Continuing where we left off from in the last post, I'd like to share with you this simplest of recipes!
Carly's Cheesy Refried Beans
1/2 tbsp canola or vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups pinto beans
4 slices pickled jalapeño, minced
1 clove garlic, smashed and minced
1 tsp chili powder
2 oz shredded cheese
For my first time cooking with dried beans, I decided to go with something very simple and comforting, something I could just plop into a tortilla and munch on happily.
Simply:
- Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat.
- Combine beans, peppers, garlic, and chili powder.
- When the beans are hot, mash them up with your spoon.
- Add cheese. Lower heat and stir until cheese is melted and combined with the beans.
- Remove from heat immediately.
(If you don't think this looks DIVINE, then clearly you are too snooty for this blog!)
Apart from the beans, I used inexpensive ingredients that I already had in the house. You should be able to find them easily in your local supermarket.
Wesson Vegetable Oil comes in 24 oz bottles for $3.39
Victoria "Hot" Sliced Jalapeño Peppers come in a 12 fl. oz jar for $3.99
Kraft Natural Shredded Cheese - Mexican Four Cheese comes in an 8 oz. bag for $4.49
McCormick Chili Powder comes in a 2.5 ounce container for $2.99
A head of garlic should cost you well less than $1
And the pinto beans, as chronicled in my last post, cost a mere 1.19 per lb (dry).
When you factor in the amount of each product I used, it cost less than a dollar per serving. NICE!
But it doesn't stop there! Like a true gourmand, I smeared these suckers in a tortilla and added fat free sour cream! Simple burritos like this make for a tasty and quick lunch or dinner, and during weeks when money is really tight, they can be a real life saver. Don't worry though: we will be working our way up to more exciting cuisine as the blog progresses ;)
With the tortilla (Mission Foods Medium Size Flour Tortillas - 10 8" tortillas for $3.69) and the sour cream (Breakstone Fat Free Sour Cream - 8 oz for $1.59), the approximate price of my meal is less than $3!! Money in the bank, folks!
Bottom Line:
My simple recipe won't make it into any cook books any time soon, but it is a quick and satisfying meal for less than $3.00!
"Beans?" you may ask. "Why beans?"
I WILL TELL YOU WHY: beans are healthy, satisfying, versatile, and a vegetarian source of protein. Most importantly, though beans are cheap. I will likely have several discussions on the merits and uses of beans throughout the lifetime of this blog, but let's start with a little healthy debate.
Canned vs. Dried
I have bought canned beans exclusively for my entire life. Then, one day (yesterday) it occurred to me: why not try dried beans?
"Because," my inner voice piped up, "you have to soak them and they take like an hour to cook properly?"
My inner voice had a point. Why bother with the extra fuss when I can buy a can of beans and shove a burrito in my face 5 minutes later? Well, you may have seen this coming, but it turns out there are indisputable advantages to buying dry beans:
- They are less expensive. True, you can buy a can of beans for less than $1.25. But that same amount of money will buy you an entire 1 lb bag of dry beans, which contains about 4 times the amount a can does.
- They are healthier. Canned beans often have extra sodium, whereas dry beans do not.
- The taste. Dried beans reputedly taste better and have a nicer texture than their canned friends. Do I agree? READ ON TO FIND OUT!
So I bit the bean bullet and bought myself a bag of dried pinto beans from the produce mart.
Ooh, they were cute little devils! But now they needed to soak. There are various ways to do this, but I followed this handy guide by dietician Alice Henneman, MS.
I decided to start with a small batch, only 1/2 cup dry. Basically, you put the dry beans in a pot and cover them with water (1.6 cups of water per ounce of beans). Then you refrigerate them for the rest of your life 6-8 hours, or overnight. Look how plump they get!
The next morning, I woke up and started to cook the beans. There are a few important rules to remember: don't salt the beans until after they've cooked, and don't over-boil them. Bring them to a boil in 3x their volume in water. (You may add spices, but honestly I didn't find that made much of a difference in their taste. From now on, I will only add spices after this process.)
After about an hour or so, your beans should be tender. You can imagine my anticipation after waiting all these hours for a taste of live bean! So I grabbed one, popped it in my mouth, and...
It was good. Not mind-blowing. If I'm going to be honest I was expecting these to be damn near magical compared to the canned variety. Sadly, my first thought upon trying them was that they needed salt. Perhaps I'm just a rube who likes her legumes salty and tin-flavored. Or perhaps I just need to grow accustomed to my new bean-cookin' ways. I will say that cooking the beans this way made for firmer, heartier seeds. Plus, after I added spices I really did enjoy them immensely! And I still have 3/4 of a bag to experiment with. Not bad.
