Peanut Butter Cookies, Part II

Really a Lot of Cookies

I know all of you peanut butter haters are sick of me by now—this will be the last peanut butter recipe for a while, I promise. But this is the one I was supposed to put up in the first place, so no choice on that.

This is another recipe that my mom got when she was living in Kansas, and this is one of the cookie recipes I make the most.

The full recipe is huge—it makes nine dozen (!) cookies—so if I’m not making them for a very large party or a weekend trip, I usually I cut the recipe in half. I made the full recipe this time to see exacly how many it makes (so I could say something more specific than that it makes “really a lot” of cookies), even though I have no use for even one cookie much less nine dozen. So if anyone is in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by and pick up a few dozen cookies.

I think of these as “food cookies” because they feel mostly wholesome even though they have a lot of sugar in them. (I was working for a while to adjust the recipe to use less sugar, but I skipped the step where I come up with a mini-version of the recipe, so every time I tried a new version I ended up with four dozen cookies, and I realized I was going to gain at least 20 pounds before I managed to come up with a recipe that worked. So, sadly, I had to pull the plug on that little experiment.)

One of my friends has in her household two small picky eaters who need to gain weight. They liked these cookies for a while (though I think they turned on them eventually; they’re really picky eaters), so she decided to maximize the calories by making sandwiches out of them, with peanut butter, banana slices, and extra chocolate chips and raisins in between two cookies. That’s some carbo loading! Not recommended for those of us who are not underweight.

The recipe I have written down is actually extremely vague—it’s one of those “cook until done” recipes—so I’ll try to describe what I do, but basically you just mix everything together, drop onto cookie sheets, and kind of squish them down before putting in the oven. Then cook until they’re puffed up and just turning brown.

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/2 cup butter or margarine
1-1/2 cup white sugar
1-1/2 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
2-1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
1 18-oz jar chunky-style peanut butter
1 6-oz package (small bag) chocolate chips
1 cup raisins
6 cups rolled oats

Beat together butter and sugar. Add eggs and mix. Add baking soda and vanilla and mix. Add peanut butter, chocolate chips, and raisins and mix. Add oats and mix until all is combined.

Drop by tablespoons on an ungreased cookie sheet and press down to flatten and squish together. (Yes, thank you, “squish” is the proper technical cooking term for that.)

Bake at 350 degrees. Take out of the oven when they’re puffed up and just turning brown. They’ll finish cooking when you take them out, and they’re better if they’re not too done.

The recipe I have says “nuts (optional)” but I’ve never made them with nuts so I can’t vouch for that. But if you dig nuts in your cookies, feel free to add them.

Specialness

A Very Special Sandwich

Okay so it’s all coming together.

Mark Bittman writes an article about peanut butter, and then I have a nice visit with my grandmother (who will turn 97 in December) and we talk about family recipes, and then someone posts a comment about peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. It’s the collective unconscious!

It’s time for the post I’ve been thinking about since writing blog posts was but a gleam in my eye.

It’s time for the post about … the Special.

The weekend before I started my project, I worked at a trade show for The Scrap Exchange in Greenville, South Carolina. On the drive down, I was discussing my project with my co-worker Rowan. Rowan had an idea for something I could eat on the project, something really good and really cheap, something that no one had probably ever heard of or would even think of eating.

Rowan went to prep school in Vermont at the Putney School. She told me that once in a blue moon they would have a very special meal — so special that it was called the Putney Special. She said it was an old recipe, from the Depression or World War II, when everyone was poor and life was hard. She said that it sounds weird, but it’s really good: toast with peanut butter and stewed tomatoes. (And sure enough, someone has actually written about it and put up a picture, so we know she wasn’t making it up just to get me to eat something gross.)

I said that’s so funny, because my family has a special meal too, an old recipe from the Depression or World War II, when everyone was poor and life was hard and it’s called … a Special sandwich, or just a Special. (As in, “Mom, would you make me a Special for lunch?”)

My housemates from college, some of whom will probably read this post, may actually remember me talking about this — though I can’t remember if I made it or not. All I remember is that I talked about it and everyone thought it was the most disgusting thing they’d ever heard of, so disgusting that no one would even consider trying it. I think I pretty much stopped talking about it after that, the same way I stopped calling soft drinks “pop” after about three days at school, during which I was mercilessly abused every time I said the word. Enough already, I’ll call it soda.

But emboldened by the appearance of of bacon in everything, and Mark Bittman’s article, and Rowan’s Putney Special, and my commenter talking about peanut butter and bacon sandwiches, I decided … it’s time.

This recipe is from my grandmother, who got it from her friend Florence Field, who was one of the first friends she and my grandfather made when they moved to Seattle in the late 1930s. She said she doesn’t remember when she got the recipe and doesn’t know where Florence got it originally, but it was something they would eat when they would get together for bridge. She and my grandfather liked the sandwich so much they started fixing it for themselves and passed the recipe down through the family. My father said he remembers eating it his whole life, he doesn’t remember the first time he had it, it was just something they always had. And then my mom started making it too.

