Much depends on dinner
Dec. 10th, 2003 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rikibethWhile tonight's turkey potpie was in the oven, I was chatting with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mtfierce. I was complaining about my sore elbow, and telling her that because of it, I had Mark dice the carrots, potatoes, and leftover turkey, while I dealt only with the biscuit crust and the gravy.
mtfierce said, "When I grow up, I want to cook real dinners like Rikibeth."
This was flattering, but, really, it's not that impressive a feat.
It has much more to do with my budget than anything else.
See, turkey potpie, while certainly comforting and homey, is really just a method for dealing with leftovers.
When turkey is 49 cents a pound, and you buy the biggest one they've got, because that's a lot of protein for a low price, and you're a family of four, that inevitably means leftovers.
Potpie is pretty stupidly simple. Take an oven dish, any size you think suitable for dinner. Hack up some leftover turkey. Chop up carrots and potatoes into rough dice. If these aren't leftover cooked carrots and potatoes, microwave them for a few minutes so they get soft enough to eat. Throw in a double handful of frozen peas. If you have niblet corn, it can go in there too. With me so far?
If you don't have leftover turkey gravy, make some sort of thickened sauce for the middle. Best if you've got some ready-made chicken broth that you can thicken with a roux, but you can make a white sauce (milk thickened with a roux) or even just flavor some water with a bouillon cube or a bit of onion or whatever. Pour the gravy or Advanced Gravy Substitute over your mixture.
Make some biscuit dough. You don't have to roll it out. Just distribute it over the top of the dish.
Bake it until the biscuit part is cooked and everything's hot.
The reason you do all this instead of just grabbing a frozen pie is twofold: one, if you have any health concerns, the homemade one is probably a lot lower in sodium and weird starchy fillers than the commercial one. two, it uses CHEAP ingredients.
The turkey was cheap, because you picked it up on sale. Potatoes and carrots are cheap. So are plain frozen peas -- a household staple. Flour for the biscuits is cheap, and if butter's too expensive for you, shortening works. You probably have the milk around anyway.
Leftover turkey gravy is ideal but not always an option. Packaged chicken broth is NOT cheap, particularly if you get the good stuff, but... here's the thing... if you're in the habit of cooking and on a budget, you can keep yourself well supplied with an everyday sort of broth with little effort. Practically no effort if you have a crockpot. Because, if you're trying to get every bit of usefulness out of your food, you should always make Stock.
Onions, carrots, and celery. The basics. Mirepoix. Well, the tops, bottoms, and papery skins of the onions, the stem ends of the carrots, and those end bits you trim off the celery can go into a lidded container or a ziplock bag or whatever in the freezer until you;ve got a potful. Sweat them in a little oil, pour in the water, let it simmer for a while, and that's the most basic vegetable stock. Throw in the chicken necks that you've pulled out of your roasting chickens (because you bought a bunch of them when they were 69 cents a pound, too), and it's an all-purpose chicken-y stock. Don't use the giblets unless you want it more smoky-tasting.
I pulled a quart of this out of my freezer tonight to make the potpie gravy. Handy.
This is how you cook on a budget.
Another fun one for Serious Leftover Usage is the "fresh picnic shoulder" -- sort of an uncured ham. Another one that's usually under a dollar a pound. It's a little trickier to carve than a turkey -- weird bones. But, lots of protein for cheap.
Corned beef brisket is even more fun. Skip the cabbage in the first boiled dinner unless you really love it -- but the boiled dinner is just the necessary prelude to corned beef sandwiches, and corned beef hash with eggs. That trick of microwaving the diced potatoes to soften them works great if you didn't make enough potatoes in the boiled dinner for leftovers.
It's better for you than a steady diet of ramen, and works out cheaper on a monthly basis than eating off the dollar menus at the fast-food joints.
My mother didn't cook like this. We were never on a limited food budget, so she didn't have to use these tricks, and mostly didn't. Leftover turkey was Sandwiches, and she didn't make stock, and corned beef came from the deli counter. I had to teach myself.
mtfierce. I was complaining about my sore elbow, and telling her that because of it, I had Mark dice the carrots, potatoes, and leftover turkey, while I dealt only with the biscuit crust and the gravy.mtfierce said, "When I grow up, I want to cook real dinners like Rikibeth."This was flattering, but, really, it's not that impressive a feat.
It has much more to do with my budget than anything else.
See, turkey potpie, while certainly comforting and homey, is really just a method for dealing with leftovers.
When turkey is 49 cents a pound, and you buy the biggest one they've got, because that's a lot of protein for a low price, and you're a family of four, that inevitably means leftovers.
Potpie is pretty stupidly simple. Take an oven dish, any size you think suitable for dinner. Hack up some leftover turkey. Chop up carrots and potatoes into rough dice. If these aren't leftover cooked carrots and potatoes, microwave them for a few minutes so they get soft enough to eat. Throw in a double handful of frozen peas. If you have niblet corn, it can go in there too. With me so far?
