Month in Review

My deepest apologies to all my fans. This has been an unforgivable absence. The end of the semester just took over me, and I haven't been able to post. This weekend was particularly crazy, as David graduated from his masters program--he now has a Masters in Music Performance! and his mother and friends were staying with us. On top of that I had three different performances to sing in myself. But we have definitely been eating and taking pictures. So here is about three weeks worth of meals:

We are in and out of the poor house these days, so as our economic situation changes, we have been going to the grocery store less often and looking for stuff on sale, and trying to do the best we can with what we already have at home. This has involved really cleaning out my freezer of all the ingredients, partially prepared meals, leftovers, and frozen staples that have been sitting and accumulating in their over the past year. One night we had very little in the house and David used the last of the homemade wheat bread to make these tuna melts. Not bad for a cheap dinner.
We've also been eating a ridiculous amount of pizza. It's cheep and we have been using the cans of tomatoes and frozen meats left over from our days of plenty. I believe this one actually used up the leftover sauce, including mushrooms and italian sausage, that I made for the black pepper fettuccine in the last post. It was perfect.
This was the second one out of the oven to which we added some leftover prosciutto. It was a bit dry and old for sandwiches but it crisped up perfectly on the pizza.
I don't remember if there was some occasion, I doubt it really, but one morning David decided to make a nice breakfast: molasses buckwheat pancakes with blackberry syrup and peach mango smoothy using homemade yogurt.
We had left over dough from the earlier pizza, so I had to invent a use for it using the ingredients we had. I know that this is going to sound a little weird, but believe me, it was delicious. It was sort of a pizza nicoise. Pizza with a very small amount of cheese, tomato sauce, tuna, and fresh chopped capers, shallots, hard boiled egg, and parsley. They eat pizza with tuna in Paraguay, and I always thought it was weird (well really it is) until I ate some this last time, and, given that canned tuna and pizza dough is about all we had around, I was lucky that I liked it.
My good friend Hanna stayed with us a few days when she was in town for a class we are taking together, and I made some dinner for a late night study session: golden beet and carrot soup spiced with saffron and garnished with homemade yogurt and fresh chives. This is actually a picture of the leftovers the next night, when we fried up some croquetas de carne y papa that I had made a long time ago (actually out of the meat from the soup bones I used to make the last pho I posted about) and stashed in the freezer. It was the perfect no-extra-cost way to round out this meal.
The next budget-inspired meal was hummus with white-flour tortillas. Hummus has to be the cheapest dinner in the world to make, given that large quantities of dried chick peas cost only cents. To my dismay, tahini is actually a bit expensive, but it doesn't break the bank. I can never get my flatbreads flaky enough, and David makes pretty fantastic flour tortillas (I make the corn ones better), so we decided to let authenticity slide.
We used the left over broth from the aforementioned pho, which had been frozen, some curry paste, the last of some cabbage that had languished far too long in the vegetable crisper, a bag of mixed frozen seafood, and the latest crop of thai basil from our window sill to make a quick seafood noodle soup. It's alarming how cheep frozen seafood is sometimes. We only used half of this bag of squid, cuttlefish, octopus, shrimp, and mussels which was a product of Thailand for only $3.50. I'm sure we are not paying the cost of the mangrove the fish farms are poisoning or of the coral reef that fish trawlers destroy. I looked for a 'responsible' choice, but the only thing I could find was a $50 bag of frozen wild-caught gulf shrimp. I rationalized the purchase by thinking it was only once, because money was tight. But it makes me worried that there is no hope for saving the oceans fisheries if even I, who things about this all the time, gives in to a 'good deal.'
Speaking of the ocean and its frailty, here is another tuna meal. I found out recently that albacore tuna are very plentiful, so we started to eat it again after probably a year of nearly none. There is still the mercury to worry about, but I'm already a little crazy, and I'm not worried about getting pregnant. This was dried pasta with tomato sauce (left over from the pizza), capers, sauteed tuna, and parsley. This is a common enough recipe, and it is very fast, easy, and tasty. It also happens to be the first meal I ever cooked for David about four years ago. I was at is apartment in college and we were hungry. He and his roomate almost never cooked, and their fridge was mostly full of condiments. But I did my best, using a can of tuna, a can of tomatoes, some jarred garlic, and a bit of serracha (rooster sauce). I'll never forget how impressed david was with the magic of making something out of what seemed like nothing.
Finally, I cooked a meal for David, his mom, and our very good friends from portland, OR who were here visiting. We made a trip to whole foods for this one, so no leftovers, frozen meals or canned goods here. The night before, we went out to a brazilian grill for rodizio, an all-you-can-eat meat fest, so I wanted to make something really light and fresh. After looking around a bit, I settled on golden beet salad with arugula, chevre, and lemon-thyme vinaigrette and manila clams steamed in vermouth with chile, garlic, and fresh cilantro. This was an amazing meal, and the pictures turned out so well that I couldn't help posting more than one.
I think this will go into the food memory bank for a long time. It was another really wonderful meal with friends of the sort I wish we had time to have much more often.

Here is a close up.