The original recipe called for chili sauce, but when my brother and I were little, we didn’t like chili sauce so my mom would make it for us using ketchup. I don’t eat this often, but when I do make it, I mix ketchup and with Asian Chili Paste with Garlic to make my own chili sauce.

Like the peanut butter ritz cracker cookies, it isn’t much of a recipe, it’s mostly just putting things together.

Special Sandwich

Take one or two slices of white bread and put them under the broiler to toast one side. (You could lightly toast them instead, but it’s not good when the bread gets too crispy, so it’s better to do just one side so it’s partly crispy and partly soft.)

Take one or two pieces of uncooked bacon and cut it up into very small pieces. (You need it to be small so it cooks quickly, before the edges of the sandwich burn. How much bacon you need depends on how big your pieces of bread are, how thick your bacon is, and how much bacon you want on. This is a very flexible recipe.)

Spread peanut butter on the untoasted side of the bread, then spread chili sauce or ketchup over the peanut butter.

Place as many pieces of bacon as you want (and/or can fit) on the bread and then put it under the broiler and broil until the bacon is cooked. (Keep an eye on it while it cooks, so the peanut butter doesn’t burn.)

Cut each piece of bread into quarters.

Eat.

It is the bomb.

I haven’t tried the Putney Special but Rowan says it’s good, and I’m inclined to take her word for it.

And if anyone finds anything like this on the internet anywhere, let me know. I looked a while ago and all I could find were recipes for peanut butter and bacon sandwiches (peanut butter with fried bacon) and links about Elvis and fried peanut butter sandwiches. Nothing with peanut butter and ketchup or chili sauce.

Paging Doctor Bombay

We have an Artists’ Marketplace at The Scrap Exchange, where we sell things made by local artists who are using reused/reclaimed/repurposed materials in their work. During the holidays, we expand that into the Green Gallery with Craftland, a juried show curated by Scrap board member Megan Risley and some of her friends on the NC Triangle Street Team.

The Craftland opening was this past Friday night, and Megan and her people did an amazing job this year—we have some really great stuff, and I totally fell in love with this sculpture.

My New Friend

The artist is a guy named Brian Mergenthaler and I talked to him a little on Friday about his work. He said he takes apart old typewriters and broken sewing machines and whatever old machines he can get his hands on. He said he basically just takes the machines apart, then sorts out all the metal pieces—separate buckets for things that look like heads, faces, legs, etc.—then welds the various pieces together to make a sculpture.

He said he had been mostly making bigger pieces but decided to do some smaller things that people might actually be able to afford, so in this year’s Craftland he has a bunch of totally cool little things that are quite reasonably priced. They’re all great!

I bought the Witch Doctor, mostly because I love it, but also because one of my friends was joking with me about how I’m a witch doctor because I know how to solve all kinds of weird random problems—answering tax questions and fixing computers and getting rid of moldy smells in closets. Basically whenever my friends have a question about something, they call me first to see if I have suggestions. (After Ann told me she thinks of me as a witch doctor, I told her that I’m actually a witch, and she said she was going to say that but thought I might be offended.)

So anyway, I wanted to show off my little sculpture, and say that any of you readers in the Durham vicinity should come to The Scrap Exchange between now and the end of the year and check out Craftland. It’s worth the trip.

Peanut Butter Cookies, Part I

The Mystical Cookie

My parents lived outside of Kansas City for a few years when I was in college, and my mom wasn’t so excited about moving there, but while she was there she learned how to make baskets (which she’s been doing for 20+ years now), and she learned how to make the best cookies in the history of the world. So it all turned out okay in the end.

The first time I flew out there to visit, we were driving home from the airport and my dad said, “Your mother has the best new cookie recipe … two Ritz crackers with peanut butter, covered in chocolate.” I thought they sounded okay, but not earth shaking.

Boy was I wrong.

These are the best cookies you have ever had. (If you like peanut butter and chocolate, that is–my brother doesn’t care much for chocolate, and my friend Ann doesn’t like peanut butter in cookies, so both of them are more or less indifferent to these. I know, those of you who’ve had them are shocked, but it’s true. Some people don’t love these cookies.)

There are people who have had these cookies once and, I am convinced, have remained friends with me for years simply in the hopes that they will one day get another one.

My mom would send them to me in college, and we started calling them the Mystical Cookies, because they’re so much better than you’d think they’d be if you just heard what’s in them. She sent them to me at the office when I worked in Princeton, and then I think she might have sent some to my boss after I left, because everyone was so sad they’d never get them again. I went back for a visit maybe five years after I’d left and was talking to someone I’d worked with and someone who had started working a year or two after I was gone. Trudy said, “How’s your mom? Does she still make those cookies?” And Sabrina said, “Oh! You’re the one whose mom makes the cookies!”

It’s nice to be famous for something.

I was visiting my folks last week and brought a few home with me, though I don’t think I managed to do justice to them in the picture. (I wanted to show the inside, so you can see how much peanut butter is in one, but none of the shots worked all that well.)

