I plan on continuing the series on an irregular basis, but doing the series each week has taught me some worthwhile lessons about food, frugality, and time management.

Experimentation has rewards
One of the big reasons for us to start doing this series was that we both enjoy experimenting with our cooking. We love trying new meals and, believe it or not, our food adventurousness has rubbed off on our children as well. I’m amazed when we have friends with children over (or visit them) and their children refuse to eat most of the items on the table. Our children try them with relish.

The biggest reason why I love experimenting is that I am constantly discovering new ingredients. For example, I would have never even thought of getting fresh tarragon, chopping it up, and putting it into scrambled eggs. I tried it on a whim due to a suggestion of how to use tarragon – and I found that it made the eggs wonderful. Now, whenever I can find some fresh tarragon, I make some amazing scrambled eggs.

Try a new vegetable or a new fruit or a new herb or spice or a new type of cheese. You might find something that you really enjoy that you never expected. Even better, you now have something new to look for during food sales as well as a broader repertoire of ingredients you feel good using in your kitchen.

At the same time, there’s always another meal
Of course, the immediate drawback that many people point to with such experimentation is that you might wind up with a meal that you don’t like at all.

My philosophy on that is this: I usually try new ingredients when I can get a good discount on them. That way, if it turns out that I don’t like it, I’m not out very much money. Most of the time, though, I find that I do like this new ingredient. Even during the worst case scenario, where I find the meal inedible, I can always find something else to eat if I’m hungry.

The upside to discovering something new that I like is far greater than the downside of a dollar or two lost and the potential prospect of remaking a single meal.

A regular repertoire of meals is invaluable
We’re a two income family with three children, two of which are in multiple activities. The simple reality of things is that we don’t have the time in the evening that we would often like to have. Quite often, one of the parents is on autopilot when it comes to dinner preparation. We simply want to be able to prepare something easily, something that we know how to do, and something that will please everyone while being reasonably healthy.

When we try new meals, we’re often asking ourselves whether this meal should become part of our regular meal repertoire. However, most nights, particularly during the school year, we just pull a meal from that repertoire and assemble it for dinner.

Adventuresome meals are fun, but they often don’t work in the context of a typical day at our house. The vast majority of the time, we rely on things we know how to make or variations on those themes.

Preparing meals in advance is invaluable, too
Along with that tactic is the incredibly useful tactic of preparing meals in advance. We’ll often prepare a full meal, store it in a sealed container in the freezer, and pull it out the night before or in the morning of a day when we know that dinner plans are going to be tight. Sometimes, we actually just pull out a kit we’ve assembled from the freezer and just add it to the crock pot. Other times, we put out a frozen casserole dish with a note saying “put this in the oven at 350 degrees at 4:30.”

These meals prepared in advance also make being adventurous a bit more difficult, as you don’t want to prepare a quadruple batch of something before you’ve tried it out with the family. Thus, our premade meals are invariably old standbys, like tuna casserole or vegetarian lasagna.

Having these meals on hand makes it possible to get one kid to soccer, another kid to dance, and still have a good meal on the table when everyone converges at home.

Let what you have on hand lead you
People often get stressed out about following recipes and finding a bunch of obscure ingredients. You really don’t have to do that. Just use what you have on hand and you’ll almost always come up with something good.

What really works well is when you have a “framework” recipe, like the flexible casserole recipe or ratatouille. These are recipes where you can basically plug in whatever ingredients you happen to have and make something that works. At least a couple of the “Dinner with My Family” posts resulted from this type of experimentation.

Instead of panicking about what to have, just throw open your cupboard door and try to assemble something. Keep an open mind and you’ll be surprised at what you can come up with.

Let what’s on sale in the grocery flyer lead you, too
We love using fresh ingredients in our meals, but they can often be expensive at the store. So, often, we just buy whatever produce is on sale and use that as the backbone for our meals for the week.

If cabbage is on sale, we’ll make some sort of cabbage rolls or cabbage-based soup. If eggplant is on sale, we’ll make eggplant lasagna. If spinach is on sale, we’ll make a spinach alfredo and have spinach salads with other meals. If bananas are on sale, we’ll eat one bunch and use another to make a loaf or two of banana bread.

Again, many of our “Dinner with My Family” recipes have resulted from just this type of purchase. We buy some vegetables that are on sale and make a dish based on them. It’s cheap, tasty, and fun.

The post Some Thoughts on Dinner With My Family appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Our garden is producing a few last-minute things – well, mostly onions at this point. Along with that, we have our ongoing crusade to use up all of the things in our pantry and freezer, including such items as cans of diced tomatoes and premade pizza crust (as I mentioned before, I’d rather make my own crust, but Sarah found an amazing sale on several cans of it and picked them up).

What to do… what to do… how about we mix all of these things together and make something of a ratatouille casserole? Sounds like a plan to me.

What You Need
The nice thing about ratatouille is that you can pretty much use whatever flavorful vegetables you have on hand. In our case, we had a can of tomatoes and an eggplant, as well as some onions and a pepper from the garden. All you need is eight or so cups of your favorite vegetables.

In addition, you’ll need three teaspoons of olive oil, 2 teaspoons of minced garlic, a taspoon of dried basil, a teaspoon of red pepper flakes, a dash of salt, 2 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar, a package of refrigerated pizza dough (or a small batch of homemade dough, which is my own personal preference), and two cups of shredded cheese, preferably mozzarella or a mix with at least some mozzarella in it.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
Chop up your vegetables! This is always a good thing to do the night before you prepare a homemade meal. Just chop them into small pieces and store them in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use them.

Preparing the Meal
Since this recipe is so quick to put together, the first thing you should do is get your oven preheating to 425 F. After that, put the oil into a large skillet and start adding your vegetables.

Can’t you just smell the onions cooking?

You’ll want to add vegetables in order of firmness, so you’ll add things like onions and pepper first, let them cook for five or so minutes over medium high heat while stirring, then add some softer vegetables like eggplant and garlic, cook for five more minutes while stirring, then add the very soft vegetables like tomatoes and cook for five more minutes. Add your spices with the softest vegetables, so toss in the basil, red pepper flakes, and salt at this point.

Right as you pull the mixture out of the pan, add half of the cheese and mix it thoroughly into the vegetable mix. Then, put the mixture into a 9″ by 13″ casserole.

Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top of the mix, then put the pizza crust on top of the casserole. Cut a few slices in the dough so that the steam has a place to escape, then put it in the oven for 15 minutes.

You end up with a beautiful and tasty casserole. We served it with some fresh applesauce and a few remaining green beans from our garden.

