I thought that for this evening I would combine the Sunday Food Interlude with with my home work for my photography class. This week, we needed to pick a subject and take 6 different photos of it in different situations and different perspectives, etc. My subject was straight from California and absolutely delicious: strawberries! Let’s take a look.

extreme strawberry closeup!

in line

ghostberries

the strawberry clock

strawberry mountain

Of course, what happens to the strawberries after all of these pictures?

I eat them up!

Aha! I bet you didn’t think I’d do another Sunday Food Interlude, did you? I certainly didn’t. This weeks lunch is already packed away, but lucky for you guys, I haven’t made the weekly breakfast yet. And that, during the non-winter months, is yummy crunchy granola. The recipes was lifted from The Kitchn, and awesome food blog, which in turn lifted it from Emily Franklin’s Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 Mom, 4 Kids, and 102 Recipes. I’ve made three modifications: 1. I bring the oven up to 345 – it makes the granola bars just a little bit crunchier. 2. I keep changing up the ingredients. One week it’ll feature crystallized ginger and macadamia nuts, and the next week it’s all about pumpkin seeds and tamari almonds (the original is cranberries and pecans). 3. I’ll think of it, really I will.

So. I use the fancy expensive ingredients, but when it comes down to it, bar for bar, these are tastier and better for you than the granola bars in the store. Oh, did I mention that even with the fancy ingredients they’re $0.20 each? That’s only slightly cheaper than the $0.22 per bar for Quaker, but these are healthier and you can make up your own flavors!

Ingredients:
3 1/2 tbsp. peanut butter, preferably chunky (i use fresh ground from Whole Foods)
3 tbsp. honey
3 1/2 tbsp. brown rice syrup*
big splash of vanilla (or other extract)
1 tbsp. brown sugar
1 1/2 cups puffed wheat/rice/kamut
1/2 cup bran buds/Grape-Nuts cereal
1 1/2 cups rolled oats (not the quick-cook kind)
2 tbl flax seed
1 cup extras (nuts, dried fruit, etc)
spice or seasoning (cinnamon, ginger, cream of tartar, etc)

makes 18 bars (regular sized bars too!)

*note try not to substitute the brown rice syrup. It really keeps things crunchy and sticking together.

Preheat oven to 330°.
Line 8- or 9-inch square (or rectangular) pan with a long sheet of parchment paper.

before warming
Warm peanut butter honey, brown rice syrup, vanilla, and brown sugar until sugar has melted and soy butter has thinned.

after warming and stirring

Mix dry ingredients in big bowl and dust with cinnamon. Pour liquid on top, mixing as you go. When everything is equally coated, spread the mixture into the pan.

Press mixture down with another, shorter sheet of parchment paper. Bake for about 25-30 minutes.

When you remove the pan from the oven, again use parchment to press bars flat.

Allow to cool completely before touching again. When totally cooled and hard, lift the ends of the parchment and put onto a cutting board and cut into longish bars or squares.

ready to eat!

Have a good week everyone!

Since I often have nothing in particular to post about, I’ve decided to try out a new thing. On Sunday’s I’ll post something food related. Blame it on FSO Wannabe and his musical interludes for giving me the idea. Some Sundays it may be a recipe, some Sundays it may be a rant on the state of America’s general lack of nutrition, and some Sundays, like today, it’ll be me bragging about how awesome dinner was last night.

Every year I have a Spring dinner. I generally invite people who 1) I don’t see very often, and 2) really love food. They’re usually either great cooks (or eaters!), and are always people who appreciate how much time and effort can go into a really good meal. There were supposed to be five courses, but we were so full after the meat course (due to two diners dropping out at the last minute), that we skipped the cheese and moved right along to dessert. Cheese can keep forever, but scallops have to be eaten right away. Anyway, on to the menu (all of the pictures are also in the gallery)!

Amuse Bouche

Caramelized Onion Creme Brulee

There is a new spice shop in Old Town Alexandria called The Spice and Tea Exchange, and they have all sorts of interesting spices, salts and sugars. This creme brulee has caramelized onions in the custard and uses their sweet onion sugar to make the top crust. I really just wanted an excuse to use 1)something from the shop, and 2)my kitchen torch.

Soup

Asparagus Soup with Bacon and Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Nothing says spring like asparagus!

