Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

I love company-sponsored Happy Hours. I drank less than I would have normally, but it was darned hot yesterday.

I came back to my boyfriend’s house to change my shirt. I got salad dressing splatters all over the front of it trying to scarf down a yummy $7 salad from Chicken Out. (Milan Cutlet salad with the tasty tasty balsamic dressing) Not really the way I wanted to meet the rest of the team working the global contract, know what I mean?

Then I walked to the bar the lads had picked out since it was in the neighborhood and proceeded to order a Shandy. I have no idea why bartenders do not know what a Shandy is, but it’s pilsner and lemonade, and the Brickskeller in DC has it printed on the menu. (Therefore nearly everyone in DC should know about it because nearly everyone has been to The Brick at least once. But I digress.) I love them on really hot days. It gives you a good buzz and refreshment without making you stupid too quickly. (Always important at these corporate networking events.)

I paid the for the first one while I waited because I don’t carry my corporate credit card around and I wasn’t expecting to be the senior consultant attending. I had a second Shandy and called it a night, but it was easily 20ozs of beer in the two drinks I had. More than plenty to lubricate a good conversation with my fellow employees.

If you like beer cocktails at all, I HIGHLY recommend a Shandy. I suppose you could do it with a hefeweizen as well. I’m the kind of person who squeezes half a lemon in mine and not just a single wedge so I flip for lemonade.

All hail the summer drink you can drink all night, avoid not look like a teetotalling prude no one wants to know, and still not get *too* drunk. (Opting for a Shandy may reduce Foot-in-Mouth Embarassment, but I don’t guarantee that it will stop it 100% of the time.)

ps- I then did Indian take-out dinner for me and the boyfriend and walked home. It was just over $25. I gave the waiter $30 and instead of $4+change, he just gave me $5! YAY! And because I had that huge salad at lunch, I only ordered lamb samosas for $6 instead of a full $12 entree. Portion control AND money well-spent. Total food budget was $37, adding in $4 for the Shandy and $1 tip, and a merry little walk!

Frankly, it’s a lot easier than you think it is and it kind of makes me wonder why I pay $5 at the farmer’s market for a 1lb loaf of bread. Since I haven’t bought a loaf from Grace’s Bakery at the farmer’s market in almost a year, it was time to give it a try. (Plus the yeast sock puppets on Alton Brown’s Good Eats show make me laugh.)

I’ve made one batch of About.com’s Master Bread Dough recipe. It’s nothing to be afraid of.

The top 3 things that scare me about baking bread:
1. Killing the yeast so the bread doesn’t rise.
2. Overkneading.
3. Impatience.

I’ve had some bad experience in Home EC as a kid so I always thought yeast bread was hard to make. But one of my close friends made yeast bread in the dorm kitchen all the time for awesome late-night bread and honey snacks. All of these fears can be overcome fairly easily.

1. Killing the yeast so the bread doesn’t rise: The recipe I used says heat the milk, water and butter till there are bubbles around the edges, which is how people did it before they had home thermometers. But don’t be stupid like me, just BUY AND USE a thermometer and don’t add the yeast if it’s more than 130 degrees F. Trust the recipe. I heated the mixture till there were little bubbles on the edges and it worked just fine.

2. Overkneading: If the recipe says knead it 20 times, or 10 times or 5 times, do just that. If it says knead for 8-10 minutes, do it just for 8. If you want to knead bread for therapy, make a separate batch or divide your recipe in half since many recipes are for 4+ loaves. (NO KIDDING! I read like 10 recipes before I found one for just two loaves, i.e. the recipe above.)

3. Impatience: Ah Grasshopper. This is what timers and internet surfing is for. Give it at least an hour to rise on the second rising, but the dough is forgiving here. Often recipes say to let the dough rise till it’s doubled. But I’ve found it’s actually up to me. I can put the bread on the counter and run a few errands. I can put it on the fridge and get slightly shorter rising time. Or I can put it on the front porch in Sunday afternoon heat and get an even shorter rising time (like 30-45 minutes).

Some other notes:
1. I used Silk Vanilla Soy Milk because we ran out of regular cow’s milk. This is premium soy milk that we usually don’t have at the house. We usually buy Rice or Soy Dream. But the enriched soy milk and extra vanilla flavor was alright. There was no gross vanilla flavor on the bread, just a hint of sweetness that was good for sandwiches and for French toast. (yum!)