Optional Ingredients
As I mentioned above, you can use pretty much any vegetable in this. Corn, spinach, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts – you name it and it’ll probably work in this. You can also vary the cheese, using other types in a mix with the mozzarella or on their own. No matter what you do, this pot pie will turn out well.

The post Dinner With My Family #37: Ratatouille Pot Pie appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

My wife loves this recipe and finds reasons to make it often. It’s helped by the fact that we had a giant harvest of squash this year, so we had to find lots of ways to use it. I like curried soups and stews, so that definitely contributed to my desire to share this one with you.

Most of the cost here is going to be the vegetables, so the more of these you have access to outside of the grocery store, the less expensive this recipe will be.

What You Need
Here’s what you need for this meal…

You’ll need:
a diced bell pepper
half of a diced onion
one minced garlic clove
a cubed and peeled eggplant
a cubed and peeled butternut or acorn squash
1 cup cooked chickpeas (canned is fine)
1 cup water or vegetable broth (we used stock)
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
one teaspoon of olive oil (or other vegetable oil)
salt and pepper to taste

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The best thing to do in advance is to chop up all of the vegetables and store them in bowls in your refrigerator. You can store the bell pepper and onion together, and you can store the eggplant and squash together, too.

Preparing the Meal
Preparing the meal is really simple. Just put the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat until it’s shimmering. Then, add the bell pepper and onion and stir for five minutes.

It’ll smell really good at this point!

Next, add the garlic, curry powder, and a dash of salt and pepper and stir for a minute more, then add the remaining ingredients. Wait until the liquid is at a low boil, then reduce heat until the liquid is barely simmering.

Let it sit for twenty five minutes, then serve. We accompanied it with a simple sandwich.

Optional Ingredients
You can make all kinds of vegetable substitutions in this meal and still have a great soup. You can use any kind of bell pepper, replace the chickpeas with other kinds of beans, use pumpkin instead of the squash, and so on. As always, use what you’ve got on hand or have inexpensive access to.

The post Dinner With My Family #37: Curried Chickpea Stew appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

As we slip deeper and deeper into fall, our family is starting to eat more cold weather food – thicker soups and chowders and so on. Hand in hand with this is our ongoing effort to slowly clear out the recesses of our pantry and our freezer by using items that have been in there for a while and largely forgotten.

The result of this is our own homebrewed “Wisconsin farmhouse chowder,” which takes several different ideas from recipes we’ve heard and things we’ve tried in the northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin area. It’s simple to make and I hope you enjoy it.

What You Need
The ingredient list is pretty straightforward. You’ll need:
- 3 1/2 cups of milk, separated into 1 1/2 cups and 2 cups
- 2 medium potatoes, cubed
- 3 or 4 shiitake mushrooms, chopped (morels would also work if you have a source for getting them)
- A bag of flash-frozen mixed vegetables -or- one cup each of corn kernels, diced carrots, and chopped broccoli
- Dashes of a few spices, including thyme, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and salt
- Half of a cup of peas (frozen or fresh, whatever works best for you)
- 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you’re using fresh vegetables, it’s always worthwhile to make them the night before, as well as the potatoes. You’ll also want to chop the mushrooms. You might also want to make the mushroom cream as well…

Making the mushroom cream is simple. Simply take two cups of milk in a saucepan, toss in the dried mushrooms, and let it simmer for half an hour. Add a dash of pepper and a dash of salt, then add two tablespoons of flour and stir it until the mushroom cream thickens a bit. You can add more flour if you’d like, but don’t thicken it until it’s solid.

Preparing the Meal
Once you have the mushroom cream, described above, add the remaining milk to it, stir thoroughly, then raise the heat to a low boil (medium to medium-high heat should do it).

Add all of the rest of the ingredients at this point except for the peas, stir thoroughly, then allow it to simmer for fifteen minutes, stirring regularly.

Add the peas at the fifteen minute mark, stir thoroughly, and allow to simmer for about three more minutes. Pull the soup off, allow it to stand for five minutes or so, then serve.

We served the soup alongside the wraps from last week. Many different types of wraps or sandwiches could accompany this soup.

Another option is to simply toss a small handful of shredded cheddar on top of the soup, as shown here.

Optional Ingredients
One simple step would be to replace the homemade mushroom cream with canned cream of mushroom soup, though there may be a flavor degradation here. Since switching to making my own by boiling mushrooms in milk, I’ve never really wanted to use the canned kind. You can also somewhat vary the vegetables according to what’s available to you.

The post Dinner With My Family #36: Wisconsin Farmhouse Chowder appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

This week’s goal was simple. What sort of healthy lunch can we make with the stuff on hand that’s in the spirit of fall (and has some of the flavors of the season), while still being relatively light, appeals to the kids, is inexpensive and uses a lot of what we had on hand already, and can easily be made in a large batch to pull out of the refrigerator in a day or two for a tight meal?

I think we pulled all of that off with this one. These wraps make for a perfect lunch and can also accompany a stew or soup for the evening meal – in fact, I ate these wraps in both of these settings. They’re a bit sweet (from the peanut butter), but both fall-flavorful and fairly light at the same time.

I’ll give Sarah a lot of credit here. She came up with these during some of her kitchen alchemy, where she just seemingly pulls out a bunch of random stuff and assembles a meal from it.

What You Need
All you’ll need is some peanut butter (I’m honestly not sure how much – just get out a jar and a butter knife), some tortillas, 1/4 cup minced apple per tortilla, 1/8 cup shredded carrot per tortilla, 1/8 cup granola per tortilla, and 1 teaspoon of roasted wheat germ per tortilla.

Roasted wheat germ is easy. Just spread out the wheat germ on a baking dish and pop it in the oven at 350 for about five minutes. Perfect.

We were able to find all of this stuff on hand at our house except the granola, which we picked up for a few nickels at our local grocery store.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The thing to do beforehand is to prep the carrots and apples. Simply chop the apples into oblivion and shred the carrots. You might also want to toast the wheat germ.

Of course, assembling the wraps is so easy that this is the real work of the meal.

Preparing the Meal
Lay out a tortilla in front of you. Cover it in a thin layer of peanut butter, then add the other ingredients as described in “What You Need.” Here’s what one looked like before wrapping.

Once that’s done, simply wrap it up, slice it in half, and enjoy!

These wraps work as a standalone meal. They also work as an accompaniment to other foods, particularly soups.

Optional Ingredients
You can substitute other spreads for the peanut butter. In fact, the last time I made these, I actually used almond butter. You can try things like hazelnut butter as well, though it’ll make the wrap very sweet. If you want it less sweet, use cream cheese as the spread. For other ingredient substitutions, you can leave things out as you wish or used other vegetables as a substitute, such as shredded sweet potato.

