Thanks for the Crepes

It is probably boring to most people, but what I bought at the liquor state-owned monopoly store today was a couple of 1.75 liter bottles of J.W. Dant Vodka. It's cheap and cost me under $30, but I have to live pretty cheaply, and this brand is much better, at least to me, than similarly priced Aristocrat or Crown Russe and other Russian vodkas. Crown Russe is pretty terrible, wow! I recently discovered that if you squeeze a lemon, mix it with just a little sugar and refrigerated water, then pop it into the freezer in a pint glass (that has already been in the freezer) for about an hour, you can add a shot of vodka from the freezer and enjoy a very fine slushy lemonade drink. Highly recommended.

I had read about the covered skillet/griddle method of reheating leftover pizza on Serious Eats quite a while ago. Being a victim of inertia, I guess, I kept doing it in a preheated oven, which dries it out. Whatever you do, do not let your leftover pizza even get close to a microwave. You're better off eating it cold, than nuking it, seriously! Since my oven broke, and I love pizza and wind up with leftovers, it prompted me to try the Serious Eats method of bottom heating in a small closed space to retain moisture. In my case, this means a thick aluminum skillet with a thick aluminum Dutch oven lid that fits it. It doesn't dry out like it does in the oven or turn to soggy mush like in the nuker. When my oven does get fixed, I am still going to use this stove top method for reheating pizza. I have used it on good purchased New York City thin crust style and good purchased upstate New York thick crust style, and both worked very well. Bonus, this method saves energy too over heating up an oven. I'm sure it will work equally well on some of the astounding homemade pizzas you all make too. Just make sure you don't crank the heat too high and burn your bottom crust.

I also just thought of another idea for stuffed bell peppers. I make a recipe I got from "Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook" that calls for stuffing halved bell peppers with succotash made from butter sauteed onion, cooked lima beans, corn and tomatoes. I started adding a little dried oregano and topping the baked peppers with shredded cheese in the last five minutes of baking and eat them as an entree. Some might prefer them as a side dish to meat, but either way, they are delicious. The original recipe calls for blanching the peppers, but I did away with that after the first time. The thirty or so minute baking time is plenty to soften raw peppers and they don't get slimy or overcooked. You could riff on this with blackeyed peas or other legumes, and I have used both frozen and fresh corn cut off the cob. I don't cook either form of corn before stuffing and baking, but I do thaw the frozen kind. This is better with fresh diced tomatoes, but I have made it with canned ones during winter. Again, salt and little pepper.

An easy recipe for your circumstances, since you say you get plenty of donated chicken, that can be made up and baked in hotel pans: A minimum of sliced potatoes and onions as a bed under bone-in, skin-on chicken parts. Mix up a vinaigrette with whatever herbs/garlic you can get and drizzle over and bake. Even dried herbs work here. Don't forget the salt and pepper, of course. The beauty part is, you can add carrots, parsnips, peppers or whatever produce you have. This is based on old French recipes where families would carry their dishes to the village baker's oven to cook, and my inspiration comes from "The Joy of Cooking". I have made this myself, and my husband and I both liked it a lot. It is a very nice return for minimal effort. Also, and this is just totally me, thinking about it, because I have never heard of a chicken cacciatore casserole like this, much less tried it myself. What about a bed of tomatoes, onion, garlic, peppers, perhaps zucchini or eggplant under chicken parts baked off in hotel pans? Salt and pepper, maybe some oregano. Maybe drizzle with a little oil before baking, and it wouldn't have to be expensive olive oil? Serve with pasta, rice or just the bread you say is in such oversupply.

Well, I guess it was last Friday when I was in the Food Lion, and was wanting lettuce there too, but knew I'd be going to Harris Teeter in a couple days. I passed on the small and pitiful looking lettuces they had, since I thought I could pick up something better at Harris Teeter. Food Lion's lettuce was not only small, but especially the red leaf had already started to decompose. They had plenty of iceberg, but that wasn't what I wanted. Food Lion is not known for its stellar fresh produce or wide selection, but rather for the lowest prices available in the area. There are bags and tubs of spring mix and spinach and baby lettuce, but I suspect that kind of thing might not be grown in the fields that are flooding. I'm just relating my experience here locally. Someone else on eG mentioned recently (like the past couple weeks) they couldn't find good lettuce either, and I thought, "Well, thank goodness, we still have plenty". YMMV, but that is the scoop on lettuce from Cary, NC for the past three days.

