Quick and simple banana-oat pancakes that happen to be vegan and gluten-free

I made these super quick and easy pancakes using ingredients I got for free. A local organization gave us some basic food packages that contained bags of oats, bags of rice, bags of dried beans, canned tomatoes, frozen fruit, frozen vegetables. (The frozen fruits and vegetables were huge bags with no brand name on them and appeared to be foodservice surplus). So, yeah, these were quite similar ingredients to what WIC gives, so I'm going to tag this as WIC as well, even though we don't currently get WIC.

As usual, I didn't really use a recipe, but I can reconstruct what I did. I put about 1-1/2 cups rolled oats and one frozen overripe banana (thawed first) in a large pitcher, added about a teaspoon of baking powder, then added almond milk a bit at a time until it was the right consistency to pour for pancakes. I mixed it with a stick blender. This is important; if you don't use either a stick blender or jar blender, which makes your oats the consistency of course oat flour, you will end up with something edible, but it will be more like oatmeal cookies with whole rolled oat pieces and it won't puff up and be chewy in the same way that this is.

For syrup/compote/whatever, I microwaved frozen blueberries and sugar for one minute, stirred it, then put it in for another minute. It was boiling by the end of the two minutes. You can do the same on the stovetop. I didn't measure the sugar; you don't need to, and can just do it to your preferred sweetness and consistency. You can also add spices if you like. This technique will work without sugar, though it will be a thinner mixture if you don't use any. Regardless of amount of sugar, blueberries don't have enough pectin in them to gel into a spoonable jam-type mixture, so you won't get anything much thicker than what is shown here. (And I realize I should have used a plate that isn't the same color as blueberries so it's clearer what it looks like, but I was mostly focused on making breakfast, with blogging as an afterthought.) If you wanted this jam-type texture, you would either need to add store-bought pectin, or use half cranberries and half blueberries.

POTATO, POTATO, POTATO

Have I mentioned I have a bunch of potatoes? Potato, potato, potaaaatoooo. I made potato salad with the tiny potatoes, the red potatoes, and the purple potatoes. It tasted like potato salad, except it looked red and purple. There was probably something more interesting I could have made that specifically used tiny potatoes and/or purple potatoes, but I made this, and it was good.

I also made potato tacos. I'm not sure if potato tacos are a thing, but I imagine they probably are, because root vegetables are a staple of traditional diets in the Americas. I chopped the potatoes up with onions and made basically homefries, but with more seasoning (I used jalapeño sauce, smoked red chili, and lots of cumin). I had small corn tortillas leftover from something, so I served the potatoes on those with tomato salsa, corn salsa from Trader Joe's (this stuff is seriously good; I highly recommend it), and some leftover goat cheese salad crumbles a neighbor gae me, which were the closest thing I had to cotija or similar. They turned out great, and were very popular among my family. 

Moar potatoes

I continue to make things with potatoes, because I continue to have entirely too many potatoes. Here are some homefries. I made them sliced, because they cook faster and more evenly. Nothing special, just potatoes, a little oil, Adobo, dill, smoked red chili powder or paprika. They're good alone, with breakfast foods, in breakfast burritos, or as a quick lunch with whatever vegetables you have around stir-fried and dumped on top of them.














Also I made au gratin potatoes. I used a recipe I found on Pinterest that I can't seem to find again. They were just OK. You can't really go wrong with potatoes and cheese, though I've had better.

I don't think I ever posted a photo of this whole Fair Foods haul. Wow. This one was pretty amazing. And, uh, contained a lot of potatoes.

Oh my god I have all these potatoes

I seem to have a ton of potatoes. Big, small, red, white, yellow, oh, and a bag of small blue ones and a bag of tiny weird-shaped ones. These were all acquired either through Fair Foods or through a similar food surplus program run though a religious organization. Both programs are amazing and have been so helpful to our family. And both programs give you a pre-packaged load of food without much opportunity to turn parts of it down. So there are all these potatoes.

I'm going to have to figure out different things to make with potatoes. Fortunately they keep quite a while, I mean, compared to things like bananas or leafy vegetables. But as tends to be the case with rescued produce, they're already getting up there in age. So far I've made a quasi-Indian curry. I sauteed onions and garlic, then threw it in the slow cooker with potatoes, frozen peas, and canned tomatoes that were either free in one of these food packages or a few cents via couponing. I dumped in a bunch of every spice I had that works in curries (see here for where to get inexpensive spices). Then once it was sufficiently cooked, I blended it a little to make it thicker, and served it over rice. This meal was close to free to make, and it served our family for dinner plus enough for everyone to take for lunch the next day.