They’re not hard to make, but you need to get candy-coating chocolate. My mom uses Merckens chocolate wafers, which she gets in the bulk bins at Wegmans. There are light and dark versions, but I like a combination of the two (I think the light is too sweet, and the dark is not sweet enough). In Kansas, she used almond bark for the coating, but I don’t know if that’s available everywhere. I think you could also make chocolate coating out of chocolate chips (or possibly any chocolate?) by melting and adding vegetable oil or shortening. There’s also a recipe for chocolate candy coating in an old version of Joy of Cooking that calls for chocolate plus butter and paraffin (!). Haven’t tried that one. I think whatever chocolate you can get that will melt without separating and harden when cool would work.

For such a simple recipe, it feels sort of complicated to explain. On graduation weekend at college, my friend Debbie was talking to my mom. She said, “Oh! I have to get the recipe for those cookies! What kind of chocolate do you use?”

My mom goes into this very long explanation of almond bark and Kansas and Merckens wafers and Wegmans and candy coating and chocolate chips and vegetable oil. When she’s done, Debbie says, “So… if I want these cookies, I should just call and say, ‘Mrs. Currie, please send cookies.’”

And my mom says, “Well, yes, that would probably work best.”

So that’s what I usually do. Sadly, you’re all on your own, so here’s a recipe (such as it is).

[And please note, these are not healthy at all. At all. Don't say I didn't warn you.]

Peanut Butter-Ritz Cracker Cookies
(a.k.a. The Mystical Cookies)

• Ritz or Hi-Ho crackers
• Jif peanut butter (I haven’t tried healthy peanut butter; I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly as good)
• Chocolate candy coating

Make the cracker and peanut butter sandwiches, using more peanut butter than you think you need. (I don’t think I’ve ever had one with too much peanut butter, but I’ve definitely made them with not enough.) Place on a sheet of waxed paper or plastic wrap on the counter or table.

Melt the chocolate. You can do it in a double boiler, but it works much better to use the microwave, because the chocolate gets hotter, stays hotter, and melts better. I don’t have a microwave, so when I make these, I usually go to someone else’s house.

Drop the sandwiches, one at a time, into the bowl of melted chocolate and, using a fork, stir around to coat thickly.

Remove the sandwich from the bowl of chocolate and place on the plastic wrap/waxed paper to cool.

When the coating is set, you can put in a tin or plastic bag. I think they taste best frozen, so I just keep the bag in the freezer and eat from there.

And I actually intended to write a completely different post about another peanut butter cookie recipe, but this is the post that came out, and now I need to go get some work done, so I’ll put the other recipe up later in the week.

On the Bus

This is not about food or saving money, but I saw a great talk last night and wanted to write about it.

On Wednesday, I saw an announcement in the N&O that 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai was speaking on Thursday at Meredith College in Raleigh, for free. I called a friend to see if she was interested in a road trip (we joke about how Raleigh is like another planet to us, we’re so Durham-centric), and she was, and she invited another friend who also was up for it, even though neither of them knew who Wangari Maathai was

Wangari Maathai, for those of you who are like my friends and haven’t heard of her, is an environmental activist and proponent of sustainable development. She started the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, a reforestation program in which rural women are paid a small amount to plant and nurture seedlings in an effort to restore indigenous forests and promote sustainable development.

She served in the Kenyan parliament and has been involved in many global development activities through the United Nations and other international nongovernmental organizations. She studied in the United States (something I just learned today, she was brought to the U.S. in the same “student airlift” program that brought over Barack Obama’s father), and was the first woman from East and Central African to earn a Ph.D.

Her winning the Nobel Peace Prize was somewhat controversial — she was the first environmentalist to do so — but she started her talk last night with idea that lack of resources generates conflict, and thus there is a direct connection between peace and environmental degradation.

When Wangari Maathai was growing up (she was born in 1940 — and I have to say that’s hard to believe when you see her, she looks incredible), the area where she lived in central Kenya was lush and fertile, her family and neighbors were able to grow healthy food, they always had enough to eat, there were springs and streams with plenty of fresh water.

When she went back years later, the stream where she had fetched water as a girl — where she played with frog eggs and then saw hundreds of tadpoles that hadn’t been there the day before and thought, “Where did these come from?” — had dried up. There were no eggs, no tadpoles, no frogs. And no water to drink. Crops weren’t growing, people didn’t have enough food.

How did this happen?

She saw the connections between the trees being cut down and the water drying up. She started working to fix it. She’s been working on it ever since.

She is amazing.

Her whole talk was great, and I’m looking forward to reading her memoir Unbowed.

The thing I want to talk about here is the great metaphor she had about how things go wrong.

When I was in college, I read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. My friends and I would joke about that, we used that phrase all the time.

Dr. Maathai also has a great bus metaphor.

She talks about “wrong bus syndrome” — you find yourself in a situation where things have gone wrong. Your crops didn’t grow, you have no food to feed your family. How did this happen?

She said that Kenyans take a lot of buses, it’s something everyone is familiar with, so in the agriculture workshops they would hold, they started explaining these problems in terms of having taken the wrong bus.

