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Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Four

December 25, 2025 //
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Today, Christmas Day, I took the day off from baking and cooking. I had planned to cook a roast lamb feast, but had no takers, and I had a last-minute invitation to a turkey and trimmings Christmas dinner, so all I made today was a kale salad for the feast and a bowl of oatmeal with sour cherries and walnuts, which I ate at noon.

Yesterday, however, I combined searching for a red tablecloth, testing tree lights, moving boxes around and making French onion soup and kale salad with baking a few dozen ginger cookies and pfefferneusse, and frosting said pfefferneusse.

I made the onion soup base first, caramelizing sliced onions in butter and olive oil, adding thyme and white pepper, de-glazing the pan with chicken stock. Then I de-stemmed kale for salad. Then I decided to tackle ginger cookies.

Ginger cookies, when you want them wafer-thin and crisp, are difficult — there is no way around it. Lessons learned or remembered this year. 1) Chilling the dough for several days is not enough 2) Kick the silicone mat to the curb — it does not help. 3) Turn off the heat in the kitchen: this dough must be seriously cold to manage (It’s the molasses). 4) When the cut cookies wrinkle when you try to pick them up, give it up, scrape the dough off the marble slab and put the dough in the freezer for a few minutes. 5) While, you are at it, refrigerate the marble slab.

Yesterday I left the marble slab in the refrigerator with rolled out dough on it. I’ll see what happens tomorrow.

After I gave up on ginger cookies, I turned to pfefferneusse, easy to roll into balls and pop onto a sheet of parchment paper when you have used up your supply of butter wrappers. They bake in a nice slow 300-degree oven for twenty minutes. Nothing ever goes wrong with them except the royal icing.

I can’t tell you how many times I have made royal icing that doesn’t want to set. I don’t want it tooth-achingly sweet, so I might use less powdered sugar than some people do. I don’t measure it. I just dump powdered sugar into egg whites and whisk until I like the consistency. I add a generous amount of anise extract — you need to taste it in the frosting.

I hand-dip each cookie in the icing and set it on the cut-open paper bag that I have been using for all of the cookies. The bag catches stray colored sugar and absorbs excess fat from the cooling cookies. Doing pfefferneusse last adds frosting drips to the brown paper.

After I finished with ginger dough for the day, I turned the heat back on in the kitchen. It turns out that a heated kitchen helps icing dry. Who knew? In our Kensington kitchen the only possible heat sources were the ovens, the stove, or the dryer. Here in Washington, my kitchen has a heating vent and thermostat. What luxury.

So, by the end of the day I had some of each of the classic four Dimmick cookies made: cocoa shortbread, maple butter cookies, ginger cookies and pfefferneusse with candied ginger and orange peel.

In times past there were more cookies. Mom would make Russian tea cakes, dream bars, even coconut macaroons. I make Russian tea cakes if I have time and I have experimented with apricot bars but have never found one I like with a serious amount of dried apricots and nuts — I want it to be mostly apricots and nuts on a not-too-sweet base. In times long past there were homemade divinity and caramels, homemade eggnog marinated in whiskey. I can make all of those things, but find it difficult to find the time. There was fruitcake and mince pie, neither of which I miss. Mom made walnut fudge and Grandma made rocky road fudge and sometimes double fudge as well as plain sugar cookies like hockey pucks: dead-white with flour, thick and hard. We liked them when we were kids, but every year Grandma used more flour and less shortening until they resembled sweetened hardtack: you could eat them if you dipped them in tea, coffee, cocoa or milk, but why bother.

Before my neighbor Eileen arrived for Christmas Eve dinner I made lemon-tahini salad dressing with garlic, added artichoke hearts and sliced green olives with pimentos for a festive touch. While she plugged in an extension cord she had brought and strung the lights on the tree, I made Gruyere croutons for the soup.

Eileen opened a bottle of Tempranillo. I routed out some punch cups from a large box of fragile glassware packed by professional movers (I have nowhere to display or store goblets, tea cups and punch cups so they are still in their box). She poured an inch of wine and we drank a Christmas toast.

We ate soup and salad, followed by cookies. We put ornaments on the tree. Eileen dried dishes, stowed leftovers and packed cookies to take home.

My current plan is to finish baking ginger cookies and pfefferneusse on Boxing Day and to box up cookie assortments to send to far-flung friends. If I run low, I will make more of anything except ginger cookies. Enough is enough. I also hope to roast the lamb, fix mashed potatoes, lemon pie, radicchio salad and cinnamon rolls. We’ll see how far I get…

Tell me about the holiday cookies you love. And let me know if you have a wonderful apricot-nut bar.

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Categories baking, Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking, seasonal recipes

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Three

December 23, 2025 //
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When I walked in the door this evening my house smelled like maple. I spent all day rolling, cutting, decorating and baking batches of Smitten Kitchen’s Nutmeg Maple Butter Cookies. I have to say that this cookie is my favorite variation on a classic Christmas sugar cookie. The dough handles perfectly (Is it the egg yolk that keeps it from drying out or getting too stiff?). And they taste fabulous. Deb makes hers austere, but when I make them I tart them up with colored sugar because, you know, when I make them they are Christmas cookies.

Here’s a secret to Dimmick rolled cookies (You may never look at cookies quite the same way again). My mother taught me to use a sequence of cutters: when the dough is untouched, when it has been chilling in the refrigerator and you pull your first quarter or eighth of dough out to roll, you select the cutters you are going to use. I like to start with six-pointed stars and Christmas trees. Then you use only those cutters every time you select a fresh round of dough. When you roll up the scraps and roll them out, you choose entirely different cutters: I chose a flower that I think of as a poinsettia, but could be a Christmas rose. All second-generation dough (aka re-rolls) is cut with this cutter. And if, God forbid, you have a third generation of dough made from twice re-rolled scraps, you choose yet another cutter.

