The Frugal Guy Cook

I need to do a comprehensive post or series of posts about my cake experiments. I have one recipe that works for cake that is eggless and free of dairy. The trick to finding that kind of recipe easily, if you have that pair of allergies, is to search for vegan and whatever type of recipe. Discovered that when I was doing clunky searches for no egg and dairy free or whatever. No need to be a vegan yourself, and you can ignore some of the finer points like making sure every ingredient complies strictly, but that community has done a ton of crossover work applicable to egg and milk allergies.

I’m reminded of this because today I experimented with making orange flavored cake, and recently perfected a yellow/vanilla cake variant of what started out as a chocolate cake recipe. I have the hardest time getting the chocolate version to come out great, but my son loves that flavor and can’t eat most chocolate. You know… milk chocolate.

I have also made versions with mango-peach applesauce and dried apricots, pumpkin (much better than my efforts to get a no-egg pumpkin bread to work without being too moist), mocha (in theory), and, very successfully, strawberry for my daughter’s fourth birthday. Sometimes I haven’t exactly measured the changes I’ve made, but it’s easy to take the concepts and extrapolate.

I know, I’m being a tease, but I’d also like to collect up the relevant pictures before I post it for real. Stay tuned Real Soon Now…

I love how this theme looks, and it’s easier to use one off the shelf than to modify extensively, but it’s driving me crazy trying to make certain changes. That is why you don’t even see the beginnings of a blogroll yet, and adding Site Meter via a sidebar widget made part of what was in the sidebar disappear. It’s very odd, there seem to be multiple sidebar parts and footer parts where one can use a widget, but part of the sidebar isn’t changed at all, other parts aren’t easy to replicate, and the footer sections advertised don’t seem to work at all.

So, in short, still working on it. And tossing around multiple post ideas, trying not to spew them forth too rapidly, at the same time, hello, should post something to get momentum rolling.

I am about to attempt to import content from The Married Guy Cook to here.  If it works, I’ll tweak from there, deleting some of the posts and continuing to set the new site up.  If it fails, I’ll remove it all and restore from backup to get to where I was before this post.

Update:
Looks like success! I’ve deleted some posts that were meaningless or self-referential to the old blog. All that remains after any more of that is to finish making sure internal links in posts point internally to FGC instead of MGC. Then any other tweaking that would have happened anyway, like category changes, blogroll, etc.

Once upon a time, I posted about cooking on personal blogs, and then I started a food blog named The Married Guy Cook.  It was inspired by and a spoof on the name of a short-lived food blog by Jeff Soyer, The Single Guy Cook.  That was especially appropriate, since my cooking ability came to the fore once I was married.

Now I am not.  Married.  Which makes the name a bit odd.  And it’s built into the domain, so still odd even if I rename the blog itself.  Which I did, but in the midst of a blogging drought and already dreaming of this new place.

Along the way, I thought about how much I knew now could have saved me and given me a better diet when I was single.  Along the way, I hit economic disaster that made my existing frugality useful and challenged it to be more so.  Along the way, I had a child with multiple allergies.  Allergies to fundamentals, eggs and milk, and more avoidably, peanuts, bananas and now tree nuts.  Worse, early on, thankfully temporary sensitivities to substances in most foods.

When I was young, I loved watching Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet.  I had to agree with my late grandfather’s remark that there was nothing frugal about much of what he cooked.  I hope to do better here, but the theme is general, not absolute.  Nor is it only about cooking.

To cut to the chase, this blog will be about frugality, something more in vogue than usual currently, and while that may relate mainly to food, that’s not about cooking as such.  Call it lifestyle as much as anything.  This blog will be about food and cooking, obviously, with an eye to frugality and making do, but not tied exclusively to it.  This blog will have a large coping with allergies component.  That could perhaps be its own blog, but I decided not to be too niche about it.  Finally, with three young, variably fussy kids to feed, expect to see an element of making them happy.  At the same time, I haven’t forgotten my decades as a single person who could have saved money and eaten better, so I plan to touch on that as well.

I welcome guest recipes and ideas.  Feel free to contact me in the comments or at an address to be named later, as I set the place up in finer detail.

Finally, I expect to import material from my old blog.  Probably directly, with the possibility of reposts from the past as well.  That may look disjointed, or be dated prior to this “first post,” so please bear with me.  And by all means, if you missed it the first time, peruse away.

I invented these recently, off the top of my head, inspired by General Gao’s Chicken. Haven’t recorded it as a recipe as yet, but I did replicate it from memory, closely enough to figure a recipe should be easy. As is winging it. Thought I’d post the picture, anyway. It’s so pretty.

Amazingly appropriate, considering the quantity of rosemary I use.

You Are Rosemary

You are stable and grounded. You may take a slow, steady approach to live, but you’re a survivor. You are an intellectual and very rational. You can see things from a logical, detached viewpoint. You are successful but not particularly ambitious. You have a way of letting success come to you. You tend to be a bit understated and modest. You let your accomplishments speak for themselves.

I can’t remember the name of the Hell’s Kitchen winner offhand, but I’d still love to dine at Louis Petrozza’s place, and I still think he’d be cool to meet, much like Rock Harper.

I wrote elsewhere about an odd Hell’s Kitchen dream I had last night. Meant to mention it here earlier, for anyone who might be interested.

Once upon a time, Deb posted her mother’s flour tortilla recipe at our former joint/family/anything blog, Accidental Verbosity, before moving to Blogblivion. We eat these fairly regularly, and once etsimated the cost for perhaps 16 of them at under 40 cents, versus, say, $1.69 for a pack of 8 commercial ones. You pay to save time and effort and get uniformity, but even Manny’s brand isn’t as good as homemade. It probably costs more now, given the recent increases in grocery costs and particularly, we just noticed on having to replace an empty, Crisco. That resulted in buying store brand soy/cottonseed shortening comparable to the current Crisco formulation. Traditionally one would use lard, which Deb almost got me as it was available and inexpensive. Definitely have to try that sometime.