Stay tuned for more potatoey goodness.

Watermellooonnn

So I got this free watermelon. Obviously watermelon is good just to eat, but I was looking for something interesting to do with it, and wanted to incorporate it into a meal. First,
I scooped out balls of watermelon. I combined this with some quinoa (I used some one-minute quinoa that I got couponing), plus chopped cucumber a neighbor gave me, a purple onion from Fair Foods, and canned black beans from couponing. I drizzled some balsamic salad dressing over it. It was quite a hit.

I don't have a melon baller, but at some point we seemed to have acquired these kid spoons that are scooplike rather than spoon-shaped, which suck as spoons, but work great for making melon balls. Yes, my grown ass made melon balls with an alien spoon. Don't judge.

The melon balls weren't super spherical, but the watermelon was overripe, so they wouldn't have been even if I had a melon baller. +1 for the weird alien spoon.

Next, since the watermelon was super overripe, there was a lot of juice and shredded melon left in the shell. I didn't want to waste it, so I combined it with some kosher/vegan agar-based jello-type stuff I had on hand. I made the whole thing in the watermelon shell, because this looked fun.

I poured as much of the liquid/liquifying watermelon pulp into the measuring cup so I wouldn't end up with too much liquid, then made sure the water was fully boiling, and poured it into the cup. I needed two cups for the amount I made, and I made it a little under to make sure it would set up with the fruit pieces added. It turned out great, and was a big hit with both kids and adults. Someone suggested the watermelon juice would also be good for margaritas or jello shots, which seems like it would also be pretty great.

Banana French toast

This was a surprisingly easy recipe I invented. Fair Foods gave us two bunches of slightly bruised/browning bananas and a loaf of what I thought was sandwich bread when I took it, but ended up being cranberry walnut bread. None of us are particularly crazy about the nuts-and-dried-fruits category of foods, so I tried to think of things I could do with it. I figured it would be improved if it were sweet, and this led me to French toast.

I knew bananas are often used by themselves as a binder/thickener in a lot of vegan cooking, so I figured this would work. I blended the bananas using an immersion blender, then added some vanilla and pumpkin pie spice. If using fresher bananas, you'd probably need to add some liquid to get it to a thinner consistency, but this was correct since these were rescued bananas. I then soaked the slices of bread in the stuff and fried them in a nonstick pan with a little oil. The result was normal textured French toast with a bit of a banana/fruit/nut flavor. We served it with maple syrup (Amazon has the best prices usually, FYI) and everyone enjoyed it. It's probably one of the simplest things I've ever cooked. Will definitely make again.

Dinner for basically free

A couple days ago we harvested the last batch of veggies from our garden before everything gets frozen and ruined. The only thing left out there are herbs, which we leave since they tend to come back in the spring. We were fortunate to have enough tomatoes and peppers that I didn't have to add anything from the store or from cans. I would have preferred more than one onion for a pot of chili, but not enough to go out and buy one.

I basically threw everything in a pot, added WIC beans and some frozen corn kernels a local organization gave us a while back, and let it do its thing. I added some Adobo and a pinch of sugar when it got close to being done. (It's about 20 minutes from being done in this picture.) With all these vegetables, it was substantial enough to serve as an entire meal. Sometimes I also make bread or cornbread, or serve with chips and guacamole, but this time I just served it plain, and it was a big hit as usual.

WTHDIDWTV: OK, not really

When I brought this Fair Foods haul home, someone in my household immediately said, "apparently today they gave us stew." (That yellow item is a yellow tomato, not an orange.) So, yeah, this wasn't a hard one to figure out what to do with. I'm tagging it as WTHDIDWTV anyway though, because it's still something we figured out to make with produce that was available at Fair Foods, rather than something we decided to make and then acquired ingredients for.

We chopped everything up, added a bag of lentils from WIC, and put it in the slow cooker with some seasonings for most of the day. We got several meals out of the pot of stew, and actually had a kid who was aggravated to find that they'd been beaten to the leftovers. I wouldn't have expected that with something so seemingly boring, but it was surprisingly popular.

This was a particularly great Fair Foods bag, because we literally didn't have to add anything to the vegetables to make a desirable meal, except for the lentils that I chose to add to make it more filling. The bag included enough tomatoes that I didn't need to add any tomato products, and enough onions and potatoes to make a nice well-rounded stew. The bag also included a bunch of bananas and some crusty bread, which we ate with the stew. Not bad, getting several meals for $2, with bananas to spare.