Why do we do this? The first time you roll out dough it has minimal added flour on your work surface. The cookies that you get from a first dough are more tender and flavorful. By the time you are re-rolling dough, you have incorporated the flour that is on your work surface and you usually have to add a bit more flour when you roll it out so that it does not stick, so second and third-generation cookies have more flour in them and the dough gets worked more: both of those things toughen the cookies slightly. The compensation is that the re-rolled dough is usually a bit easier to work with due to the added flour and sometimes you can get the stiffer cookies quite thin. The second generation cookies may look better than the first generation ones, but the first ones taste better. Switching cutters functions as a code. You can say to those in the know, “The poinsettias are re-rolls,” while you make them attractive for others to grab.

My mother favored delicate, thin cookies and I share that preference. I tend to use small, angular cutters with unfussy shapes. My favorite cutters are just an outline of the shape, as opposed to the kind that have a flat top and a sharp cutting edge — cookies tend to get stuck in overly fancy cutters. I don’t make gingerbread men, although I have the cutters to make them.

As I was throwing red sugar onto the maple poinsettias, I realized that I would run out of red sugar before I had baked all of the ginger cookies (which I haven’t started yet). I also saw that I did not have enough powdered sugar to make royal icing for the pfefferneusse — that recipe makes a lot.

When you make cookies hour after hour by yourself, you get into a rhythm. Take a butter wrapper and use it to grease a baking sheet. Set that on the counter. Add flour to your work surface: I use a silicone mat over a marble slab. Pat the dough into a round as you would for pie crust. Flour your rolling pin. Roll out the dough as thinly as possible. I usually end up with one thick end on the top and am running out of room to roll, so I will break the thick part off and set it aside — it is just like new dough because I haven’t finished rolling it.

Choose your cutters and flour them. Place the cutter as close to the edge of the dough as you can. Then place the next cutter as close to the last place you cut as you can. After awhile, you start to see “If I turn the tree cutter right side up here and upside down there” I can cut very close together.” I imagine someone laying out paper patterns on fabric. I don’t think of myself as having strong spacial abilities, but I am good at placing cookie cutters, probably because I’ve done it a lot.

Pop the filled cookie sheet in the refrigerator to chill while you fill the next one. Transfer the chilled sheet to your work table for decorating. When all your trays are full of cut cookies, preheat the oven. Decorate the cookies while it preheats.

As I cut cookies, I move the scraps off to the side of the marble slab — I will gather them up to re-roll later. Mom sometimes made “scrap cookies” of the odd bits of dough between cookies. I prefer to re-roll the scraps and make cookies with recognizable shapes.

Suddenly I remember the family lexicon: members of my immediate family talked about “crap cookies,” not because there was anything wrong with the Christmas cookies we looked forward to all year but because my younger brother couldn’t say esses when he was little. “Scrap cookies” became “crap cookies.”

Before I decorated the last round of poinsettias, my phone rang. My former next door neighbor from Oberlin Avenue who is one hundred years old now was calling to wish me a merry Christmas. I was touched. I asked her if she would be going out to visit her daughter for Christmas. She was, but she wanted to see if I was home first. I told her I was baking cookies, that that had been one of Madge’s specialties and that I still baked them. She said she’d check up on me from time to time and I told her I had never forgotten how she sent us food when my mother was so ill.

While cookies bake, I mix up new batches of colored sugar. I’ve made light green, turquoise, denim blue, orange and an accidental brown — no matter what the package says you cannot make purple sugar with cheap liquid food coloring.

I do not set a timer. When the cookies are ready I will catch their scent wafting through the air. When cookies smell like cookies they are done.

I baked the last tray of cookies, washed my silicone mat and forced myself out of the house for a Safeway run. Safeway was out of red sugar, but I got powdered sugar and a few treats (coffee yogurt and tapioca pudding) and the thyme leaves I have been eying, outrageously priced at nine dollars, but 33% off this week. The walk stretched out my back a little, compressed from all the standing and sitting.

I fed the cat, had dinner myself (bagel, peanut butter, yogurt, raw carrots) and realized I wasn’t up for a second shift. The ginger dough is the hardest one to handle. Stay tuned.

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking

Dear Madge (a Letter to My Deceased Mother)

November 30, 2025 //
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Dear Madge,

My Thanksgiving dinner was two days late this year. I got a virus a week before Thanksgiving and was not well enough to shop and do food prep. My neighbor Eileen, who lives just around the corner, suggested that she could take me to Grocery Outlet on Wednesday morning and we could have dinner on Saturday, so that’s what we did.

Prices have gone up. The “free” turkey that you get with purchases required $125.00 of spending at Grocery Outlet and $150.00 at Safeway. And some things on my list were not on the shelves at all — maple syrup, for instance.

Friday morning I was standing in the kitchen, noticing how well the fast burner on my stove browned onions. I knew you would be pleased. I actually had to turn off the heat for awhile while I chopped celery and grated carrots.

I learned a new trick for roasting chestnuts: after you cut the cross in the shell, you soak them in water for an hour before roasting them. Oh. You and I didn’t know that. It worked like a charm.

What I really miss, Mom, is your kitchen: the zinc-lined bread drawer, the bread boards, the double ovens, the cooler, all of those big low cabinets and drawers. You and Stan the carpenter did a great job of designing a practical working space.

It’s all gone now. The people Bryan sold the house to took out many desirable things, converted closets to bathrooms, ruined the bay window in the breakfast room to make a deck (handy for the chilly Kensington summers). We were fortunate to live in that well-designed house for so long.

