It is time to talk about more recipes...
I started this blog long before the recession hit simply because I was experienceing my own recession. Living in one of the most elegant cities in the world without resources allowed me the privilege (yes, privilege) to experience truly hard times. You never really look at the world and people in quite the same way after experiencing financial hardship.
I thought that for this installement I would share with you a classic shopping list I used during the roughest times. Now that times are better for me, I am actually sticking to this list as much as possible. It is wonderfully satisfying to know that you can survive on nearly nothing.
Keep in mind a couple of things. This list was used to sustain two adults, one male and one female and represents food that should last for a period of no less than '4-5 days. The budget was about 10 Euros.
One bag of sliced bread - 1.00
One box of frozen hamburger patties- 10 in a box- 3.89
One jar canned tomatoe sauce- about 12 ounces- .80
One package pasta or rice- .70
Two fresh onions- .45
3 fresh carrotts- .35
2 Courgettes- .70
Carton of Milk - .60
Bag of coffee- .80
Bag of lentilles- .95
Tomato paste- .20
Can of stewed tomatoes- .20
You will notice that this list is sorely lacking in the fresh fruits and vegetable area. These are some of the most expensive items in most shops as we all know. Not to worry, I have another 10 Euro fruit and vegetable list that would be used for the same sustaining purposes. Here is that list.
One 2.5 kilo sac of potatoes - 1.95
2 kilo bag of onions- 1.45
One bag of fresh courgettes- 1.65
6 carrotts- .70
One jar of tomatoe sauce - .80
One box of dry couscous- .75
One 10 pack of fresh eggs - 1.00
Carton of milk- .60
Box of tea- .45
One 2.5 kilo bag of apples- 1.50
Each of these lists is bare bones food. There is nothing here by way of condiments, spices, etc...
For such a list of basics to season, I recommend spending not more than 9 Euros as follows:
Salt- .60
Pepper- .55
Mayonnaise- .65
Mustard- .35
Harissa red pepper paste- .45
Curry powder- .55
Herbes de Provences (an herb blend of 3 green herbs) .55
Balsamic vinegar- 1.55
Olive oil- 3.65
Sugar- .75
Now, what can you really do with list number one?
I guaranty that you can get at least 5 dinners, 5 lunches and 5 breakfasts from that list. Here is how you do it...
Pasta Bolognaise- Half an onion chopped: half a carrot chopped fine; saute with 1 of the beef patties (no need to add oil); Once fully cooked add half the jar of tomatoe sauce and allow to simmer on low for a good 20 minutes. Serve over rice or pasta- This is enough for 2 persons.
Hamburgers using sliced toasted bread served with grilled onions.
Vegetarian lentil stew- begin to cook about one third of a small sac of lentills in 3 times its quantity of water. When water is reduced by half and the lentills are beginning to get soft, add half a chopped onion and half a chopped carrot, roughly chopped; add either half a can of stewed tomatoes or a small can of tomatoe paste. Allow to simmer until lentils are fully cooked and the stew is thick and hearty. Serve with toasted bread.
Meatballs- using 2 beef patties- crumble one slice of torn or shredded bread into a bowl; add defrosted beef patties. Roll into balls and saute on low in non stick pan. Once fully cooked, add a couple of tablespoons of tomatoe sauce over the patties and continue to simmer. Serve over rice.
Dolmas- Cut the courgettes in half (NOT lengthwise!)... you will now hollow out the courgette portions creating courgette tubes... fill the tubes with a beef and chopped onion mixture. Saute in non stick pan until center meat and courgettes are fully cooked. Add a tiny amount of water. Serve with rice or couscous. Did you save the courgette centers? You should have!
Hamburger helper, your own version! - cook rice; transfer to larger pot and add a beef pattie or two; add finely chopped half an onion and the courgette centers you saved; add remaining tomatoe sauce. Transfer to a pyrex pan and bake for 10 minutes until top is crusty.
What is lunch you ask?
Lentil stew- another round! ( make the rest of the bag- enough for two days)
Vegetarian lentils and rice with carrot ( make the rest of the bag- enough for 2 days)
Open face hamburgers
What is breakfast?
Cafe au lait + Toast
This is survival folks, not the Ritz!
Do this for one week and I guaranty you that by now your mouth will be watering over the thought of saltines and ketchup! List number two is frankly far easier to deal with. Omelettes and egg salad; couscous with vegetables; potato soup; onion soup; vegetable soup; potato salad; baked apples; legumes Provencal; onions farcis au couscous; fried or poached eggs; scrambled eggs with home fries; And a lovely cup of tea every morning!