WTHDIDWTV: Zucchini Fajitas

This was one of the easiest things I've made recently and one of the cheapest. I had several huge zucchinis from my garden, even after I gave a bunch away to anyone who would take some. I also had onions, jalapeños, and habañeros from my garden, plus green peppers, avocados and limes from Fair Foods. I wasn't planning to use the peppers, but ended up needing them because Old El Paso and I have differing ideas about what constitutes "seasoning." Maybe I should start a class action suit. Just kidding. Mostly.

I grew these, yo

I sauteed the zucchini, green peppers, and onions, along with a packet of Old El Paso fajita seasoning that a coupon deal had paid me to take out of the store. I then tasted the stuff and realized that the packet contained approximately nothing, despite claiming to contain a bunch of spices. Which is weird, because their chili seasoning and taco seasoning are all right. This was bland though. I ended up adding soy sauce, lime juice, adobo, habañeros, and cumin. So, basically it was like I made my own seasoning anyway. Oh well, still cheap, and all stuff I had on hand. Next time there's a deal on the seasoning packets, I'll just get the taco one. There's not a lot of difference in the actual spices included, and I can add soy sauce and lime juice to the fajitas myself.

The dim lighting makes the bad tortillas not look as
bright white or spongy as they actually are. Do not be fooled.

I also had several boxes of Goya Spanish rice from couponing and Old El Paso tortillas that were free from couponing. FYI, the Old El Paso tortillas aren't very good. The flour is the overly bleached bright white type and they're kind of spongy and puffy, like bad overly processed white bread. Even store brand are better than these. They were free though, and they taste fine when filled with deliciously seasoning veggies. Oh, and I made some guacamole too, because guacamole.

Threw it all into the spongy tortillas, and there's some good stuff. There was enough for leftovers too, because there was so much damn zucchini. They kept well when pre-assembled and taken for lunches. (Sour cream and guacamole transported on the side if you're able to reheat it).

WTHDIDWTV: Still moar cucumbers

I did another google search for cucumber recipes, because they're continuing to take over. We keep giving them to people and eating them ourselves, and there keep being cucumbers. This was a quick and easy lunch; cucumbers, dill, and cottage cheese, served on toasted pumpernickel from Fair Foods. It's a little hard to eat, because the cucumbers slip off, but it was really good. Except notice how a whole lunch only uses six cucumber slices. There just is no way to get rid of these things! Argh!

WTHDIDWTV: Sweet potatoes, kale, corn, zucchini

Tacos! Who doesn't love tacos? I'm a big fan both of the fast-food Tex-Mex type and the more authentic type; I just think of them as pretty much completely different foods.

Today I made the Mexican type with stuff I had around the house. The cost was about a dollar to feed the whole family with some leftovers.

I had tortillas that I got free with coupons. They're Old El Paso, which are overly processed and kind of gross, but they were free. I had sauteed kale and sweet potatoes from the other day, which were from Fair Foods. I had zucchini from my garden and corn that someone gave us, which I also sauteed together. It was huge zucchini full of large pumpkin-like seeds, which I left in and cooked as-is, since these seeds roast up nicely and are often included in Latin food. The kale and sweet potatoes were generically seasoned since I used half of the batch in my quiche fritatta whatever thing the other day, and the corn and zucchini I cooked up with a lot of hot peppers and fajita-type seasoning, intending to use them just for this. I added canned kidney beans I got for a few cents with coupons, and some sour cream that I got with a coupon. Good stuff.

For dessert we had cucumbers.

WTHDIDWTV: Sweet potatoes, kale, onions, cucumbers

Hey where'd I go? I just logged in on the computer after a month or so of not doing so, and I realized that I screwed up some setting and was sending all my posts from mobile into a drafts folder instead of publishing them. I guess it's not much of a blog if people can't see it, hm?

So, here I am. Um, I made some stuff with produce from Fair Foods and our tiny garden. We had a bunch of sweet potatoes and kale. I sauteed them with onions and herbs from our garden, then made a thing. I'm unsure whether it's a quiche, frittata, stratta, omelette, casserole, or what. And the sites google pulled up about what these are didn't agree with each other. So it's just going to be a thing.