I was tired on Saturday morning because your cat Onyx jumped over my head at 2:45 AM. She came here to live with me this month. Surprisingly, at fifteen and a half she still goes up and down the stairs — I feed her in my bedroom, but she likes to supervise the opening of the can, which happens in the kitchen. When she woke me, I realized that I was hot and that the hallway outside my door was hot.

I had tried out the heat in the kitchen and adjoining dining room for the first time on Friday, anticipating dinner guests who would expect me to heat my house. I knew I had turned the heat off, but it was clear that it had been blasting away. Basically, the control knob malfunctioned: it turned, but it didn’t make contact with the mechanism that controls the temperature. I wrenched it off again, hoping that I had been successful (The vent was so hot that I couldn’t tell if it was still on).

I went back to bed after 3:00 AM, but could not get back to sleep. I forced myself down to the kitchen at 8:15 AM where it was still warm enough to go barefoot. Usually it is about 45 degrees in there this time of year, good for rolling out pastry.

Then I just worked: I stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven, pulled the neck out and started a stock pot with vegetable scraps. I made Grandma’s roll dough and your pie crust, pumpkin pie filling, cranberries. I trimmed and poked yams. I trimmed Brussels sprouts and cut crosses in the bottom.

My neighbor Eileen arrived when I had reached the point of utter exhaustion and was functioning on determination and willpower. She had a workman in tow (Her husband begged off because he is currently subject to coughing fits). Dave the workman brought the glass top from the old breakfast room table up from the garage, unwrapped it, cleaned it up, and set it on its pedestal. I had dragged up the pedestal and chairs on Thursday.

I don’t love it in my dining room — it’s too big for the space, especially the chairs — but I had to have a table in place for holiday entertaining so it will stay there at least until January 6th. Kelly, my friend and former landlady, is coming for pie and coffee in the next few days and she will appreciate having a chair at a table. I eat in my bedroom and on the front porch a lot.

Anyway, the food was delicious — all the things we usually made, except salad: working alone I can’t make a salad on Thanksgiving Day. I had thought to make a kale salad with lemon-tahini dressing because it improves as it sits, but I didn’t have the energy to make it on Friday, or the time to make it on Saturday. I asked Eileen to carve the turkey and to mash and season the potatoes because I was decanting dressing, making gravy, shaping rolls. I had her make after dinner coffee, too, while I whipped the cream.

Thank you for teaching me to cook this good, basic Midwestern food. I still enjoy cooking it and eating it and sharing it with others. Eileen pitched in to do a lot of the clean-up — she’s much more careful about wrapping food than I am. I sent her home with food for her husband, packed into my cake pans and then I had a hot soaking bath.

Onyx is enjoying a small dish of turkey scraps every day. She would like a bigger dish of them, or perhaps for me to serve them more frequently, but i don’t want her to develop digestive problems. She is much more vocal than she used to be: she runs through her repertory of yowls and howls and complaints every morning when she wants to be served breakfast earlier than I wish to get up, but she’s basically a good kitty and has largely adapted to life in this house. She hides in the bedroom closet if she hears a stranger on the stairs. She still roly-polys occasionally and I sing her little Onyx songs (“If i Were an Onyx,” “Rock-a-bye, Onyx,” and “Roly Poly, Onyx little cat girl”). She is definitely a survivor cat.

I don’t know what else to say. I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you and all of those holiday dinners we made together and thinking of your mother’s eagle eye when I was peeling and de-eying potatoes. Today I enjoyed a breakfast of pie, coffee and rolls and started listening to Christmas music. My house has wide window sills so I will scavenge greenery and put up birds and ornaments.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Love,

Sharyn

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Categories grocery shopping, home cooking, seasonal recipes

“What’s in the cupboard” baked oatmeal

November 7, 2025 //
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I like to make baked oatmeal. I make stove-top oatmeal too, but I like having breakfast made ahead for those mornings when I don’t want to fuss with anything beyond feeding the cat and making coffee.

The last time I made baked oatmeal I looked up a basic recipe that used four eggs because I only had four eggs left in the house. I flavored it like a carrot cake, adding to the oats, milk, eggs, soda, salt and baking powder, maple syrup, grated carrots, coconut, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and walnuts. It was delicious.

I was going to make it again, but as I was gathering ingredients my eye fell on a jar of apple butter (I have two from a baking box I used to subscribe to, alas put out of business by tariff shenanigans). It sounded like a good thing to add to baked oatmeal and already contained cinnamon and cloves.

When I opened the jar, I found the darkest apple butter I had ever seen, the color of a cup of strong coffee. I mixed it in with 2 and 1/2 cups of milk, four eggs, half a cup of maple syrup. I added freshly ground cardamom, ground ginger — forgot I had fresh ginger in the freezer — a teaspoon of soda, a teaspoon of baking powder, a scant teaspoon of salt. I added all this to four cups of rolled oats in a big bowl and then added a cup of raisins, a cup of chopped walnuts and three finely grated carrots — I like sneaking vegetables into breakfast.

I buttered a thirteen by nine oblong pan and poured the oatmeal mix into it. I had the oven on to 375 F because I was baking a salmon fillet on a bed of roast vegetables. I took my dinner out of the oven and reduced the heat to 350 F, letting the oatmeal sit on the counter to absorb liquids while I ate. After I wrapped my leftover salmon in foil and refrigerated it, I popped the oats into the oven and started doing dishes.

About thirty-five minutes later, I opened the oven. The baked oatmeal was very dark brown, raisins visible on the top. I took a table knife and scooped out a bit from one corner. The result was nice and moist from the apple butter and the taste reminded me of gingerbread, although there was no molasses or brown sugar in the mix. It must have been the long-caramelized apples.

