Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for a Late January Week

Friday

• lentil and vegetable soup, using whatever veggies I could find in the fridge, plus canned green beans, canned tomatoes and some macaroni pasta
• freshly-baked French bread (it came out of the oven 5 minutes before serving, can't get much fresher than that!)
• tangerines
• blondies that my daughter made, late, late, late last night (love those night-owl university students!)

Saturday

• hot dogs
• a pasta and nut sauce
• canned green beans
• cole slaw

Sunday

• ham and corn pudding
• yam casserole, topped with mini-marshmallows
• cole slaw

Monday

• leftover ham and corn pudding
• leftover yam casserole
• candied pineapple slices, sauteed in butter and brown sugar

Tuesday

• 10-minute turkey pot pie
• canned cranberry sauce
• olives
• blackberry-rhubarb sauce (from the freezer)

Wednesday

• leftover lentil and vegetable soup, topped with cheese
• garlic toast made from leftover French bread
• dried cranberries

Thursday

• baked turkey bacon
• pancake squares
• stewed prunes

So, another week gone. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a repeating pattern in my menus. Friday I always make double of everything. I freeze half, and on the following Wednesday, we have a completely leftover meal. Sunday, I also double-batch most of dinner. Then on Monday we eat leftovers.  Thursday is always an easy breakfast for dinner menu. And my husband now always cooks on Saturday. This routine greatly reduces the amount of time I spend cooking dinners.

The other area in which I am really saving time is grocery shopping. I stocked up pretty well in the fall months. I'm now using those supplies for the bulk of our groceries needs. I have another busy weekend ahead of me (volunteering all day on Saturday), so I don't think I'll have time for any grocery shopping this morning, after my appointment. We are running low on eggs. So be it. I can save time by skipping grocery shopping this week, then doing a big stock-up next Friday, when I won't have other weekend obligations to follow through on. 

Do you ever find yourself facing this sort of decision -- shop now and have ample supplies, or, delay shopping another week and save 2 hours? It is a way to save time. One of my delightful daughters offered to "help" with the grocery shopping. It was sounding great until I realized that her list consisted mostly of Cheetos and Doritos, while mine consisted of the "boring" foods like eggs and whole wheat flour. I did make a promise to do a huge shopping trip the first week of March, and maybe some Cheetos will make it into that shopping trip.

Anyway, I'm wishing everyone a great weekend. If you live where there's a storm, I hope you don't have to go out in it, but can sit by a window and just enjoy the view. Snow is always prettier when I don't have to drive in it.

The 10-Minute Turkey Pot Pie

This really takes more than 10 minutes, if you count the time to originally roast and chop the turkey, make the gravy and mix the pie pastry. And of course, the time spent baking.

However . . .
on the day that I assembled and baked it, that's all the time I had in order to throw it together and begin baking in the oven.  So, in that sense, it was a 10-minute pot pie.

Before those 10 minutes, I had frozen turkey chunks in gravy, from Thanksgiving And, I had pie pastry in patties, in the freezer. To get from here to finished product --

Early in the day I found the frozen turkey and pie pastry, and set out to thaw.

About 45 minutes before dinner, I emptied the turkey in gravy into a glass deep-dish pie plate, peeled 3 carrots and chopped quickly, then added to the turkey in gravy, along with water.  I microwaved all of this for 3 minutes.

While  the turkey, gravy, water and chopped carrots were in the microwave, I peeled and rough-chopped 3 potatoes. I added the potatoes to the carrots and turkey, then microwaved for another 6 minutes.

While that was microwaving, I washed and chopped 2 long sticks of celery and rolled out the pie pastry.

Once the potatoes were about half-way cooked, I added some dried onion flakes, a little more water and chicken soup base, along with the celery, plus some canned peas.  I stirred this all together, and topped with the rolled-out pie pastry.

I was in such a hurry that I didn't even slash the pie neatly. But instead, with one hand holding the pie about to go into the oven, I quickly used the other hand to make 5 slashes into the top of the pie. It didn't seem to matter that it wasn't "pretty".

The pie was baked at 375 degrees F, for about 25 minutes, while I worked on another project. My hands-on time, the day of baking the pie was really just 10 minutes. 10 very rushed minutes. --  but 10, nonetheless.  

Things that saved time -- 

• I used dried onion flakes in place of more time-consuming process of chopping fresh onions, then sauteing in fat before adding to the turkey and vegetable mix.
• I used about 1 heaping teaspoon of chicken soup base to boost the flavor, instead of "fiddling" with the seasonings.
• I had pie pastry in single-pie patties in the freezer, ready to use after thawing. And I only used one crust for the pie, on top where it matters most.
• The turkey that I froze, right after Thanksgiving was already in chunks, and in a seasoned gravy.
• My vegetables were roughly chopped. If I'd wanted to save even more time, I could have left the peels on.
• I mixed the pie filling in the baking dish (a glass, deep-dish pie plate), the same dish that I microwaved part of the filling in, before placing in the oven.