This thing was incredibly easy to make. Just pour veggies, eggs, cheese, cottage cheese, and seasonings into a large flat pan, then bake until done. The cottage cheese is optional; I got several big containers of it from couponing last week. If you don't like cottage cheese, don't worry, as long as you do like dairy products and soft cheeses in general; when you put it in something that cooks at a high temperature, it melts completely, and it's indistinguishable from ricotta, cream cheese, or other dairy products that you might use in this way. This works in lasagne and stuffed shells too. And of course, I served it with cucumbers, because our garden is producing them like crazy with no end in sight.

I seem to have a shitload of cucumbers

Cucumbers neatly lined up (bottle of free wine for scale)

So, I don't really know how growing stuff works, other than that you put seeds in dirt, water it, and it works maybe 50% of the time.

Apparently my cucumbers decided to do really well this year. We've been getting a harvest like this every couple of days. If you live on my street and wonder why there were cucumbers in your mailbox, you're welcome. Of course they had to go and do a lot better than the more versatile things we planted (squashes, tomatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, okra, collards...). Not that I'm complaining, but I have a feeling I'm going to end up spending more to buy things to use up the cucumbers than I saved by growing food myself.

All of us in Chez Scraper really like cucumbers, but the one downside is that is that most everything you can make with them is pretty much completely devoid of calories, which doesn't really work as an entire meal for kids. Cucumbers are not like most vegetables where you can make stir fries, pasta, burritos, etc. with them. A few weeks ago I made cucumber maki rolls, which was enough for a standalone meal. It still only used up one cucumber for the entire family though; they're mostly rice. We made cucumber/watermelon/basil/mint salad all from our garden, which was delicious but not an entire meal for growing kids, so we served it with some hummus, bread, and grilled veggies. We've done some salads with more substance to them too -- green salads with salad dressing and canned beans, and a salad of cucumbers/peppers/chickpeas/olives. This weekend I'll probably buy some grains that work with cold salads and do some of that. Or maybe I'll ask the internet how to make pickles? Hm, I wonder if you can make cucumber kimchi...

Fake Korean food for about 50 cents per person

I improvised this dinner tonight. I call it "a bunch of stuff I needed to use up, plus hot sauce." Each plate has half a packet of instant ramen, 1/4 of a block of tofu, one egg, and a bunch of vegetables from Fair Foods. The dozen eggs were 25 cents using stacked coupons. I used some hot sauce I got for free with coupons, soy sauce I got for 25 cents with coupons, and some sweet chili sauce from Trader Joe's. It would have been better with kimchi and actual Korean chili sauce, but was pretty delicious nonetheless.

Another meal for a buck or two

I forgot to snap a picture until they were mostly gone

Here's tonight's dinner, which I tossed together with some stuff from Fair Foods and a few things I had in the pantry. It probably cost about two dollars for everything.

I make these potato wedges quite often. They're ridiculously easy; I just chop up a potato, toss with Goya Adobo, paprika, and dill. Then place on a greased baking sheet and cook at the same temperature as your other stuff (usually around 350-400) until soft and slightly browned. You can also toss with flour to give them a bit more of a skin, but I didn't bother. They're really just vessels for condiments anyway, right? I served them with a variety of condiments (obviously) and some veggie burgers made using my usual recipe that I've mentioned here before. The potato wedges were made using potatoes from Fair Foods (part of a bag of about 20 lbs of produce acquired for $2) and spices I had in the cabinet, so they cost maybe 10 cents for a batch large enough for the whole family.

The veggie burgers cost probably a dollar or less to make about 12 of them. It's the recipe I've talked about before -- equal parts cooked steel-cut oats and equal parts black beans cooked until they're basically like refried beans, then mixed with desired seasonings, formed into patties, and baked or pan-fried. The buns are a bit sad-looking, but they were 66 cents for a bag of eight of them at Stop and Shop, so I can't complain. I opened them up and tossed them in the oven for about five minutes to toast them, which always helps cheap white bread. I sauteed some onions and mushrooms, also from Fair Foods, to put on the burgers for those who wanted them.

We also had some corn, also from the Fair Foods haul. A friend of mine recently taught me the method of putting them in the oven still in the husks and baking them for 20-30 minutes. It's much easier than my usual method of indoor-corn-cooking, in which I basically try to grill it except in frying pan or in the oven. I do like corn better if it's slightly grilled, but this was just fine and it was so easy to just stick it in the oven and leave it there until it was done.

And you know how I said the cat is an asshole? These pictures were taken with me sitting a foot away from the cat, trying to shove the cat off the table. See how effective it was? See how afraid and remorseful the cat looks? See how much the cat cares about anything other than corn right now? Yeah. Be on the lookout soon for posts about how to sell cats on eBay. 