The post Dinner With My Family #35: Peanut Butter and Apple Wraps appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

As I’ve mentioned several times, Sarah and I are making a special effort to spread out our trips to the grocery store – and with some real success. Part of this is simply using things that we’ve had in the refrigerator, the cupboard, and the freezer for a while.

One item that’s been in the fridge for a bit are some rolls of prepackaged pizza dough that we got on sale a few months back. We like to make our own pizza crust, but the price was low enough on the prepackaged pizza dough that we simply bought some.

How do we use it, though? Usually, when we make pizza, I just make a crust from scratch.

The solution was obvious: sandwich pockets. We simply take ingredients that we have on hand, fold pieces of the dough around those ingredients, and bake them in the oven.

What You Need
Last night, we made two large batches of these sandwich pockets. One variety (the one I took lots of pictures of) included broccoli, fresh chives, and cheddar cheese. I also made some pockets using bell peppers and ricotta cheese. Both types included a mix of dried herbs (oregano, basil, and so on).

To make four pockets, you need a roll of refrigerated pizza dough (or a small batch of homemade dough), the ingredients you wish to put in the middle, some salt and pepper to taste, and a single egg.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you’re using any fresh vegetables in these pockets, chop them in advance. This always saves time.

Preparing the Meal
The first thing you’ll want to do is mix together your filling ingredients. For me, this means for four pockets, I’ll mix together a cup and a half of broccoli, a cup and a half of shredded cheddar, a dash of salt, a few dashes of ground pepper, three tablespoons of chopped chives, and a few dashes of mixed dried herbs.

I simply toss all of this stuff together with my hands until it’s reasonably consistent.

After that, I unroll a container of the pizza dough on a surface lightly coated with flour or with canola oil to prevent sticking.

Cut this pizza dough into four equal pieces. In the center of each piece of dough, put roughly a quarter of the mixture.

Simply fold over one side on top of the mix, then fold over the opposite side. After that, fold the remaining two sides over the mixture, forming a pocket. Easy as can be!

Crack an egg into a bowl and beat it with a fork. Then, brush the egg on top of the pockets. This will create a wonderful golden crust on top.

Preheat the oven to 425 F, then place the finished pockets onto a baking sheet that had lightly been coated with canola oil to prevent sticking.

When I had the sandwiches all ready to go into the oven, there was a bit of the mixture left over, so I sprinkled some on top of each of the pockets. Here’s eight of them, ready to go into the oven.

Bake the sandwiches for fifteen to seventeen minutes, until golden brown on top, then serve. We had some sliced apples along with the sandwiches, making for a great lunch or a light dinner!

Optional Ingredients
Obviously, you can put pretty much anything you want into these pockets. One thing I like about these is that you don’t have to stick with what you might think of as pizza toppings. It might seem odd to put broccoli on a pizza, for example, but it works perfectly here. Just use roughly three cups of filling for every four you make and let your imagination run wild – meats, vegetables, cheeses, mushrooms, whatever you want.

The post Dinner With My Family #34: Sandwich Pockets appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

At this point in late September, we’re starting to reach that point of using what things are still coming in from the garden along with the things we can find in our freezer and pantry to make new dishes. We’re also starting to move into more “fall”-type dishes, such as heartier soups and stews.

Our vegetarian gumbo is a great example of all of these things at once.

What You Need
You’ll need a half a cup of flour and a half a cup of your preferred vegetable oil to make the roux, a key flavorful part of the gumbo. You’ll also need a variety of vegetables – we used a small onion, a small bell pepper, a stalk of celery, a diced tomato, a handful of green beans, two sliced carrots, a handful of sliced okra, and a bit of cumin, paprika, and oregano for spicing. This will all be served over rice, so you’ll also need that.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The biggest preparatory step you can take is to simply chop up all of your vegetables in advance. This is a great prep step that you can always do the evening before or the morning before a meal prep.

Preparing the Meal
The first step is to get your rice cooking so that it’s ready when the gumbo is finished. Rice is quite simple to prepare, so I won’t focus on the details of that here.

The next step is to make the roux, which is essentially just a mix of flour and fat. Since we’re making a vegetarian gumbo, your fat will come in the form of a vegetable oil. Simply stir together the flour and oil over medium-high heat for about ten minutes, constantly stirring, until it begins to turn a bit of a caramel color, something like this (I perhaps added a bit too much flour to the roux here, but it’s workable).

As soon as you have roux, add the stiffer vegetables (like the onion, bell pepper, and celery) and cook for another five minutes, stirring a lot at the start to distribute the roux, then regularly thereafter.

At this point, add all of the remaining ingredients and about four cups of water. Stir thouroughly and then let it simmer for about forty minutes, stirring regularly.

When everything’s finished and the vegetables are tender (the carrots are probably the best ones to check), simply put some rice in a bowl or on a plate and pour some of the gumbo on top. Delicious! We served it with a fruit medley.

Optional Ingredients
You can get away with using pretty much any vegetable in gumbo, though I would consider tomatoes and onions to be pretty essential, and okra to be nearly so. Simply use up whatever your garden is providing or whatever vegetables you can easily acquire.

If you wish to add meat, you can easily add sausage and chicken to this meal. Cook the sausage and chicken in the pan before you do anything else. Remove the meat and leave the fats behind, using them as the “fat” portion of the roux that you make by simply adding flour to the liquid in the pan after you remove the meat and stirring it rapidly.

The post Dinner With My Family #33: Vegetarian Gumbo appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Right now, our garden is providing us with a small mountain of butternut squash. We have more of it than we know what to do with.

As a result, we’ve been eating a lot of it lately and experimenting with it in different ways. Of the things we’ve tried, this was the most enjoyable result for the time and extra money invested.

What You Need
The ingredients are pretty basic. All you need are these things (half of which came straight out of our garden):

You merely need bread crumbs (3/4 cup, separated into 1/2 cup and 1/4 cup), a small yellow onion, one butternut squash (roughly 3-4 lbs. in size), 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, six ounces of crumbled blue cheese (the only remotely expensive part of this meal), and a tablespoon of minced fresh thyme (you can use dried if you have it). You will also want some sea salt and crushed black pepper to taste.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
You can prepare the entire dish ahead of the time and keep it in the refrigerator, just adding perhaps five minutes to the total baking time below.

Barring that, there are two things I would do in advance. First, I would peel and cube the butternut squash into relatively small cubes, like these.

