By my third update I have stopped tracking the time I was spending on food and in looking back on the food we ate, most of what I cooked this week was from my fridge or my Winco trip with the local red barn groceries finding their way into my menu as snacks, ingredients, or in the case of the squash as I will detail below, failures! I never did make the winter vegetable slaw, but if you want to try it, it is truly amazing. I find that beets, carrots, and purple cabbage all keep really well in the fridge. Apples too.
Recipe: Grate one apple down to the core, along with a few carrots, and a red beet. Grate or finely chop some purple cabbage. Mix it with a small amount of pomegranate molasses, lemon olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (I have great friends who gift me with these types of things for birthdays and such). Eat and eat and eat and eat! So good! You can get creative and add chopped oranges too.
I didn’t get a chance to look at the Grit’s menus too closely, but what I did notice was that one dinner with a wine pairing is 55.00 per person. If I went there I would need to have both time and childcare and then I would need to be prepared to spend the equivalent to almost 2 weeks of my foodstamp budget. While they might source their food locally, their wine list included wines from France. Furthermore, any establishment that carries that much wine is automatically implicated in labor issues as wineries locally and abroad are highly labor intensive and often make use of migrant labor. The website did not have the farms they source from, but I bet that Willamette Valley Food and Farm coalition would have that information in their brochure. I think the access and labor issues embedded in high end restaurants like this deserve way more critical analysis than I am able to do with this blog. Still, I think the local food movement that births restaurants such as this allows for upper class consumers to feel like they are making a conscientious difference by eating locally, while allowing them to ignore labor and accessibility issues embedded in their food. I don’t see anything progressive about this restaurant. The irony is it still has the Shamrock diner advertisement painted on the building, showing that at one time, one could get a meal there for 25 cents. Right now it is just another business that is adding to the quarterly rent increases I experience. When I think about the Grit, I cannot help but wonder how long before I am priced out of the neighborhood I have lived in off and on my whole life.
So now that I have given you the recipe for a salad I intended to eat and talked a little bit about food I could never afford to eat, let me tell you a bit about what I did eat. (note, I the pictures all looked better while I was editing this post, for some reason they show up all wonky on the published version).
Don’t let the squash fool you, it is still cold on the inside.
The first night I brought out some lamb that I had in the freezer. I had already prepped it with spices, finely chopped onion, dried cranberries, and parsley. I wanted to try a recipe for a lamb stew. It was really quick. I browned the lamb, added grated carrots, some sumac, cinnamon, and a bit of lemon juice, a can of chick peas, and some chicken broth. I topped it with fresh spinach and chopped almonds. Garnished it with yogurt. It was pretty good, though not something I will make again. I had a lot left over which leads me to my squash disaster.
So on Thursday night, I needed to use the squash, as I mentioned in my previous post, it was going bad. So I remembered that I had left over stew from the other day and I stuffed it all in the squash and put it in the oven. However, I couldn’t get it started until late, so it wasn’t done when we needed to eat. So I turned off the oven and we went to Café Yumm. I ended up spending 15 bucks, which as I learned previously is roughly equivalent to 2 days of snap budget. Then Friday, I took the squash with me to my dad’s house and tried to cook it the rest of the way. It was okay. Not great. I left the leftovers with my dad. I don’t care for left over lamb.
Breakfasts this week remained pretty normal. The weekdays were some variation of the recipes below.
Oh, eating breakfast amongst the groceries that still need to be put away.
No sugar Oatmeal and sausage: Bring water, cinnamon, and raisins to boil, add a bit of muesli and old fashioned oats. Turn off stove, mix in a bit of vanilla at that point and let sit while the sausage finishes cooking. Top with plain yogurt.
Egg and Gouda English muffins: Toast English muffins with Gouda on them, put on a little mayo, salt and pepper, add scrambled egg and eat with a side of sautéed zucchini. So good!
Sausage and English muffins with cream cheese and jelly with apple slices on the side.
Saturday morning was way better. I got to use the challah bread for French toast. I needed to use the left over sausage from this week’s breakfasts, and I had bacon in the fridge as well. So we had French toast, made with cinnamon nutmeg, clove, and vanilla in the egg batter. We topped it with frozen blueberries and the last banana from our Winco trip, topped with a tiny bit of maple syrup and plain yogurt. Today, I didn’t feel like cooking so Liam had cereal, from Food for Lane county and I had coffee and toast.
The cheddar cheese went over well, and was gone after two afterschool snacks, and a packed school snacks. All in all I think it made three sandwiches, and two packed school snacks.
I found the back of the Late July crackers to be an amusing read at the breakfast table. Despite such a big box, those lasted for about 2 snacks, one the night he got them, then one after school.
Snacks this week were also pretty normal, other than the ingredients were of higher quality than usual and therefore, it was a bit more frustrating when Liam wasted them. I also gave him the possibly local bell pepper. He didn’t like it. It tasted funny apparently and wasted a bunch of it at school. I packed him leftover oatmeal from breakfasts. Sliced carrots, and golden delicious apples. I have to cut most everything so he can eat things with his braces.
Lunches happened for Liam at school mostly and more often than not I ended up skipping. Though I did have a meeting over lunch and there was food there this week, so I ate that. I did end up eating a banana for snack, but as per usual, I was mostly way hungry come dinner time. Today as we prepped the apples and pears my dad gave us from food for lane county for sauce, I stuffed a few pears with feta, chopped almonds, cranberries, and dried figs and baked them. Liam stuffed his with cream cheese and cranberries. This was pretty darn tasty!
Dinners, other than the traumatizing squash were pretty tasty. There was the stew mentioned, then Wednesday after a very long day there was chicken meat balls and potatoes that a friend made us. It was glorious to be able to just pop that in the oven. It amazes me even with that, I still ended up spending a lot of time in the kitchen this week. I cannot recall the specifics of the other meals. I am using the tomatillos tonight in guacamole and as a salsa on top of the enchiladas I pulled from the freezer. I actually have to end this post now, as I need to go cook dinner. My conclusion will follow shortly.