Cheap Bastid's If You Grill Chicken Breast...Meg Will Come

Last Thursday I had the day off. So I stuck my head in the freezer. Now, this freezer (if you recall the photo I ran last week of all the stuff in my freezer) is chock full of hard frozen food. For those of us over 50, it’s more like Fibber McGee’s closet than a freezer. You never know what’s going to come tumbling out when the door opens.

So I poked around just a bit. I wanted something to grill which would give us some left-overs because I had to work all weekend and wanted to be able to take something for lunch.

I stuck my arm in on the far left side where I keep the chicken and started pulling out freezer bags of stuff. God, it hurts when you drop a quart bag packed full of frozen chicken thighs on your toe when you’re wearing slides. Geez, damn! Anyway there were thighs and legs and boneless/skinless breasts and way in the back—so far back I literally had to stick my head in there was a bag with 4 bone and skin on breasts. Suddenly, there’s a voice in my head, “If you grill it, she will come.” Whoa! Since when did I turn into Ray Kinsella? I pulled my arm back like it was about to freeze off. I peered back inside, bags of other chicken parts beckoned on the counter.

Tentatively, I stuck my arm back inside the freezer. “If you grill it, she will come.” Gingerly I grasped the bag filled with the 4 breasts and eased it out onto the counter and then I slowly replaced the multiple bags of other chicken pieces.

“If you grill it, she will come.”

It started a few months ago. I had taken 2 bags of chicken out of the freezer. One bag had 4 thighs and the other 4 legs. It was going to be a feast with left-overs. We got a text while I was grilling the chicken. Miss Meggie was on her way over (Meggie is my 20 year old step daughter). OK, no problemo, we thought. When she got here we were sitting and eating our salads. Meggie dropped her bag and computer in her room and came out to get a tray. When we finished our salads we noticed that out of 8 pieces of chicken that there were only 4 left. We looked at one another and started laughing. Guess she’s hungry!

“If you grill it, she will come!”.

I pulled the bag of breasts out and put them on a tray on the counter to thaw (or as Carolyn says to “unthaw”). The first thought that crossed my mind was, “Hmmmm, I wonder if this is enough? The last 2 times I did bone-in breasts on the grill, Meggie came over for dinner.” Naw, it’s OK. I tell Carolyn what I’ve taken out for dinner and her response is, “I guess that means Meggie will be over. She’s been over the last few times you grilled chicken.” And then we didn’t think anymore about it.

But all day, I kept hearing in my head, “If you grill it, she will come.”


So, we let the breasts thaw and prepared for a simple dinner of grilled chicken breast and left over potato salad (homemade of course). It’s now coming up on 5 p.m. Carolyn’s sitting at her computer and starts laughing. “Walt, I just got an e-mail from Meg. She’s coming over for dinner. She’s going to think the only thing we eat is chicken breast.”

“If you grill it, she will come!”

She never spontaneously shows up on nights we’re doing canned soup and salad or hot dogs. But she seems to have an infallible radar for the juicy goodness of crispy-skinned grilled chicken breast.

But I’m grumbling just a tiny bit. There goes my fantasy of having chicken salad sandwiches for work or a cold left-over breast teasing me from the fridge in the break room, beckoning me to snitch bites on the fly throughout the day.

The really good news though is that with Miss Meggie coming over, it mean it’s time for an “emergency” ice cream run. I hop in my ageing Mazda and head on over to Stater Bros. (We’ve been on a plain old chocolate ice cream kick lately topped with sunflower seeds). Just for a few seconds I stand in front of the poultry counter fantasizing about picking up another package of breasts at $.99/lb but no, we’ve got enough and I can stock up later in the week.

To make a long story short. Miss Meggie came over, gracing us with her regal presence and there was enough chicken to go around. It’s just too bad she didn’t ask us if this was heaven. Because then we could have said, “No, it’s Vista.”