I would also chop the thyme if you’re using fresh thyme in the recipe.

Preparing the Meal
First, preheat the oven to 425 F. The prep won’t take long here, folks.

Toss together everything but the spare 1/4 cup of bread crumbs in a large mixing bowl until the squash is fully coated.

Spread the mixture into a 9″ by 13″ baking dish, spread the remaining 1/4 cup bread crumbs on top, then bake for 40 minutes. Pull it out and you’re ready to eat!

We served the meal with a small spinach salad and a simple pressed sandwich.

Optional Ingredients
The easiest thing to substitute here is the cheese. If you’re not a fan of blue cheese, you can use other similar soft cheeses such as feta. You can even experiment and use other cheeses like mozzarella if you so choose. As always, use what you have on hand instead of buying stuff.

The post Dinner With My Family #32: Butternut Squash Casserole appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Right now, we have an abundance of vegetables coming from our garden, far more than we can easily consume. Bell peppers. Onions. Tomatoes. Broccoli. Green beans. They’re all coming in at once.

Naturally, that means we’re eating these vegetables a lot. They serve as side dishes in many of our meals and, when we think up an idea, they also serve as the main course for a meal or two.

Here, we’re doing something very simple with the vegetables. We simply cut up some vegetables from the garden, cook them over high heat with a bit of water, add some rice noodles and a bit of sauce, and we suddenly have a wonderful simple meal.

What You Need
All you really need are rice noodles (dry ones are fine), some sauce that you like (soy sauce is fine, or you can try teriyaki sauce or countless other sauces), and some vegetables from your garden. That’s really all you need!

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The biggest step in this entire process is simply chopping up all of the vegetables. In this, we used a bell pepper, some green beans, some broccoli, and half of an onion.

Almost any vegetable that’s fresh from your garden would work. I’d use tomatoes, potatoes, peas – almost anything that would come out of our garden would be fine in this.

Don’t worry about amounts too much, either. I try to have two parts overall vegetables to one part rice noodles by precooked weight, but you can really do whatever you’d like. You’ll find that the noodles (if anything) expand during this and the vegetables definitely shrink, so it will seem like there are as many noodles as vegetables when you’re done (if not more noodles).

Preparing the Meal
About half an hour before you’re going to add them, put the dry rice noodles you have in a bowl of water. This will make them perfect for cooking.

If you have wet rice noodles (some stores sell them), just wait until you’re ready to add them.

When you’re ready to cook, simply add a bit of water to a large pot, turn the heat up high until the water is boiling then throw in your vegetables. I suggest putting them in in order of toughness, with the toughest vegetables first. Wait a minute or two, then add the next vegetable. In our case, I started with the onions and peppers together, waited about three minutes, added the beans, waited another three minutes, then added the broccoli. Keep stirring throughout this so it doesn’t burn to the bottom, and add a bit of water occasionally to keep deglazing the bottom of the pan (the flavor is delicious).

Wait until the vegetables are just a little bit less tender than you’d like (by taste-testing, of course), then add the rice noodles and the sauce you wish to use. Keep stirring for roughly seven more minutes, then remove it from the heat and serve.

Delicious, incredibly simple, and pretty inexpensive! It’s a home run for us!

Optional Ingredients
This dish is so incredibly flexible. You can pretty much add any garden vegetable you wish to the mix. You can add pretty much any sauce to the mix that you’d like, too. Amounts are pretty flexible, too, though I try to stick to about two parts pre-cooked vegetables to one part noodles. Just try whatever you have on hand and whatever sounds good to you.

The post Dinner With My Family #31: Mixed Garden Stir Fry with Rice Noodles appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Bell peppers are appearing by the dozen in neighborhood gardens, which means it’s time to figure out some great uses for them. My favorite use is to take five or so, clean them out, and stuff them with rice and other goodies.

Even if you don’t have a garden of your own, this is still a good time of the year to try stuffed bell peppers, as the key ingredient you need (bell peppers) is often on sale in the grocery store. At least, that’s the case around here, where grocery stores are competing with roadside vendors for sales on the fresh produce that’s coming online.

For us, this is a perfect summer rainy day meal. It’s really flexible, takes advantage of fresh vegetables from the garden, and creates a delicious meal with plenty of leftovers.

What You Need
For the exact recipe I’m describing below, all you really need are a few bell peppers, roughly one cup of cooked rice per bell pepper (this is a good opportunity to cook some extra rice for other meals, so don’t hesitate to cook some extra), roughly one small tomato per bell pepper (or one large tomato per two bell peppers), and a bit of cheese (we used a bit of Parmesan and some mozzarella). We also sprinkled some dried herbs (basil and oregano) on top along with some ground black pepper.

However, you can stuff these things to your delight. Other ingredients you might use include onions, garlic, mushrooms, spinach leaves – the options are endless.

You’ll also need an oven and a good-sized dish to bake the peppers in. I’m using a 5.5 quart enameled cast iron pot for the five very large bell peppers we’re using.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you want, you can do the entire meal preparation the night before quite easily, leaving you to just pull out the dish to bake the bell peppers in the next day.

You can also divide up the work into batches by cooking the rice in advance or preparing the complete mix that you’re going to put inside the bell peppers in advance.

One thing I would absolutely do in advance, though, is clean out the bell peppers. Cut a hole in the top to remove the stem and allow yourself some room to spoon in some of the mixture you’re going to make, then thoroughly clean the pepper so that you remove excess seeds.

Preparing the Meal
First, cook the rice according to the package directions. We used long grain brown rice, but anything will work here.

While the rice is cooking, clean and then dice up your tomatoes. I usually try to conserve as much of the juice as possible from the tomatoes when doing this.

When the rice is done, mix the tomatoes directly in with the rice, along with any additional vegetables or ingredients you’re using, like onions or mushrooms or herbs or some of your cheese. I made plenty here so that we can freeze one batch of the mix to add to peppers again later in the fall, using the last of our peppers from the garden. We mixed about 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese straight into the mix.

Start spooning that mix directly into the peppers. When the pepper fills up, I like to press down on the top of the mix with a spoon to force out air bubbles, which usually makes room for a bit more mix.

Once you’ve stuffed all the peppers and put them in your cooking pot, pour in the rest of the rice mix right in with the peppers if you have a little extra. It will cook just fine. Add any extra ingredients on top (we added mozzarella cheese), cover, and bake at 375 F covered for about 8 minutes per pepper (if the filling was hot) or about 12 minutes per pepper (if the filling was cool because you refrigerated things).

Scoop out the peppers (with some of the extra rice) and serve!

