March 15, 2010 by KerryAnn Foster.

My children are prone to complain if they see the same meal too many times in a row.  To keep them from getting food boredom, I often take leftovers and turn them into something new. I do pinto beans on a Monday night, doubling the beans and setting the extra aside.  I serve cornbread for dinner on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the following day for lunch I serve the reheated beans spooned over the cornbread.  For me and the kids, we’ll eat three slices of cornbread and a third to a half a pound of dry beans for a lunch.

Final cost- 73 cents a serving using organic beans or 67 cents a serving for conventional.  If you can use cornmeal that isn’t gluten-free, it will be a cheaper meal. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in leftovers, Nut-free, Soy-Free, Lunch, lazy cooking, crock-pot, Casein-Free, Cheap Eats, frugality, recipe, Gluten-Free | Print | 1 Comment »

March 13, 2010 by KerryAnn Foster.

How many times do your kids run into the kitchen and pull their stool up to the stove to take a peek at what you’re heating up for lunch, only to hear, “Awwww!  Again?  We ate that last night!”  Fried rice is a good way to reinvent leftovers from the night before.  I serve this by having rice one night and then doing a roast, pork or chicken and veggies the second night.  The third day for lunch I combine the rice and leftover meat and veggies to make fried rice.

Fried Rice Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in leftovers, Nut-free, Lunch, lazy cooking, Menu Mailer, Casein-Free, Cheap Eats, recipe, Gluten-Free | Print | 2 Comments »

February 24, 2010 by KerryAnn Foster.

We have a new sample Menu Mailer posted over on the forum.  Come join us and take a look.

We’ve recently changed the Mailer format and it has received overwhelmingly positive feedback by our subscribers.  As usual, we have maintained our goal to keep all meals under 30 minutes of hands-on time and have one meal a week that is meatless or meat-optional yet filling.  Now we have added three new features to the weekly mailer.  A Soup of the Week through the Fall and Winter, to help get extra veggies and bone broth into your family.  I suggest you serve a small cup each night to your family as an appetizer, fifteen minutes before you put the main meal on the table.  This allows you to use meatless soups and use up leftover veggies as a form of added nutrition, when your family normally would not accept a meatless soup as a full meal.  This also gives you an option for a quick lunch on a busy day.

We have started prepping all of the onion, celery and carrots into one batch using the food processor, to cut down on your hands-on time in the kitchen each evening.  Cooking them all at once then putting some in the freezer allows you to get meals on the table even faster on busy weeknights.  Other veggies that can be prepared ahead are also listed. We have also listed all of the grain soaking and cooking and all of the bean sprouting/soaking and cooking ahead, so you don’t have to worry about doing it during the week.  However, we continue to put that information on the weekly prep list in case you don’t have time to accomplish it before the week starts, in order to make sure you are covered either way!

Finally, we have started doing at least one batch-cooking meal a week to help you stock your freezer and give you an extra option for lunch.  Depending on the week, we might do a completed main dish or a piece, such as BBQ sauce or a plain roasted chicken, that can be used in many different recipes going forward.  Sometimes we also do both, as was recently seen in our week with BBQ chicken where you could put the BBQ chicken as a coplete meal, then the extra BBQ sauce and plain chicken into the freezer for other dishes, according to what would best meet your family’s needs.

We hope you like these new changes to the mailer!

Posted in lazy cooking, Menu Mailer, Organization- inside, Cheap Eats | Print | No Comments »

February 12, 2010 by KerryAnn Foster.

I confess.  I hate making pancakes.  The first round sticks to the pan, you stand there for an hour flip flip flipping, just to get enough to feed your brood for breakfast with no leftovers.  Every one that hits the plate gets claimed and gobbled up before the next batch comes off the skillet.  I wind up eating my breakfast, consisting of the gnarled up pancakes the kids wouldn’t touch, standing up while continuing to flip.  Nope, not for me.  Too busy, especially knowing I will spend at least 30 minutes hands-on time in the kitchen for both lunch and dinner plus any time needed for the ferments, kefirs and what-nots.  THEN there’s the clean-up.

I’ve started doing oven pancakes instead.  In fact, I’m lazy.  I do oven pancakes AND cook my bacon in the oven.  No huge, greasy spatters to clean up afterward and a cast iron skillet to wash by hand.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in lazy cooking, Nut-free, Soy-Free, Menu Mailer, true confessions, Cheap Eats, recipe, breakfast, Casein-Free | Print | 6 Comments »

February 10, 2010 by KerryAnn Foster.

Finally, a post about food!

We’re having nasty weather yet again.  The sky is spitting snow, there’s a blizzard advisory and we’re on the border of it but I’m really hoping we won’t get anything.  They keep on telling us yet more snow is coming and making the forecast for the coming days worse then change it all the next hour.  Thanks to having taken multiple classes on weather, I understand the constant flip-flops but I really wish they wouldn’t do it.  I wish someone had strangled that groundhog, cause I’m sick of snow!  God is laughing at me because I wanted to move to Asheville in part because it rarely got snow. Supposedly.

Today was proving to be a busy day thanks to doing taxes and writing the mailer.  I am behind on menu planning for this coming week and I do my shopping at the end of the week, so I drug out the crock-pot and threw this together from what I had on hand with the big London broil in my fridge, in between conversations about how I understand what the cat is saying when he meows and the proper way to write a “W.”  I often have clients complain when I don’t give exact measurements, but the fact is that I most often measure many things in the palm of my hand or not at all. The only thing I typically measure is when I bake so I don’t turn out little brick loaves.  Otherwise I go on intuition and proportion since I usually cook in a hurry and have at least one of two short folk giving me a stream of consciousness in monologue or diatribe form while I work statuesque with the old-man cat wrapped around my feet.  Thanks to the motorized, heat-seeking Croc accessory, I rarely move while cooking once I plant my feet well enough for him to adhere to me.  I’m really good at leaning and reaching.

Fajitas on Rice Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Egg-Free, Nut-free, Soy-Free, lazy cooking, beef, Casein-Free, recipe, crock-pot, Gluten-Free | Print | 1 Comment »