Now, somehow or another it seems that I’ve finally mastered the technique of grilling bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts. It’s only taken me 30 years! I know that it’s not as healthy as boneless/skinless but it sure tastes better. And I have plenty of use for that healthier kind. Let’s put it this way, cavemen did not bone and skin the birds they killed and cooked. They skewered them and shoved them over an open flame.

So here’s how I do it:


Miss Meggies Chicken Breast

4 chicken breasts (bone in & skin on)
Salt, pepper, garlic
1 tbsp cooking oil

Thaw the breasts. Put them down on a tray big enough to hold them. Peel the skin loose with your finger and shake a bit of the salt/pepper/garlic mixture (my basic, go-to spice blend) under the skin onto the meat & cover it back up with the skin. Using a silicone basting brush, paint a really thin skim of oil onto the surface of the chicken and then sprinkle some of the spice blend onto the breast. Turn them over and paint the bottom (bone side) and sprinkle more spice blend. Now you’re ready to cook.

Prepare grill to medium hot (you should be able to hold your hand about 3” over the hot grill for about 4 seconds). Put the breasts bone side down onto the grill and leave them for 3-4 minutes. (As they say sometimes in poker: “no peekie; no lookie”). Then flip them over onto the skin side for 3-4 minutes. You’re going to be generating some smoke because what you’re trying to do is render the fat off the breast to moisten and flavor the meat.

Now, flip the breast back over to the “bone side” and move it to a slightly cooler portion of the grill. The smoke should be pretty much gone because the fat is rendered. The skin which is now up should be starting to get some color and have some grill marks. Let it cook for about 10 minutes. Then flip it again for 3 minutes and finally back to skin side up to finish, about another 3-4 minutes.

All total, it takes about 20 minutes or so to come out with chicken breast that’s done, that has a deep, rich, brown, crispy, tasty skin and meat that’s juicy with just a hint of the salt/pepper/garlic you applied in every bite. Let the breast rest for about 5 minutes or so before eating so the juices flow back in and the meat’s cooled enough to eat.


So that’s it. We like to serve this simply with either a garden salad or potato salad and it’s a terrific meal. Carolyn likes to peel the skin off her's and eat it last almost like a chicken skin Chicharrón. (I wonder why no one's every tried to make chicharrons out of chickn skin?)

The Cheap Bastid Test: This is easy. I buy these breasts on “special” at $.99 a pound. Each breast is about ¾ lb. So 4 breasts cost about $3. Add about $1 for the potato salad ingredients and you’ve spent $4 to feed 3 or 4 people.

And Meggie loves it too.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!

Cheap Bastid's Chicken & Dumpling Soup

Cheap Bastid’s thing is to try to cook really tasty food on a tight budget. I like sharing that and maybe getting some other folks whose budgets are pretty tight thinking about food in a different way.

This week we’re talking Chicken and Dumpling Soup. Why? Well, a couple of weeks ago I was looking for something to cook that would provide some left-overs because my work schedule had me working until 8:30 several days in a row. I got rummaging around in both my brain and in the freezer and came up with chicken but wanted to do something different and old-fashioned. I had never cooked dumplings before and wanted to try them to be able to say I have done it and for the flavor and “old fashioned” idea of Chicken and Dumplings.

And in going through the freezer, I came across a couple of freezer bags with some freezer burned chicken legs and thighs. Once upon a time they would have gotten tossed. But I figured that it wouldn’t make any difference because I was tossing them in the slow cooker and making soup. I was right. So here’s another Cheap Bastid, stick-to-your-ribs, old-fashioned recipe that you may just enjoy.