Optional Ingredients
As mentioned earlier, you can stuff the peppers with any number of things. While I would consistently use some sort of grain to make up some of the bulk of the stuffing, you can use any sort of grain, from long-grain rice to quinoa. You can also add many different types of vegetables to the grain. We used tomatoes, but you could easily add spinach, onions, garlic, radish – any number of things. You can also add spices and cheese to your heart’s content.

The post Dinner With My Family #30: Stuffed Bell Peppers appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

By fish fillets, of course, I’m speaking of whatever type of fresh fish you prefer – swordfish, salmon, catfish, or whatever else you like.

In our case, we used fresh catfish fillets. These fillets had never been frozen and were actually caught in a river just a day or two before we prepared them. They smelled, looked, and tasted delicious.

What You Need
Obviously, you’ll need several small fillets of whatever type of fish you prefer. For this recipe, we’re using an amount that adds up to about two pounds of fish. We’re also using a bit of olive oil to brush the fish with before grilling.

For the corn and tomato relish, you’ll need four ears of corn and two large whole tomatoes, as well as a bit of basil (fresh or dried, whatever’s easier for you). These are easy to acquire in the mid-to-late summer.

You’ll also need a grill, of course.

In our grilling process, we used two small cedar planks to grill the fillets on. These are not required – the planks were gifted to us by a friend. If you do have an opportunity to use them, they do add a certain character to the fish, but I’m not convinced I would invest any of my own money into the planks.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
One step you can take in advance is to prepare the vegetables. Roughly chop the tomatoes and store them in a bowl.

You’ll also want to shuck the corn, then use a knife to slice the kernels from the ear. It’s pretty easy to do – just start at one end of the ear and guide the knife below the kernels. If you cut too deep, you’ll feel a lot of resistance, so just let the knife guide you.

Preparing the Meal
Preparing the relish is quite easy.

Simply put two tablespoons of olive oil into the pan, spread it around, and heat it over medium-high heat for a couple minutes. Add the corn and stir it regularly, waiting for the kernels to brown just a bit.

Then, add the tomatoes and either two tablespoons dried basil or 1/2 cup minced fresh basil. Keep stirring and cooking for about another minute, then turn off the heat. Your relish is done.

The fish is even easier. Start your grill, lower the rack until it’s close to the flame, and turn up the heat to high. Brush the fish with some olive oil and sprinkle a bit of salt and pepper, then put the fillets right on the grill.

Grill the fillets for four minutes, then flip them (unless you’re using the wood planks, in which case you don’t flip). Allow it to grill for four minutes more, then use a thin knife to check the center of one of the fillets. Depending on the type of fish, you’re probably looking for a white flaky texture to indicate doneness. If you’re unsure, check the temperature, as fish need to have an internal temperature of 140 F to be done.

Take the fish off and serve with the relish and perhaps some vegetables on the side.

Optional Ingredients
If you wish, you can marinate the fish as you desire. Lemon juice, lime juice, orange juice, and many herbs and spices are common things to add to grilled fish. When accompanied by the relish, I like the fish to be nice and simple, but experiment! Do things that seem tasty to you!

The post Dinner With My Family #29: Grilled Fish Fillets with Tomato and Corn Relish appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Pita bread has such a wide variety of uses that we always pick some up if there’s a sale on it. One particular use for it is making individual micro-pizzas, where each person can have the toppings they want on their own pizza. This allows everyone to have the toppings they want that others might not want, avoiding such things as The Great Mushroom War.

Not only that, our calculations indicate that this actually makes a fairly inexpensive meal. We can easily produce five individual mini-pizzas for less than $5 (if we don’t get too crazy with the toppings).

What You Need
You’ll simply need a pita bread for each person eating, along with a small amount of olive oil and some basic pizza ingredients: sauce, cheese, and whatever pizza toppings you’d like. For our family, that usually involves mushrooms, black olives, turkey pepperoni, and onions, for starters.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The biggest step you’ll need to take for early preparation is to just make sure the cheese is shredded and that the vegetables are diced. You can easily store these in containers in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use them.

Preparing the Meal
Start by brushing both sides of the pitas with just a bit of olive oil. This will help the crusts cook properly, as well as give them a bit of extra flavor.

From there, preheat the oven to 400 F (about 200 C). Then, begin assembling the pizzas in whatever way you like. Everyone can do their own if they so wish, or you can make them yourself.

If you wish, you can easily grill these little pizzas, as long as you have the grill at about 400 F. On this day, it was a bit rainy, so we just cooked them in the oven on a cookie sheet. You can also do them right on the racks in your oven if you so choose.

Note that if you cook these on a cookie sheet, you may want to spread a thin layer of olive oil all over the cookie sheet to prevent sticking and to make a nice golden bottom on the pizzas.

Bake until everything is beautifully melted and a bit browned, then serve. We served ours with some fresh sliced cantaloupe.

It’s quick, delicious, and pretty cheap!

Optional Ingredients
Go crazy! It’s pizza! Try artichoke hearts, pineapple, sun dried tomatoes, spinach, cabbage, fish, sauerkraut – anything and everything goes as long as you like it. I’ve eaten pizzas with nothing but sauerkraut, onions, and a bit of extra cheese and quite liked them, for example.

The post Dinner With My Family #28: Personal Pita Pizzas appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One challenge my wife and I take on (and something that I post about in this series roughly once a month) is the challenge of converting unusual recipes into something that’s delicious straight out of the crock pot.

Many people look at a crock pot as a device for cooking roasts and stews, nothing more, nothing less. That’s simply not true. You can prepare all kinds of meals in it, setting them up in the morning and enjoying them when you walk in the door in the evening. They’re perfect for busy families who love home-cooked meals but often are severely time-challenged.

This time around, we’re preparing a couscous dish right in the crock pot.

What You Need
Here’s what you’ll need:

1/4 cup onion, minced (or 2 tablespoons dried onion flakes)
2 carrots, chopped
1 large tomato, diced or 1 (15 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 cup cooked chickpeas or 1 (15 oz.) can garbanzo beans, cooked
1/4 cup vegetable stock or 1 vegetable boullion cube
1 tablespoon garlic, minced or 1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/3 cup raisins

The couscous is actually prepared separately. You’ll need 1 cup dry couscous and 2 cups water to prepare it.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
Most of the work for a dish like this is done in the morning. You’ll need to do any vegetable preparation you need to do, first of all.

Next, use nonstick cooking spray on the inside of the crock pot (or thoroughly rub the insides of the crock pot with vegetable oil). Add all of the ingredients except for the couscous and water to the crock pot and turn it on low for six to eight hours.