It's not easy folks but you can do it! If you have the luxury of the condiment list, the possibilities are far more interesting....not endless, but more interesting.
Good luck!
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Thursday, April 10, 2008
A Dollar a Day- Could you do it?
There is a small ad that appears from time to time on this blog with the headline, " A Dollar a day". I wonder if those of us in wealthy countries could live on that if we tried. It would not be a question in most cases of having to, but just very simply of trying to, to see if we could do it.
What does a dollar buy you? A small bag of generic rice, pasta...sure. But what about flavour?
What can you make for a dollar's worth of ingredients? Think about it...now make that stretch to feed you all day long. Right, you got it...only one meal.
At times when money has been lean while living in France, I began to see where many French dishes sprang from. One day, looking in my kitchen, a few days before the paycheck landed, I had a few things on hand...but what if I had to feed a family on this? What would I have done? What do and what have people done? I then saw the birth of many things I would have looked past otherwise like onion soup, croque monsieur, cassoulet....these are all poor dishes. The dishes created from want and need, born of tremendous creativity and the human desire for flavor despite circumstances. It takes a genius to take a few onions, a little olive oil, salt, pepper and if you're lucky, a beef bone and make a feast large enough for a family. I can see into the origins of this classic French dish like never before. I savour it when I taste it. I appreciate it. I hail the French!
Of course, this is not an ability unique to the French. The entire world has created dishes from need. A dollar a day...or less.
Give it a try on a day when you are feeling particularly low. On a day when the internal rains are pouring despite the sunshine outside. You will feel better.
Onion soup
Makes about 4 servings
1/8 cup olive oil
4 large onions, sliced
1 tablespoon flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
4 cups water
Begin to saute the onions in a the olive oil on medium heat...cook until they just begin to caramelize, turning a soft golden brown. Now, sprinkle in the flour, mustard salt and pepper...continue to saute for just a few minutes.
Transfer the onion mixture to a large soup pot. Add the water. Cover. Cook on a gentle low heat
for about 2 hours.
If you do not have Dijon style mustard, improvise! Use what you have...you can substitute a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce or even hot sauce.
What does a dollar buy you? A small bag of generic rice, pasta...sure. But what about flavour?
What can you make for a dollar's worth of ingredients? Think about it...now make that stretch to feed you all day long. Right, you got it...only one meal.
At times when money has been lean while living in France, I began to see where many French dishes sprang from. One day, looking in my kitchen, a few days before the paycheck landed, I had a few things on hand...but what if I had to feed a family on this? What would I have done? What do and what have people done? I then saw the birth of many things I would have looked past otherwise like onion soup, croque monsieur, cassoulet....these are all poor dishes. The dishes created from want and need, born of tremendous creativity and the human desire for flavor despite circumstances. It takes a genius to take a few onions, a little olive oil, salt, pepper and if you're lucky, a beef bone and make a feast large enough for a family. I can see into the origins of this classic French dish like never before. I savour it when I taste it. I appreciate it. I hail the French!
Of course, this is not an ability unique to the French. The entire world has created dishes from need. A dollar a day...or less.
Give it a try on a day when you are feeling particularly low. On a day when the internal rains are pouring despite the sunshine outside. You will feel better.
Onion soup
Makes about 4 servings
1/8 cup olive oil
4 large onions, sliced
1 tablespoon flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
4 cups water
Begin to saute the onions in a the olive oil on medium heat...cook until they just begin to caramelize, turning a soft golden brown. Now, sprinkle in the flour, mustard salt and pepper...continue to saute for just a few minutes.
Transfer the onion mixture to a large soup pot. Add the water. Cover. Cook on a gentle low heat
for about 2 hours.
If you do not have Dijon style mustard, improvise! Use what you have...you can substitute a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce or even hot sauce.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Paris, Poverty and People
I have had the opportunity to travel. In those travels I have mixed and lived with people from backgrounds very distant from mine. Their experiences are truly worlds apart from my own yet within them I have found more than one element of similarity. Some that are leaps in the imagination to get to and others as close as your front door and as familiar as your old shoes.
If all of these elements, there is the singular element of food that is indeed the ultimate common denominator. When I lived in poor neighborhoods in Paris and shopped in the local grocery stores with my African, Arab and Asian neighbors, the familiar was always swirling around us. Universally loved flavors we all shared. Coca-Cola, bread, ice cream, frites...Others, were as foreign to me, like their roots and spices, as perhaps my eating pork was to many of them.The Halal butcher and the French butcher share a common practice but certainly their inventory was different.