She told a little story. She said, “I was in Cleveland yesterday. What would have happened if, instead of coming to Raleigh, I had taken a bus to New York?”

“What would have happened?

Well, no one would have been there to meet me. I wouldn’t have seen the nice people I saw today when I got to Raleigh, who picked me up and drove me to a nice hotel. I wouldn’t be here in this beautiful setting talking to all of you nice people who came out to hear me.

I would be in New York.

I wouldn’t know anyone. I wouldn’t have any money. No one would know who I was or why I was there. Probably the police would stop me and ask what I was doing out on the street. All kinds of bad things would happen.

It would be terrible. And all of that would be because I was in the wrong place — because I had taken the wrong bus.”

She then talked about why people end up on the wrong bus. What are the reasons?

She said you might be at the bus station and you might not know which bus to take. So ignorance was one reason. There are no signs, or you can’t read the signs, so you don’t know which bus is yours. You just get on the first bus that comes and take it wherever it goes.

Another problem is misinformation — someone tells you this is your bus, but it isn’t.

(And I loved her example of misinformation. She talked about how before the missionaries arrived, people in Kenya believed that God lived on Mount Kenya. Sometimes he would walk around, take trips, but mostly he lived up there, in the distance, on the snowy peak.

The missionaries came and told the people that God didn’t live on Mount Kenya, he lived in Heaven.

She said, “Now, I went to Catholic school and there I learned that God is omnipresent. God is everywhere. He lives in the Alps and in the Andes and in the Himalayas, and even on Mount Kenya. So the missionaries were wrong. God does live on Mount Kenya.”)

Often you get on the right bus, and things start out just fine but after a little while you realize that the person driving the bus doesn’t know where he’s going. He’s taking the bus in the wrong direction.

So another reason you can end up in the wrong place is that you have a bad driver.

What are the things that keep people from stopping the bus when it goes in the wrong direction, from getting off and getting on another bus?

One problem is uncertainty and fear — people aren’t sure, they’re afraid of being wrong, so they stay quiet even though it seems like the bus is not going in the right direction.

Another problem, which she said is a problem in Kenya right now, is violence and intimidation. People know they’re on the wrong bus, they know the bus is going in the wrong direction, but the men driving the bus have guns and will not turn the bus around, will not let them off the bus.

She said that is a problem that’s hard to solve, that everyone on the bus needs to work together to turn things around and to get the bus going in the right direction.

Here’s an article she wrote that talks about her work and gives the bus metaphor and some other examples, for those of you who are interested.

All of her talk was great, and if you ever get a chance to see her (especially in an outdoor amphitheater, on a clear night, with a very bright moon) you should.

I especially love this idea of the bus because, like all great metaphors, it’s simple yet powerful, and it applies to so many different situations.

How did I get here? Is this where I want to be? Am I going in the right direction?

Am I on the right bus?

If you look at your life, and it isn’t what you want, if things don’t look like you thought they would, perhaps you are not on the right bus. And when you realize you’re not on the right bus, that the bus you’re on is not going in the right direction, you need to do something about it.

Don’t stay on the wrong bus, don’t stay on a bus with a bad driver. Stop the bus and get on another one, or get the driver to turn the bus around.

This is something we all would do well to remember.

And on a completely unrelated note, if I had thought of it, I would have tried to participate in the Q&A and asked what I can do to be able to sit and stand as ramrod straight as she does — even now, much less when I’m 69 years old. She looked like a statue sitting there before her talk started, listening intently to the introduction, head high, looking straight ahead.

Maybe that’s what you look like when you grow up carrying firewood and water, and planting food and playing with tadpoles, instead of sitting at a desk or hunched over a keyboard all day.

And that may be as important of a lesson as the bus.

Lunch for 15

Scrap Exchange had a Swap-O-Rama on September 5 and it’s a little crazy for the people working at it, a bunch of them are there all day, so we usually provide food. (What’s a Swap-O-Rama? Here’s info from Wendy Tremayne, originator of the idea, and here’s a blog post I wrote about our Swap in Raleigh, with pictures!)

This year we thought Only Burger was going to be around for the event so we were going to order lunches from them, but there were apparently problems with permits or zoning or some such thing and they couldn’t have the truck there. So no Only Burger.

So on the Friday before, when I called to check in and see how things were going, I was told that we had to figure out something food-wise.

We decided that doing sandwiches would be easiest, and because I was in the middle of working on things I didn’t really feel like working on, I offered to take care of it.

So off I went and shopped and cooked and packed everything up for transport, and bright and early Saturday morning Ann came and picked me up  and we loaded up the coolers and while we were driving to Raleigh, I started to tell her about my shopping experience and said something about the four stores I went to.

She said, “You went to four stores?”

I said, “I went to four stores … twice.”

She said, “You have to write a blog post about this.”

So here it is.

The reason I was able to do the $1/day project is because it wasn’t all that different from what I usually do — it was basically a mildly extreme version of my life.

With documentation.

