Some Food Updates & A New Experiment

I found my new favorite blog the other day: 30 Bucks A Week. Tina and Phil live in NYC and spend only $30/wk on groceries. Like us, they aren't fanatics about their experiment, they still eat out occasionally and drink alcohol, which aren't included in their weekly total. They're vegetarian and the food they eat looks really yummy - just check out their recent Mac & Cheese recipe, which Nathan is begging me to make him.

So we're going to try the $30/wk experiment, for at least a month. We currently spend about $275/mo. on groceries so it would be a significant savings for us.

Onto the food updates....

We successfully replicated the Green Papaya Salad I had at Sawatdee the other week! Modifications to the posted recipe: Left out the chili, spring onions, and fish sauce. Added shredded carrots.

The ingredients were really cheap at Shaung Hur, a large Asian grocery store near us. 2 green papays were about $1.50 and was enough for at least 4 large servings. Nathan made a simple peanut sauce to pour over his instead of the dressing in the recipe:

Simple Peanut Sauce

-Peanut Butter (couple big spoonfuls)

-Soy sauce (splash)

-Rice Wine Vinegar (splash)

-Water (splash)

Whisk everything together until smooth. Sorry for the lack of specific ingredient amounts, he just threw it together and tasted as he went. There are many more complex peanut sauce recipes out there, but this can be made in just a minute from kitchen staples.

The other night it looked like the fridge was bare, but starting to think with the $30/wk. mentality, I made do with what was in there:

Orzo Pasta Mish Mash

Ingredients:

-Orzo or whatever pasta you have around

-1/2 container of baby bella mushrooms

-1/2 onion

- 2 small tomatoes

-olive oil

-2 large cloves garlic

-lots of fresh basil (leftover from our papaya salad)

Preparation:

While pasta is cooking, saute onions and mushrooms with olive oil in a pan until really cooked (15 minutes?). I splashed some white cooking wine in after awhile too. During the last couple minutes, add in tomatoes and minced garlic until just cooked.

Mix with pasta and chopped basil. I'd recommend making a lot of the veggies because they cook down quite a bit, and I like to have about an equal ratio of veggies and pasta in my dish.

Very filling, Nathan loved it!

-Kelly