Cheap Bastid’s Chicken and Dumpling Soup
4-5 pieces of chicken (legs, thighs, breast it can still be frozen)
2 cups chopped carrots
1 ½ cups chopped onion
½ cups chopped celery
16 oz chicken broth
3-4 cups water
Garlic
Salt, pepper, cumin, rosemary or thyme
Pancake mix

Directions:
Get out your slow cooker or a dutch oven (whichever you prefer to use). Put it on the stove at medium or turn the cooker on high. Dump in the chicken broth and water, then add the chicken. I also like to add some heartier broth by dumping in 3 or 4 beef or pork broth “ice cubes” that I keep in the freezer. Add salt, pepper, garlic and herbs (dried herbs work just fine). Start chopping your veggies and dump them in when you’ve got them prepped. (All of this is more or less depending on how much veggies you like in your soup).

Now you can relax and let this cook for 2-3 hours. Get the pot simmering—a slow roll works good—and cover the pot. Read the newspaper, watch some TV, whatever. This is going to start smelling good within an hour. After 2-3 hours check the chicken. When it’s about ready to fall off the bone (stick a fork in it and twist—if the meat wants to fall off, then it’s ready). Take the Chicken out of the pot, put it on a cutting board and then remove first the skin and put aside, then the meat from the bone. Toss the skin and the bone and shred the meat then chop it into about ½-3/4 inch pieces. Then toss all that back into the pot and clean up your cutting board. Taste test the soup for flavor. It should be starting to taste real “chickeny” and you should be getting some flavor from both the veggies as well as the seasonings. I really like the way this soup smells while cooking with the combination of chicken, celery and herbs.


Now is the time to leave the cover “cracked open”. This will release steam and let the liquid cook down a bit intensifying the flavor and thickening it a bit. Make sure you’ve got plenty of liquid in the pot so this can happen.

After about another hour of simmering, taste test again. This time it’s to check on the “doneness” of the vegetables. A bit of texture is a good thing—you don’t want “crunchy” and “mushy” is overdone. So, if they’re just a bit “al dente” now would be a good time to prep your dumplings.

I came across a recipe online that suggested using pancake mix for dumplings. That’s good because I didn’t have any “Jiffy” biscuit mix and didn’t have any baking powder to make the dumplings from scratch. The secret is that rather than the 2 to 1 ratio of mix to water that pancakes require, use a 1 ½ to 1 ratio—so that it’s a bit thicker.

Use 2 teaspoons to “drop” the batter into the pot. One to pick up the batter and the other to slide it off into the soup. Cover the whole top of the soup with the dumplings. Turn the heat down so that it’s not bubbling, cover and let it simmer for 45 minutes to an hour until the dumplings are nicely puffed up and bobbing around like pasty, yellowish buoys.

Soups on! It’s time to eat. The dumplings will give the soup a smooth silky texture and provide that something extra that takes a good chicken soup and turns it into something special—Chicken and Dumpling Soup. A fantastic, tasty, home-cooked, comfort food, country-style meal in a bowl.

The Cheap Bastid Test: Well, I should say that old, freezer burned chicken isn’t worth anything but, it was about 1 ½ lbs. of chicken that cost about $2.50 at the grocery store. The veggies cost maybe $1, the broth added about $.50 and I used about $.50 worth of pancake mix. Total for the meal: $4.50. This fed us dinner for 2 nights and lunch for 2 days—a total of 8 meals. That’s stretching a food budget dollar and making something incredibly tasty at the same time. Give it a try. Your family will love it.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good! Eat Cheap! Be Grateful!

Cheap Bastid's Pizza Chicken!

Last week’s Top Chef Las Vegas is on for about the umpteenth time and it reminded me that today is Foodie Tuesday. I was going to start doing some things this week on school night dinners.

You know, it’s totally possible to have a family meal together every night. There’s no need to call Chili’s for carry-out or troop over to Quiznos. With just a bit of planning you can have a meal ready to go in a half hour pretty much every night. You’ve got to plan your meals in advance and do things like taking things out to thaw the night before and put them in the fridge. You’ve got to do your grocery buying with menus either in mind or in hand to make sure that you have the ingredients on hand.

