Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for a Cool March

I missed an extra week of Cheap & Cheerful Suppers. I'll try to remember everything we had, but there are a few days in there where I didn't write down what we had that are foggy.

Friday
pepperoni pizza, stuffed grape leaves, dried figs -- a very Mediterranean meal

Early last fall, I froze a bunch of grape leaves from our vines. I rolled about 20 small to medium sized leaves up, then wrapped those in several big leaves and tied with thread. The big leaves are for lining the cooking pan and placing on top of the stuffed small and medium leaves to hold it all down while cooking. I stuffed this batch with rice, garlic, onion , chives, dill, salt/pepper, a drizzle of olive oil and squirt of lemon juice. I steamed them with some chicken stock. These were such a treat in late winter. wOrking with the frozen, then thawed leaves is just a little trickier than working with fresh. The frozen/thawed leaves cling to each other and take patience to separate them all, but worth it. The figs were from our two fig trees. We don't usually get enough ripe figs to dry, but in 2021 we did. So delicious!

Saturday
bean and TVP enchiladas, sautéed garden greens and onions

Sunday

rice, scrambled eggs with cheese and sausage, steamed carrots

Monday
tuna sandwiches, Cole slaw (using last of Napa cabbage and red cabbage), canned pineapple chunks

I needed an easy dinner. I've been working hard on several fronts and too tired to do anything time-consuming.

Tuesday
bean with bacon soup, bran muffins

Wednesday
scrambled eggs, rice, steamed carrots, radish green salad

One of my daughters cooked tonight and I gave her this easy menu. I know scrambled eggs aren't considered dinner fodder in some households. My family has often had breakfast foods like scrambled eggs at dinner time.

Thursday

TVP spaghetti, canned green beans, cupcakes

This was the day I had some bad family news. Our plans had been to make a deep dish pizza and watch a movie. Instead, we threw together this simple spaghetti meal and put off the pizza and movie for the next night.

Friday

deep dish pizza (recipe courtesy of Kraft Foods from the 1980s -- my daughters love these vintage manufacturer recipes), steamed broccoli

Saturday & Sunday - I think we had some sort of Mexican refried beans and tortillas meal one night and lentil soup and rolls the other. I don't recall what else we had with these meals.

Monday
brown rice, peanut and vegetable sauce, bread pudding with fruit sauce

Tuesday
cream of green soup (using garden greens), garlic-Parmesan toast

Wednesday
tuna noodle casserole, radish green salad, rice pudding (leftover rice from Monday and a half slice of very stale bread I found in the fridge) plus the rest of fruit sauce

Thursday
KFC chicken-potato-corn-gravy-cheese bowls, radish green and watercress salad, carrot sticks, banana bread

I have to thank Alice for the KFC bowl idea. I had all of the ingredients on hand and this sounded easy and tasty. My family loved these!

I baked a couple of times during this period, bread, banana bread, muffins, no-bake cookies, and scratch cupcakes. I used some of our old, old and flat cola from Christmas season 2020 as the liquid and part of the sugar in the banana bread. It worked just fine and there's no cola flavor. This soda is flat and no one wants it now. So, I thought I'd use it as part of the sugar and the liquid in various recipes. I've done sloppy Joe mix and baked beans with flat soda, too. I just hate to throw it out. 

I actually did remember most of what we've had these last two weeks. How was your week? Any special meals or snacks you enjoyed?

Homemade Garden Cloche Winter Experiment

The climate in my area is moderate for winters. Most years we do get a little snow that sticks around for 3 to 7 days. Our overnight low temps can dip into the teens for about a week in December or early January. This past year we had about 1 foot of snow on the ground for the better part of a week with temps not going above freezing for that entire period (lows in the low teens some nights). I'd say this was a bit colder than typical. I'm giving you this info as background for my recent experiment.

I had been curious about whether or not garden cloches would help my overwintering of greens for early spring harvests. So I decided to use homemade cloches over part of the Swiss chard but not all. I made my cloches out of plastic 1-gallon milk jugs, cutting off the bottom inch of each jug. In fall around the time of the first frost, I put these cloches on 11 Swiss chard plants. I left them on the plants all winter, removing them yesterday. Occasionally wind would blow them off, and I'd go out and put them back on. When it snowed in December and January, the snow piled up on top of each cloche. I didn't do anything to clear the snow. I left about a dozen Swiss chard plants bare for all of winter.

As I mentioned above, Tuesday I removed the cloches. 5 of the 11 plants survived the winter and are now thriving. (In the photo above, I'd just shoveled new compost around the plants and pulled out the surrounding weeds.) 

In the section with uncovered Swiss chard, about 6 feet away, only 1 of 12 plants looks like it has spring growth on it. Others of these plants may put out some growth in a couple of weeks, or they may not. I'm not sure yet. However, one thing is for certain, the cloches brought about new healthy growth much earlier in the overwintered Swiss chard. I'd say this experiment was fruitful for me in coming winters. Our kale and turnips overwinter without covering, but the Swiss chard has always been hit or miss.

Why do I like to do these experiments? I think I'm always looking for ways to improve in my work. With gardening, that means harvesting even more or for more weeks of the year. If we ever truly need to rely heavily on our garden, it's nice to know that we can get more Swiss chard when not a whole lot  else is producing. The bonus is the milk jugs didn't cost me anything and have now been set aside to reuse next winter. I may try this next year to see if I can get the kale or turnip greens to start spring growth even earlier in the season. Anyways, my little free experiment.