And media coverage.

But shopping for people who are not me is different. Shopping for a lot of people is different, and shopping for a lot of people when you don’t really know how many people will be there and you don’t know what people will want to eat or not eat, is even more different. And doing this cheaply is not something I’m particularly good at. But I’m working on it.

So I figured this was a good opportunity to be systematic and see what I could figure out.

I started by thinking about what we wanted, and putting together a general outline of what I would need to make and what I would need to buy.

This is actually the most important part, otherwise you will get way WAY way too much food. You can start out with a list of everything you might want to make or eat, but you then need to think think think about how many people are going to be there, what they are actually going to eat, and what you really need to make. Remembering the whole time that less is enough.

I realized that one of the reasons I have trouble when shopping for large groups is because I’m buying things I don’t normally buy, so I don’t know who has the best prices. This leads to a lot of hemming and hawing and general supermarket-aisle angst, where I drive myself crazy.

So as part of the new systematic approach, I decided I would come up with a pretty specific list of what I was going to make and what I needed to get and then comparison shop before actually shopping. (Hence the four stores twice plan.)

This strategy was facilitated by the fact that all of the stores I wanted to go to — Compare, Food Lion, SuperTarget, Trader Joe’s — are basically on the same road.

So I drove to each of the four stores with my little list and wandered the aisles and looked at prices.

After the last stop at Trader Joe’s I walked back to my car, looked at my notes, and wrote down a list of what I was actually going to make and what I needed to get at each store.

The general plan was sandwiches (carnivore & vegetarian options), chips, fruit, veggie something, drinks, dessert. I didn’t want to spend all night cooking, but I was willing to put together things that are easy and/or significantly cheaper and/or better when you make them yourself.

Here’s what I ended up buying:

Trader Joe’s: $15.39
whole grain sandwich bread
lavash flatbread
sliced pepper jack cheese (12 oz)
grapes (20 oz)
tortilla chips (32 oz)
bananas (6 @ $0.19 ea)

Target: $23.24
deli-style turkey
bacon (1 lb)
pretzels (16 oz.)
juice (Juicy Juice & Ocean Spray Cran-Pomegranate)
lemons (2 lb)
carrots (1 lb)
brownie mix
brown sugar
Gulden’s brown mustard

Food Lion: $4.28
seltzer
cups
small jar Duke’s Mayonnaise

Compare: $16.06
cantaloupe
jalapeno
green pepper
cabbage
avocadoes (4)
tomatoes
onion (2 lb)
lettuce
cilantro
limes (4)
garlic
6 oz. bag of Nestle chocolate chips

BP Family Fare: $5.98
12-pack cans Coca-Cola
12-pack cans Fanta Orange Soda

Total Spent: $64.95

I made hummus, salsa, slaw, cookies, brownies. I also cut up fruit and vegetables, and cooked bacon for the sandwiches.

So we had sandwiches on wheat bread or lavash, with any combination of turkey, bacon, hummus, lettuce, tomato, avocado, onion, mustard, mayonnaise, salsa. We had fruit (cantaloupe and grapes), vegetables (carrot sticks and slaw), pretzels with hummus, chips and salsa, and brownies and oatmeal-raisin-peanut butter cookies for dessert.

Here’s what I learned.

Trader Joe’s was suprisingly not cheap.

I got tortilla chips there because a 32 oz. bag was $3.50 (vs. $2.50 for a 16 oz. bag at Target) but it was way more chips than we needed, so I would have been better off with the smaller bag.

The bread was a good price, and the cheese was less for more than at Target so that was a good buy too. The grapes I totally shouldn’t have gotten — it was $2.99 for 20 oz. and for some reason when I was in the store I was thinking that 20 oz. was almost 2 lbs so that was around $1.50/lb which is a good deal, but of course 20 oz. is nowhere near 2 lbs., it’s only a pound and a quarter, so it’s actually about $2.40/lb which isn’t a good deal at all.

Which brings me to my main point about Trader Joe’s.

I think they try to trick you into thinking you’re getting a good deal when you may or may not be. They package things in odd sizes, they generally price things individually rather than by the pound, and there are no scales anywhere for you to weigh and figure out how much you’re actually paying relative to what you’d pay at a different store. They also put signs all over the store that say “Great Price!!!” so you feel like you’re getting a great deal. And it’s very easy to end up in what I think of as IKEA mode, where you’re like, “Wow! Look how cheap this is!” and buy things even though you don’t actually need them.

Also they have that Costco thing going where they are cheaper per unit on very large sizes. As I think I’ve stated previously, I believe that’s a false economy; when you have more, you use more so you don’t really end up saving nearly as much as you think.

So basically Trader Joe’s in general makes me nervous, but I still expected it to be cheaper for the kinds of things I needed for this little adventure and was surprised that it wasn’t.

Because Trader Joe’s is kind of a haul for me, if I were to do this again, I would get my produce at Compare and everything else (other than drinks) at Target.