At all times, my freezer contains 4-5 lbs. of ground beef in 1 lb (or less) bags, bottom round roasts, boneless loin chops (2 to a bag with some individually wrapped), pork shoulder roast, chicken legs & thighs broken out in bags with about 4 pieces each, boneless/skinless chicken breasts, Italian sausage, a couple of pounds of bacon and a frozen pizza. That’s my basic load and I keep it replenished when the meat is on sale. Is this giving YOU any ideas of what you might be able to cook using some of the meat in my freezer?

One other thing before a recipe—try starting this school year with 2 new rules at dinner time:
#1 Lose the bottles or cans of beverage at the table. Go to milk, juice or water poured in a glass. It’s healthier. We all drink too much soda.

#2 Everybody eats the same thing. Not chicken breast for Mom & Dad and mac & cheese for one kid and SpaghettiO’s for the other kid. If a kid just won’t eat something they can either leave the table without dinner (don’t worry they won’t starve) or they can go and fix their own PB&J and clean up after themselves.

Sermon’s over. Let’s cook something. Today, I’ll give you a super simple recipe that I “invented” for what we always called “Pizza Chicken”. It’s always been a favorite of my kids and my daughter reports that she makes this at least every couple of weeks at her home. Why did I call it “Pizza Chicken”? Simple, kids love pizza! It made them totally willing to try it and once they did, they loved it. Obviously, this was a “required” recipe in “Dad’s Cookbook and Kitchen Survival Guide”.

Pizza Chicken

2 boneless/skinless chicken breasts
1 can tomato sauce
4 oz. Shredded mozzarella cheese
Grated parmesan cheese
Salt, pepper, garlic powder, basil, oregano

Put 2 tablespoons cooking oil into a medium skillet and heat on medium high. Add the chicken breasts to pan, season with salt, pepper and garlic and let brown on both sides (should take about 4 minutes per side). Season the breasts as they cook with salt, pepper and garlic.

Pre-heat oven to 375. Put tomato sauce in a bowl and add garlic, oregano, basil and salt and pepper. When breasts are browned, transfer to a baking dish, pour tomato sauce over them. Cover with mozzarella and then sprinkle parmesan on top of that. Bake in 375 oven until cheese it turning golden (about 20 minutes or so). Remove and serve on bed of spaghetti or fettucine. It’s that simple. If you want, add some chopped onion and bell peppers while you’re browning the chicken to give some additional depth of flavor.

Wow, isn’t that easy! And, it’s a 30 minute meal if you’ve made sure to thaw out your chicken breasts ahead of time. This sounds like one of the super easy recipes you get out of a magazine but it’s something I “invented” almost 25 years ago when my kids were young. It’s good, tasty and with the mozzarella, just a bit gooey. Add the parmesan for just a bit more flavor.

What’s this going to cost? About $3 for the chicken, about $1 for the tomato sauce and
About another $1 for the cheese. Total for 4 people is about $1.25 each.

That’s the Cheap Bastid way—Eat Good, Eat Cheap, Be Grateful

Cheap Bastid's Left-Over Chicken and Grits--It's My Anniversary

Today is my 4th wedding anniversary. This is the 3rd marriage for both of us. (Or perhaps as we joke it’s the last for both of us). Anyway we got married 4 years ago today in a “Cheap Bastid” wedding in Reno, Nevada. It was a planned elopement just for the 2 of us complete with a 6 day honeymoon in Reno. I used Southwest Rapid Rewards for our plane tickets (1 for me plus a bonus Companion Pass for Carolyn) and I used HHonors rewards for our hotel—Harrah’s Hilton. Even better, the Hilton messed up our reservations and we ended up in a “whale suite” for 5 nights!

Don’t get me wrong about being Cheap Bastid. This is what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. We had fun, including a white water kayak trip down the Truckee River in which I got in a fight with a willow tree growing out over the river. Carolyn laughed so hard that she got twisted around and started through a bunch of rocks backward. The willow tree won the fight too.