This is a repost and, because it wasn’t written by me, guest recipe, inspired because I recently started making these myself, and found that the recipe was harder to find searching than it ought have been. I realized I’d started a food and cooking blog but never posted this here. Duh.

This was something Deb knew how to do inside out and I deferred to her, as one of her specialties. I’ll comment further at the end, but here is her original text:

Mama Jedi’s Flour Tortillas

We’ve been experimenting with different things to do with flour tortillas ever since we finally got around to trying my mother’s recipe for them. She used to make these often when I was a kid, since they’re better and cheaper than store-bought (and, I believe, because at the time it was tough to get even a passable grocery-store tortilla in rural Minnesota, a situation that has since changed). She taught some of the other women in the neighborhood how to make them, too, and they’ve been a hit with all who have tried them.

Mama Jedi’s Flour Tortillas

4 cups flour
1/2 cup shortening, in small cubes
1 & 1/4 cups warm water
1 & 1/2 teaspoons salt

Dissolve salt in water and set aside. Rub shortening into flour with fingertips. (I’ve got the warehouse-club-sized can of shortening, so I meaure it into a cup then divide it as I add it to the flour…instead of a single lump, little spoonfuls. Works just as well…the point is to have it in small pieces so it’s easier to rub into the flour.) Gradually add salt water to flour mixture. (The trick here is getting the flour/water ratio right so the dough is smooth rather than sticky or flour-y. I always seem to need a tablespoon more water or flour to make it just right, depending on how perfectly I’ve measured and the weather that day.) Knead well. Set aside covered for a minimum of three hours (I wrap it in plastic wrap, to keep the dough from getting a “skin,” then toss it back in the bowl and cover with a towel.). Knead again. Divide into 1 & 1/2 inch portions and roll out on floured board. (I shape the dough into a cylinder, then cut off the appropriate portion for the size I want for each tortilla. Usually takes me a test tortilla or two to get it right. The best part of that is that the mistakes are so tasty…yum. I also roll them out right on my countertop…a board is certainly not required, unless you have tile. *grin* The dough should be good and stretchy and a bit of a pain to roll out, and tends to shrink slightly when transferred to the pan, so roll ‘em thin.) Cook each on a hot griddle/frying pan until it bubbles and browns slightly. Makes anywhere from 12 to 18 tortillas, depending on size, thickness, and how many get eaten along the way.

As for what we’ve done with them…we’ve made burritos and quesadillas and even chicken and veggie wraps in the last couple of weeks, and I have no doubt some of the turkey will find it’s way into them in one form or another. Very versatile and very, very yummy.

The first time I made these, I became the official tortilla maker, they came out so well. The directions above say knead again after the dough sits at least three hours. Turns out that Deb didn’t actually do that when she made them. I did it minimally at best. It doesn’t seem to hurt them and anecdotally may be better, though certainly if the dough needs a little extra to get the texture feeling better while making it into cylinders.

I use one of those Pyrex cups that has lines up to a cup but room to add an extra quarter cup by eye. I microwave cold water a minute or 90 seconds, stir in the half tablespoon of salt to dissolve, and set it aside. I’ve been using about a cup in practice.

I make sure the flour is worked into the shortening extremely thoroughly. It’s somewhat like making pie crust, but without the objective of flaky.

I flip them over and over while rolling, to hel combat the curling and get them thin enough.

Basically it’s an easy easy thing to make. The big consideration is the sitting time for the dough. It’s fast compared to making bread. It’s even relatively fast to roll out, and I roll a couple then start cooking as I roll more.

They are so useful and so cheap. We’ve had the challenge of a baby with food sensitivities that seem to be based around salicyslates, and these were a perfect introduction to wheat-based foods, which as expected don’t bother him. Being simple and homemade, I knew exactly what was in them. Not like, for instance, whoile wheat pasta that contains corn meal, which he can’t have. But I digress.

Enjoy!

Not much time, as I am about to make supper here myself. As predicted, it’s Petrozza versus Christina, with Corey gone at three. Respectable, and apparently she was better than my impression of her had been. I do think it was an easier decision that he made it appear, because as always, it came down to the pass, and Corey was easily the worst.

Christina was smart to realize what the challenge was going to be and think about and discuss the ingredients of the dish while dining with her parents.

It was amusing Ramsay called Christina a cheerleader, because Deb has been doing that all season, as a type, at least, perhaps worse if she never actually was one.

It’s a tough call, and there are a variety of skills being tested. Christina would be Heather the second, only less obviously competent up front, more of a talented newbie who lucked out. Petrozza would be the “hey, they let an old guy win for once” winner. Christina would keep the alternating male/female pattern. Petrozza would set them free from it.

Petrozza would seem to be perfect and would definitely be my choice, except the lackadaisical, forgetful tendency. That can be sharpened off and balanced by supporting staff.

Christina is more capable of leadership than I might have expected, but would need some polishing of her own. For her, though, it’s the start of a career, with a bang, and she’d have incentive that Petrozza, being established in his own right, might not.

I’m perhaps rooting slightly for Petrozza, but it’s not going to bother me either way. Presumably we’ll see a lot more of how each of them really are during the finale.

In the course of this, I was looking at the Hell’s Kitchen Wikipedia article and associated season articles. It’s interesting to note that Heather is done with her spiffy contract and is working as “a chef” at nowhere significant. It’s interesting to note that Michael, who famously accepted and then withdrew from an offer to work with Ramsay, and eventually got a plum restaurant gig as executive chef on the strength of his win, is no longer in that position. You just never know.