2. Time is your most expensive ingredient. I made the recipe knowing I would only make 1 loaf and freeze the other half. That was fine for me. I had a bad headache last week and came home early in the afternoon. It was enough time to make a loaf of bread for dinner. I had no idea when I’d bake the second loaf. I thawed it out in the fridge on Saturday night into Sunday morning. I thought I’d wake up early and have fresh bread for Sunday brunch. But I didn’t wake till after noon and we left the house to hit the farmer’s market. Instead I shaped the dough and put it ON the fridge before we left. When we returned, the dough was still cold and hadn’t risen. I put it outside with a tea towel on top. In the heat of the day, it rose 75% in 30 minutes. Because I was pressed for time to complete another errand before dark, I baked it without the full doubling, but the texture of the bread was equal to that of the first loaf.

How cheap was it? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. But if Sistah Ant’s statistic of $3.30 a loaf is any indicator, then it was damned cheaper to make my own. Everyone keeps flour, sugar, and salt around. I’m sure it’s not hard to have some milk and eggs either unless you’re vegan. (eew.). If you make a grocery list, getting some yeast at the supermarket can’t be too hard. Remember, a lot of recipes are also for multiple loaves, not just one. So even if I spent the equivalent of $3.30 on ingredients for this recipe, I got two loaves at $1.65 each which were tasty and delicious. (As of this week, Hodgson’s Mill yeast was 52 cents a packet or 3 for a dollar at their website. But I have a preference for Fleischmann’s. I feel like the packets have a longer shelf life.)

The other thing is that I’m much more inclined to eat the whole loaf if I make the bread myself. Often in the summer heat, cheap bread goes moldy on me before I can eat it all. I can assure you that every crumb of my two loaves was eaten and never had a chance to grow mold.

My next experiment in bread baking will be with whole wheat.

Now, the part you’ve been waiting for! THE FOOD!

The food was pretty good all weekend. Because three meals of our trip were going to be provided as part of wedding festivities, boyfriend and I agreed to pick up some beer, sodas, and snacks and have one really nice meal. We picked up the equivalent of a case of beer, a case of soda, an orange, chips, hummus, soy milk and cereal for the house. Some of the beer we ended up giving away rather than take back with us. We did bring back the orange and leftover cereal to DC. Overall, the price on food I thought was expensive because everything has to be trucked in. I was hoping stuff would be cheaper but I think it’s not because nearly everything there is driven by tourism. Short of the poultry industry and some farming, we weren’t sure what other industries were down on the mainland there.

Part of the fun of going on vacation is finding out what the locals eat, but I made a mistake. Some of the kids at the house recommended Dirty Dick’s, a local chain for seafood and while my dinner was alright, boyfriend didn’t like his softshell crabs and fries. I had snocrab with corn and boiled red potatoes which I thought was yummy, even though it took some effort to eat it. We also had some oysters on the half-shell, but oddly they weren’t fully shucked. They were still attached to the shell and I’m used to the shucker cutting the meat off the shell. Boo! Later I was talking to a shop owner and told him we were at Dirty Dick’s and he just shook his head. I guess I shouldn’t have listened to the kids at the house, but that’s ok. We made up for it later. (Dinner with one cocktail, oysters on the half shell and two entrees was $50.)

We lucked out on Saturday when we found Dare Devil Pizza on S. Virginia Dare Trail, in Kill Devil Hills. (Get it?) We had their jalepeno poppers (yucky with too much cheese) and a totally awesome white pizza, The Greek. We asked for it without the usual tomatoes. It was really tasty with a lot of garlic and spinach with a white sauce that was really rich. We ordered the large but should have had the small since we only ate 4 slices. We boxed the rest and took it back to the house, but didn’t end up eating it when we realized we didn’t want the garlic smell in the car with us when we drove back to DC. Stinky but fantastic! The crust was pretty good on it too. Nice and crispy.

Detour first to the lunch we had on the way home: I think I’ve fallen in love with vinegary Carolina BBQ. I love good tomato-based sauce with spicy kick, but that’s what I’m used to having up north. Carolina BBQ may be my favorite, especially Scott’s because it has some bite. Wells is ok, but I prefer it a little hotter. Add a dash of Texas Pete or Tabasco, and it’s pure goodness. We stopped at Southland Trade since I saw a ton of billboards for it and we ran into it just as we were feeling puckish. It’s just a little souvenir shop and take out place with a bunch of tables. Not large, but pretty popular with the locals. The staff was nice and friendly. One BBQ pulled pork platter with fries, and one extra pulled pork sandwich and two sodas was $15, about the same as McDonald’s maybe, but WAY WAY BETTER. I sat there squirting Scott’s on to my plate and dipping my sandwich in it to get the bread sopping wet with vinegar tastiness. (And it’s available via mail order online! Click the link for tasty food!)