Bottom line:
In general, beans provide a cheap source of protein to pad your diet. Dry beans have health and budget advantages over canned ones, but it's up to you to decide whether or not they are worth the trouble.
I told you we would cover burgers ;)
I love me a juicy, tasty burger. These beauts get a lot of bad rap because of their evil fast-food cousins (and some not fast-food restaurants...if you really want to give yourself a scare, check out Ruby Tuesday's nutrition info. That's right, 900+ cals for a VEGGIE BURGER.) However, if you do your homework and prepare the burger yourself, there's absolutely no reason you can't indulge in a meat-and-cheese-seeded-bun-love-fest once in a while.
Do-It-Yourself
Food Network guru Alton Brown swears by grinding your own burger. This of course requires some kind of apparatus to grind the beef, like a food processor, or an actual meat grinder (how Pink Floyd). I've never attempted this myself. However, his recipe is as follows:
8 oz chuck, trimmed, cut into 1 1/2 inch cubes
8 oz sirloin, trimmed 1 1/2 inch cubes
To put it in perspective: Fresh Direct (who doesn't deliver to my neighborhood, drat them) prices chuck at $4.99 per lb, and sirloin at $3.99 per lb, which means that for $4.49 you get a pound of freshly ground beef. If you dole your beef into 4 oz. portions (which is my preferred burger size), you get 4 1/4lb patties for less than a dollar-fiddy a piece (and they're all sittin' pretty at a reasonable 305 calories). Eat it, McDonald's.
Frozen Option
If I teach you one thing with this blog, it will likely be to USE YOUR FREEZER. I can't tell you how much money you will save, because I haven't bothered to count it. Rest assured, though, your wallet will thank you. Freezing food will protect your leftovers and help you stretch your resources. Bonus scenario: there's a great sale on pork tenderloin/ground turkey/chicken lips at your local market, and you've been dying to try out that Cubano/turkey meatloaf/ chicken lip stew recipe your grandma gave you, but you don't know when you'll have time to cook it. No matter! You can buy it and freeze it until you're ready! Such a simple rule, and burgers are no exception.
A good place to check for inexpensive meat is Omaha Steak Company. Now, I will warn you to put your number (including cell) on the do not call registry, because OSC loves to make little courtesy calls asking you to buy their beef. I'm 100% Not Into This (and for the record, I asked them not to call me and they complied), but I do occasionally get email updates from them, and they have some pretty good deals pretty frequently. As of this writing, you can get 16 (!!) 8 oz. burgers for $34 (as opposed to the regular price of $66.99). If you follow my example and halve and reshape the patties into 4 oz. servings, that's a whopping 32 burgers for only $1.06! (I should totally be on TV with this). The patties come individually wrapped and stored in a big stuff-in-your-freezer-box, which - you know - I wish they used less plastic, but it makes it a breeze to defrost individual patties. I did the math, and you save about 40 cents a burger if you go for the box of 8 oz. burgers, as opposed to buying the rough equivalent of 4 oz. burgers.
Each patty is 100% pure beef, which is really the only kind of burger I recommend eating, unless you like earthworm as a potential filler (okay, that was a vicious rumor). It's 490 calories for the 8 oz monster, only 245 if you cut it in half. Not bad.
Bottom Line
Follow Alton Brown's recipe for freshly ground burgers. Approx $1.30 and 305 calories per 1/4 lb burger.
Go the frozen route with Omaha Steak Company. Approx $1.06 and 245 calories per 1/4 lb burger (with the deal described above).
Hello, new friend. Welcome to my little project.
For the past few months, money has been tight. Like a lot of folks in the New York animation scene, I'm between jobs right now. That's fine. I don't mind being on a budget. There's a lot of unnecessary spending that goes on in the life of a youngster like me, and frankly spontaneous binge-shopping is a habit I'm happy to break. But I can't go without one big thing: FOOD!
I love cooking, I love sharing recipes, I even love food shopping. Maybe it's my Italian-American upbringing, but I just really appreciate the sense of love and community that food can foster. And of course there's the "duh" factor: when prepared well and with tasty ingredients, food is delicious!
My fiance and I have been living on tight food budget lately, and you know what? I love it! There is a sense of satisfaction I get from knowing that I am saving money AND being good to my tummy. I'd like to pass that feeling on to you.
I find it alarming when people say you can't eat well on a tight budget. That simply isn't true. What I want is to show you that you can take that $2 you were going to spend on a life threatening Sonic burger/shake/heart disease combo and invest it in a healthier choice!
But don't worry...there will be burgers and shakes here, too ;)
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