Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for Mid-February

I haven't recapped our week's meals in a while. No time like the present to remedy that! I feel like I get ideas from your menus. I hope that my menus provide some ideas for you, too!

This past week's main meals, whether you call them supper or dinner:

homemade pizza

Friday
homemade pepperoni pizza, with canned green beans and steamed carrots

Saturday
vegetarian tostados -- refried beans, homemade flour tortillas (some were fried in oil, mine was dry-fried), canned tomatoes, shredded cabbage, and salsa, with carrots sticks

Sunday
lentil-vegetable soup, with scratch dinner rolls

Monday (Valentine's Day)
Asian-inspired meal -- egg and veggie fried rice (using frozen eggs), potstickers (freezer item leftover from the holidays), with steamed broccoli and tofu-chocolate whip for dessert

sausage and greens frittata

Tuesday
egg, sausage, onion, cheese, and radish green frittata (using rest of container of frozen eggs, and radishes I grew indoors), with Parmesan potato cubes and orange wedges

Wednesday
chicken nuggets (my daughter bought these), pasta mixed with leftover rice (from Monday), steamed broccoli, gingered fig-applesauce (made with green figs I preserved last fall)

taco soup

Thursday
taco soup topped with toasted corn tortilla strips and scratch brownies for dessert

As I mentioned before, we pulled together our Valentine's dinner from what we had on hand. Pretty much how we do our everyday meals. It all worked out and was delicious. Thursday's taco soup came about on Wednesday when I was searching for plant-based freezer meals to tuck away for a busy day. I found a recipe for taco soup for which we had almost all of the ingredients on hand. My daughter was making dinner this night and I knew she could make this. We decided to add a 4-oz chunk of ground beef to the soup. So, not a solely plant-based meal, but a low-meat freezer meal. (By the way, I have lots and lots of meat-based freezer meals. I was just looking for some variety in this department.) 

My favorite meal this week was on Tuesday, the frittata. We had made a similar frittata for our Christmas brunch. I knew we'd enjoy it just as much for dinner. I make frittatas for dinner a couple of times per month. They're like a quiche, but without the pie crust. This particular one was made special with the addition of browned sausage meat. I used 4 eggs, 6 ounces of pork sausage, 1 1/2 ounces cheddar cheese, some milk, half an onion, some greens, salt, and pepper. The frittata we made for Christmas brunch had red and yellow peppers in place of the greens. The Parmesan potato cubes were simply cubes of potato tossed with Parmesan, onion powder, salt, pepper, and a mix of oil and sausage fat then oven-roasted next to the frittata.

For most of the week, we've had cupcakes and Valentine's sugar cookies as our desserts. Thursday afternoon I had set aside time for baking, as we'd eaten all of the cupcakes and cookies at this point. I baked some granola, followed immediately by a batch of bran muffins, and those followed by a batch of brownies that I topped with chocolate chips when they came out of the oven (spread them as they melted). While the brownies were baking, I made a batch of hot cocoa mix for my family. By baking successively like this, I used one bowl, one set of measuring spoons/cups, one mixing spoon, and one rubber spatula. I didn't rinse these between uses, but washed them all at the very end of baking. Making my work easier.

Does it seem like I bake a lot of sweets/treats? The truth is, we all like different things. My husband likes hearty, but also really likes any kind of cold cereal because it's easy. So, I suspect the muffins and granola will be a hit with him. One daughter in particular loves cocoa. The other likes it, too, but she is just as likely to go for a cup of tea as a cup of cocoa. And both daughters will love the brownies. For me, I don't drink the cocoa (a milk thing), nor do I eat granola (an oat digestive thing). I'll have a muffin or two and a brownie or three. I expect that most of this baking will be gone by the end of the weekend.

We're about out of sandwich and toast bread. I had thought to bake some French bread on Thursday, then decided to postpone that until I make pizzas tomorrow (Friday). I'll do both pizza crust and French bread dough at the same time and save myself some work (same recipe for both). 