I went to my neighborhood pizza joint again for their Monday special $6.99 14" pizza. Man I love their pizza! Burned the roof of my mouth slightly, as usual, and it was well worth it, as usual. If you are reading this in driving distance of Cary and like good NY-style pizza, get yourself to Primo Pizza. They have really good tiramisu too, but I passed since I've been indulging in chocolate cupcakes and still have 3 left in the fridge. They are a mom and pop shop, and really work to deserve your custom, unlike the chains. Don't get the cheesecake, though. I don't think it has cheese or eggs or anything that makes cheesecake what it is. It is the only thing they offer that I've tried that I found lacking. When I went a few doors down to the Harris Teeter grocer, I could not find any Romaine lettuce that was on my list. There wasn't even a single head of iceberg either. Finally, after searching high and low, I accosted a guy putting up citrus and he explained that they were out of a lot of produce items from California due to flooding. Okay. I settled for one of the three small heads of green leaf and was happy to get it. It set me back $2.49 as opposed to the 99 cents the last head (that was twice as large) I bought cost. The guy said it might be as long as May before supplies from CA were back to normal. I also had feta on the list, but since I like that mostly with the unavailable Romaine, I nixed that and picked up a pound of strawberries instead. A spring salad of green leaf lettuce with strawberries and a sweet and sour soy sauce and ginger dressing is on the agenda for dinner sometime very soon. So if you like lettuce, you might want to pick some up while supplies last. Salads may be hard to pull together for a while, but they had plenty of other green stuff: escarole, endive, spinach, chard and rainbow chard, kale, and on and on.

It was another wonderful spring day in the neighborhood here, with afternoon highs in the mid 70's F/20's C. Sunny and not nearly as much wind as we've had lately. I'm getting really tired of having to hold tightly to the screen doors to keep them from smashing around in the winds lately. So it was a grill out day! I started with a warm spinach salad. I cooked off bacon strips, removed and drained the bacon on paper towels. I poured off most of the bacon fat, reserving a little and added chopped onion and sauteed that a while. While that was going on, I juiced a lemon, and made lightly sweetened lemonade in a pint glass, because I like it fresh squeezed. I stuck the glass, which had been waiting in the freezer and filled with refrigerated water, lemon juice and sugar back into the freezer. Then I added vinegar, just a little sugar, salt and pepper to the sauteed onion in the skillet for the spinach salad dressing. In goes the baby spinach and that gets tossed over low heat until the leaves are coated well with the dressing and beginning to wilt a little. They continue to wilt after plating, which is why this dish waits for no woman. Top with a sliced hard boiled egg and crumbled bacon, and you have a delicious salad. I ate that, cleaned up the skillet and stove, and then went out to lay my charcoal fire. When the fire was ready, I took a rib eye seasoned with salt and ground black pepper out and put it on the grill to cook. I started the microwave on a baking potato and went quickly back out to tend the grill. When the steak was almost done, I went back inside, turned the potato over in the nuker and hit it with another 2-1/2 minutes and took a clean plate out to retrieve my steak. While the steak was resting, I split the potato, mashed the insides in the skin a little with a fork and added, butter, chives, a little mixed shredded cheddar and provolone, then returned it to the microwave for 30 seconds to melt everything together. When it came out, I topped the potato with yet more crumbled bacon and cut off a generous portion of the 1-1/2 pound, inch thick rib eye for my dinner. The steak was perfect, tender and oh so good. You know what, though? I think I prefer just butter and sour cream on a baked potato. Maybe a little chives. I will try a loaded one every so often, and it's okay, but next time, I'll definitely go simpler. I had to forgo the usual roasted marshmallows for dessert, but it was worth it. I had some purchased chocolate cupcakes in the fridge, and I knew they were good because I had one for dessert last night. Tonight, I indulged in a second one. Oh, and by the time I retrieved my glass of lemonade from the freezer, after I had sat down and taken a few bites of steak and potato, I discovered it had turned to lemonade slush. I liked this drink so much, I made myself another one, but the second one wasn't frozen, and a leetle vodka might have sneaked into it.