Throwing preserves or other spreads into baked oatmeal is a good way to use them up should you find yourself with a lingering jar or a flavor that you don’t usually buy. Ditto for syrups, or even the liquid from canned fruit. To make a 13 x 9 pan of baked oatmeal, I use 2 and 1/2 cups of whole milk and 1/2 cup of maple syrup or honey for a total of three cups liquid, but you can use any kind of “milk” you like, or substitute fruit juices or syrups. Part of the fun is figuring out what flavors complement each other.

I cut a square of baked oatmeal every morning. It doesn’t need anything — you can pick it up in your hand and nibble on it — but I like to nuke it in a bowl with a fresh splash of milk for a warming breakfast on a cold morning.

Do you make baked oatmeal? What is your favorite flavor?

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Categories breakfast food, frugal eating, home cooking

Where did the sweet corn come from? Plus an amazing bread pudding.

May 9, 2025 //
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I went to the farmers market today, as I do almost every Saturday, but I went to Safeway first because I needed tissues and dishwashing liquid and jarred salsa. I vaguely remembered that there was something on special that I wanted, so I cruised the produce section, and there it was: fresh corn, five ears for five bucks. I checked to make sure it had been grown in the U.S. — I don’t believe in importing produce from Mexico.

I last ate fresh corn in October, so I bought five ears and started thinking about what I would make with it, starting with pizza and pasta. I bought a small jar of sun-dried tomatoes to go with the corn. By next year I will be growing and drying cherry tomatoes again once I have a yard of my own.

The new crop in the market today was asparagus. I don’t like asparagus, so I passed it by. But there was a potato farmer so I bought a bag of red potatoes to supplement all of the spring greens: arugula, spring mix, bok choy, radishes. I’ve been eating radish greens lately, sauteed with pasta or in eggs, so I bypassed the bunches of turnips as well.

I picked up a dozen farm fresh eggs, brown and blue. For those of you keeping track, they cost eight dollars, so you can still eat an egg-based meal for two bucks.

I made pizza for lunch with pesto, mozzarella, an ear of fresh corn, feta and some sun-dried tomatoes. While it baked I made a salad of spring mix, arugula and a sliced radish. Then I had not one, but two modest slices of my chocolate beet cake with sour cream frosting, my reward for carrying a heavy backpack all morning.

Tonight I’ll probably eat pasta with Italian sausage, feta, lime, sun-dried tomatoes and more corn. I might throw in bell peppers, bok choy or arugula if I want more greens.

After lunch I found an old Facebook post of mine from today’s date. When I lived in California I bought strawberries, apricots, peaches and artichokes on May 3rd. Sigh. One of Kelly’s friends brought me a basket of strawberries yesterday and they are delicious, but stone fruit is a long way off and I don’t know if we get artichokes in western Washington at all. Two of the things I miss most about my native state is the variety of fresh produce available year-round and the quality of that produce. Here, however, we have utterly beautiful autumns with turning trees and springs full of lilacs, peonies and rhododendrons.

I started researching trees for a home orchard again: I don’t have a house and yard yet, but I will, and I will want to start some trees as soon as I can so that I will be harvesting my own peaches and figs again in a few years.

This morning I turned my gift of strawberries into strawberry cornmeal griddle cakes. I have been making this recipe from Smitten Kitchen for several years (My former partner loved strawberries).

Since I started this post, I have been completing cooking projects: I candied all of the orange peels I had saved in the freezer. I used a vegan vanilla cake mix to make cupcakes and frosted them with some of my leftover sour cream chocolate frosting.

This morning, I needed breakfast because I finished the strawberry pancakes yesterday. I had some milk that is on the verge of turning that I needed to use. I remembered that I had some bread in the freezer. I pulled out the bread, which turned out to be part of a loaf of challah. Good. I would use it to make a breakfast bread pudding with candied orange peel.

I turned the oven on to 350 degrees. I cubed the bread and chopped up orange peel. And then inspiration struck: what if I incorporated the last of my leftover sour cream chocolate frosting? Chocolate-orange breakfast bread pudding was born.

I made it the usual way: put the cubed bread in a bowl. I added the frosting to the bread before beating the eggs in the frosting bowl so as to dislodge all of the bits of frosting and incorporate them into the eggs. I added the eggs to the bread and frosting.

Then I made a mistake: I know to scald milk for bread pudding, but I skipped that step and just poured the milk over the bread, frosting and eggs. I added vanilla.

Then I tasted the custard — don’t do this if you are afraid of raw eggs — I needed to see how sweet it was since I don’t usually put frosting in bread pudding. I added a scant 1/3 cup of sugar and stirred everything together.

The result of my mistake is that my pudding resisted setting. After half an hour, I stirred the top layer back in to absorb more liquid and continued to bake the pudding. Because I did not scald the milk, my bread pudding took nearly an hour and forty-five minutes to bake. But it did finally set.

And OMG is it delicious! I am not normally a chocolate for breakfast fan, but the richness of the sour cream frosting and the chocolate and orange flavors are marvelous.

I didn’t measure the milk. I used three extra-large eggs because that is what I had. The bread was about a third of a loaf of challah. I would guess there was about a cup of frosting — maybe a generous cup. Candied orange peel to taste. 1/3 cup added sugar. A generous splash of vanilla. If you want a better guideline for proportions or ratios, consult an actual recipe for bread pudding — I usually just throw it together free-hand. Tassajara Bread Book has a good recipe for breakfast bread pudding But do yourself a favor and scald the milk! It will save you time and energy.

Stay tuned for next week’s adventures.