Lastly, you’ll note on yesterday’s post that I spent $150 at Owens’ Restaurant. That was a mistake on our part. You see, I saw a 2005 Cakebread Cellars Sauvignon Blanc on the wine list and I thought boyfriend might like it since he prefers whites. But it turns out he very much did not like it at all and though I could have been happy with a glass or two of something red for $15-20 total, I ended up very drunk and silly on 2/3rds of a $54 bottle of wine. If it wasn’t for that, dinner would have been less than $100 and well worth it.

I decided not to be tempted by their lobster tail appetizer stuffed with crab meat. I was too full from snacking in the car and craving some salad. I stuck to the Shrimp and Grits diesh with sausage and the creamiest grits I’ve ever tasted in my life. I swear, they were fantastic! The online menu doesn’t give you a sense of how much entrees are, but you can guess that it’s much more posh than other places on the Outer Banks. There’s filet mignon and lobster and stuff like that so expect to pay the same prices as you would in DC, $20-35 an entree.

Owens was by far the best place we ate. It was also the most expensive, but I think it was worth it. Boyfriend and I agreed that we’d eat one really nice meal while we were down there and it absolutely fulfilled our hopes and expecatations.

1. My old company’s 401k plan finally rebounded back to $24K this week. It’s bad that I haven’t rolled the funds over, but I like the international funds available to me there. I think I will wait a bit longer to do the rollover though since I’d like the balance to rebound back up to about $27K before rolling over. (I prefer to sell and move the cash. Then I can reallocate.)

2. I think I’m going to donate $100 each to Doctors Without Borders for Myanmar and China as a one-time donation. My company is doing a matching donation, and gratefully, no one in our China division has been directly effected by the earthquake.

3. The awesome Thai restaurant near my house will substitute tofu in my favorite curry. I swear, I opened the box and it looked just like chicken. The texture was different, but I needed the visual illusion last night. I *almost* ordered meat for dinner, but I’m still trying to eat meat only once a day.

4. I had lunch for $1.05 on Monday. That was for a small soda at McDonald’s. For some reason, boyfriend got some free chicken sandwich coupons in the mail. All I had to do was walk into a store with the coupon and redeem. Very easy. I have one coupon left for a breakfast sandwich. I’ve had them before. They’re really greasy so I’m not sure I will get one, but it’s nice to know I have a freebie if I’m hungry. Maybe I’ll give it to the next homeless guy I see.

First off, you have to remember, I don’t cook at home. I am staying with a friend while my apartment undergoes renovation. I feel funny about taking over his kitchen, so I don’t. I usually buy my lunch because otherwise, I’d never leave my desk, ever. It comes from working in a call center. You get measured on your availability to take calls so I almost never get up.

At any rate, not only do I need to pay for a lot of gas to get to my new job, but the insult to this injury is that there’s really no place to pick up lunch out there. I have to either walk, which would be ok if my allergies weren’t freaking out right now, or drive to someone place to get food.

Driving means hopping into the car and trolling the industrial park for its small delis for something tasty. Frankly, I’m starting to think I SHOULD pack my lunch, but I hate cold food and I still haven’t figured out the kitchen at the new gig. It took me 3 days to find the coffee and vending machines because no one showed them to me the first day and the second kitchenette I was using was so tiny there was nothing in it. Not even a plastic fork.

So I’ve surveyed the places to dine and I think the local supermarket, the furthest away from the office of the ready options, is the best place to eat for freshness and price. But it’s still not cheap. I’m going to start bringing my own diet sodas soon and I’ve already started keeping some snacks in my desk so I don’t freak out with hypoglycemia. I’ll have to plan things a lot better, but I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to get so busy every day that I’ll forget to eat let alone make a market run to stock up.

UGH. The motivation to be frugal is flying out the window. I miss the convenience of urban areas, hopping down the street and grabbing a pack of mints or a soda. POOH ON YOU, SUBURBS!

Lesson here? Adjust, Accommodate, Adjust. I hate a wrench in the works, but I must strive to remain ever flexible.

One ruined batch of tomato sauce = Lemons
Lemon, artichokes, pesto, pepper = Lemonade

There was spot of mold on the jar of the tomato sauce because we waited too long to finish it off. Too bad we didn’t notice it till after we started cooking. (ok, not me. Boyfriend.) With a pound of cooked pasta, I had to find an alternative topping but there was no parmesan cheese in the pantry. What’s a girl to do?

I scrounge the shelves and find a can of artichoke hearts and a lemon. I google “pasta lemon juice artichoke hearts” and find a recipe from Food Network. It looks pretty reasonable, but I can hear boyfriend futzing around in the kitchen. I don’t know where he got pesto from, but hey, that looks good!