Preparing the Meal
When you’re ready to eat, get a saucepan out and boil 2 cups of water in it. While the heat is raising, stir the ingredients in the crock pot, then turn it off and let it sit.

When the water is boiling, add the couscous to the water, put the lid on, and let it boil for five minutes. The couscous should absorb the water. After the cooking, you can optionally add a teaspoon of butter or margarine to the couscous, mixing it in with a fork.

Mix the couscous with the other ingredients in the crock pot, then serve! We served it with a very simple salad and it was quite delicious (I had seconds).

Optional Ingredients
Unlike many of the recipes I post, I wouldn’t modify this recipe very much at all. This dish relies a lot on the flavor balance between the ingredients, so if you’re interested in this recipe, I’d stick to the ingredients as closely as possible.

The post Dinner With My Family #27: Crock Pot Couscous appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I love pita bread. Pita bread makes it easily possible to really experiment with almost anything as a sandwich filling. Hence a sandwich made from crumbled feta cheese and chickpeas that turned out to be surprisingly delicious.

This recipe is based on one found in the Bon Appetit Fast Easy Fresh cookbook that has long been a part of our kitchen cookbook shelf, requisite wear and stains and all. We often use cookbooks for inspiration, but rarely follow recipes verbatim.

What You Need
You’ll need:

1 lb. eggplant, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
2 cups cooked garbanzo beans or 1 15 or 16 oz. can cooked chickpeas
1/2 cup reserved liquid from cooking the beans (or from the can of beans)
1 tbsp. ground cumin
1 tbsp. lemon juice
4 tbsp. fresh mint (we got ours straight out of the garden)
5 tbsp. crumbled feta cheese (optional – we made some with and without)
3 pita breads, sliced in half
2 tbsp. vegetable oil for cooking

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
As always, prep the vegetables early. Cook the beans if you’re using dried beans (and don’t forget to reserve 1/2 cup of the liquid at the end). Chop the onion. Store all of this stuff in the refrigerator.

Preparing the Meal
Put the oil in a skillet, spread it around, then heat it over medium-high heat. Add the eggplant and the onion, then saute for nine minutes or until the oinion is starting to turn brown (it’ll smell great).

Mix in the beans, lemon juice, and cumin and saute for a minute, then add a few spoonfuls of the reserved liquid. Saute for another three minutes and keep adding the liquid by the spoonfuls if the mix looks dry. You want it to be very moist but not runny.

Mix in the feta and the mint, then remove from heat. Cut the pita breads in half lengthwise, then stuff the halves with this mix and serve.

We ate the sandwiches with a sliced fresh peach obtained from a friend.

Optional Ingredients
This recipe works very well as-is because of how the flavors mesh, but you can use almost anything within a pita and it will turn out well. Experiment with what you have in hand and find things that work well. We’ve made lots of things in pita shells, ranging from Greek-styled food (like this) to things that are practically tacos.

The post Dinner With My Family #26: Feta and Chickpea Pita Sandwiches appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

My wife and I love making “panini” sandwiches at home, even though we don’t have a panini press. We’ll experiment with ingredients, then cook that sandwich up beautifully.

This exact panini recipe is based on one from the July/August 2011 issue of Vegetarian Times, with a few twists of our own devising.

What You Need
All you need are some vegetables and some bread.

2 avocados, thinly sliced
1/2 cup thinly sliced sun dried tomatoes
1/4 cup finely diced onion
2 cups baby spinach
4 ciabatta rolls, split in half

You’ll also need just a tiny bit of olive oil.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
As always, prep the vegetables. Slice the avocados and the onions and even the sun-dried tomatoes if need be.

Preparing the Meal
You’re essentially making a sandwich here, so slice the ciabatta rolls in half (if you haven’t already). You’ll then want to put just a bit of olive oil on the tops and bottoms of the sandwiches – the parts that will be exposed to the panini press (or to the alternate solution we describe below).

Then, layer the avocado, tomato, onion, and spinach on each of the rolls, then complete the sandwiches.

If you don’t have a panini press, get out two skillets and a few heavy canned goods. Lay the paninis in one of the skillets over medium heat, then put the other skillet on top of the sandwiches. Put some weight into the top skillet, which will press down on the sandwiches.

Cook for two minutes, then remove the heavy top skillet and flip the sandwiches. Replace the weight and cook for two minutes more. Since we like ours well done, we flipped the sandwiches again, placed the weight back on, and cooked for two more minutes.

We served ours with homemade yogurt on the side. To give it a bit of a sweet flavor, we added a spoonful of strawberry jelly to the homemade yogurt and stirred it up until the jelly broke down into small specks and the yogurt took on a pink hue.

Optional Ingredients
Paninis are incredibly flexible: all you do is add the ingredients you want. Meats, cheeses, vegetables, condiments, breads – just make it how you like it, then press it while you cook it. It’ll be delicious.

The post Dinner With My Family #25: Avocado-Spinach Panini appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Once a month or so, we try to make something interesting and new using our slow cooker. Often, we try to make modifications of ordinary dishes to see if they’ll work in the slow cooker.

Sometimes this works well and you end up with a good replication of the original dish. Sometimes it’s awful and you wind up with something barely edible.

Then there’s that third case, where you expect a duplicate (or something close) of an original dish, but the crock pot version ends up being good on its own, but very distinct from the original.

We like to make vegetable-heavy enchiladas. We’ll pack all kinds of vegetables into the tortillas, wrap them up, and bake them in the oven. In fact, I wrote about these enchiladas (in a slightly different form) a few months ago.

What happens when we try to translate that dish into a crock pot version so we can just start it in the morning, walk away, and eat in the evening (perfect for a busy day)?

What You Need
What you need, more than anything else, is a pile of vegetables. Here’s what we used. Many of these items came straight from our garden.

2 cups cooked black beans, or one drained can
1 bell pepper, chopped
2 cups corn kernels, fresh or frozen
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup black olives, sliced
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cups cooked pinto beans, or one drained can
4 tomatoes, crushed or loosely diced
2 cups tomato sauce
2 whole zucchini, diced

You may also wish to add meat. If so, try out 1 1/2 lbs cooked chicken, shredded.

For spicing, you’ll want 2 tablespoons chili powder, 2 tablespoons ground cumin, 1 tablespoon basil, and 1 tablespoon oregano.

You’ll also need 10-12 tortillas, corn or flour.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
Chop all of the vegetables. You can put all of the chopped vegetables right into the same large bowl if you’d like.

Preparing the Meal
Mix everything but the tortillas together in a large bowl. Stir until roughly consistent, like so:

Put roughly 1/4 of the contents of the bowl in the bottom of the crock pot.