Seafood & Salad

Seared Scallops with Salad of Haricort Vert and Sweet Peppers

I love love love scallops. They really just need to be seared to be delicious, so I try to not overdo anything with them. For the salad dressing, I used almond oil, shallots, white verjus and a little mustard. The haricort vert (skinny green beans!) were quickly blanched and the peppers (yellow and red) were simply minced.

Palate Cleanser

Lemon Lavender Sorbet

I do love to make my own ice creams and sorbets, but frankly, no one around here does better than the folks over at The Dairy Godmother, and this lemon lavender sorbet is a perfect palate cleanser.

Meat

Three Preparations of Lamb

So this is the main MAIN course. On the left is a lamb shank that was braised in red wine and accompanied by white beans (recipe via epicurious). On the right is shishbarak, awesome spiced ground meat dumplings in a minty yogurt sauce/soup. The middle was my little masterpiece. Rack of lamb with garlic roasted brussels sprouts and a mini yorkshire pudding (made with fat from the lamb rack). The lamb was pretty much perfectly cooked, thanks to the wonderful people of SeriousEats.com. I followed blogger Kenji’s method of a fool proof rack of lamb by using a cooler as a Sous-Vide, then searing the slow cooked rack. It was amazing. The chocolate sugar I got at the spice shop probably helped, and of course, the meal would not have been the same without the fantastic meat provided by Let’s Meat on the Avenue, an honest-to-goodness local butcher shop in Alexandria. They’re awesome and if you’re in the DC area, I can’t recommend them enough.

After all of that, we had slices of pineapple upside down cake, the same recipe I used for the cakes served at my wedding.

I hope you all enjoyed the first Sunday Food Interlude – now, pumped full of anti-histamines, I’m going to bed. Good night everyone!

Oh my goodness! Two posts in just one week – I’m setting myself up for disappointment and disaster here. Anyway, I got a new camera recently and will be starting photography class soon. Since I have this nice new toy now, I felt compelled to meet some friends before dawn this morning at the Tidal Basin to take advantage of the ‘golden hours’ and get some good shots of the cherry blossoms, which are now cresting their peak. It was pretty crowded! It was early, and thankfully not a cruel April Fools joke. Now I’m really tired, but I’m putting the pictures up just tonight just because I told my dad that I would.

Click on the picture to go to the gallery!

I read a lot of blogs, almost all of these bloggers are MUCH better about posting updates than I am. It’s been almost a month since the last time I wrote here, so anyone who’s still out there deserves a bit of an update. =)

1. Chad got a promotion! Huzzahs!
2. I’m pretty much languishing at around 60 out of 100 on the Consular Register, so
3. I’ve been taking conversational Hebrew in downtown DC, and talking to the wonderful Leah Krauss in Haifa, Israel on Saturday afternoon. She says I’ve been improving a lot since we started doing this about 5 weeks ago. I’m hoping to take a phone test in Hebrew in April to boost my score. That would put me in the high 20′s or low 30′s on the register and a much better position for getting an offer to an A-100.
4. Chad finally went to get his medical clearance. The med clinic didn’t like his iron levels, so he had to see a gastroenterologist, who made him get an endoscopy. Hopefully they’ll be happy with that and he can get his clearance soon. The whole process has just reinforced how much he dislikes going to the doctor. This was his first trip in about 10 years.
5. I start a photography class in two weeks, and I’m pretty excited about that.
6. Chad got into his school program’s honor society (no surprise there).
7. My hair is currently shorter than it’s been since I was 12. Also, I have BANGS (first time since I was 9!).
8. We filled out our census forms. I only checked 3 ethnicity boxes. Probably could have checked a fourth, but no one’s 100% certain about having Chinese ancestry on my Mom’s side.

And that’s all of the news that’s fit to print publish submit (?). Hopefully I’ll have more exciting stuff soon. Good Night World!

I have to say that March 1 is one of my favorite days of the year. Not only will Spring be here soon (ya hear that ya meddlin’ snow!), but it mainly means that February is over.