I chop up the artichoke hearts up and juice the lemon. I saute them and put them on top of the pasta and pesto. A little too much lemon juice, but at least I had a vegetable for my dinner. I used the whole lemon instead of tossing out the rest of it or saving it and letting that also get moldy. I ground up some black pepper for some bite and tossed it on top. I took it off the heat when the hearts were warmed through but not browning. Not great, but ok. Good enough to eat.

A well-stocked pantry is key to rescuing dinner. I’m just lucky the shelves weren’t emptier else I would have had to order delivery or take out. Despite the rising price of grain products, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep a few jars and cans of this and that around.

One sentence: Inexpensive and extremely tasty vegetarian Chinese eats.

Admittedly, I didn’t eat vegetarian there. They were out of the veggie tempura I wanted so I went with Singapore Curry Noodles because good ones are hard to find on the east coast and I miss them from my lunch days in San Francisco.

I had the chicken satay appetizer and the noodles as the main course. The satay wasn’t the best. But my friend had the crispy tofu steak appetizer. They were nicely puffy and crispy. I loved them! My friend also had the General Tso’s Chicken, but with not-chicken ‘tofu’ chunks. But they were decidedly not tofu. Soy-based maybe, but not bean curd. They were fibrous and meaty, and mighty delicious. Very satisfying with some fresh steamed broccoli in a satisfying bright green color and deliciously crisp.

The noodles were good. The dish is made of very thin noodles, a little chicken, shrimp and egg, and lots of onion, but sadly it wasn’t quite as curry as I like them. That’s ok because it was only my Plan B order. The main thing is that this restaurant does vegetarian Chinese and the price for two appetizers and two entrees was about $23 excluding tip. Not too bad for a meal in Georgetown.

Though I am raving about the vegetarian food, they will make any of their dishes with meat or soy products. And if it’s not on the menu, just ask. We didn’t try asking about thousand layer tofu crisp, but I really miss that dish from Kowloon in San Francisco and I might actually ask for it next time.

ps- This place is a few doors down from The Rhino, THE PLACE in DC to watch the Red Sox. (My old G’town roomie was a BC grad and loved going to the Rhino to watch games.) You can’t miss it. They have a new BoSox banner hanging on M Street. Gotta love it!

As a rule, I eat meat daily and would never considering being a vegetarian. However, there are benefits to eating less meat for three reasons.

1. It’s better for your health. I started cutting back on red meat on the advice of a dermatologist. I had very bad acne in college and he told me to abstain from beef because of the synthetic hormones which might cause my acne to be worse. (Stress on ‘might’, but I had nothing to lose.) Plus there are added benefits to cutting out meats like lowering your fat intake and cholesterol counts.

2. It’s good for the wallet. Meat is expensive. Pound for pound, tofu is kind of expensive too if you get the organic stuff, but let’s face it, when you’re looking at entrees on a restaurant menu, the vegetarian options are always cheaper. As it is, at the Korean wholesale place, I get them for $1.50 a block (about 14 ozs).

3. It’s good for the environment. Most corn in the US is actually used as animal feed for the animals you like to eat most. I read somewhere that it takes like 16 lbs of grain to make 1 lb of beef. It also takes a lot of water and fertilizer to make 1 lb of grain, so any quantities of those inputs have to be multiplied by 16. You can reduce your carbon footprint quickly by cutting meat from your diet.

I’m not ever going to give up all meat unless my doctor says I have to. But I’ve been eating more meatless entrees, or halving the portion of meat I do eat. Consider trying a meatless meal once or twice a week. Track your grocery spending. You might find you’re saving money. (Just be mindful of your cheese intake. That kind of negates #1 and #3.)

We had a visitor this weekend so we took her to the Library of Congress’ re-opened exhibit areas and then to Jaleo for tapas dinner on Saturday night. Then we went back to Napa 1015 for the totally awesome brunch Sunday morning. (Where they recognized me and boyfriend from a few weeks ago. Gratefully there were a lot more people there for brunch and I also got a friend to go there for dinner last week for her birthday and she said it was amazing. But I digress.)

Jaleo is by far the best place in DC I’ve been for tapas. La Tasca doesn’t even compare. And fortunately, Jaleo is in several locations around DC.

The food ranges from the very traditional Patatas Bravas, roasted potatoes with aioli and tomato sauce, to funkier stuff like artichoke hearts with grapefruit slices and olives. OMG was dinner delicious I am salivating just recalling the dinner.

We got 9 dishes total, 2 desserts, a glass of sherry and a bottle of wine. Damage was about $135 + tip. Dishes ranged in price from about $6-10 each and the wine was a Rioja for $34. This was dinner for 3 and way too much food, but we wanted to impress our guest and give her a lot of options for her first taste of Spanish food.