My experiences in Paris, the immigrant Paris, has allowed me to see the quest for food from another angle. I recall one day standing in line at the check-out counter of the neighborhood ED supermarket. ED is a hard discount chain.Not much variety but the general basics in everything and not at all expensive compared to the Monoprixs and Champions. On this particular day, an elderly woman was paying, or attempting to pay for her items which consisted solely of a plastic wrapped package of Danish salami. Probably 30 ultra-thin slices in the pack. The woman who was dirty and poorly dressed in rags, really.. rags, reached into her thread bare coat pocket and pulled out a paper cup, probably an old espresso cup she found on the ground. In that cup which was serving as her wallet, were a few coins. her bony, dirty fingers reached into the cup for enough coins to pay. There was one customer between her and I ( I was third in line). The second customer, another woman, well dressed and attractive, offered to pay for her food. The cashier had been asking the first woman a question but she either did not understand or pretended to not understand. The second woman provided a coin or two and the first woman left without saying anything. "C'est pour manger, monsieur," the second woman said to the cashier.
As I watched this scene play out, I wondered if my compatriots would be as quick to pay for someone else's food like that. I'm sure it would happen there as well as here. And then I thought, how many times had I ever in my life seen a person so obviously impoverished in my country. Not often. They are there, but they are not often seen.
In Paris the impoverished live amongst the well off. There are poorer neighborhoods and extremely wealthy neighborhoods for sure. But that in and of itself does not determine whether a quartier's residents are eating or not eating on any given day. It is not a determinant of an average income or any income at all.
I still look in wonderment at people who have to survive in this city with no family to rely on nor good job to go to. These are the people who make literally something from nothing everyday. These are the survivors.
This blog therefore is dedicated to delving deeper into the cuisine of poverty. Poverty food. It is not an oxymoron. It is the fruit of the human race's quest not only for survival, but for survival with flavor, savour, spice and beauty. Some of the most delicious things have come from this and they are reminders of what we are capable of as human beings.
If all of these elements, there is the singular element of food that is indeed the ultimate common denominator. When I lived in poor neighborhoods in Paris and shopped in the local grocery stores with my African, Arab and Asian neighbors, the familiar was always swirling around us. Universally loved flavors we all shared. Coca-Cola, bread, ice cream, frites...Others, were as foreign to me, like their roots and spices, as perhaps my eating pork was to many of them.The Halal butcher and the French butcher share a common practice but certainly their inventory was different.
My experiences in Paris, the immigrant Paris, has allowed me to see the quest for food from another angle. I recall one day standing in line at the check-out counter of the neighborhood ED supermarket. ED is a hard discount chain.Not much variety but the general basics in everything and not at all expensive compared to the Monoprixs and Champions. On this particular day, an elderly woman was paying, or attempting to pay for her items which consisted solely of a plastic wrapped package of Danish salami. Probably 30 ultra-thin slices in the pack. The woman who was dirty and poorly dressed in rags, really.. rags, reached into her thread bare coat pocket and pulled out a paper cup, probably an old espresso cup she found on the ground. In that cup which was serving as her wallet, were a few coins. her bony, dirty fingers reached into the cup for enough coins to pay. There was one customer between her and I ( I was third in line). The second customer, another woman, well dressed and attractive, offered to pay for her food. The cashier had been asking the first woman a question but she either did not understand or pretended to not understand. The second woman provided a coin or two and the first woman left without saying anything. "C'est pour manger, monsieur," the second woman said to the cashier.
As I watched this scene play out, I wondered if my compatriots would be as quick to pay for someone else's food like that. I'm sure it would happen there as well as here. And then I thought, how many times had I ever in my life seen a person so obviously impoverished in my country. Not often. They are there, but they are not often seen.
In Paris the impoverished live amongst the well off. There are poorer neighborhoods and extremely wealthy neighborhoods for sure. But that in and of itself does not determine whether a quartier's residents are eating or not eating on any given day. It is not a determinant of an average income or any income at all.
I still look in wonderment at people who have to survive in this city with no family to rely on nor good job to go to. These are the people who make literally something from nothing everyday. These are the survivors.
This blog therefore is dedicated to delving deeper into the cuisine of poverty. Poverty food. It is not an oxymoron. It is the fruit of the human race's quest not only for survival, but for survival with flavor, savour, spice and beauty. Some of the most delicious things have come from this and they are reminders of what we are capable of as human beings.
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