We’ve made it through another $56 in February with…drumroll…$2.90 to spare! Well, at least according to my calculations, which, this year, did not count oil, because I was lazy. Or spices, because I never count spices during this thing (one little jar lasts all year!). So, I suppose if we counted the oil or the spices, we were probably actually over budget by a few dollars. I, however, don’t care. We made it, and once again, were viscerally reminded of the difference between want and need.

I certainly want that chocolate bar during some stressful times. But I absolutely do not need it. I went through my most stressful week at Halfaker during the first half of February, and there was no comfort food, no stress relieving candy, no cookie breaks. I still got the job done, and well, without the instantly gratifying reward of whatever I happened to be craving at the time (chocolate!)

A couple of shout outs to the food that got us by this month: 2 roasted chickens at $0.89/lb turned into somewhere around 30 meals (soups, stews, and chicken pies). No knead bread is always a winner a $0.07 per wonderful ‘artisan’ loaf. The wonderful snickerdoodle is a lifesaver at $0.04 per 2 inch cookie. Finally, the most important thing we ate all month, and my lifesaver when it came to making sure dinner was on the table on those weekday nights when no one had any time to cook: the empanada. Wonderfully flaky and stuffed with nutritious and delicious chicken, black bean, and spicy tomato chickpea fillings, the empanada kept us sane, and kept my evenings free of the stress of planning a cheap meals. All that and just $0.33 cents each. Fantastic.

Health-wise we’re all good. Chad lost 7 lbs and I lost 6. Hopefully we’ll get some of that back in muscle since Chad can start running again, and daylight savings quickly approaches. Sunlit evenings mean I can start biking to work again in a few weeks. I’m very excited, poor Adelaide hangs forlornly in the garage, waiting for me to take her out again. Soon!

Maybe next year, depending on what we’re doing, I’ll improve my blogging frequency during February and write more about it. We’ll see, that’s a whole ‘bother 11 months away, and I’ve got other things to do between then and now.

We’re heading downhill on our $56 in February, and I just wanted to check in and give a report. As of right now, we’ve eaten $27 worth of food (exactly!) versus a budget of $30, to be under budget by $3. A typical weekday meal starts with oatmeal, followed by a chicken stew of some sort for lunch. Dinner is an empanada and we finish off the day with a cookie (snickerdoodle!).

I think that this third year is definitely the easiest, for three reasons. One is all of the lessons learned from previous years. I’m much better prepared and equipped to plan and make nutritionally dense foods that will keep us going the entire day. The second is that it had been a while since Chad and I last ate until we were too full, and this has helped us from feeling as hungry as we did that first year – our stomachs are just smaller than they have been in the past. The third and most delicious reason is empanadas. At the end of January I spent way too many hours making 41 empanadas with 3 different fillings (black bean, spicy chickpea, and chicken). However, that investment of time made this month’s dinners a breeze. All we have to do is bake them in the toaster oven for 30 minutes and we end up with a tasty, nutritious, satisfying meal. One of these days I’ll remember to take a picture.

There isn’t much of a point to this post besides checking in with the world and musing a bit about just how much time goes into making an activity like this work. And since this is my blog, I think I’ll just keep going.

My apartment smells very strongly of chicken. This afternoon I roasted the second of the two roasted chicken I bought at Costco last month, and now the bones are simmering in the stock pot with the leftover aromatics from the ‘ends’ freezer bag. That freezer bag is/was full of onion ends, carrot peels, mushroom stems and the leftovers of herbs and things. In a couple of hours, I’ll have the stock necessary to make the kale, potato and chicken soup we’ll be eating for lunch next week. The chicken for the stew comes from half of the roasted chicken, the other half got mixed with some parsley for this weeks roast chicken, pita and hummus sandwiches lunch. Total cost for 10 days of weekday lunches for the two of us: $10.88.

Total time is another matter. Yesterday I made the pita and hummus, I suppose the total time for that was about an hour active cooking time. The roast chicken was probably 45 minutes active time – mainly because it takes a while to completely carve and cube a roast chicken. I’m guessing that the soup will take about 30 more minutes active time, mainly for chopping onions and kale, then also for watching it to make sure it doesn’t over cook. Finally, I’ll probably make at least two loaves of bread this week to go with the soup, which will be about another 15 minutes active time. Total active time for 10 meals: 2.5 hours active time.

