Gustatory Circuit » Budget Conscious

Red Chicken Curry w/Bamboo Shoots

Yvonne — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:35:12 +0000

Active prep: 10 mins
Cook time: 20 mins
Serves: 4-6

This is the kind of recipe that makes me wonder why Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee is such a hit. I mean, don’t want to make your own curry paste, use pre-made stuff from a jar. Duh, right? This recipe is dead easy because mostly you’re just dumping stuff out of cans and jars into a pot and stirring. You don’t need a TV show to tell you how to do that!

I started with a recipe from Thai: The Essence of Asian Cooking by Judy Bastyra (this book seems to no longer be available, but the author has two other Thai books out: Thai Cooking and Thai Food and Cooking) and improvised a bit. I’ll post what I actually did below and then follow up with my suggested tweaks.

Red Chicken Curry w/Bamboo Shoots
Adapted from Thai: The Essence of Asian Cooking by Judy Bastrya

2 13.5-oz. cans coconut milk
1 c. low-salt chicken broth
1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breast, diced
Kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper
3 T. red curry paste
1 T. Thai fish sauce
1 T. packed brown sugar
1 8-oz. can sliced bamboo shoots, drained
1 15-oz. can straw mushrooms
1.5 c. frozen sugar snap peas
1 T. lime juice
Handful of fresh basil leaves

Season the diced chicken liberally with salt and pepper.

Pour 1 can of coconut milk and half the chicken broth into a large pot. Stir and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Add the curry paste and stir until it is well-integrated. Add the chicken, fish sauce, and brown sugar. Stir to combine. Reduce the heat to medium and cook for 5-6 minutes, or until the chicken is barely cooked through. Stir often to make sure the chicken doesn’t stick to the bottom.

Pour in the remaining can of coconut milk and remaining chicken broth. Add bamboo shoots, straw mushrooms, and sugar snap peas. Increase heat to medium-high and bring everything back to a boil, stirring often.

Remove from heat and stir in lime juice and basil. Salt to taste. Serve over steamed white rice.

This was plenty good as is (I ate two bowls of it), but I think it could be even better.

Suggested changes: more chicken (at least another 1/2 lb.), more fish sauce (one more tablespoon, maybe stirred in at the very end with the lime juice), more bamboo shoots. I’d also consider throwing in some grape tomatoes or canned pineapple chunks. In that case, I’d probably cut back on the brown sugar or eliminate it entirely.

To give the curry more depth of flavor, next time I’ll probably brown the chicken in oil first (perhaps throw some ground cumin and coriander into the seasonings?), set it aside, and saute some onions/shallots before pouring in the coconut milk. There’s lots of room for experimentation while keeping it a fast and easy meal.

Budget:

Item	Price
2 cans coconut milk	$3.38
1 can bamboo shoots	$1.15
1 can straw mushrooms	$3.69
1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts	$2.99
Total	$11.21

Pantry ingredients: Chicken broth, curry paste, fish sauce, brown sugar, sugar snap peas and 1/2 lime squeezed for juice (both left over from the bison curry), basil from the balcony herb garden, and rice.

It looks like we’ll get five servings out of what I made today (two dinners for two people, plus tomorrow’s lunch for me). I think the actual cost of the pantry ingredients here is pretty minimal, but even if you round the total up to $15, that’s still only $3 per serving and therefore pretty economical.

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Grocery Shopping at Costco

Yvonne — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:44:57 +0000

We don’t often buy groceries at Costco because we’re just two people and we’ve learned that we cannot actually consume a quart of dip before it goes bad. The kinds of things we do buy are either non-perishables (e.g., our favorite brand of canned peaches), or might-as-well-be-non-perishables (e.g., a 5-lb. bag of mini Babybel cheeses that will be fine for 6 months in the fridge). We were there today to pick up toilet paper and some other things and I thought I’d check out their lump crab meat, since I’ve got a crab and avocado salad on the menu for this week.

One pound of lump crab meat was $15.99. Eight ounces of fresh lump crab at our regular grocery store costs about that much. I happened to find the house brand of crab on sale when I made the jambalaya, but wasn’t too happy with the quality—it was pretty well shredded instead of “lump” and still had bits of cartilage in it. Now, the Costco stuff is in a can (and pasteurized so it’ll keep for two months in the fridge), but I think it should be plenty good enough for jambalaya and crab salad at about half the cost of what I’d been planning to buy this week.

Next up, chicken. Boneless, skinless breasts for $2.99/lb, boneless, skinless thighs for $2.19/lb, and bone-in, skin-on thighs for $0.99/lb. Not necessarily rock-bottom prices, but still good sale prices and I’m quite sure it’s less than what I’ve been paying. Plus the meat is already divided into tear-off pouches so I can just defrost the amount I need for dinner without having to pre-separate a bulk tray into a bunch of freezer bags as soon as I get home.

And finally, salmon. Remember I paid $12.99/lb for farmed Atlantic salmon? Costco had very similar salmon for $6.49/lb. CRAZY. That’s less than what our regular grocery store was charging for decrepit-looking salmon and this stuff looks great.

We came home with what should be 6 weeks’ worth of meat and seafood for less than $80. Combined with the other stuff that’s left in the freezer (some Italian sausage, brisket, and 2 Cornish game hens), I don’t think I’ll need to buy any more meat for two whole months.

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Braised Chicken Legs w/Tomato

Yvonne — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:27:00 +0000

Active prep: 20 mins
Active cook time: 25 mins
Inactive cook time: 50 mins
Serves: 4

This issue of Fine Cooking calls this a “weeknight” chicken braise, but I’d only attempt this on a weeknight if you don’t mind waiting 2 hours for dinner.

