This is one of the cheapest soups you can make! Using the leftover turkey carcass from your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner to make turkey stock, and filling the soup with torn up turkey scraps makes this very affordable. Add in some really low cost ingredients like barley, carrots, celery and peas and you have a hearty winter soup recipe that will help your budget last until you pay off the Christmas debt! Read more
I’m realizing that we tend to eat a lot more meat in the winter. The rest of the year we usually stretch our meats in pastas, casseroles or stir fry like this week’s beef broccoli. But in winter we often want meaty main dishes like crispy fried chicken, pan fried steak, or these simple and homey garlic lemon chicken thighs. Read more
Beef Broccoli is a quintessential Chinese American dish, available in Chinese restaraunts all over the United States. Unfortunately it is all to easily ruined by gloppy sauces, often the result of too much cornstarch or (even worse) using processed sauce from a jar. Making beef broccoli from scratch is so simple and it’s also an affordable way to stretch expensive cuts of beef. And if you’re really hoping to trim your food budget in the meat department, it’s time to consider buying part of a cow from a local farm.
Eric and I eat a lot of rice, we even buy it twenty pounds at a time! This is nothing new, I’ve always loved rice. In Hawaii I would buy a bowl of rice for 50 cents for breakfast at school then douse it with Aloha Shoyu. I thought that was the perfect breakfast to start the school day off right. While I still love plain rice, sometimes I also love to doctor it up and make it a little more exotic. This dish of cinnamon infused rice tossed with pomegranate seeds, saffron and mint tastes complex, but is really quite simple to make and sure to wow guests at your holiday party.
Eric and I are shocked, thrilled and honored to have won the 2010 Johnson Family Gingerbread Competition! It was a close race and we really thought we’d be giving up our title to someone else. Make sure you check out the original 2010 competition post if you haven’t yet, it gives great details on each gingerbread creation.