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Categories breakfast food, frugal eating, home cooking, Uncategorized

Frugality and Eating, Week Eight

April 4, 2025 //
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I thought I had started this week’s post, but I can’t find a draft. I start the post on Saturday because Saturday is farmers market day. I’m still buying and eating Brussels sprouts and kale each week. Will I always eat Brussels sprouts and kale? No. When will I stop buying Brussels sprouts and kale? When there are other things at the market to buy. Today there was purple sprouting broccoli — I didn’t know what I would do with that so I didn’t buy any. Total spending: $17.00. I didn’t buy a treat today and I’m doing less cooking and eating the same things over and over because I’ve been busy with protests.

When I got home, I made kale salad with lemon-tahini dressing and ate shortcake and tea.

Saturday breakfast: baked French toast with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, mixed berry shortcake, black tea; dinner: pasta with Brussels sprouts and pesto.

Sunday I had a Zoom meeting after breakfast and went to a noon protest: I carried a bag of crackers, cheese, dried cranberries and almonds with me, but did not eat it there. I stopped off at the health food store on the way home for staples: half and half, frozen blueberries and dried sour cherries. Total spending: $23.04 Sunday breakfast: baked French toast with blueberries, coffee; lunch: crackers, smoked cheddar, cranberries, almonds, kale salad, mixed berry shortcake, black tea; dinner: homemade bean burrito with salsa and sour cream.

Monday breakfast: French toast with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, homemade pizza with arrabiata sauce, kalamata olives, roasted peppers and Italian sausage. After Monday lunch I wanted to use some shortcake biscuits, so I made them into faux scones with cream and jam: I split a shortcake and put it in the oven that was warm from baking the pizza. Then I whipped plain cream. I spread the warm shortcake with lingonberry jam and topped it with whipped cream. There is a controversy whether you apply the jam or cream first to a scone (or faux scone). I like the jam on the bottom — if you put the cream on the bottom of a warm pastry, it melts. I like biting through the cool cream into the jam and biscuity base. I wanted something different for dinner tonight, so I sauteed half of an Italian sausage, some orange bell pepper and scallions and added a couple of scrambled eggs. I ate that wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla with a dash of Cholula and followed it up with an orange — breakfast for dinner, always an option if you like breakfast food.

Tuesday breakfast: last of the baked French toast with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, pizza, black tea; snack: shortbread with jam and cream; dinner: refried beans, salsa, corn tortillas.

Wednesday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, pizza, black tea, pumpkin blondie. I wasn’t hungry at dinner, so I just ate some almonds and dried sour cherries.

Thursday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, pizza; snack: shortbread with jam and cream, black tea; dinner: pasta with pesto and Brussels sprouts; snack: chocolate.

Thursday I stopped at Grocery Outlet for some basic supplies. Here’s what I bought: a gallon of whole milk ($3.99) five pounds of all purpose flour ($2.49), salami ($9.99), pizza crusts ($3.79), pasta ($2.38), lemons ($2.76), canned pumpkin ($3.79), canned sour cherries ($3.98) and toilet paper ($5.99). Total for groceries: $33.68.

Friday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, pizza (arrabiata sauce, kalamata olives, roasted red peppers and salami), black tea, coffee shortbread; dinner: pasta with pesto and Brussels sprouts; snack: candied almonds.

Another frugal week starts tomorrow with a visit to the farmers market, and a Hands Off protest and then I will tackle a new topic: in hard times What Do You Need to Be Happy?

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Categories frugal eating, home cooking, Uncategorized

Frugality and Eating, Week 7

March 28, 2025 //
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I began my week of frugal eating on Saturday morning with coffee and baked French toast with blueberries to fuel me for a trip to the farmers market. Breakfast is one of the meals I reliably cook for myself: I am a morning person — by dinner time I often do not care what I eat. The other thing I will almost always do is make a bowl of salad every time I run out of it: because I have been eating kale salad, which is pretty much indestructible no matter how long it sits around, I usually make salad twice a week.

By Thursday last week I was out of greens and jonesing for them, so I bought two bunches of kale and one bag of Brussels sprouts. Total spent: $17.00. I had just run out of eggs, so I picked up a dozen farm fresh eggs for $7.00. Lastly, I stopped by Pane D’Amore bakery for my new Saturday lunch treat: a slice of focaccia and a chocolate-walnut cookie for $7.25 — I am particularly liking food-to-go on these busy Saturdays of demonstrations. On days other than Saturdays, I am likely to pack up salami, cheese, crackers, containers of homemade kale salad, nuts and/or oranges to keep me fueled while I stand in public spaces holding signs.

I was out all morning — at the bank, at the market, at Hollywood Beach for a native American water blessing ceremony and march. Once home, I ate my focaccia before running off to the library sale. The focaccia is filling and I rested and napped most of the afternoon and evening. I don’t like to eat heavily in the evening, so I nuked a bowl of Brussels sprouts, added a spoonful of pesto, followed that with a homemade pumpkin blondie for dessert and called that dinner.

Saturday meals: Breakfast: cardamom French toast with frozen blueberries, coffee; lunch: focaccia; dinner: Brussels sprouts with pesto, pumpkin blondie.

Sunday meals: Breakfast: homemade pumpkin pancakes with blueberries, coffee; Lunch: leftover homemade pizza with pesto, kalamata olives, roasted peppers; black tea with evaporated milk; Dinner: kale salad with feta, dried cherries, roasted almonds and lemon-tahini dressing.

Monday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, homemade pizza, half chocolate walnut cookie, black tea with evaporated milk; dinner: whole wheat burrito with refried beans, salsa and sour cream.

Tuesday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries; lunch: kale salad, homemade pizza with arrabiata sauce, feta, kalamata olives and roasted peppers, black tea, pumpkin blondie; dinner: burrito; snack: dried cherries, roasted almonds.

