Monthly Archive: July 2007

This is about food, but not about cooking, since I had it at a restaurant.

I tried fish tacos at the 99 Restaurant yesterday, expecting them to be edible but not much more, ordering to satisfy my curiosity, because I had to make a decision and it’s tough with a 17 month old menu assistant, and because they were at a reasonable price.

Wow! They were fantastic. Who knew?

It also turned out that the aforementioned toddler liked bites of the fish better than the fries

, cheese sticks and chicken fingers on the plate she was sharing with her sister.

Anyway, the combination of the guacamole, fresh salsa ingredients like tomato and onion, fresh cilantro, and sour cream went wonderfully with the fried fish, which itself was pretty tasty. Not something I’d probably ever try to make at home, but I’d order it again. And guacamole… perhaps we should try making that at home sometime? It’d be an interesting addition to burritos.

I’m officially bored. Any ideas?

We have a freezer full of boneless chicken breasts, a few drumsticks, a bunch of hamburger (which I freeze in the form of patties, thaw and use in other ways as needed, like in red sauce or tacos), and a bit of pork, both boneless loin steaks and a couple thin chops. There are some basic frozen veggies; corn, French green beans, peas, and chopped broccoli. There’s a mess of chopped sweet onion and green pepper, frozen for convenience, as well as a large sweet onion in the fridge. At the moment there is no frozen unground beef.

Elsewhere in the house are the normal staples; carrots, rice, dry beans of various types, barley, flour, less than a cup of Bisquick because I forgot to restock, herbs and spices and boullion cubes, etc. No potatoes, oddly enough.

Nothing fancy. I don’t want to have to go buy ingredients, especially stuff like scallions or fresh cilantro or whatever that I have never used.

No baking. We avoid that in this weather. Crockpot, stove top, microwave, even toaster oven are fine.

Any ideas?

I feel like we’re in a rut of Mexican variants like burritos and tacos, pasta with meaty red sauce, plain old chicken fried with random seasonings and served with rice and a veggie, chili, and so forth.

I’ve talked about making homemade refried beans from scratch, using dry pinto beans, and those are certainly amazing, if not like anything you ever get in a can. However, as a matter of convenience, it’s useful to keep on hand some canned refried beans.

We’ve tried different ones, but mainly buy Old El Paso. They’re the best overall, and if bought at Wal-Mart or by the 8-pack at BJ’s, cheap enough. They are mildly seasoned. Refried beans seem to range from essentially plain beans, cooked a lot, maybe with some lard, to something seasoned significantly with garlic, onion, maybe cumin or other seasonings. My homemade ones generally contain actual chopped pepper, onion and garlic, as well as oregano, cumin, red pepper, maybe this or that else, like celery flakes and cilantro. Even plain, though, the beans are tasty, and good with other, stronger stuff, say in a burrito.

The other brand we’ve eaten the most is Taco Bell. By contrast, they are plain or nearly plain beans. The texture is different; the canned brands all vary in thickness and degree to which you might want a bit of water in the bottom of the pan when heating them. At Hannafor

, they are 20¢ a can less than Old El Paso, which led to my buying them a couple times recently when even buying canned beans was a luxury. One thing I regret about the food blogging is that I tend to lack the money to experiment on anything that costs, well, an amount most people would consider no big deal, let alone truly expensive foods. Besides, the point is that I have needed to learn more, get creative, and be frugal as a “married guy cook,” so a lot of what you see here is my adventures, rather than being a true foodie. You certainly won’t find me getting on my private jet and flying to New York because that’s where my favorite steakhouse happens to be. Not sure I’d do that even if I had a private jet.

Last time I wanted to grab a can of beans while in Hannaford, they didn’t have the variety of Old El Paso I like to get, and I noticed Hannaford had a store brand. Either I’d never noticed, or that’s a new thing. Those were 10¢ below even the Taco Bell beans; almost as little as I’ve ever paid. Cool, I’m usually willing to try store brand whatever once. Our favorite frozen vegetables are Wal-Mart’s own brand, and there’s almost nothing Wal-Mart or Hannaford brand we’ve ever disliked. After trying BJ’s own grated parm cheese, we’ve never tried a store brand again, but that was exceptionally bad.

