Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for Mid-September

Here's something new for my household's grocery shopping -- we bought 30 pounds of beef from a rancher with a small-scale operation. This was something I'd been wanting to do for a decade. Now was the right time. 

I wasn't sure how much freezer space 30 pounds would take up, so I didn't want to buy any more than that at this time. I'll buy more when we use all of this. 

This beef was a lot more expensive per pound than grocery store beef, but it is much more flavorful, and I know that the animals are well-cared for, and the quality is higher (ground beef is 85/15, the stew meat had just enough fat on it to make it tender without needing to drain the meat after searing). So, our meals for this last week begin with the first of our beef purchase.

Friday (my husband cooked and I forgot to get a photo)
beef, tomatoes, garlic and macaroni
apple wedges

Saturday (again no photo)
scrambled eggs
rice
tomato-cucumber salad

Sunday

Sunday
beef stew, using our garden potatoes, carrots, celery, garlic, green beans, and herbs, plus beef
cornbread for the rest of the family

Monday

Monday
baked beans
sautéed garden veggies
apple wedges
cabbage and cucumber slaw
plum cake (for the rest of the family)

Tuesday

Tuesday
roasted chicken, gravy
mashed potatoes or slice of bread
cabbage, cucumber, tomato salad

Wednesday

Wednesday
leftover chicken in bbq sauce
white corn grits
apples and plums
tomato, cucumber, basil, garlic salad

cookies

Thursday --
I was super hungry and barely remembered to take a pic

Thursday
chicken soup, using leftover chicken, garden celery, carrots, green beans, herbs, and a store onion
fresh-baked French bread

cookies

Lots of good produce from the garden this week to go with 1 whole chicken and 2 pounds of beef. I've been digging the carrots for meals as I need them. So far, the first 2 pots have good-sized carrots. I don't expect the other 4 pots to have equally-large carrots, as those were planted and thinned just a little later.

Breakfasts included toasted homemade bread, jam and peanut butter, oatmeal, no-bake peanut butter-oatmeal cookies (my daughter thinks of these as breakfast cookies), eggs, coffeecake, cornbread and syrup, tomatoes, plums, apples, orange juice, and some commercial cereal and pork sausage. For lunches, we used some of the leftover roasted chicken in sandwiches, plus apples, plums, tomatoes, cabbage, and salad greens for produce. 

So, that's what we ate this week. What was on your menu?

How we stay warm while we delay turning on our furnace

Maple-Pecan Cookies

I tend to bake and cook more often this time of year than even in the dead of winter. This week I've baked cookies, a pan of cornbread, 2 coffee cakes, a 3-loaf batch of wheat bread, roasted a whole chicken, cooked beef stew and 2 pots of soup, made a pan of baked beans, and kept the dehydrator going with plums and tomatoes all week, on top of using the stovetop for quick-cooking. I'm doing all of this house-warming cooking because it adds a bit of heat to the house in these last few weeks before we turn on the furnace.

Italian Prunes, halved, pitted and dried

It may still be warm during the day where you live, but for us in the maritime northwest, the daytime highs have cooled substantially. A daytime high of 62 degrees F feels chillier  to me when the temperatures drop off in the early fall than when the cold winter yields to spring. To compensate, we're putting extra layers on our bodies and extra layers on our beds.

I've never calculated if using the oven more to add heat to our house is more cost-effective than just turning on the furnace. But I do know that I can tolerate cooler indoor temps better if I'm moving around in the kitchen. And putting on a sweater or an extra blanket is the time-proven action that pairs with turning the thermostat down a degree or two. In addition, my family loves all of the extra baked goods and comfort foods they're getting right now.

Anyway, for every week we put off turning on the furnace, I'm sure we're saving at least a little money on utilities.

Want to bake some Maple-Pecan cookies?

Here's how I make mine:

I use a chocolate chip cookie recipe as a guide, substituting maple flavoring for vanilla extract and chopped pecans for chocolate chips. I use real butter as the fat and increase the flour called for in the recipe. Otherwise, the Maple-Pecan cookie recipe is pretty much like the basic chocolate chip cookie recipe on a package of chocolate baking chips.

Here are the ingredients and measurements:

1/2 cup butter, softened

3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon maple flavoring
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1  1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped pecans

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg and flavoring. Mix in salt, soda, flour and pecans. Chill the dough for 30 minutes. 

Drop dough by teaspoonful onto ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 375 degrees F for 9-11 minutes, until browned and crispy-looking around the edges. Remove from baking sheet right away.

These cookies baking in the oven not only warmed me up, but definitely made my house smell like fall.

Do you use your oven more in fall to help warm the house, too?