Anyhow, I’ll get to a recipe in a little bit. I just wanted to tell you a bit about the love of my life. It took me 54 years to find her.

And here’s a little piece of music to go along with this anniversary mushiness, “Special Lady” by Ray, Goodman & Brown. (Recipe follows)



One night last week, Carolyn said she wanted something with grits for dinner (now THAT’s PROOF that she’s a “Special Lady”). So, I had some left over grilled chicken breast (the official cheffing term is “paillard” meaning that I pounded the crap out of the breasts with a heavy saucepan before I grilled them) and decided to see what I could do with it. And here’s what I came up with.

Special Lady Chicken and Grits
2 cups stone ground yellow grits
1 grilled chicken breast
4 thick slices of bacon
½ diced fresh jalapeno pepper
½ cup (appx) diced onion
1 roma tomato diced
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (or jack)
Chicken Broth
2 tbsp flour

Prep
Cut chicken into ½ inch cubes. Cut bacon slices into about 1 inch pieces. Dice jalapeno, onion and tomato. Put 4 cups water in a large pot and turn temp to high. Put large skillet on stove and turn heat to medium.

Cooking
Put bacon in skillet to brown. Bring water to a boil. When bacon just starts to color add the onion and jalapeno and let bacon continue to brown. When water boils, stir in the grits and turn the heat down to low. When bacon is brown sprinkle in the 2 tbsp flour and stir into the mix (including the bacon grease). Add about 1/3 cup chicken broth and chicken. Add ½ cup chicken broth to the grits and stir in the cheese (cover and let simmer) but return for a stir every couple of minutes. Turn heat down on skillet. Gently scrape bottom of skillet to loosen the bits and incorporate them into the blend. Add the diced tomato (I like the tomato for both the color and the little bit of acid). Turn heat off on the skillet. Turn heat off grits.

Plate grits with the “sauce” over the top. This is some good “country style” eating full of flavor and a great use of leftovers.

That’s the Cheap Bastid way! Eat well. Eat cheap. Be grateful.
And….I’m grateful for my “Special Lady”

Cheap Bastid's Homemade Enchiladas & Sauce!

I love enchiladas, especially New Mexico style. But I haven’t really tried making them very often because I just don’t like the taste of the “enchilada sauce” that you buy in a can. It always has a faintly metallic taste that I don’t care for.

So, I took off on a quest to come up with a recipe for enchiladas and a homemade sauce that fit “Cheap Bastid’s” criteria: inexpensive (OK, cheap), tasty and easy to make. And, I think that I was able to get that done reasonably well. I searched the web for recipes and came up with several which I kind of cobbled together to come up with the one I’m using here. There’s 2 recipes—one for enchilada sauce and one for enchiladas. Both are easy although the enchiladas get just a bit messy when you’re assembling them.

Enchilada Sauce
2 tbsp flour
¼ cup good chili powder (New Mexico or Cali)
½ tsp chipotle or cayenne
8 oz can tomato sauce
Ground cumin
Garlic powder
Onion powder
Salt
1 ½ cups water
¼ cup vegetable oil

Mix flour, chili powder & chipotle/cayenne in a small bowl. Put skillet on medium heat and add oil. You’re going to make a simple roux. Add the flour blend and immediately start to whisk it. (My first effort to do this burned the flour blend because I was using too much heat so stay with medium). Whisk until smooth which will only take a couple of minutes.

Add tomato sauce, water and the remaining spices and turn the heat down to medium low—a simmer. You want a consistency that is thicker than water but not “gloppy”. How much spice to add? Enough! We like cumin so I go a bit “heavy” on it. But remember, add spices—then taste it! You can always add more and the longer the sauce simmers, the more the spices will blend in.