Is that like a puff pastry piece stuck upright into the bowl? And yes, very excellent fare after such a trek.

McDonald's has sold a gazillion sandwiches with basically the same ingredients as the one Hungry Chris made with better ingredients. Someone besides me must like them. I can't eat THAT much.

I have no magic answer to your question, here, MetsFan5. As an employee of a couple of non-profit organizations for sixteen years, I can only say that the people who do the accounting (me), or information technology (me), or the many other functions of the larger organizations have to make a living and pay bills too. I noticed at the end of my career with the YMCA that the executive salaries had quadrupled, and was taken quite aback by this. What can one do? that is the trend nowadays to concentrate wealth. I was not supposed to even know this, but do you really think that someone with carte blanche on the computer system is not going to indulge their curiosity? You just can't let on about it as an employee, you know, straight face and all, while you are being exploited? Believe me, though that the worker bees, like I was, in non-profits are very far from overcompensated. Everyone is afraid to give money to "beggars" or the homeless, but that does cut out the middle man. So maybe they might spend some on alcohol. Well who would not want a frickin' drink, given their circumstances? The government demands so much of non-profits, too. They are required to have an outside audit by a public accounting firm every year to verify that they are in compliance with their 501C tax exemption status. This is not cheap, either for the fees of the CPA firm or for the grunts like me, who have to use a lot of time and resources to give them things they had already been given that they lost. The first time this happened, I started generating a list of all the materials and information I had supplied them and had their rep sign for it. *Sigh* It did work, though. The disappearing reports thing never happened again. I don't think it especially endeared me to them, but hey, I'm not an especially endearing person, it seems. BTW the CPA audit billing dwarfed any compensation I received. I can say, that YMCA and Eastern Star were above board as far as the law goes. Complying with the law is expensive, though, very. Perhaps @Rebel Rosehas better advice about how to help without having your contributions disappear into overhead and executive compensation. She? seems to be doing a good job of this.

When this topic first appeared, it made me go to the pantry and get a small glass mise en place bowl and put some old-fashioned rolled oats into it and sprinkle them with a little kosher salt and eat them while perusing eGullet. I only like rolled oats either dry like that, or in granola or oatmeal cookies. They are also great roasted a little as a topping for a nice loaf of bread. I adore rolled oats on the crust of good bread. Oooh! and one of the main reasons I keep them around is for a butter, brown sugar topping that gets baked crispy on top of fruit crisps. The oats absorb moisture and become less appealing with leftover refrigerated fruit crisps, but are still palatable enough for said leftovers to disappear. I can abide steel cut as long as they are not overcooked. They are still mucilaginous, but somewhat redeemed by the chewiness that the grains themselves have. I don't love them, but they're healthy, so I will eat them. I do not like the gluey texture of boiled rolled oats at all, and sort of figured this overnight idea would not be for me. I'm serious y'all, I think you can literally paste up wallpaper with the mucilaginous stuff that comes out of cooked rolled oats! EEEeewww! Thanks for taking one for the team @ElsieD.

You are scaring me, but I hope you can get some help. You seem to be a good photographer, with your avatar of peas without wrinkles, which I remember you developing. There are a lot of French speakers on this site, so it you could catch the label in a shot, perhaps it could be enhanced to the point where someone can help you with what it says? I remember someone saying that monkfish liver is the foie gras of the sea, but damned if I remember where I read it. Oh, and I do not think that anything can be safely canned or jarred without some sort of cooking. One can't even just chunk raw vegetables into a canning jar without some heat, unless you are raising the acid level and pickling them. Here is the Google search page for monkfish liver:site egullet.org.

Food fantasies can be good when you can't get the real thing. I hope you have time to slow down and realize your dream.

How is it used? How did you use your purchase from London?

