Chef Lisa

So many recipes made around the Christmas holidays call for crystallized ginger, and it’s so gosh darn expensive to buy. I decided to make some from scratch – I was able to make 2.5 cups of crystallized ginger for half the cost of a 2 oz bottle bought at the store!

I started with Bruce Moffitt’s recipe, but made some minor changes. They’re listed below:

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I love all things lemon. Lemon cake, lemon candy, lemon tea, the works. Lemon curd is a special favorite of mine, but it’s made with so much sugar, and I thought I’d have to give it up forever. Not so!

I found a low carb, sugar free lemon curd recipe, played around with it, and this is what I ended up with. It’s full of lemony deliciousness, though not as sweet as most people might be used to. If you prefer it sweeter, just add more sweetener.

And lemon curd’s not just for desserts anymore! Check out my Lemon Chicken recipe that uses it!

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Now, I won’t pretend to say I’m doing the once a month cooking thing. Not ready to do that yet. Still, that doesn’t mean I didn’t think to take advantage of the great meat deals I got this week. I was able to get 3.5 pounds of Certified Angus ground round, 1.5 lbs of Certified Angus ground chuck, and a center cut whole half loin today. We’ll be getting 8 meals out of that, making an average cost of $1.87 per meal.

It’s all been prepped. The ground beef separated into 1 lb packages and put into the freezer (one’s in the fridge to make beef “sausage” tonight for supper). The pork loin was divided into 3 (each section about 2 lbs); two were sliced up into strips for use with Spicy Pork Stir Fry, and one was cubed up for use in Onion-Apple Pork Stew (or something similar).

Tomorrow I’m going to be baking and getting the veggies all prepared. The Spicy Pork Stir Fry takes a lot of peppers and onions, mainly because I love it with lots of peppers and onions.

I also packed of 12 cups of home made chicken broth into 2 cup portions. Tonight I’m going to be roasting two chickens (got them for $0.87/lb), then shredding the meat and setting the carcasses aside to make soup – which I’m going to freeze. We use a lot of chicken broth over the winter, in chowders, to cook rice in, and other yummy stuff. Those two carcasses should get me about 16 to 20 cups of broth. That should last me until whole chickens are on sale again.

What do you do to help save money and make meal prep easier for you and your family?

I decided today (well, last night actually) to make some sourdough completely by hand. The dough is resting now after kneading, waiting to be split into two loaves for the second rise and then bake. I thought I’d share with you a couple of things I’ve learned about making my whole wheat sourdough bread:

1. I need to get a much larger bowl to mix everything in. I had flour flying all over the place. A bowl that holds about 3 gallons might do the trick.
2. The dough is very sticky. While spraying the mixing bowl and dough hook when using the machine might be enough, oil must be used on your hands, otherwise you’ll end up with a half inch of dough caking them.
3. Kneading by hand is not something I should do for that amount of dough ever again. My hands and wrists are killing me.
4. Every time I make bread, I love doing it more and more.

I’m glad to see I’m getting people here, looking at my recipe for sourdough bread. I just want to point out that the recipe isn’t for 100% whole wheat bread. I use a combination of unbleached white whole wheat and unbleached all-purpose flour for my starter, mainly because I use it for more than just bread. The recipe itself also uses a combination of whole wheat and bread flour.

But don’t think I’m going to give away my bread machine. I love to use it to make pizza and pasta doughs.

I’m doing some baking today. I just took a batch of Sourdough Chocolate Cranberry Cake out of the oven, and I’ve learned three things about sourdough today. First, I prefer thick sourdough starter to runny starter, especially when baking this cake. Second, this cake really does better as bars cut out of a 9″x13″ pan than as cupcakes. And third, there are 24 g of carbohydrates in a serving of this cake. (I’ve added the nutrition info to the recipe.)

I love this cake, so I’m going to have to see what I can do to bring that carb count down a bit.