In terms of drinks, for some reason I can’t find seltzer water at Target, I don’t know if I’m looking in the wrong place or what, and also convenience stores regularly have crazy cheap specials on 12-packs of soda, which I like better than 2-liter bottles because (a) the bubbles are better (b) you can use keep leftovers indefinitely and (b) aluminum is highly recyclable.

I wanted non-soda options besides seltzer and juice so I started looking at iced tea, and I was looking at the big bottles of Arizona iced tea but all of those are sweetened and I really wanted something without sugar and then all of a sudden I was like, “Wait, I can just make my own tea at home.”

Duh.

So I made iced tea, combination of Celestial Seasonings Berry Zinger, green tea, and English breakfast tea, which I like to make strong, then mix with seltzer and a little fruit juice, and it’s fab. And it’s effectively free — when I buy a box of tea bags I have it for years.

I definitely recommend this as the frugal drink option.

Overall the food was pretty good, and there was definitely too much, but I was able to foist some off on fellow workers and the rest I took home with me and ate throughout the following week and I don’t think much at all was wasted.

I was reimbursed $57.59 from The Scrap Exchange. (I didn’t charge for things we didn’t use at all, like mustard, or that I just used a small amount of, like mayonnaise and brown sugar, or things that I will use again, like cups, so that’s why what I charged is different from what I spent.)

Ann thought it was totally cheap but it seemed like kind of a lot to me. It was only lunch, after all, and my goal is $1 per meal, so I feel like it should have been $15, but I spent almost 4 times that. Though the total is for everything I bought, including the food that was eaten later (most of the chips, pretzels, hummus) as well as some items that weren’t consumed at all (juice, half the bag of chocolate chips), and it doesn’t include things like eggs and oil that I used in some of the recipes, so it’s not the most exact accounting of everything, and I think it’s just sort of hard to compare and really I just need to not worry about it.

When all was said and done, I realized that one of the reasons I spend too much money on things like this is because (a) I want to make sure there’s enough food, and (b) I want to make sure there’s something that everyone will like. This means I have more variety than I would otherwise, and, correspondingly, larger quantities.

I think the only way around the quantity problem is to do a box lunch kind of thing, where you do specific amounts of specific things and that’s all. I’m not crazy about that idea, so my approach is to make things I like and will be willing to eat for the rest of the week if it doesn’t get eaten at the event. That actually works out pretty well.

The other problem is that I use events like this as an excuse to get all kinds of things that I like but don’t generally get for myself. And I did a much better job with that this time — no M&Ms, no sour cream onion dip, no Trader Joe’s sweet and salty nut mix.

So I made progress with something at least. The rest, I’ll keep working on.

Health/Food Update

I took a break on this between mid-May and mid-August, but I’m back to reading health books and thinking about what is “healthy food.”

I’m definitely not buying into the main premise of Good Calories, Bad Calories (the last book I made it through in the spring) — that carbs are the problem and a high protein, low carb diet (e.g., Atkins) is the solution — but I think the author makes some interesting points and the book definitely changed how I think about food and what to eat.

One of the things I noticed after the first week or so of my project was that I felt really great, especially in the mornings when I would wake up. I felt like my heart rate was lower and I wasn’t hungry; everything felt calmer.

[Good Calories, Bad Calories Aside #1: This is one of the several significant things I disagreed with in Good Calories, Bad Calories -- he has a chapter about calorie reduction and how it doesn't work for weight loss because people can't stick to a reduced-calorie diet: it makes them miserable, they think about food constantly, they're not able to concentrate, etc.

This was not my experience at all, and Taubes's argument appears to be based primarily on a study of World War II conscientious objectors who agreed to be fed a diet similar to what Europeans suffering through wartime shortages would be eating -- three small meals a day consisting of watery soup, one or two slices of bread, potatotes, and similar poor-quality foods.

Taubes described the results of the study and how awful the conscripts reported feeling, that they became obsessed with food, etc.

Uh, yeah.

As I said, I did not have this experience at all, and think the fact that you are looking at draftees in an institutional setting, where I'm guessing most of them didn't want to be in the first place, and then give them awful food and have them keep a diary of it, are really significantly confounding variables. I'm not sure how much of that study can be transferred to everyone everywhere who tries to lose weight on a reduced calorie diet.]

It’s hard to know how much of how I felt during the project was from my body having adjusted to a very low-calorie diet, how much was from the things I was eating (whole grains, high-fiber fruits and vegetables), and how much was from the things I wasn’t eating (fat, salt, sugar).

And I’m not really interested in replicating the entire project, but I have been thinking about trying to see if I could figure out which parts made the most difference and try to work some of those into my regular life.

The thing that I’ve found is that, for me, limiting salt/fat/sugar/calories is highly subject to disruption.

The reason I was able to do it on the project was because it was part of a larger goal that I was really committed to. I had arranged my entire life around the project (I even skipped a trip to my niece’s birthday, which came right in the middle of the project time frame — I felt badly about that but I think being in People magazine and on Rachael Ray made up for it, my nieces loved having a famous auntie) and if I had work meetings that involved food, I explained what I was doing and why I was drinking water instead of ordering lunch or coffee. That was totally fine in the short term.