I have an inquiring mind too, so when you mentioned this the other day, I Googled and Googled, but could come up with nothing more than what you did: dried wild mint, so I didn't post anything. I will ask at the Mediterranean Store, next time I'm there. I think the owner is from Iraq. Maybe @shain could provide some insight? Mysteries intrigue me. I mean I have even looked incessantly for a translation, finally reverting to the obscure search engine Lycos, which I am convinced has better underlying technology than the others. Nothing. A native speaker could spot a misspelling in the handwritten label that we'd miss. I did try the spelling butniq. Still nothing. I would be interested, and probably, so would @Smithy, to know @liuzhou's experience and knowledge of this herb. He posted while I was typing and madly searching again, hoping for a more definitive answer.

@Anna N, This topic is a godsend for me right now, so many thanks. I'm one of the ones who know who I am. Just to be clear, you would like a new separate topic started for each leftover ingredient? So one for sausage, one for beans, one for mashed potatoes, etc. ? And the heading should be: Loving Your Leftovers Series: # (leftover ingredient)? It seems clear to me, and seems like it would be well organized and searchable, but since it seems to depart from the norm here, I just want to start with a clear understanding. Also, it's okay to both post successful use of your leftovers and ask for the ideas in the appropriate ingredient # topic in the series?

Butterbean honey is produced in the hives that are brought in to pollinate butterbeans or lima beans. It's good stuff.

I was thinking ME too, and I wanted to suggest you to a @johnnyd heads up, because he still reads and posts occasionally and is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the Portland food scene. Sorry I can't help with any direct experience, but have a good time, and if we can get Johnny involved, I know you will.

I had a bit of leftover shrimp marsala for dinner. It was a side dish instead of an entree this time. Then I fried a zucchini, and then a 4 oz. ground chuck patty in the same skillet after collecting the oil and cleaning it. I served the hamburger on sliced Italian bread in anticipation of a 4 mile/6-1/2 km walk for supplies tomorrow. I had a few ounces of the last blueberries for dessert. More food than I usually eat, but you are supposed to carbo load for exercise, right?

@liuzhou, I am so sorry you can't get a decent steak there. But shouldn't this be in Food Funnies? I had several laughs out of this one! Ay yi yi! 哎哟 I'll bet it's not so funny, though, when you have a serious steak jones going on.

There are several threads extant on eGullet that deal with eating on the cheap. I think this is my favorite one. There is good info here, more ideas here, more here, and some here. I'm not very psyched about developing recipes with so many stipulations and restrictions, just to get shot down, but I did have an idea about dirty rice made with chicken livers. Since there is so little room in the budget for meat, and an ounce of chicken liver provides 99% US RDA of Vitamin B12, is cheap, and liver haters seem to like "dirty" rice, what about something like this? Also, cook up pinto beans on the first day to feed the group for two meals with a little pork (shoulder is usually cheap) and you don't need much relative to the beans. You want onion, salt and jalapeno in there, and you are set for a bean stew on the first serving. All it needs is cornbread, and greens are great if you have them. Kale, turnip, mustard, spinach, whatever you can get. If you have butter for the cornbread, then you have a luxury to offer. Also, stuff like jalapenos and onion can be incorporated into the cornbread, or corn, cut off the cob, if you have it. Then refrigerate the leftovers for a couple days so you won't create monotony and serve something else the day after the bean stew. On the third day, mash the beans, as you heat them, with a potato masher, since you said not to expect a food processor. The hand mashed beans give better texture anyway. Serve the refried beans in flour tortillas with some grated cheese and finely chopped onion. The best accompaniment would be shredded lettuce and tomato, if you can get it. In summer you can make delicious soups with a relatively small amount of ground meat, browned off in the pot, removed, then onions, carrots, celery added and sauteed in the remaining fat. Then add the meat back, and water, stock or some bouillon cubes, plus any produce you have available. Crusty or even crappy bread will do, if that's all you have, and there's your meal. Saltines are also very cheap, if you buy a generic brand. In winter you can roast root vegetables. Gratins can be made with all kinds or produce, if you have a little dairy, and stale bread crumbs make a good topping for this. Savory strata is also a good use of stale bread, if you can get eggs and milk, perhaps some cheese, with onions, peppers, spinach, mushrooms (even canned), or probably your kale if you cooked before adding it. A little bacon, sausage or ham would be welcome, but not strictly necessary. I love beets, and some don't, but Harvard beets seem pretty easy to love. Also, they lend themselves to roasting well, and that's less labor intensive. Good luck with your project @Rebel Rose!