So, these were our dinners this past week. What was on your menu?

My Kitchen Garden 2022: What's New, What's Tried and True

Who here will be planting a vegetable garden this spring and summer? Can we talk vegetable gardening yet? I know many of you are still under snow and ice. (Sorry about that.) Maybe a little thinking toward warmer weather will be a good thing.

Earlier today (Wednesday), I started the first seeds of the season indoors in a flat under lights. Because I wasn't sure how easy it would be at planting/seed starting time to find and get the seeds, soil, and compost I needed, I ordered early. 

In October, I added several bags of potting soil for starting seeds to my curbside grocery order. I lucked out and they were sold out of the cheap brand and substituted Miracle Grow soil at a pittance per bag (I bought 6 bags of soil for $1.99 ea, reg. $5.99 ea). I needed potting soil for growing leafy greens indoors over winter, so I went ahead and bought what I would need in spring for seed-starting as well. In December, I placed an order online for the new seeds I would need for this year. And then this week, we had a truckload of compost delivered to our driveway.

That's a lot of compost. We were needing compost for a large part of our yard and having this delivered all in one go will save me the work of buying many bags in the spring, filling the trunk of the car multiple times.

We're expanding our garden again. This time, we're adding a new pumpkin patch with room for sunflowers, corn, and peppers, all heat-lovers. This new patch is in a circle inside our u-shaped driveway, a spot that really heats up and receives the most direct sun of any of our garden spots. (Our property is surrounded by large stands of massive evergreen trees.) Despite all of the sun, this has been a poor growing spot due to rocky soil that doesn't hold water in our dry summers. We'll leave several inches up to a foot of compost on a raised mound in this circle to provide a better growing medium. I've already begun moving buckets of this compost to our regular garden beds. In addition, our previous pumpkin patch will be used for other veggies, and the soil there will be improved with several wheelbarrows of compost. In addition to food-growing locations, we plan on using whatever compost is left in ornamental rocky soil areas and to top-dress our lawns.

Back to the vegetable garden. . . what's new is I'm trying celery, onions, and hot peppers for the first time. It's always a gamble the first year I try a new veggie. It usually takes a couple of years to get the location and timing just right. But I'm hoping for a little of each. I'm also doubling our potato bed space this year. I saved twice as many seed potatoes from last year's harvest to replant in March. My hope is we will have enough potatoes that I feel we can dig some new potatoes in summer without taking too much from our fall harvest. 

What's tried and true for my garden is Early Girl tomatoes. The last 2 years I had to use other tomato seeds and was somewhat disappointed in the tomatoes. Early Girl are the most reliable tomatoes for my garden. Other gardens with more sunlight or higher summer temperatures can grow a wide variety of tomato plants. I'm pretty much stuck with this one variety. The other tried and true veggie for us is kale. I grow an abundance of kale every single spring and summer, simply because it does so well in my garden. I have 2 kinds of kale, a Russian curly kale and an Italian type of kale, lacinato. Both grow well here and provide us with tender baby leafy greens for salads, and mature greens for cooking. The bonus with kale is it survives even cold winters here and returns with some tender new leaves beginning in late February, lasting until early April before bolting. My hanging salad baskets will return as well this spring. These were so successful in the first half of the season last year, then not as well when the summer heat really began. 

My complete list of veggies for this year include: kale, tomatoes, pumpkins, winter squash, hot and sweet peppers, sunflowers (for the seeds), sweet corn, pole and bush beans, lettuce, spinach, beets, turnips, cabbage, Brussel sprouts, carrots, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, and potatoes. If most of this grows well, we'll have variety both in summer and then for next fall and winter for our needs and some to share with others.

If you're growing a garden this next season, what do you want to plant? What would you like to grow but you don't have the right conditions (this would be eggplant for us)? What do you think you'll try for the first time this season? If you don't grow a vegetable garden, have you ever thought of buying into a CSA? What's been your experience with CSAs?