AH, but it’s the INACTIVE time that adds up. Chickpeas for the hummus had to soak overnight. I use the No Knead Bread method recently popularized by Mark Bittman, which take a full day and a half to rise and rest before baking. Chicken roasts, then rests, for a total of 2 hours and stock simmers for 3 to 4 hours. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not watching that pot boil, I’m writing this blog post from the comfort of my couch. It’s the inactive time is what makes the month possible (and delicious).

For example, a 1 pound bag of chickpeas is $1.69, whereas a 16 ounce can is say…$0.99 (give or take). A pound of dry chickpeas, once cooked, can fill at least four of those cans, at a savings of $2.27. It’s not a whole lot of money any other month, but that’s over a days worth of food for Chad and myself. Pennies add up quickly when you’re counting every one of them. Also, personally, I think that food that that takes a long time to cook often ends up tasting better – but that could just be me.

So! To finish up this meandering post, $11+2.5 hours active cooking+a couple of days inactive cooking=10 days of delicious lunches for me and Chad.

Until this year, I don’t think I had ever heard the term Thundersnow (which I still haven’t witnessed). I’m also pretty sure that ‘snowpacolype’ just recently joined the local lexicon. I know that the amount of snow we’re getting right now happens in a lot of part of the world I’d really rather not live in, and I think it’s pretty, and means there will be plenty of water later one. We’re lucky for that. But the Commonwealth of Virginia (at least some parts of it – I don’t know if us Northerners count), is still part of “The South.” “The South” should not get 30 inches of snow (or whatever it will be when the cold pretty white stuff stops falling from the sky).

And, of course, since it’s a rare and unnatural occurrence, we took some SNOW pictures.

Update! Chad and I walked over to the Masonic memorial on Sunday to watch the people sled, ski and snowboard. There are pictures of that in the snow album too!

February starts on Monday, and so does another $56 in February. As of right now, we’re going to try for year three.

So what am I talking about? For those of you who come here for Foreign Service related information, the next month might be a bit of a departure from the norm. As the URL, pictures, and other blog posts suggest, this website is about the VonHinkens, that means me, my husband Chad, and whatever might be going on in our lives that we like to write about. In February, that means we talk about extremely frugal eating. This will be the third year Chad and I embark on an experience/experiment that involves us spending $56 on food for the month of February. If you want, you can read about $56 in February 2009.

Whenever we bring up this tradition (does three times make it a tradition?), people say at least one of the following three things: ‘that’s not possible,’ ‘how?,’ and ‘why?’ Let me give you the short responses:

“That’s not possible!” To this I say HA! Back in 2007, when we did this the first time, I wanted to do it primarily to find out if I could. I can, and I can even come in under budget. So yeah, there is a little bit of pride, and a little testing to see if I can still pull it off.

“How?” It takes a lot of planning. A LOT. Coming in on (or under) budget is an extreme logistical project for me. Chad is very supportive, but he’s not the one cooking everything from scratch. And I mean it when I say from scratch. Beans come from dry, I make my own stock (if I’m going to use it), sometimes I’ll make yogurt, cottage cheese, and breads (including pita – it really is very easy). This takes a lot of time and frankly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do it this year. This year I’m working for a company that keeps me pretty busy, and there’s the faint possibility of travel for work during the month, but we’re going to try anyway. We’ll see what happens.

“Why?” This is most complicated and least tangible answer. There are a lot of reasons that might not make sense to anyone outside of our little family of two. At first it was to see if we could. Then the money saving aspect, especially when we were trying to pay off our credit cards, was really attractive. However, our reasons have grown more philosophical as we continue – it has become an exercise in mindfulness.

During February, we are much more aware of what we eat, what goes into our food, and what we put in our bodies than we are in any other month. We are also more cognizant of how much we consume, and this is not limited to food. While Chad and I are already pretty light eaters, February reminds us of what it’s like to be hungry. The annual reminder makes us hate waste of all kinds, and since we don’t want to hoard anything, we don’t acquire more than we need.

I won’t be blogging quite so often about this year’s $56 in February, I’m not going to have the time. Also, it’ll probably be a big repeat of last year, and that can get boring. But I’ll post now and then about how we’re doing. Here’s a quick spoiler: we’ll be eating a LOT of empanda-pasty-samosa-pie type of food. Cheap and delicious!