Wednesday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries; lunch: Brussels sprouts with pesto, homemade pizza, pumpkin blondie, green tea; dinner: homemade burrito; snacks: chocolate with nuts, roasted almonds, dried cherries.

Thursday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, roasted strawberry shortcake*, black tea; dinner: pizza, kale salad, whole wheat tortilla.

Friday breakfast: pumpkin pancakes with blueberries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, homemade pizza, roasted strawberry shortcake, black tea; dinner: pasta with Brussels sprouts and pesto.

* If you should find yourself with underripe strawberries, you can cut them up, sprinkle them with a bit of sugar and roast them in a 350-degree oven to concentrate their flavor. You lose the raw character, but they taste better. I made the shortcake biscuits with 2 and 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour, 1 cup of rolled oats, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup butter 3/4 cup evaporated milk, a pinch of salt and 2 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder.

Total weekly food spending: $31.25, including my Saturday lunch treat.

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Categories desserts, frugal eating, grocery shopping, home cooking, Uncategorized

Frugality and Eating, Week 5-6ish

March 22, 2025 //
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I promised I would talk a little about creativity this week. Here goes: to create something you need to have a problem to solve, something you want to do. And then you have to make a decision to do it with what you have on hand. This is important: while it is nice to have a fine musical instrument or the best pigments or some other luxury (and there is something to having decent or even excellent materials), the creativity does not come from the excellence of your materials, it comes from your decision to bring something into being, which is generally because you want something.

For instance, back in 2018, I had an emotional response to the United States administration separating children from their parents at the southern border. My experience as a former MFT told me that this would be traumatic for the families and children. I wanted to say something about it. But more than that, I wanted to sing something about it because songs carry emotional weight and evoke emotional responses.

So I started imagining what a woman would say who was walking to the U.S. border. The song starts:

I walked a long way, longer than you know.
I walked a long way, carrying my pain and fear.
I walked a long way -- I had nowhere else to go.
I walked a long way to get here.

I knew I wanted to sing it in both English and Spanish to reach Spanish-speakers. Fortunately, I studied Spanish in high school and college. I found a local poet to help me put my English words into Spanish in a way that I could fit them into the tune. I hired my partner at the time, Mr. Johnny Harper, to produce both English and Spanish versions. I booked studio time. I hired back-up singers and a piano player and, through trial and error, I built the arrangement I wanted.

Then, as I have done with almost all of my recording projects I painted a watercolor album cover painting. I had to adjust the painting many times to get the color intensity I wanted. I had to photograph it and have it photographed many times to get the photos to reflect the colors of the painting. All the time I was shooting for something, aiming for something that I wanted.

The cooks among you are perhaps wondering what this has to do with frugal eating. It has everything to do with it. The ingredients I buy at the farmers market or Safeway or grocery outlet are the beginning of my creativity in the kitchen. I am guided by ingredients and by what I like to eat. For instance, I like home fries and I hate hash browns. This is an easy choice: I don’t make hash browns and avoid them in restaurants because I don’t like them — I turn potatoes into other things. If I didn’t like potatoes at all, I wouldn’t buy them.

So what did I buy this week? The farmer with the sweet potatoes comes to the market once a month, so I bought several sweet potatoes. The other vegetable vendor had savoy cabbage today — I bought some because at this time in the year it is wonderful to have a new vegetable to cook with. Then I bought a mixed bag of roasting vegetables, mostly to get carrots and Brussels sprouts, and two bags of kale because kale is still what is available for salads and I don’t mind it if I smother it in tahini, garlic and lemon juice. The sweet potatoes cost $11.50 and the other veggies cost $27.92. Big spender today.

I have another busy weekend and I needed to hurry back home quickly, so I bought myself an extravagant lunch of vegetarian focaccia and a chocolate-walnut cookie from Pane D’Amore bakery. That might just become my weekly lunch treat. Both items were excellent and I enjoyed the break from constant cooking. That set me back $7.25.

I don’t know yet what I’ll make with my ingredients, or when I’ll buy more. I still have borscht, bread, and kale salad from last week, so I won’t have to cook tonight. Saturday dinner: kale salad, leftover pasta. Snack: chocolate-covered nuts

Sunday breakfast: pumpkin polenta (polenta cooked in milk with half a cup of pumpkin puree, sweet spices and maple syrup, coffee; lunch: kale salad, dinner: sweet potato with salsa and sour cream; snack: chocolate-covered nuts

Monday breakfast: pumpkin polenta, coffee; lunch: kale salad, borscht, leftover fried potatoes, muffin; dinner: bread with cheese, roasted peppers, salami, Brussels sprouts with pesto; Snack: bread and jam

Here endeth the daily recitation of what I bought and ate last week: last Thursday, midway through this post, my laptop died. It took six days to replace it and have data transferred from the old to the new, interrupting my daily recording of what I ate and spent. I did spend $85.28 at Grocery Outlet on March 14, where I restocked on citrus, celery, bell peppers, green onions, garlic, chicken broth, whole wheat flour, pasta, pasta sauce, chicken meatballs, crackers, whole wheat tortillas, evaporated milk and sour cream. I also bought strawberries and whipping cream because it’s spring (probably should have waited longer on the strawberries, which looked good, but lacked flavor: I folded a few of them into a batch of strawberry cornmeal pancakes, which I ate with newly-purchased raspberry syrup and frozen blueberries). Total spent on food for the days covered by this post: $159.92.

Pretty soon I am going to go to the kitchen for Saturday’s breakfast of baked French toast: I made it yesterday with eggs, milk, sugar, butter, and a loaf of sliced cardamom-orange bread that I bought at Sluy’s Bakery in Poulsbo for $8.24 when I was in Poulsbo seeing to data transfer. During my day-long excursion there I bought pizza and salad for lunch for $12.02, hot chocolate and cappuccino to keep me going for $11.06, and a pecan roll for $2.20. I also brought food with me, which I ate for dinner: kale salad, salami, cheese and whole wheat crackers.