It is totally worth it for a weekend meal though, especially if you consider that only needs one pot and less than an hour of actual work; the rest of the time the chicken is just sitting in the oven.

Braised Chicken Legs w/Tomato
Adapted from Fine Cooking Dec 2006

6 oil-packed anchovy fillets, rinsed and patted dry
2 medium cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 T. chopped fresh rosemary leaves, plus 1 t. whole fresh rosemary leaves
1 c. low-salt chicken broth
1 1/2 lb. bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
1 1/2 lb. chicken drumsticks
Kosher salt and black pepper
2 T. grapeseed oil
1 c. red wine
2 lb. Roma tomatoes (about 5 extremely large tomatoes), cut into wedges and seeded
1 T. red-wine vinegar

Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.

Put anchovies, garlic, and the chopped rosemary in a food processor or blender and process to finely chop. Add the chicken broth and process for 30 seconds to blend everything together.

Season the chicken liberally with salt and pepper. Use a 12-inch ovenproof saute pan with a lid. Heat oil over medium-high heat. Arrange chicken in a single layer, skin-side down, and cook for about 5 minutes or until nice and brown. Turn the chicken over and brown the other sides, 3-5 minutes. Transfer the chicken pieces to a plate. Pour out the fat and return the pan to the stove on medium-high.

Add the wine to the pan and bring to a boil, scraping the brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the broth mixture and return the chicken and any accumulated juices to the pan. Layer the tomato wedges on top and cover. Put the pan in the oven for 45-50 minutes until the chicken is tender.

Transfer the chicken and tomatoes to a large serving dish and cover. Skim off as much fat as possible from the sauce. Set heat to medium-high and bring sauce to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 5 minutes so the sauce reduces. Stir in vinegar and remaining rosemary. Season sauce to taste with salt and pepper. Pour sauce over chicken and serve.

We’re Asian, so we usually eat this with plain steamed white rice. The serving suggestion in the magazine is to serve with noodles or mashed potatoes, but I don’t think I would do that. This is a fairly rich and extremely full-flavored dish to begin with; I think mashed potatoes would make the whole meal too heavy. Noodles might be ok if they weren’t buttered. It’s also good (and more low-carb-friendly) just by itself, which is how we ate it this week.

This dish only uses about half a tin of anchovies, so if you’re anchovy lovers like us, try warming a few leftover fillets in the sauce and eating them.

If you’re an anchovy hater, don’t worry. The anchovies lend a nice saltiness to the dish, but it doesn’t taste fishy.

Budget:

Item	Price
2 lbs. Roma tomatoes	$2.19
1 tin anchovies	$1.53
1 bottle red-wine vinegar	$3.67
Chicken drumsticks	$2.25
Total	$9.64

Pantry/freezer ingredients: Garlic, rosemary (from balcony herb garden), chicken broth, chicken thighs, salt and pepper, grapeseed oil, red wine
Leftover ingredients: Anchovies, red-wine vinegar

Let’s bump this up to $12 total to account for the chicken from the freezer and the red wine (left over from a bottle we drank), so that’s $3-ish per serving. Not bad, not bad at all.

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Evaluating the Grocery Bill

Yvonne — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:08:07 +0000

My husband and I tend to eat out a lot, especially over the last few months due to general life upheaval. We have the luxury of being able to afford it, but I was never fully comfortable with it—I’m a big believer in the psychological, nutritional, and budgetary power of good, home-cooked meals.

So I made the conscious decision to cook more as the general life upheaval subsided (and yes, my husband can cook, and quite well—wouldn’t have married someone who couldn’t, to be honest—but the kitchen is almost exclusively my domain for now and that’s just fine).

The first thing I did was to go through my rather large collection of cookbooks and cooking magazines and pick out things I wanted to try and thought could be made in an hour or less. I entered the relevant info into a spreadsheet, planned menus for the week for maximum ingredient usage, and shopped accordingly.

And now I’m curious how it all turned out, budget-wise.

Here is the list of ingredients I bought for the last four days, starting with the roasted chicken (the curry was a carryover from last week’s menu, when I overestimated how much we can actually eat):

Item	Price
1 bunch asparagus	$4.36
1 lemon	$0.20
1 bunch celery	$1.36
1 red bell pepper	$0.99
1 5-oz box organic baby spinach	$5.83
1 9-oz bag whole pecans	$4.99
1 13-oz jar unpitted green olives	$6.92
4 chicken leg quarters	$3.18
4 thick, bone-in, center-cut loin pork chops	$11.92
1 8-oz container lump crab	$6.99
1 16-oz package kielbasa	$2.99
1 4-oz container Old Bay seasoning	$2.99
1 10-oz bottle Worcestershire sauce	$2.59
1 6-oz container crumbled feta	$5.99
Total	$61.30

I did make fairly heavy use of the pantry—olive oil, lemon juice, spices, rice, onion, scallions from the balcony herb garden, chicken stock bought in bulk at Costco, Dijon mustard, and balsamic vinegar. Since I’m just after a first-order approximation here, I’ll round the grocery total up to $65 and assume that the pantry items are partially canceled out by items I bought but didn’t completely use up (olives, Old Bay, celery, Worcestershire sauce).

$65 spent on groceries for 12 meals comes to $5.42 per person per meal. It’s a far cry from the Hunger Challenge (read more in Cooking with Amy’s September archives), which only gives you $1 per person per meal, and still more than what many families I know live on, but this is a significant reduction from what we used to spend to feed ourselves. I figure that food of similar quality would probably run us $10-$15 (at least) per person per meal at a restaurant, and at least we’re not eating $5 Footlongs or ramen every day. The money saved over a year would easily pay for a nice vacation.

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