I made homemade tacos last night, which we then had for lunch today as well, before Deb took the kids to the pool and I fired up the AC in my office to work. What; this isn’t work? The tacos are a whole other post. I tried corn tortillas for the first time and they were astonishingly good. Sadie even corrected her mother last night, declaring them very good, as opposed to merely good.

That was where I used the Hannaford store brand refried beans. Not only are they cheap, and not only are they decent, but also they are the best we have tried. In the future, I’ll buy them preferentially. They aren’t plain, and in fact are fairly heavily seasoned, but it’s the tastiest. Your mileage may vary. Thus the whole rambling post reaching this point; they were good enough to want to crow about, and I’m not even getting paid for product review blogging.

Chicken is the big sale item this week at Hannaford.

Usually we eat boneless chicken breast, and that is mainly in 10 lb pre-frozen bags purchased at BJ’s. It’s more than the good sale prices of $1.99 and below, like this week’s $1.77, but it’s well below the customary full price, and it’s less work than boneless breasts bought fresh at the supermarket. Those require more trimming. Nonetheless, I regularly buy some when it’s on sale, using it fresh and then freezing the rest.

I happen to like dark meat. For me it’s always been a huge treat to get a turkey or chicken drumstick especially. I also don’t generally mind eating it right off the bone, or being made more rather than less aware of the meat’s living animal origins. Boneless is handy, but not my strong preference. It’s insanely cheap to buy and roast a whole chicken or turkey when on sale (or even not so on sale), so I’m the one who handles that as I am not generally bothered by it (besides having an until recently unknown natural talent for it).

Last week, dinner at my grandmother’s house was drumsticks baked falling-off-the-bone done, as it should be, in approximate no peek chicken style. No peek chicken involves water, onion soup mix, dry rice, other details I am probably forgetting, and chicken baked in a pan, covered with foil most of the time, resulting in strongly flavored rice and chicken that didn’t require a lot of effort or attention. I should re-obtain the original recipe sometime.

It turns out that Valerie loves dark meat. The worse/greasier, the better. It probably didn’t hurt that the chicken was very flavorful throughout, but our little vegetarian rabbit girl singlehandedly ate most of a drumstick.

I recently had a conversation with someone who, to cut back on grocery spending, recently started buying mainly bone-in chicken and boning it, or cutting as much as possible off the bones as the case may be, herself. That made me wonder if perhaps I should do that. But then, it depends on the cost to effort ratio. Is it really worth buying split chicken breast for $1.49 on sale and boning it when boneless is $1.77? How about when boneless is $2.20? How about when the gulf between $2.20 in $22 increments and $1.49 in $5 increments is almost insurmountable, you’re so broke? Guess it always depends.

So when I was buying milk and bread the other day, I picked up a pack of the $1.77 boneless breasts, which will probably get used, with the rest freezer fodder. I noticed drumsticks, nice looking ones, on sale for 59¢ a pound, which either I had missed or was absent from the flier. Or circular. That’s a regionalism, no?

I bought a big pack of drumsticks, costing next to nothing, figuring at least feeding me and the kids something different. Which is the real point of this post; soliciting ideas for their preparation. I’d been musing about the possibility of tossing them in the crockpot, just to sort of cook them with barbecue sauce or whatever without using the oven, or maybe to cook them off the bone and make shredded chicken stuff. Which I’d wondered about doing with other bone-in chicken, like the breasts. It’d feel like boneless breasts would be “too good” for that sort of treatment.

Alternatively, I’d probably cook them in a frying pan, be it in “fried chicken” form or not. Which made me think of a rub, shades of the way I have lately been doing steak destined for burritos. Which made me think of the “bring your own meat” poolside cookout we’ll be attending on the 4th, to which we’d planned to bring mainly hot dogs, perhaps a couple frozen burger patties.

So here I am soliciting ideas, while leaning toward possibly concocting a rub or a sauce or a marinade and bringing the drumsticks to the cookout for proper grilling and sharing with the other people who’ll be there.

Thoughts? On drumsticks specifically or chicken generally? Lacking a grill and it being summer, we’d normally lean crockpot or stovetop methods, which is why the exception of using someone else’s grill is tempting.