Cheap & Cheerful Suppers to start the New Year

Celery Salad from Tuesday

Friday
It'll be pizza and a movie night at home for us. We've checked out a movie from the library, and I have homemade pizza sauce in the fridge. I'll make a scratch pizza crust (using this recipe). As pizza is finger food, and we'll be eating while watching a movie, I'll add other finger foods. We have some cola leftover in the fridge. It's likely a bit flat, but we're not picky and will drink it anyway. I have a sliced lime in the fridge, too. I like cola with lemon and ice in it, but we'll give lime a try tonight. So, here's the New Year's dinner menu:

homemade pizza (cheese, olives and onions)
carrot sticks
celery sticks
orange segments
apple wedges
cranberry-oatmeal-pecan cookies
cola

Saturday
meatloaf (I'll make a double batch and freeze half for a future meal)
gravy
mashed potatoes (I'll make extras for a quick potato-onion soup tomorrow)
caramelized onions (the leftover onions will go into tomorrow's soup)
frozen peas
pumpkin pie (making 3 pies, for leftovers to get through early in the week, and 1 for the freezer)

Sunday
rosemary-turkey-potato soup
bread
leftover pumpkin pie

Monday
leftover rosemary-turkey soup
Yorkshire pudding
celery sticks
leftover pie

Tuesday
homemade tomato soup
toasted cheese sandwiches
celery salad
pumpkin pie

Wednesday
kale, onion and ham quiche (making 2, 1 for tonight, the other for the freezer; the pie dough is from the big batch I made on Saturday, rolled out these last 2 crusts and put into pie tins, kept in the fridge for a few days)
oven-roasted winter squash and potatoes

Thursday
(Christmas un-decorating party tonight, which means snacky foods for dinner)

crackers
cream cheese and pepper jelly spread
carrot and celery sticks
olives
deviled eggs
meatballs
orange segments
peanuts
chocolates and the last of the homemade peppermint ice cream


I have to admit, my favorite dinner this week was the meatloaf. I just love my beef these days. Along with a gravy, some mashed potatoes and freshly-baked pumpkin pie, it was all so delicious.

You may have noticed, we're eating a lot of carrots, celery, oranges, onions and potatoes. 'Tis that season. I'm hoping for more variety in early spring, when produce stands open for the season.

The January vegetable garden

My finger tips are frozen into useless stumps, as I type this. There is black ice on the street in front of our house. And I had a 1-inch thick slab of ice to toss off of one of the garden row covers when I went out to harvest some kale. That is how cold an early January day can be, here in the Pacific Northwest.

Yet still, there are vegetables that I can harvest. They somehow have the gumption to outwit the freezes and snow that mother nature hands out to us here.

I harvested a full bucket of baby kale with which to make 2 quiches. I could have harvested more, but my fingers were fumbling in their numbness.

What else has survived? I saw Swiss chard, mustard greens, radish greens, sorrel, beet greens and watercress, all in edible condition. The cabbage, sadly, did not survive, even under a row cover. But we shall relish having fresh vegetables even in these short days of January.

It should be noted that not everything that survived was under a row cover. Some of the kale, the radish greens, beet greens, sorrel and watercress are all out in the open. The baby kale in the photo, above, came from a spot in the open.

Anyone in the maritime northwest contemplating trying a winter garden should be encouraged that many greens can be grown through winter, here.