I'm not trying at all to advocate feeding the poor with ribeyes and clams, because that is economically unfeasible and would be political suicide. All I'm trying to say is that B12 should be considered and can't be obtained from plant foods. Perhaps the B12 in fortified foods is tested for efficacy by the FDA, but that in supplements is not, like vitamin pills. There is movement to do that, but with focus of the current administration, it is very doubtful for the foreseeable future. I confess ignorance as to whether or not the claims of Vitamin content in processed fortified food products are FDA verified or not. I also want to note that while chicken my have a much lower environmental impact, and be less expensive than beef, chicken has very little B12 in the meat, other than the organ meats, and even chicken eggs have more than the muscle meat. Even a single boiled egg has more B12 than can be found in a roasted thigh. Milk is not really a high source of B12, either, although it has more than twice as much in a cup as found in a chicken thigh. The liver would be a hard sell for most people, but it is very nutrient dense, and some like it. It's also cheap. People who don't like liver seem to like Dirty Rice, though. It is mashed up chicken liver that makes the rice "dirty", and just an ounce of chicken liver provides 99% RDA of B12. I wonder if dirty rice would fly as a soup kitchen recipe? I don't eat a lot of meat, so I watch my B12 intake. My late step mom was an ovo-lacto vegetarian, and she took periodical B12 injections at the behest of of her physician, so it has come up on my radar. I used to think chicken was fine to supply B12, but it is a weak source. All that said, dried spaghetti, canned marinara sauce, canned veggies and fruits, dried beans and rice, that are the staples of our local food banks, sure beat the pants off going hungry! I can see where donors feel generous and wise about donating such things, but I have to say they don't really make a complete basis for proper nutrition. One cannot live by bread or even plant protein alone. Well, not for too long, anyway.

It's true that beans are a relatively inexpensive source of protein and other nutrients, but like all plant foods, they lack Vitamin B12. Beef is a very good source of B12, and it's usually cheaper than other good sources of B12 like oysters, salmon, sardines and clams. While I love beans and eat a lot of them, many don't like them at all or would feel deprived without meat. Meat is a great morale booster for the majority in this culture. We undoubtedly, as a country, overindulge in meat, but many (and that includes me) think that some animal based food is necessary for adequate Vitamin B12 intake in the diet. If the vegetarian diet includes dairy and eggs, they can get B12 there, but it is not as concentrated as the meat and fish products listed above. That is something to consider, too, I would think.

Shrimp marsala with a nice juicy, ripe mango for dessert. I looked at this recipe as well as others looking for ideas. I didn't find anything that really grabbed me over (the probably inauthentic) marsala dishes as they are served in restaurants in this area. I also had some lovely fresh mushrooms that I wanted to use, so my dish was simple. Sliced mushrooms sauteed in butter with garlic added after juices started to release, remove mushrooms, add a bit more butter, add peeled, deveined wild caught, NC shrimp, and more garlic. Sautee a minute, add marsala, add back mushrooms, reduce sauce, finish with a little more butter and serve over thin spaghetti. I probably won't do it again, although it was good enough. I left me longing for the lighter flavor of just garlic, and butter finished with pasta water in this dish. I love my marsala made this way with pork, but with shrimp, the wine seems to muddy the flavor. Okay, I'm definitely not doing it again. The flavor of shrimp is so delicate. I don't even care for tomato in a shrimp dish, but that seems to be popular, so YMMV.

Hmmm, now that I think about it, Food Lion used to carry sprouts, and I think they disappeared around the time of the last contamination scare. I wasn't interested in contracting food poisoning, so just forgot about sprouts for a while. By the time I looked for them again, Food Lion had dropped them, and still doesn't carry them, but their selection has always been limited, although they are the least expensive supermarket in the area. I'm just glad to have found a safe source of sprouts again.