Nice to see you! that recipe looks and sounds wonderful! I like the idea of letting the pasta cook with the heat off. good savings trick.Keep up the good work. You are an inspiration in these trying times.

Peace,

charlotte

As for working with the Microplane zester, if you have the long one, you can turn it upside down and do your zesting/grating and everything stays in the unit. It’s a great tool for citrus zest, hard cheese, nutmeg, and grated chocolate. Yum!

The Energy Assistance Program I was in last fall had a mandatory class the participants had to sit through. They made the mention that preheating the oven was a waste of energy. What a joke. The stove’s not the monster consumer of gas, it’s the furnace. And if you followed that advice about preheating, you could foul up a lot of things that are meant to be in the oven a very short time at a very high temperature. It’s not going to make a huge difference on something that will be in the oven for hours, but in those cases the energy costs to preheat the oven will be marginal compared to the total hours the dish will be in the oven (which still will not amount to much, when you’re looking at monthly gas bills just under $20). Getting my gas bill down from 66 cents a day to something like 58 is not worth my worry.

I’m enjoying the recipes and the accompanying pix.

A nice respite from the pretty serious financial management stuff.

The pictures really tell the story- kudos on the pedegg trick- that’s really clever!

Um – why applesauce? Does not seem like a natural match, at least, not to someone like me with an Italian last name. Just curious.

Incidentally, add lemon zest to salads for a great summer salad.

And BTW, as a vegetarian, I agree with other posters who observe that foods other than meat and dairy contain protein. Also, you don’t need every single meal to be perfectly balanced, as long as you eat a varied diet throughout the day and week that doesn’t consist of junk food.

The silverware had a fight. The knife and the spoon were RIGHT, so the fork LEFT.

Also: knife, spoon, and right all have five letters; fork and left have four.

Silpat is the original French brand and is a bit spendy, but there are a lot of brands now and you can often find them on sale. I’m still using my first Silpat I bought back before there were other brands (many years ago) and I bake a lot, so they last a *long* time. It saves me prep time, clean up time, and saves oil, parchment paper, and flour/corn meal.

Fashion suggestion: Buy a shirt one size smaller that actually fits you well through the shoulders, and you will look much less droopy and tired. It’s amazing what a good fit in clothing can do for the appearance you project.

One comment on some of your previous “how low can you go” posts, though. You’ve talked about using dried herbs instead of fresh. It can be a money-saver, but I just don’t think most dried herbs give the punch that fresh herbs do. One way to get past the cost is to do container gardening of herbs. I can grow basil really cheaply in pots from late April through early October, for instance, and fresh, it really adds something. Dill and oregano grow easily in your yard and will re-seed and come back every year, so eventually, there’s no cost at all.