If needed, add another quarter cup of water. Bear in mind that when you use the sauce on the enchiladas that it will thicken up a bit more in the oven. This made just enough to make the enchiladas. If you want to have some to pour over the finished enchiladas you may wish to double the recipe. Taste the sauce as it simmers and adjust the spices to your taste (in other words if you want it spicier add some more chipotle or cayenne). I added a couple of good squirts of habanero sauce because we like things spicier than most people.

Now you’re ready to get making the enchiladas.

Cheap Bastid’s Easy EnchiladasEnchilada sauce
2 cups (8 oz. jack or mozzarella cheese) shredded
1 lb shredded meat (chicken, beef or pork)
12 corn tortillas
9x13 inch glass baking dish
Green onions (for garnish)
Chopped tomato (for garnish)
Sour Cream

Some recipes call for a quick frying or baking of the tortillas and some don’t. Tyler Florence from Food Network said to just microwave them for about 30 seconds. I did some microwaved and some with no heating and I think just a bit of microwaving works best. It makes the tortilla just a bit more pliable as you load it and fold it into the dish. So put a short stack of 4 on a microwave dish and zap them for about 30 seconds on high. Load those, then do 4 more.

Whatever meat you use—chicken, pork shoulder or beef (chuck/bottom round/ground) is best shredded. Use 2 forks or your hands and put it in a bowl. Shred the cheese and put it in a bowl. Pour enough sauce in the baking dish to just cover the bottom when you spread it out with the back of a spoon. Put the rest of the sauce in a wide opening bowl.

Use your hands. Get messy—you’ll want to wear an apron! Dip the tortilla into the sauce to coat it (actually what worked best for me was to hold the tortilla over the bowl and dip sauce out with my fingers and then “fingerpaint” the tortilla—it coats the tortilla and “saves” sauce.

Hold the coated tortilla in your hand, put a couple tablespoon’s worth of meat in the middle then about a tablespoon of cheese (again I used my fingers). Roll the edges of the tortilla over the meat and cheese then lay it in the baking dish, folded side down. Do this for each tortilla. Then pour sauce over the top and sprinkle the rest of the cheese over that and your ready to bake. Cover with foil.

Put the baking dish in an 375 degree oven for about 15 minutes and you’re ready to go. Plate with 2 enchiladas topped with extra sauce, sour cream and garnished with green onion and tomato.

(I cook. I'm not a food stylist!)

Cheap Bastid’s budget:

So did this meet the “cheap” requirement. Pretty much. I figured that it cost $7.50 for the ingredients using boneless, skinless chicken breast, block cheese shredded, tomato sauce, tortillas, and spices. That fed 3 people generous dinner portions and was enough for lunch for 2 the next day. Three dinners and 2 lunches in a Mexican restaurant would set you back about $45.

The other thing to remember is that if you do this with roast pork or roast beef, that the meat can do “double duty.” Plan your meat purchase so that you can have a roast beef or pork dinner with enough left-over for enchiladas. You can cook the roast beef or pork, shred it and then freeze it for when you want to make enchiladas or BBQ sandwiches, etc. That stretches your food budget farther, reduces waste and increases taste!

If you use ground beef, remember I trick myself by using 12 oz. as a pound. It works! I also buy “London Broil” (bottom round) or boneless chuck when it’s on special (usually about $1.60-$1.75/lb.) and the grocery store grinds it for free. Ground London Broil is about 90-95% lean and ground chuck is 80-85% lean).

Plus, I discovered a couple of other things. Two 8 oz. cans of Hunts tomato sauce costs $1 at my grocery store. One 16 oz can of Hunts tomato sauce costs $1.39. An 8 oz. container of sour cream was $1.35 while a 16 oz. was $1.69. So we did baked potatoes last night with sour cream.

I hope you enjoy this recipe. It’s a work in progress and I’ll be tinkering with it the next time I cook it. That’s the fun of cooking! Getting creative in making stuff that tastes good and saves you money. That’s the “Cheap Bastid” way.