After breakfast I will go to the farmers market and start a new post covering what I buy this week. Or not: I started these frugal eating posts because I thought people would find it helpful to know how to eat well on little money, but maybe all of you already know how to do that, or maybe you all still have plenty to eat on. If you’d like me to continue the Frugal Eating posts, please leave me a comment.

P.S. “The Border Song” is still available on CD.

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Categories frugal eating, home cooking, Uncategorized

Frugality and Eating, Week 4

March 7, 2025 //
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It’s Saturday, March 1, 2025, which means it’s farmers market day. Before I left the house, I had a helping of breakfast bread pudding with frozen blueberries and my standard cup of freshly ground dark roast decaf coffee with half and half. I brought with me some water, some roasted almonds and an orange because I planned to join a march after my jaunt to the market.

On the way to the market I mailed a gift grocery check for $200.00 from a friend to my credit union and stopped at the bank to get $40.00. I still had $13.59 in cash left from last Saturday. I didn’t expect the $200 check and was grateful to get it: it means I could pay my storage charges today and still buy food to supplement what I already have in the house.

Today I bought two bags of kale for $10.00 and a mixed bag of potatoes, beets, carrots and Brussels sprouts for $16.00. I also bought a thick slab of vegetarian focaccia to eat at the demonstration for $4.00 — this turned out to be a great value, full of tomatoes, artichoke hearts and kalamata olives, Mediterranean flavors that I have missed this winter. Total spent: $30.00.

I spent two hours on the street, holding my sign, singing lustily, and walking from the downtown assembly point to the courthouse with hundreds of people who gathered in support of our National Parks Service. The best sign I saw played off the “Fire Danger” indicator: It said “Being Fired Danger” with the needle in the red for “extreme danger.”

When I got home I put my groceries away and ran a hot bath with Epsom salts: my hips and feet ached from too much standing, but I like being out in the streets with like-minded people and I will be there whenever I can.

Cooking tip of the week: on the days and times you have energy, do some food prep or cooking so that you will have food ready for when you are tired or busy. Right now I have one more serving salad, one serving of bread pudding and a bowl of cooked ziti waiting in the fridge. And Sunday morning, right after breakfast I grated carrots and one beet that will go into the next batch of carrot-tahini muffins (I really like them — can you tell?), and then I continued grating beets, carrots and Brussels sprouts that will go into a pot of borscht. And then I mixed up some whole wheat bread dough and put it in the fridge for a slow rise: when I get back into the kitchen I will coordinate making the muffins, making a pizza for lunch, baking the bread and assembling the soup.

Saturday lunch: part one, on the go: focaccia; part two: Brussels sprout salad (at 4 PM). Snack: black tea with milk, dark chocolate almond. Dinner: baked potato with sour cream and black pepper, pan-fried and steamed Italian sausage and Brussels sprouts. I finished the potato, but only half of the sausage and sprouts — I’ll recycle them as pizza toppings later this week.

Sunday cooking, part two: when I went back to the kitchen I took the bread dough out of the fridge, and began preheating the oven to 425 F while I assembled the soup: crumbled up mushrooms, chicken broth, salt, pepper, garlic, grated vegetables and water. While that simmered, I made the muffin batter. I popped the muffins into the oven and ate soup and leftover salad while they baked, plus put on a kettle for tea. When the muffins came out, I made the tea and let it steep while I put together a quick pizza. While the pizza baked I ate a muffin and drank my tea.

Reducing the oven to 400 F, I transferred the muffins from the muffin tin to a bowl and re-greased the muffin tin for clover leaf rolls. You shape them by rolling three small balls of dough for each muffin cup. I also greased a pie tin to hold a round loaf made from the remaining dough.

Next I needed something to do while the rolls rose in the pans. I grabbed a bag of kale and pulled the leaves into pieces, discarding the stems. When that was done, the rolls were ready for the oven, so I put them in, leaving the loaf to rise on top of the stove. While the rolls baked I made salad dressing out of my remaining tahini — in the tahini jar. When the rolls came out, I put the loaf in the oven and went upstairs to rest.

So, in part of one day I produced most of what I will eat this week: soup, salad, pizza, muffins, rolls, bread, salad dressing. And then I came along after dinner and made what I’m calling “Mounds bar pudding” for dessert: I combined half a can of coconut milk with vanilla and about two tablespoons of powdered sugar, whipped it to blend it and poured some over a bowl of chocolate pudding. If I had had coconut flakes, I would have sprinkled them on top.

Monday breakfast: muffin, home fries, coffee; lunch: borscht, kale salad, whole wheat roll; dinner: Brussels sprout salad, pizza, whole wheat roll, muffin; snacks: whole wheat roll, chocolate, Bengal Spice tea. Spending: $10.03 for tahini and half and half.

Tuesday breakfast: muffin, home fries, coffee; lunch: pizza, kale salad, whole wheat roll; snack: hot cocoa, whole wheat roll, chocolate-covered nuts; dinner: pasta with chicken meatballs, marinara and shredded kale.

Wednesday breakfast: muffin, home fries, homemade mocha; lunch: kale salad, pasta, whole wheat roll; snack: chocolate, shortbread, tea; dinner: borscht, whole wheat roll. Spending: $3.99 one gallon of whole milk.

Thursday breakfast: muffin, home fries, coffee; lunch: kale salad, pasta, whole wheat roll; dinner: pizza, orange segments; snacks: tea, shortbread, roasted almonds, “Mounds bar pudding.”