On top of that, put a layer of tortillas, enough so that the below layer is covered.

On top of that, keep layering. Add 1/3 of the remaining mix on top of the tortillas, put another layer of tortillas on top of that, then put 1/2 of the remaining mix on top of those tortillas, put another layer of tortillas on top of that, then put the rest of the mix on top.

Cover the crock pot and cook it on low for six to ten hours. You’ll end up with something looking like this.

We like to serve dishes like this with simple rice. We cooked ordinary rice in vegetable stock, then added some salsa near the end of the cooking.

That’s dinner! Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Optional Ingredients
Obviously, there’s some strong flexibility with the vegetables you add. You’ll want to keep it around 12 cups of total vegetables, but feel free to eliminate a vegetable you don’t like or add one that you do like that makes sense (like tomatillos or something).

You can also try different proteins, such as chicken or shredded beef or ground beef. Cook these before adding them to the initial mix.

The post Dinner With My Family #24: Crock Pot Enchilada Casserole appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One of my favorite food blogs out there is Peas and Thank You, which focuses on healthy cooking with children in mind. I often find myself browsing it when trying to think of interesting food ideas that my children might really enjoy.

Recently, I came across a wonderful recipe for zucchini and quinoa lasagna there, one that I immediately wanted to try. After a few little modifications, that’s exactly what we did – and it was a big hit with my family.

What You Need
Here’s what you need to pull off this recipe.

2 large zucchini, cut into 12 thin, 1/4 in. thick slices
salt
1 cup dry quinoa
2 cups vegetable stock or broth or water (you really can make your own stock)
1/2 cup tomato sauce
1/3 cup onion, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
2 tablespoons cream cheese (we usually use a non-dairy type)
salt and pepper to taste
2 cups marinara sauce
1/2 cup shredded Mozzarella cheese (we often use non-dairy Daiya)

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
As always, cutting up the vegetables in advance is a great tactic. You can also prepare the entire lasagna in advance if you’d like, preparing it to the point that it’s ready to pop in the oven. Keep it in the refrigerator until you’re ready or freeze it for future use.

Preparing the Meal
Preparing this dish is really simple.

Preheat the oven to 400F. Spreat out the zucchini slices on paper towels and sprinkle them with a bit of salt and pepper and let them sit while you prepare the quinoa.

In a saucepan, bring the stock (or broth or water), the quinoa, the tomato sauce, the onion, and the oregano to a boil. Cover the pot and let it simmer for 25 minutes until the liquid is mostly absorbed by the quinoa.

Take the mixture off the heat, then add the cream cheese, the basil, and the parsley and stir thoroughly until it’s consistent.

At this point, you’re going to make a series of layers. Starting from the bottom of an 8 inch square baking dish, you’ll want 1/2 cup marinara sauce, spread evenly. Going up from that, you’ll want four zucchini slices (spread evenly), then half of the quinoa mix, then 1/2 cup marinara sauce, then four more zucchini slices, then the rest of the quinoa mix, then 1/2 cup marinara sauce, then the remaining zucchini slices, then the remaining marinara sauce, then the shredded cheese.

Bake this in the oven for 30 minutes and you’re ready to serve! We served it with a salad and some bruschetta.

Optional Ingredients
As always, this recipe is quite flexible. One spectacular ingredient to add is mushrooms, which you can add directly to the quinoa mix. Many other vegetables work as well, as do Italian sausage, ground beef, or chopped poultry of your choice. Just add things to the quinoa mix and see what you get!

The post Dinner With My Family #23: Zucchini-Quinoa Lasagna appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

This past weekend, we had several houseguests over for dinner. For these houseguests, we had a very summer-y American meal: we made some potato salad, fired up the grill, and cooked a few things.

The only catch is that my current dietary restrictions keep me from eating meat and dairy products. What can we do to have such a summer meal that I can eat while still pleasing everyone?

Our solution was two-fold: we made a batch of black bean and quinoa burgers for grilling and we made a potato salad that I could easily eat. I’ll talk about both of these today.

What You Need
Our black bean and quinoa burgers are based on a recipe we found in the July-August 2011 issue of Vegetarian Times, modified a bit. We really enjoy the ideas and recipes in this publication because they do a fantastic job of making vegetable-heavy meals really tasty. The potato salad incorporates ideas from all over the place, though there happens to be a somewhat similar potato salad recipe in that same issue of Vegetarian Times.

For eight burgers, you need:
1/2 cup quinoa
2 1/4 cups water
1 small onion, finely chopped
6 sun dried tomatoes
1 1/2 cups cooked black beans
2 garlic cloves
hamburger seasonings, to taste

For the potato salad, you need:
2 lbs. potatoes, diced into 1 inch cubes, and water to boil them in
2/3 cup plain yogurt (we used soy yogurt)
1/2 cup mustard
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 bell pepper, diced (use whatever color you prefer)
2 celery stalks, diced
1 small onion, sliced
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cracked black pepper

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The biggest step you’ll need to take in advance is to cut up all of the vegetables you’ll need and store them appropriately. You’ll also need to cook the black beans (if you’re not using canned beans, which many people do for convenience).

Preparing the Meal
First, let’s talk about the burgers.

Cook the quinoa and salt in 1 1/4 cups of water. Raise the water to a boil, then allow it to simmer for 20 minutes. All of the water should be absorbed by the quinoa.

Put the onion and the tomatoes in a skillet and cook them for four minutes, then add half of the beans, the garlic, the seasoning, and 1 cup water. Simmer this for five minutes or until virtually all of the liquid has evaporated.

Add half of the quinoa to the bean mixture, put all of it in a blender, and puree it until it’s a thick paste. Mix the paste together with the remaining beans and quinoa.

Shape the mixture into eight burger shapes, then cook them in the oven for ten minutes – just long enough so that they hold together well.

After this, you can grill them to your heart’s content. I find that they were pretty good after about 3 minutes on each side over medium heat on a propane grill.

And there you have it! Top the burgers with whatever burger toppings you like and serve them on a bun. I used brown mustard, rice cheese, tomato slices, onions, and a pickle slice on top.

What about that potato salad?

The first step is to boil the cubed potatoes. Cover them in water (with an extra inch or so of water on top) in a pot and boil them for about five minutes so that the potato cubes are tender but not so soft they’re falling apart.

Mix together the mustard, yogurt, salt, pepper, and olive oil into a liquid mixture. This will effectively be the “dressing” for your salad.

Then, mix together your “dressing,” the potatoes, and the remaining vegetables. Toss them so that the vegetables are coated in the dressing, then chill and, when ready, serve.

