Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for the week

Wednesday
*salad of lettuce, tomatoes, watercress, cucumber, baby beet greens
*baked chicken, smothered in fresh pesto
*brown rice, cooked in chicken stock, with herbs from garden
*leftover plum-blackberry pie

Thursday
*chicken fried rice, with egg, garden cabbage, kale, shallots
*fruit salad with apple, pear, blackberries, plums -- all from our garden
banana pudding cream pie (my son brought home a bag of overripe bananas from his office that were going to be thrown out)

Friday
*homemade pizza topped with marinara, cheese, basil, olives and fresh tomato
*marinated cucumbers
*sauteed yellow crookneck squash
leftover banana pudding cream pie

Saturday
bean, rice and cheese burritos
*tomato wedges with 1000 Island dressing
*leftover sauteed summer squash
banana bread

Sunday
homestyle macaroni and cheese
ham
*kale sauteed in ham fat
*steamed green and waxed beans
banana bread

Monday
*Tex-Mex black bean soup (with garden veggies, shallots, Swiss chard, summer squash, plus canned tomatoes)
sopes
*fruit salad (plums, apple, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, marshmallows)

Tuesday
*chicken and dumplings, w/ green beans, Swiss chard, carrots
*tossed salad, w/lettuce, tomato wedges and marinated black beans
hot fudge pudding cake

Wednesday
*black bean burger patties, topped with marinara sauce and mozzarella
brown rice cooked in chicken stock with garlic powder and onion powder added
*kale sauteed in ham fat
*fresh plums

*indicates part of this meal item came from the garden or orchard

So, this time of year, our fridge looks somewhat bare, almost all of the time. A good part of each day's meals comes directly from the garden, and is not stored in the kitchen. Like last night, the kale and plums were picked in the afternoon. Looking in our fridge, you would never guess that I could be making meals from it, would you? This isn't an end-of-week look to our fridge, either. It pretty much looks like this every day in late summer.

The day before, I run through my mind what main dish item we should have for the next day's dinner. Then in the morning, I rummage through the fridge for anything that needs using up, to add to dinner.

Last night's dinner :

With the black bean burgers, not only did I have the black beans cooked already, but I also had about 1/8 cup of leftover refried pintos from Saturday's burritos. And about 1 tablespoon of vinaigrette from the bottom of the bowl of last Wednesday's salad. Then the marinara was made with leftover pizza sauce (from Friday), chopped oven-roasted canned tomatoes (made on Monday for Tuesday's lunches), and the juice from the open can of tomatoes. All of those items were sitting in the fridge before this photo was taken. Leftovers rarely get shoved t the back of the fridge, here. If they're not frozen, eaten the next day, then they find their way into a dinner later in the week.

I think one of the things that helps with leftover management, for me, is NOT planning a week's worth of meals ahead of time. When I have menu-planned a week at a time, I have wound up with a lot of leftovers at the end of the week. Just my two cents. So, if you don't menu-plan extensively and you're feeling guilty about it, well, take heart, I don't do a lot of menu planning these days, either.

If you're wondering about our garage fridge, it currently has almost a case of butter, a half-gallon of whole milk thawing, some heavy whipping cream, assorted cheese, some condiments, along with the thawing pork roast for tomorrow's dinner. Our freezers, well they're a different story altogether.

Buying canisters of unflavored gelatin

Sorry I couldn't get this posted for yesterday. I was playing mental health non-professional for the day, emphasis on "non-professional". All's good now, but I was wiped out for a day. Back, now, though!

left: 2 new canisters gelatin from Amazon
right: old box of 32 packets from wholesaler, about 3 years ago

So, in posting about what I bought, grocery-wise, for August, I mentioned that I finally got around to restocking our supply of unflavored gelatin. Previously, I had bought this in individual, four  1/2-cup serving each, packets, through Cash & Carry. It was still a pretty good deal from Cash & Carry, but I was looking for a less expensive way to purchase gelatin. And as I bought this through Amazon, this is a purchase any of you would be able to make. So, thought I'd share just what a good deal this is.

I use plain, unflavored gelatin, plus fruit juice or pureed fruit, to make salads and desserts. It's a good way to use excess garden fruit, or make a homemade fruit sauce (like rhubarb sauce) portable for brown bag lunches. Or, to make a jello base, for adding chopped miscellaneous fruit from the garden, for a fruit salad. (Last week, I found a couple of apples knocked off the tree. I brought them inside, cut off bruises and other bad spots, then chopped and added to a homemade lemon jello, made with bottled lemon juice, sugar, water and gelatin.)

I also use gelatin in chiffon pies and sorbet. Pumpkin chiffon pie is my family's favorite version of pumpkin pie, as it's light and airy. I make this pie several times per year. Another favorite of ours, using gelatin is Chocolate Bavarian Pie -- a whipped, mouse-like chocolate pie. I've also turned orange juice concentrate plus gelatin and sugar, into an orange chiffon pie, one year, when needing a dessert, was about to move, so had an otherwise empty pantry. It was surprisingly good, for such an ad lib, last-minute dessert. So, that's primarily what I use unflavored gelatin for.

Unflavored gelatin has an unlimited shelf life, if kept cool and completely dry. As for expiration dates on gelatin, it actually has more to do with the packaging breaking down, rather than any deterioration of the product. So, stored properly, so no moisture gets into the dry product, my unflavored gelatin should last as long as it needs to, before consuming all of the product. Once opened, a canister like this can be transferred to a glass jar with tight-sealing lid, or the entire canister can be placed into a gallon-size ziploc bag.

for a price comparison:

Through Amazon.com, a 1-lb canister sells for $10.18 each (when buying 2 canisters). One canister contains 283 servings. So, that's 14  1/2 cents per four 1/2-cup servings (equivalent to a small box of Jello, or one of the packets of unflavored gelatin), if using the recommended 2 teaspoons gelatin granules per 2 cups liquid. Phew -- the take away in that is   14  1/2 cents

Through Cash & Carry (a wholesaler with better prices than my standard grocery store on this product), a box of 32 envelopes (to make 128 1/2-cup servings), costs $11.88. That works out to 37 cents per 4  1/2 cup servings, using 1 packet per 2 cups liquid.  37 cents

Buying in a canister is 60% cheaper than buying in packets through a wholesaler!!

Yes, I did have to buy A LOT of gelatin. But I look at it this way, now I don't have to think about buying gelatin again, for a lo-o-o-ong time. (And as I said before, it keeps indefinitely.)

For our home, the real value to buying unflavored gelatin is in transforming something that's become humdrum into something new and different. When using produce that is primarily only what I grow, for a season, there can be a lot of repetition. I don't have the option of just not buying more rhubarb next week, if we're tiring of rhubarb. When next week comes, we still need to eat rhubarb.

As a result, we eat a lot of rhubarb sauce and blackberry-rhubarb sauce in our family. It's made with fruit from our own property and is almost free. The only cost is the sugar. When we tire of the fruit as sauce, I can use a little unflavored gelatin and transform it into a fruit jello, adding a bit of interest to a food that has become boring. And trust me when I tell you that packing a container of fruit gelatin is so much neater in a backpack all day, than a similar container of fruit sauce.


(For how to make fruit jello, using real fruit or fruit juice, here's how I do it.)