Friday breakfast: muffin, home fries, coffee; lunch: borscht, kale salad, whole wheat roll; snacks: black tea, chocolate, muffin; dinner: pasta with meat balls, “Mounds bar pudding” with raw almonds.

Total food spending this week: $44.02

Next week, in addition to telling you what I eat and spend on food, I’ll write a bit about creativity.

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Categories cooking, grocery shopping, home cooking, philosophy, Uncategorized

Frugality and Eating, Week 3

February 28, 2025 //
2

Saturday morning I began my day with the last of the tahini-beet muffins I made last week, a blood orange and a cup of decaf coffee with half and half. Then I walked to the bank, where I withdrew forty dollars, which I hope will be enough to cover this week’s grocery shopping.

I like having money in the bank — in fact, I feel uncomfortable if my business account falls below $200. Today it is at $65.00. I could have left the $40.00 in there, but I also like having fresh, healthy things to eat and I like supporting local farmers, especially the ones who bring vegetables to market in the winter.

I walked from the bank to the farmers market where I purchased two bags of kale for $10.00 for salads (I still have potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, garlic and a few Brussels sprouts from previous weeks). Then I stopped at the Pane d’Amore booth to look at loaves of bread. I can bake my own bread and sometimes do, but I have a busy week and did not want to commit to baking bread. I also have tortillas and ready-made pizza crusts on hand, plus a loaf of challah in the freezer.

The bread that called to me was the Oaty Oat bread. I bought a loaf for $7.25, making use of my .25 bag discount. Farmers market total: $17.25.

On my way home, I decided to stop at the health food store because they have a sale on navel oranges. I can eat them as snacks, juice them, make orange syrup or orange curd to enhance baked goods. I can make orange rolls for breakfasts or snacks or orange-cumin bread. I can add them to salads. I still have lemons, limes and blood oranges at home. I bought a four-pound bag of organic oranges for $8.99.

I have a white board in my kitchen where I list things I want to buy soon. I decided to stop by Safeway and get just those items: sour cream, red salsa and flour. I lucked out because all three of them were on sale. I bought unbleached bread flour — I had been looking just for unbleached flour, but unbleached bread flour was on sale for $3.17 for five pounds. Because I am not planning on making an angel food cake or delicate pastry this week, I bought the bread flour, saving myself more than two dollars (Regular flour ran $5.45 and was bleached). Safeway total: $9.77.

Home again, I unpacked my groceries and put them away, except for one bag of lacinato kale. I sat at my kitchen table removing the leaves from the central stems, which allowed me to rest from my load-bearing walk. When my glass bowl was full of kale I added the usual suspects: fresh-squeezed lemon juice, minced garlic, tamari and a heaping tablespoon of tahini.

By the time I had made the salad, I realized that what I wanted for lunch was a big salad and a slice of bread with jam. I dished a big bowl of kale salad and crumbled some feta into it to make it more substantial. I cut the end slice from the oat bread, cut the slice into two halves and spread one with some marionberry jam I had received as a gift and the other with lingonberry preserves from a past baking box (More on that next week).

What goes with bread and jam? Tea. I made a pot of Irish Breakfast Tea to take the chill off the afternoon. I buy loose tea from Canada — here is my tea rant for your reading pleasure.

Saturday dinner: Homemade burrito: tomato wrap, shredded greens, refried beans, sour cream, salsa (I’m trying to organize a protest about cuts to Social Security so I needed something quick); chocolate pudding.

Sunday: An early political meeting, three loads of laundry and a breakfast bread pudding made up of half a loaf of challah from the freezer, three eggs, a quart of whole milk, juice and zest of one orange, vanilla, nutmeg and a handful of sugar, baking at 350 F. Breakfast drink: mocha made from fresh coffee, leftover cocoa and half and half. Lunch: kale salad, homemade pizza. Snack: bread and jam.

Monday: Breakfast bread pudding with a handful of frozen blueberries, coffee; Lunch: kale salad with roasted almonds, homemade pizza, bread and jam, black tea with milk (hungry and cold today). Dinner: homemade burrito.

Tuesday: Breakfast bread pudding with blueberries, coffee with half and half. Lunch: kale salad, homemade pizza. Snack: toast with butter and jam. Dinner: homemade burrito

Wednesday: Breakfast bread pudding with blueberries, coffee with half and half. Lunch: roasted cashews from the bag (bad day, spent most of it in bed). Dinner: kale salad, homemade pizza

Thursday: Breakfast out: a friend treated me to breakfast to celebrate my upcoming birthday. Very frugal for me, not so much for her. Bonus: Chestnut Cottage where we ate gives you a free pastry on your birthday, so I snagged a cinnamon roll to eat tomorrow. Late lunch: kale salad because I ate a big high-calorie breakfast. Dinner: a few sections of orange and a lot of water because I was not hungry.

Friday: Breakfast cinnamon roll from Chestnut Cottage, coffee with half and half. While the cinnamon roll heated and the coffee dripped I shredded Brussels sprouts for a later salad and doused them with olive oil and lemon juice to marinate. Later I will add matchstick pieces of green apple, dried cranberries, roasted cashews and yellow mustard. Lunch: Brussels sprouts salad and oatmeal bread. Dinner: pasta with pesto and Brussels sprouts. Snack: two chocolate-covered caramelized almonds.

Note: I am not recommending skipping meals, nor am I skipping meals to save money: I am reporting to you what I actually do, what I actually spend, and what I actually eat in case it gives you some ideas about how to eat more frugally in challenging times. I promise you that I enjoy eating the food that I prepare — if I didn’t, I would switch it up and make something different.

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Categories frugal eating, grocery shopping, home cooking, teas and tisanes, Uncategorized
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