Sunday-night-cooking-stuff extravaganza

I'm trying to get back into the habit of spending Sundays cooking some time-consuming dishes, or at least the time-consuming components of quick dishes. This cuts down on the whole problem of realizing it's time to feed these people, seeing that, as one of the kids puts it, "we don't have any food, only ingredients," and making macaroni and cheese from a box or pasta with jarred sauce for the millionth time. Not that there's anything wrong with those meals, of course, but I like to mix it up a bit with some healthier and more interesting fare. And we don't need to talk about the times I've been even less responsible and ordered pizza with a credit card when I've realized there isn't any food I can make quickly. So, yeah, I spent today making some big ol' vats of things, which can be quickly turned into various meals. I made the first of my quick meals tonight as well (pictured above).

Today I made:

1. a huge vat of white rice
2. a big vat of Spanish rice
3. a medium vat of chili
4. a slow cooker full of steel-cut oats
5. a full batch of bread dough
6. a vat of black beans
7. three pounds of oven-baked tofu 

For dinner tonight, I used a small amount of the rice to make sushi. Sushi is actually ridiculously easy, and a great way to turn random veggies into an entree. You mix a cup or so of rice (white, short grain works best) with seasoned rice vinegar (available at Asian grocery stores for much less than at mainstream grocery stores, and lasts years in the fridge), slap it on some seaweed, put veggies on it, and roll it up. I had a cucumber from Fair Foods, and I made this using a quarter of it. (WTHDIDWTV: cucumber edition.)

Next, I used some of the baked tofu to make two types of Thai curry. I found coconut milk at Dollar Tree in Allston last week and stocked up on it; coconut milk is rarely on sale, rarely included in coupons, and can be two dollars or more per can.

The "recipe" for red curry is simple: sauteed onions, pre-made red curry paste (a little pricey, but store it in the freezer and it lasts forever, and it's cheaper than buying lemongrass and all that to make from scratch), lemon juice, brown sugar, soy sauce, basil, coconut milk. You can also add fish sauce or vegetarian worcestershire sauce if you like. Then add whatever you like -- I used baked tofu and cubed butternut squash. Oh, and the basil I used wasn't Thai basil, but it was basil I grew on my windowsill from an herb kit I got at Dollar Tree last year.

Jungle curry is essentially the same thing, but no coconut milk. Therefore, use less red curry paste, unless you like it ridiculously hot. I prefer red curry, but we have a household member who can't do coconut, so I made both. The jungle curry I made with zucchini and green beans from Fair Foods, and some of the baked tofu. Both dishes took 10-15 minutes to make since I'd already made the rice and tofu. We have plenty of leftovers for later in the week, and still have a ton of rice and tofu. (WTHDIDWTV: zucchini, butternut squash, green beans edition!)

Later in the week I'm going to use some of the oatmeal and some of the black beans to make homemade veggie burgers. The rest of the oatmeal will be for breakfasts of course, and the rest of the black beans will be eaten with the Spanish rice and some Trader Joe's guacamole that was left here recently during an evening of cards and three-buck chuck.

The bread dough is going to go toward some sandwich bread, veggie burger buns, and probably some pizza. The full batch is enough for all that, which is pretty amazing.

I made everything listed using things I had at home already. Everything was pantry ingredients, plus a few produce items I had. I'd say that all the food I made cost me under $10 total, because I got most of it with coupons/from Fair Foods/stocking up at Dollar Tree, but it could be purchased for under $20 if you just went to a store. That's pretty amazing for a week's worth of food. I may spend a few more dollars here and there to add some cheese, some salad greens, maybe fresh fruit for the oatmeal.

At the same time though, I'm always hesitant to post these sorts of food roundup posts, because I fear that they encourage the sorts of people who say that no one should have food stamps and no one needs to be buying processed lunchbox foods, because everyone should just cook a bunch of vegan quasi-ethnic food from scratch. Those people need to stuff it though, for a number of reasons.

So, even though our family is quite a ways below poverty level, we have a lot of privilege at the moment. We have the time, energy, and mental stability to be able to do things like spend all day Sunday cooking. We have stable housing and clean, working cooking facilities. We have basic cooking skills and utensils. We have a reliable fridge and freezer to store the stuff. We have me who is able and willing to tow this wacky family around to different ethnic grocery stores and to the Fair Foods truck, and who is frequently home when these things are open. We have the appearance of class privilege (due to speaking like educated people, work experience, not being young parents, to start with) so that if our kids pack weird lunchbox food or have friends over for homemade snacks, people assume we're health nuts or hippie artists instead of too poor to buy the usual snacks.