I got the artichoke hearts with grapefruit and olives, wild mushroom rice (basically a risotto), and cannelones with foiegras and pork. Boyfriend got Chorizo in crispy potato pastry, chicken croquettes, brussel sprouts with grapes, apples and apricots, there was mashed potato in cabbage leaf with goat cheese (’Trinxat’), sauteed cauliflower and Patatas Bravas.

Dessert was the warm chocolate birthday cake with with bergamot flavoring and yummy vanilla ice cream and Basque cake with semolina cream, cinnamon-vanilla sauce & ice milk, and a very nice sherry for the guest. Dessert was amazing. I highly recommend the chocolate cake if you go soon. It’s a seasonal special.

In retrospect, 9 dishes was too much for the three of us. Jaleo has huge portions. 2-3 is usually enough for a person. But I’ve been places where 3-4 is more the norm. (Thirsty Bear in San Francisco comes to mind, but I also remember their fish cheeks and beef with rosemary dishes. Yes. That good.)

They also have a wine shop near their Crystal City location. CRAP. I wish I knew this before. boyfriend and I had a really amazing wine there before that just knocked our socks off. But now I can’t remember what it was, else I would buy a case of it tomorrow. A rioja. Of course. What else would you have with tapas?

Amelia is a new blogger and like many of us, she’s working on getting her financial house in order, as well as lose weight. Her blog is called Amelia’s Healthy Life. Because if you have enough money, you can buy a trainer’s time, or quit and focus on your health full-time. (I had a friend who did this and frankly, he’s really hot after losing 100lbs in 2 years.)

At any rate, I was kind sad to read she had a Mac N’ Cheese disaster at home. But hey, we’ve all been there and done that. I’ve botched many a cheese sauce. In fact, mine was grainy on Sunday night, but quite edible.

I’m a little disturbed though by the recipe used. It’s a lightened version of Alton Brown’s stove top recipe and I’m utterly confused why there’s so much butter and egg in it. If you’re putting a sauce on the noodles, don’t bother putting butter on them. It makes the sauce slide off. Even Alton Brown says not to do that.

Macaroni and cheese is a very easy pantry recipe. Shoot. I made it for dinner on Sunday because boyfriend and I were sitting around what the hell to eat and feeling lazy. Having watched an Alton Brown casserole program, I was kind of inspired to make homemade mac n’ cheese. There is only one trick to mac n’ cheese and one trick only.

MAKE A GOOD BECHAMEL SAUCE.

Bechamel sauce is a very basic French sauce. (Thank you very much Julia Child!) It’s also called a ‘white sauce’. It’s so freakin’ cheap to make, but also very easy to screw up. Got butter, flour, and milk? I bet you do.

Melt a tablespoon of butter in a saucepan on medium to high heat till it’s foamy. (Alton Brown says that’s when the water burns off leaving only fat and milk solids.) Then drop in a teaspoon or two of flour and cook till it’s lightly browned. You want to coat each flour molecule with some fat, or else you get floury flavor, so don’t use too much flour. Err on the side of less if doing this without measuring. Gradually whisk in a cup of milk and cook till thickened. This is the tricky part because you will end up with a lumpy sauce if you do not whisk your little heart out. The best way is to take the pan off the heat and add a little milk at a time so the flour absorbs it all before adding more. Take care that the pan is not too hot when you do it. That’s what usually screws mine up.

To make a cheese sauce, add a 1/2-1 cup of sharp cheese like cheddar, but gruyere or another fondue cheese works just as well. Try a smoked gouda. Fog City Diner in SF makes it with smoked gouda, ham and peas. YUM. (ok, I admit, not low calorie)

I just don’t get why someone would use a egg white for this to save calories. Eggs are picky and will curdle if the heat’s not right. If you want less fat, just use less butter. The sauce will be thinner since you have to adjust down the flour as well, but at least you haven’t added a finicky egg.

The mac n’ cheese on Sunday night was about half a box of rotini from the pantry. 1 tsp of butter. 1/2 tsp of flour. 1/2 cup of low fat milk. A sprinkle of cayenne pepper. 1 c of grated sharp cheddar cheese. (Save some for the top)

I stuck it all in a casserole dish, sprinkled on the last of the cheese, and crushed a few Triscuits since I didn’t have bread crumbs. Baked it in the oven at 350 for 10-15 minutes to re-warm the noodles and make the top a little crusty. It was enough for 3-4 servings. The leftovers were freshened up with an extra sprinkle of cheese before popping in the microwave.