Healthy and Cheap Family Meals for Tight Budgets

Sweet Potato Oven Fries

3/29/2017

The method described here is the same for sweet potatoes fries or regular potato fries. It’s an easy, no fuss way to get homemade fries on the table. And while it uses oil, it’s far less than what's used in deep frying, so it’s easier on the waistline - and healthier, too.

Just be sure to allow enough time – about an hour – to get them on the table. That’s an hour where you can pretty much go off and do other things, but it’s still time you need to plan for.

Here’s the recipe:

Homemade Basic Seitan (Wheat Meat)

3/23/2017

As I think I’ve mentioned a few times before, my husband and I first began including vegetarian meals into our menus to save money way back when we were struggling students on a very tight budget.

Throughout the years since then the level of our vegetarianism has varied, but in recent years we have begun to avoid meat pretty much all the time, mostly for health and budget reasons, but also to lessen our impact on the planet. (It takes much more land to feed an animal to then feed a person than it does to feed a person directly.)

But we both like meat. In the past I have used soy tempeh as a meat substitute in some meals, but it costs much more than I typically pay for a pound of meat, so that kind of defeats the purpose of saving money.

I’ve known about seitan, the so-called “wheat meat”, which is made from wheat gluten, for a while, but only recently decided to explore it a little more closely.

However, when I checked it out at the store, it was even more expensive than the tempeh. That was disappointing, but I didn’t give up and proceeded to do a little research into making my own. I figured that since it’s essentially made with a component of flour, it couldn’t be harder to make than bread.

And I was absolutely right about how simple it is to make. In fact, it really could not be easier to make your own seitan - even easier than bread, actually.

All it takes is about 10 minutes of prep time, an additional 45 minutes of cook time, and voila, you have about 2 pounds of seitan to work with. It has a nice chewy consistency that to my mind is a darned close facsimile of what you get with meat. It’s good.

Caramelized Onions, the Easy, Slow-Cooker Way

3/14/2017

It’s no secret that I’m normally the kind of cook who has little patience for fancy foods or extra or added cooking steps. I'm always looking for the easiest way to get a meal on the table.

I don't want to say I'm lazy or anything; I prefer to think of myself as practical and efficient.

Yeah, let's go with that.

So even if I really like something that tends to be complicated or take a long time, I will always try to find a way to simplify the process so that I can incorporate it into my regular cooking more easily. Caramelized onions are just such a case.

As the name suggests, caramelized onions are packed with sweetness. When added as an ingredient to a recipe they can add a flavor punch that raises the taste experience of even a mundane dish to a higher plane. Which is why you’ll find them called for in all kinds of recipes, from grilled meats to salads to grilled cheese sandwiches. Caramelizing turns the humble, everyday, yellow onion into a gourmet-level ingredient.

But there’s one problem with them: they take forever to prepare. Yeah, you'll find so-called quick recipes that include caramelized onions as an ingredient, but they always seriously underestimate the time they take to prepare.

There is simply no such thing as a quick recipe using caramelized onions.

Truth be told, it can easily take an hour on the stovetop and almost constant attention besides. You can shorten the time a bit by putting them on a cookie sheet in the oven, as shown in the pictures below, but it still is going to take 45 minutes.

That’s a lot of time to dedicate to one single ingredient in a recipe, particularly when you have to add that cooking time to all the other prep steps

Egg Alternatives

3/2/2017

May Belle - one of my sister's free-range, laying chickens that I helped nurse back to health after she was seriously wounded by an unknown predator. A sweet, lovely girl. But some people cannot enjoy the delicious eggs she lays.

I have a son who has developed an allergy to eggs in adulthood, so I have become much more conscious of the whole food allergy issue.

I'm not alone.

Awareness about food sensitivities has grown in recent years in general, and that makes it much easier than it used to be to find ways to accommodate them, or find recipes that cater to a particular type of allergy.

Having an allergy to eggs is quite common, as is the desire to eliminate them from the diet by those following a vegan regimen.

But it can be difficult to avoid them, given how much they're used in so many food products, from baked goods to some pastas, to mayonnaise, etc. It demands careful reading of ingredient labels to make sure it's not included in whatever the food may be.

In the past, an egg allergy often meant essentially giving up all kinds of baked goods, as well as anything else that uses egg as a binder, such as meatloaf, many types of burgers, or lasagna, just to name a few.

But awareness has helped educate and promote alternatives for eggs that can be used as a substitute in those recipes and in others, with very satisfactory results.

Below is a list of those substitutes I am familiar with. Some work better for different recipes than others, so you may want to experiment a little to see which one works best for your favorite one.

In some cases, you may even be surprised to find that the egg alternatives produce better results than the eggs do themselves.

That happened recently when my son's girlfriend baked two loaves of the same sweet bread, using eggs in one and pureed fruit in the other. We all agreed that the one with the pureed fruit was better.

So even if you don't have an allergy or you aren't vegan, these alternatives are still useful if you ever find yourself short of eggs for a recipe you planned.

Sweet Potato Oven Fries

Homemade Basic Seitan (Wheat Meat)

Caramelized Onions, the Easy, Slow-Cooker Way

Egg Alternatives

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