If you don't have leftover turkey gravy, make some sort of thickened sauce for the middle. Best if you've got some ready-made chicken broth that you can thicken with a roux, but you can make a white sauce (milk thickened with a roux) or even just flavor some water with a bouillon cube or a bit of onion or whatever. Pour the gravy or Advanced Gravy Substitute over your mixture.
Make some biscuit dough. You don't have to roll it out. Just distribute it over the top of the dish.
Bake it until the biscuit part is cooked and everything's hot.
The reason you do all this instead of just grabbing a frozen pie is twofold: one, if you have any health concerns, the homemade one is probably a lot lower in sodium and weird starchy fillers than the commercial one. two, it uses CHEAP ingredients.
The turkey was cheap, because you picked it up on sale. Potatoes and carrots are cheap. So are plain frozen peas -- a household staple. Flour for the biscuits is cheap, and if butter's too expensive for you, shortening works. You probably have the milk around anyway.
Leftover turkey gravy is ideal but not always an option. Packaged chicken broth is NOT cheap, particularly if you get the good stuff, but... here's the thing... if you're in the habit of cooking and on a budget, you can keep yourself well supplied with an everyday sort of broth with little effort. Practically no effort if you have a crockpot. Because, if you're trying to get every bit of usefulness out of your food, you should always make Stock.
Onions, carrots, and celery. The basics. Mirepoix. Well, the tops, bottoms, and papery skins of the onions, the stem ends of the carrots, and those end bits you trim off the celery can go into a lidded container or a ziplock bag or whatever in the freezer until you;ve got a potful. Sweat them in a little oil, pour in the water, let it simmer for a while, and that's the most basic vegetable stock. Throw in the chicken necks that you've pulled out of your roasting chickens (because you bought a bunch of them when they were 69 cents a pound, too), and it's an all-purpose chicken-y stock. Don't use the giblets unless you want it more smoky-tasting.
I pulled a quart of this out of my freezer tonight to make the potpie gravy. Handy.
This is how you cook on a budget.
Another fun one for Serious Leftover Usage is the "fresh picnic shoulder" -- sort of an uncured ham. Another one that's usually under a dollar a pound. It's a little trickier to carve than a turkey -- weird bones. But, lots of protein for cheap.
Corned beef brisket is even more fun. Skip the cabbage in the first boiled dinner unless you really love it -- but the boiled dinner is just the necessary prelude to corned beef sandwiches, and corned beef hash with eggs. That trick of microwaving the diced potatoes to soften them works great if you didn't make enough potatoes in the boiled dinner for leftovers.
It's better for you than a steady diet of ramen, and works out cheaper on a monthly basis than eating off the dollar menus at the fast-food joints.
My mother didn't cook like this. We were never on a limited food budget, so she didn't have to use these tricks, and mostly didn't. Leftover turkey was Sandwiches, and she didn't make stock, and corned beef came from the deli counter. I had to teach myself.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
ahhh...
Date: 2003-12-11 01:15 am (UTC)I regularly toss chicken carcasses, onions, carrot and celery bits, and any other veggies that have leftover bits, into the freezer. When there's too much, I make stock! I usually have quite a bit of it around, and yum it's so good for soups, gravies, whatever!
Thanks for the smile seeing someone else getting the most out of their food dollar :)
no subject
Date: 2003-12-11 01:44 pm (UTC)But really, it is!
Date: 2003-12-12 12:24 am (UTC)I will admit that roasting a huge turkey takes some effort, the worst of it being when you have to flip the fool thing over after the first hour.
But the rest of it really is pretty simple. Chopping up a few carrots and potatoes is not tricky. My 8-year-old is learning to do it, with minor supervision (yes, that's right, tuck your fingers AWAY from the blade, sweetie). Microwaving them for a few minutes to soften them is no harder than microwaving a frozen burrito. Any monkey can do that.
Biscuits, I admit, are easiest with the right equipment -- I like to use the paddle attachment on my stand mixer to distribute the butter into the flour. But you can do them with just a bowl and a fork. Flour, baking powder, and salt in the bowl. Say, two cups of flour, a tablespoon of baking powder, and half a teaspoon salt. Chunks of cold butter on the dry stuff -- six tablespoons should do it. There's marks on the wrapper of the stick. Mash the chunks with a fork until everything's sort of crumbly. Pour in a cup of milk, stir it around a few times until it's dough. NOT complicated. These aren't perfect round flaky objects, they're a layer of stuff on the top of a potpie -- they don't have to be complicated. If you put a couple of spoonfuls of sugar in with the flour, you can use the same stuff to top a fruit cobbler.
I admit that my big upright freezer in the basement is very handy. But you don't need anything that huge to get into the stock-making habit. You can keep the scraps in a couple of one-pound deli containers in the door. And you can freeze the finished stock in anything you consider convenient -- I like half-pound deli containers, but some people like to use ice cube trays, and then pop out the frozen cubes and dump them in a ziplock bag, and use them like bouillon cubes.
This stuff IS easy. Shrimp bisque from scratch is complicated -- all that futzing around with the shells and the brandy and the strainer. Buche de Noel is complicated -- egg-foam cake, the filling, the rolling, the icing. Potpie is not complicated.