So leave people alone who feel the need to buy their kids individual bags of Doritos, OK? But if it works for you, I recommend trying this pre-cooking in large batches thing.

What the hell do I do with this vegetable: okra and corn edition

The fair foods truck this week had okra, corn, onions, red potatoes, grapefruit, oranges, bananas, and iceberg lettuce. Amazing.

I grilled the okra, which is incredibly easy and in my opinion tastes pretty much the same as fried okra. Just cut off the ends, put it on a baking sheet, drizzled it with olive oil and some spices, and baked at 450 until it looked done:

Some of the okra we ate just like this. The rest, I used to make the fritters. I cut up about a cup or so of okra into small pieces, along with one small onion that I had sliced and grilled, plus the kernals from half an ear of corn, also grilled in the oven in the same way. I added half a cup of cornmeal, half a cup of flour, adobo, cumin, about half a cup of cheddar cheese, then enough milk to make it into a firm dough. I dropped it onto a baking sheet, flattened them out a bit, and baked at 400 until done:

What the hell do I do with this vegetable: onions and red potatoes edition

Y'all didn't really need a blog post to tell you what to do with potatoes and onions in the middle of June, right?!

Chili: ridiculously cheap and ridiculously easy

Chili (shown here on some delicious nachos) is one of my favorite standby meals. Everyone in the household likes it, it keeps for a week in the fridge if it lasts that long, it freezes well, and best of all, it's incredibly easy and cheap to make.

It's easy to make with couponing finds, pantry staples, veggies from Fair Foods, WIC, or your other favorite source. Pretty much all you absolutely need is beans, some sort of tomato product, and seasoning.

My easiest chili recipe is quite cheap, but isn't actually the cheapest recipe I've come up with (which I'll get to later.) Here's what you need:

• Two cans of beans -- I used one can of kidney beans and one can of black beans
• One 16-ounce can of diced tomatoes -- can also use one can of tomato sauce, one can of tomato puree plus water to make it about 16 ounces, or two to three fresh tomatoes
• One onion
• Spices -- I used Goya adobo plus lots of cumin
• Peppers with some heat to them, or powdered pepper, or hot sauce -- I used hot sauce

Put everything in a pot. Cook on the stove until boiling, then turn down and simmer on low for about two hours, until it looks like chili. If it needs it, add a pinch of sugar to bring out flavor and help everything caramelize. Add salt, more seasonings, and more hot sauce or other hot peppers if needed. As listed here, it makes about six servings for about $2.50 worth of ingredients (assuming full shelf price). If you coupon, you likely have cans of beans and tomato products in your stash that were somewhere between free and 20 cents each.

If I have time, I prefer to cook chili in a slow cooker. It's less likely to stick and turns out better, but you need to plan ahead. I would at least double the batch if I were doing this.

You can also add veggies to chili. Zucchini and yellow summer squash are my favorites. Corn, yams, pumpkin, spinach, kale, and peppers are all great too. Especially if you're using the slow cooker, I imagine you could add just about any vegetables, since they get really soft and blend together with the other ingredients.

If you want to make the recipe even cheaper, use dried beans. Obviously this method takes several hours, even if you use the stove on high heat. They're considerably cheaper though, since a pound of dried beans is about the same price as a can but will absorb water and yield a whole pot. I don't bother soaking beans when doing slow-cooker chili. My slow cooker is the large oval type, and I generally put a total of one pound of dried beans (usually some combination of kidney, pinto, and black beans to add up to one pound). For a pound of beans, I would use two to three cans of tomato products or several pounds of fresh tomatoes, two to three onions, and a lot more spices.

Where to get inexpensive spices warrants its own post, I think. Stay tuned!

What the hell do I do with this vegetable: spinach edition

I still have about 3.999 pounds left of the four pounds of spinach from Fair Foods. Did you know that spinach is mostly water and shrinks like crazy? I wilted some (dig my fancy cooking term there) by putting it in the microwave for one minute, then chopped it up with scissors. I ended up doing this about five times, because I'd put a huge bowl full of it in there, then take it out and it was like a tablespoon worth. I added the spinach to a batch of latke mix from a box, along with some cumin, and baked them in the oven. They're gone now, so I think that means they turned out well.