you joined the church you'd soon hear, "Worthington and Loma Linda foods are designed to be healthier than the things meat eaters eat." If the church was big enough (and lucky enough) to have an official Health & Temperance Minister like GBP the person would add, "At the 'cooking school' Sister Peters will be demonstrating how to make healthier 'health foods.'"

Thanks to the Griffins, non-Adventists can now learn how to make that kind of "health foods."

To buy it here, send $10 per copy + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to either of the addresses at the very bottom of the screen (down below the Amazon giftcard widget), and we'll send the Griffins $1.50. (If you send a U.S. postal money order, you don't send a surcharge to me because you pay it at the post office.)