Spend Less/Get More

I thought it was time for the old “Cheap Bastid” to come through with some thoughts on saving money that might be useful seeing as how the economy is in the toilet and money is tighter. And, if you’ve got a family, you can end up with more family time than you had before.

It’s not hard to reduce grocery bills and at the same time incorporate flavor and creativity into meals. You can go to a bit of an extreme like I used to when the kids were growing up. Then, my goal was a family meal every conceivably possible night which was inexpensive, good tasting, balanced and could be prepared in a half hour or less.

Grocery shopping was done on Saturday morning. The first step in the process was to come up with a day by day menu for the coming week’s suppers. A lot of the meals weren’t elaborate—we’d have “brinner” (breakfast for dinner) usually once every two weeks if not more often. I mean, how pricey and how hard to cook are scrambled eggs or pancakes? Anyway, I’d do menus oftentimes letting each of the 2 kids pick one dinner they’d like. The next step was inventory. What ingredients for those meals did I have on hand and what did I need to get in order to do it?

From there the inventory also considered staples, beverages, snacks and dessert. Now I didn’t go nuts on any of those—one big bag of chips was expected to last the week; when they were gone that was it. Then I would take a look at coupons and specials—both for stocking up and for the week’s supplies sometimes substituting in order to get a better price. Last, I would compile the final list. I always used the same grocery store so my list was written in the order in which the item would appear in the store (that saves both time and money by the way).

I will guarantee you that if you take an approach like this that you’ll save 10-15%--minimum—without shortchanging yourself. You’ll do fewer impulse buys and will use what you buy.

But, there’s other things you can do too. For example, buy store brand cereal rather than name brand (it’s a cardboard box, some grain and sugar for crying out loud—you just don’t need to pay for the national merchandising). And by the way, if the kids resist, that’s too bad. Let them buy it themselves or go without. Either way it’s no sweat off your nose and no harm will come to the kids.

Buy your meat when it’s on special—then stock up. I buy the big packs of boneless skinless chicken breasts for under $2 a pound when it’s on special. Then when I get home I break it down and put 1 or 2 breasts in plastic bags (I also sanitize and re-use plastic bags too!). I do the same thing with ground beef. I buy “London Broil” on special at less than $2 a pound too and keep a couple on hand. One of these days I’ll write a piece on using that cut of meat several different ways to make inexpensive, taste like a million bucks multiple meals.

If you’re trying to use the excuse that you’re too busy—well, you’re too busy not to. It just makes sense. There’s an ad on the back of this week’s Newsweek for Ragu about how you can buy Ragu and make spaghetti for $2 a serving. That’s a lot less than it’ll cost you at Buca de Beppo or Olive Garden but I can still make it for less than $1 a serving, including garlic toast and salad. In the first place I don’t buy jarred sauce—for 3 reasons. One, the glass jar itself adds to the price. Two, there’s way too much sugar in any of the jarred sauces used to cut the acid of the tomatoes. And three, the jarred sauce costs typically at least $3. I buy the big can of sauce for less than a buck with less sugar. I have a full spice cabinet and I’m going to make it taste even better when I heat it and if it’s too acidic, I can add a bit of honey or sugar. See, I just saved you money again.

And why order out pizza for anywhere from $15 to $20. The ingredients in a pizza crust cost less than $1 (and most of that is for the packet of yeast) and it takes less than 10 minutes to make a crust—do a Google search for making pizza crust). Sauce is easy to make and you can easily brown up some hamburger or sausage or have some pepperoni on hand. For about $4 you can make your own 12” pizza. It’ll take a couple of times to get the hang of making the crust and you have about an extra 2 minutes of clean-up while the pizza is baking but so what. And any or all of this can be done with the kids helping prep and clean. Then you sit down together for 15 or 20 minutes, eat, talk and be a family.

So we’re saving money while at the same time building family. And like the MasterCard commercial says—that’s priceless.