Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for May

Tostados on Friday

Friday

Tostados -- home-fried corn tortillas, medley of pinto beans, brown rice and olives in spicy sauce, topped with cheddar, lettuce, shredded carrot and dressing of mayo and homemade salsa
Canned green beans sauteed with oil and salsa
Choice of brownie or pumpkin bread for dessert

Saturday

Scrambled eggs and cheese
Spaghetti noodles in leftover sauce from meatballs last week
Vegetable medley of diced carrots, frozen peas, 1 small potato chopped, butter and onion powder
Brownies/pumpkin bread

Sunday

Pigs in blankets, using marked-down Lil Smokies (99 cents/package) and scratch biscuit dough
Carrot sticks
Dried cranberries
Fresh, steamed asparagus (saved the butt ends for soup)
Brownies

Monday

Meatball-vegetable soup, using lots of scraps from the fridge
Toasted Cheddar cheese sandwiches
Pumpkin bread slices with cream cheese

Tuesday

Leftover soup (minus the meatballs), pureed with the immersion blender, really tasty
Yorkshire pudding
Blackberry-rhubarb-vanilla crisp

Wednesday

Black bean and cheese tacos
Green salad
Roasted carrot sticks
Dried cranberries

Thursday

Easy rice bake
Oven-roasted canned tomatoes
Pumpkin bread
Rhubarb custard pie


It was another hodge-podge week. It seemed like every night I was just throwing stuff together, without any real menu idea. I'm in a bit of a slump with meals, and more into the home decorating thing this week. I suppose that is good in itself. I took care of some challenging, to me, things this week.

On the up-side with regards to cooking, I have a small dinner party coming up in June, and I got that menu planned. My son's girlfriend's parents are coming to dinner (ACK!!). We've never met them, so I'm a bit nervous. Outside of cooking holiday meals, like turkey and ham dinners, I'm not terribly proficient at dinner party cooking. But I came up with a menu, that uses a lot of what we have on hand already, and will hopefully be very delicious. Just curious, if you had to come up with a dinner party menu, using mostly what you have in stock right now, what would you prepare?

I hope you all had a great week. What was on your menu this past week?

You know this, right? the tough ends of asparagus

Asparagus is a rather pricey vegetable. So I like to make sure that I use as close to every last bit that I can.

But those tough ends can be a problem, just as they are. I do the thing I think we all do, snap the stems to break off the tough ends, then steam or roast the tender parts.

I hang on to the tough ends to use in soups and casseroles. I use a vegetable peeler to remove the tough skin on the those ends. Without the skin, the asparagus ends are tender enough for chopping and adding to casseroles or soup. And the amount of waste is reduced to a small amount of skin from the bottom ends of the stalks.

And I even save the liquid from steaming the long stalks. I pour it into my fridge jar of veggie liquids to add to the next pot of soup. (The liquid in this jar, above, is a combination of asparagus steaming liquid and the liquid from a can of green beans. It was added to a soup that I made on Monday.)

Anyways, I splurged a bit on Sunday, and bought 2/3 pound of fresh asparagus at $1.88/lb, to have with dinner, and I was reminded of peeling the tough ends.