But in my normal life, I feel like as soon as I have one high-sugar, high-carb, large-amount-of-food day (for instance when preparing food for 15 people working at the Swap-O-Rama, including making brownies and cookies) I’m completely off track and have to start over from square one. Since it takes a few days for my body to adjust to a new regime, it feels really hard to get into the groove I need to be in, especially since I seem to run into an “exception” at least once a week.

And this is one thing I do agree with about Good Calories, Bad Calories — carbs beget carbs. The more refined sugar and flour you eat, the more you want.

So I’ve realized if I want to make changes, I just have to commit to them and stop making exceptions, because the list of exceptions will be endless.

And that brings me to another concept that I learned about during my research and that, unlike Good Calories, Bad Calories, I can be 100% fully behind — Volumetrics.

This is the term that Penn State researcher Barbara Rolls has come up with based on her decades of obesity reseach — it is the idea of substituting foods with low energy density (low-calorie, high fiber foods like fruits and vegetables) for energy dense food (high-calorie foods like high-fat dairy, meat, refined flour and sugar).

Her research has shown that people are just not very sensitive to calorie intake; rather, they feel full when they’ve eaten a certain volume of food, regardless of the calorie level of the food. So if you substitute high-volume, low-calorie foods, for high-calorie, low-volume ones, you will lose weight without feeling hungry

[Good Calories, Bad Calories Aside #2: this is another one of my huge problems with Good Calories, Bad Calories. In 450 pages of text with hundreds and hundreds of references -- and extensive sections about caloric intakes and reduced calorie diets -- there is approximately one reference to Barbara Rolls and her research. Taubes criticzes people for selectively using evidence, but as far as I can tell, he does the same thing.]

I haven’t managed to read any of the actual research papers yet, but I was able to get The Volumetrics Eating Plan from the public library, which is sort of the meal plan/recipe version of the book.

It’s basically what I noted in A Few Lessons — you will feel better on fewer calories if you eat high-fiber, high-volume foods (i.e., foods with a lot of water in them, like soup and cabbage).

If you have stored energy to spare (in the form of fat — as I definitely did, and still do) you will most likely feel totally fine, and not excessively hungry, even though you are taking in fewer calories than you might think you need.

I’m not sure what happens if you don’t have stored energy to work from — I suspect you’ll feel hungry eventually if you’re not getting the calories you need and are at or below a weight your body can live with. (If I ever get to that point, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.)

So that’s what I’m going to work on for now — focusing on high-fiber, low energy density foods and trying to limit sugar and refined flour, and seeing how that compares to how I felt when I was on the project.

If I learn anything interesting, I’ll let you know.

Babette’s Feast

When I lived in Princeton, there was a weekly film series in one of the lecture halls on campus. (I seem to recall that it was the chemistry building, but I could be wrong about that, that seems like an exceptionally weird place to show movies.)

I don’t remember who sponsored it, or whether it was in the summer or all year, but I remember going to them on a regular basis. There would be two movies on a particular theme shown together as a double bill. Some were new and some were older, and usually they were good movies, and it was cheap and took up the whole night — and since we were all very poor, a cheap activity that took up the whole night was definitely a good thing. So we went to a lot of those.

There were some really good combinations — The Grifters and House of Games, True Love and Moonstruck, Metropolitan and Reversal of Fortune. Also some not so good combinations — for instance The Last Temptation of Christ and Wings of Desire nearly did me in. Not that they’re not good movies, but I don’t recommend trying to watch those back to back sitting on a wooden seat in a college lecture hall. After 2-1/2 hours of Martin Scorcese and Jesus Christ, the last thing you need is a movie that beings with random meaningless sentences that only angels can hear, in German. (Now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t even believe we sat through that whole thing.)

One of the movies I saw in the chem lab was Babette’s Feast, and it’s now driving me crazy that I can’t for the life of me remember what it was paired with. The only thing I can think of is Diva, mostly because that’s another one I saw that I can’t remember what it was paired with, and they are peripherally related in the sense that they both touch on art and artists. But that doesn’t seem right, it seems like it should have been another food movie.

None of which is at all relevant to anything, it’s just what I think of when I think about Babette’s Feast, which is really a great movie, and which I’ve been thinking about the past few days because I’m having some friends over for a nice dinner. I’m not spending 10,000 francs, but I’m definitely spending more than a dollar, and it’s a different experience shopping for a meal and not thinking at all about how much it will cost or even trying to think about ways to do it for less.

I don’t expect my dinner to be quite the transformative experience of Babette’s, but hopefully it will be good.

In the midst of thinking about that, I offered at the last minute to take care of food for the folks who worked at the Scrap Exchange’s Swap-O-Rama Rama this past weekend. And for that I actually was thinking about how much it would cost and trying to do it for less.

I’m very good at shopping and cooking cheaply for myself, but I’m not always good about doing it for other people, and I’m working on getting better at that. I figured this was a good opportunity to work on that, so I spent a lot more time on it than I would have otherwise, and I did learn some interesting things that I will share once I’m done with my special dinner and can get everything analyzed and written up.