Optional Ingredients
Whenever you’re grilling, you have a lot of flexibility. Try different seasonings in the burgers. Use hamburger instead of the black beans and quinoa – or mix two parts hamburger with one part black beans and quinoa. Try different toppings on your burgers. No two burgers ever need be the same.

The same goes for the potato salad. Add hard-boiled eggs to the salad for some great texture and flavor. Use mayonnaise as an alternative to the yogurt. Try different herbs and spices. The possibilities are endless.

The post Dinner With My Family #22: Cooking Out with Healthy Options appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One of my children’s favorite bedtime stories is the classic tale Stone Soup.

The basic story is as follows:

Some travellers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travellers. The travellers fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire in the village square. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travellers answer that they are making “stone soup”, which tastes wonderful, although it still needs a little bit of garnish to improve the flavor, which they are missing. The villager does not mind parting with just a little bit of carrot to help them out, so it gets added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travellers again mention their stone soup which has not reached its full potential yet. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning to help them out. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by all.

When I tell it to my children, I often make it up as I go along, having the villagers adding all sorts of unusual ingredients to the soup to the amusement of my two oldest children. I’ll have the villagers add things I know they love (like pasta and cauliflower) and things I know they dislike (like tomatoes), just to get them interested and to get a reaction.

Recently, as we were planning a weekend camping trip, the children wanted to make “stone soup.” We decided to do this while on our camping trip, using a Dutch oven over the campfire to make a soup. We’d start the soup in the afternoon, let it slowly cook over the campfire, and enjoy it in the evening.

You can do the same thing at home quite easily on your stove top.

What You Need
The only essential ingredient is several cups of water, which will provide the backbone for the soup.

The entire spirit of stone soup is to pick a medley of ingredients. If you’re cooking this with a group, let everyone bring an ingredient or two. The entire fun of this soup is to find out what will come of the unusual mix.

The only ingredients I would highly recommend are some salt and pepper for seasoning. Everything else is up to you. However, if I were making the soup, I would try to add some reasonably complementary ingredients to what other people were adding.

If you’re getting into the telling of the story, you will also want to have a couple of large, well-cleaned stones. These aid in the cooking a bit as they help the soup to maintain a standard temperature, but they’re not necessary. In order to clean the stones, we actually cleaned them by hand, ran them through the dishwasher a few times, and boiled them for ten minutes.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
You don’t really need to do anything in advance other than thinking about things you might add. Some potential ingredients, like vegetables or meat, may need to be cut up or prepared in advance. It depends heavily on what you choose to include.

Preparing the Meal
Although you can use whatever ingredients you like, I’ll describe the stone soup we made on this camping trip. We camped with several people and different people brought along different ingredients.

We started off with two and a half quarts of water in the Dutch oven, along with three boullion cubes (much easier than transporting stock to the camp site) and our two stones. We placed this over the fire and waited for it to boil.

As the soup began to boil, we added a diced potato, three chopped carrots, two diced tomatoes, one chopped onion, two handfuls of partially cooked mixed beans, and some chopped celery. We allowed this to simmer for about an hour, then added some salt and pepper to taste.

We then added a handful of rice and kept cooking it until the potatoes and beans were tender. We then added some macaroni and some leftover quinoa, then cooked for another fifteen minutes or so. At this point, the vegetarians got bowls of soup, then we added a pound of cubed ham and allowed this to heat up for five or so minutes.

The soup was then served with oyster crackers and shredded cheese.

Optional Ingredients
Remember, of course, that you can use pretty much anything in this soup. Pretty much any vegetable, any grain, any pasta, any herb, and any meat will work.

It’s quite fun to cook this as a group, with people bringing unexpected ingredients. I would suggest that you give a bit of a guideline to others – for example, nothing too sweet and nothing anyone is allergic to – but let them bring whatever they like. It’ll turn out interesting at the very least.

The post Dinner With My Family #21: Stone Soup appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I’m not quite sure where we picked up this simple recipe. I was extremely doubtful about it the first time we tried it, but now it’s a staple in our home.

Give it a try – you might just be surprised.

What You Need
You’ll need…

1 1/2 cups uncooked quinoa (quinoa is a grain, like rice, that’s really easy to prepare)
3 cups vegetable stock (or water if you don’t have stock)
1 pound protein (we used beans; you can use extra firm tofu or cooked chicken or beef or whatever)
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
8 to 10 cups mixed vegetables – whatever you like
2 cups barbecue sauce (we made our own, which you’ll see below)

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
You can cut up the vegetables in advance. Also, if you’re using meat, cut it into small pieces and cook them. If you do that and aren’t using vegetable stock for the liquid, pour three cups of water in the pan at the end of the cooking, then reserve that liquid for the recipe. That’s delicious stuff.

If you’re using dry beans, soak them overnight in water. The next morning, drain the liquid, replace that liquid with water, then boil the beans until they’re well-cooked (this will vary depending on the size of the beans).

Preparing the Meal
First, boil the liquid, add the quinoa, and simmer it for fifteen minutes, stirring it a bit here and there. The quinoa should absorb all of the liquid in the pot.

Turn the oven on to 400 F. Toss the mixed vegetables together and spread them out on a cookie sheet, then bake for 10-15 minutes, turning the vegetables over at the 5 minute mark. Cook the vegetables until they’re perfectly done for your tastes.

If you want to make your own barbecue sauce, you need 1 cup ketchup, 2 tablespoons molasses, a dash of garlic powder, a dash or two of chile powder, 1 1/2 teaspoons vinegar, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and 2 tablespoons water. You can add other things to taste, too – cracked black pepper, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, a dash or two of liquid smoke.

Mix these ingredients together thoroughly in a bowl and you’ve got your barbecue sauce!

You can serve the protein (beans), the vegetables, and the quinoa separated (that’s how our kids prefer it):

You can serve them mixed together with barbecue sauce (that’s how I prefer it):

You can also serve them together without barbecue sauce or with the sauce on the side, too:

It’s incredibly flexible! It’s also quite delicious for a light summer dinner.

Optional Ingredients
This recipe is incredibly flexible. You can choose the protein you like – tofu, chicken, beef, beans. You can choose the mixed vegetables you like – broccoli, zucchini, summer squash, corn, cauliflower, etc. You can make your own barbecue sauce however you’d like or just pick up a bottle of it. You can mix everything together or keep it separate on your plate. It’s really a flexible meal that can be made in a way that anyone will like.

The post Dinner With My Family #20: Quinoa Monk Bowl appeared first on The Simple Dollar.