So there’s something for you all to look forward to.

Pancakes

Short Stack

I was at a diner a few weeks ago eating with some friends, and was trying to decide between eggs and pancakes. One of my friends said I should get pancakes, because you can cook eggs for yourself but you don’t cook pancakes for yourself.

Channeling Bart Simpson, I said, “Au contraire, mon frere. I make pancakes for myself all the time.” (Okay, I didn’t actually say, “Au contraire, mon frere.” But I should have.)

The reason I make pancakes for myself pretty regularly is because they’re cheap and easy, they make a lot of food, and I think they’re really good the next day. They also travel well; if you need something to take with you on a trip, they make a good quick breakfast or snack in the car.

I nearly always add stuff to my pancakes—frozen blueberries or other frozen fruit, or nuts or granola, or some combination of those things.

The best combination I ever came up with was peaches and cranberries that had both been in the freezer for ages, they were shoved back in the corner and it was one of those days where I hadn’t made it to the store in a really long time and had to get creative if I wanted anything at all to eat. Those pancakes were the bomb.

I haven’t gotten too creative lately but have mostly been sticking with my current favorite — banana-pecan pancakes.

I like bananas on the underripe side, so once they start showing brown spots, I usually let them go all the way brown and then peel them and put them double-wrapped in a plastic bag in the freezer. They’ll keep pretty much indefinitely and are great for smoothies or muffins or … pancakes.

Unless you have a pecan tree, pecans are not cheap, but you don’t have to use many of them to make a big difference, and they’re very calorie-dense, so the serving size is small and the cost per serving is better than you might think. (Divide the per pound cost by 16 to get the per serving cost, for a one-ounce serving, which is a pretty generous handful and has between 150 and 200 calories for most nuts). I definitely think that nuts are worth the extra expense.

The other item that can add to your pancake cost is syrup, because pancakes without syrup are like a day without sunshine. (Hot pancakes that is; I think cold leftover pancakes taste just fine without anything on them.)

I used to get maple syrup from the farmer’s market near my parents, where it’s cheap and tasty. Then I didn’t manage to get up there (or have my folks bring me some) for a few years so I was getting it at the grocery but then the price of maple syrup went through the roof and I realized I didn’t really care whether I had genuine maple syrup on my pancakes, I just needed something sweet. So I made a simplified version of the pancake syrup recipe from the Tightwad Gazette and now that’s all I use.

Here’s the original Tightwad Gazette recipe, for you purists out there:

Pancake Syrup

3 cups granulated sugar
1-1/2 cups water
3 Tbsp molasses
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp butter flavoring
1 tsp maple extract

Bring all to a boil, stirring until sugar dissolve (a good rolling boil). Turn off burner, but leave pot on burner until bubbling stops.

The first time I made it, I didn’t have maple flavoring, and butter flavoring seems wholly unnecessary (if I want my pancakes to taste like butter, I’ll put butter on them) so I skipped those, and thought it was fine. I did get some mapeline (artificial maple flavoring) from my mom the last time I was home but I haven’t used it yet. I kind of like the syrup tasting like molasses.

So here’s my simplified version (with a smaller quantitity — I don’t use enough syrup at a time to need 3 cups of it), which I call…

Better Than Aunt Jemima Syrup

1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup water
1 Tbsp molasses
1/2 tsp vanilla (optional)

Bring to a boil to dissolve sugar.

The end.

For my pancake recipe, I use a modified version of the basic Better Homes & Garden plaid cookbook recipe. I usually use buttermilk because I always have powdered buttermilk in the fridge and don’t go through it very quickly. (Saco brand powdered buttermilk is available in the baking section of all of my local supermarkets; I’m assuming that’s national but don’t know for sure.)

Banana-Pecan Pancakes

1-1/4 cup flour (I use a mix of whole wheat and white, usually 3/4 cup white and 1/2 cup whole wheat)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
4 Tbsp powdered buttermilk + 1 cup water, or 1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 frozen banana, cut into small pieces
1/4 – 1/3 cup chopped pecans (approx 2 – 4 oz.)

Sift together dry ingredients. In a small bowl, whisk together egg, water (or milk) and oil. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir to mix. Add banana and pecan pieces and stir until everything is mixed and all dry ingredients are moistened. The batter will by lumpy.

The hardest part about pancakes is cooking them right. I use a cast-iron frying pan and I’ve found that the trick is to not turn the heat up too high and just be patient. (If the heat is too high, the outside will burn before the inside is cooked. Not that I’ve ever done that.)

It also helps to have a good coating of melted butter (or bacon grease!) in the pan for the first round, and then subsequent batches will be fine without adding more fat.

The pancakes are ready to turn over when there are bubbles all along the top. If you lift up a corner with the spatula, you can usually tell whether it’s brown enough.

Put the oven on warm and put the pancakes in the oven to keep them warm while the rest of the batch cooks. Heat the syrup while you cook the pancakes, so you’re not putting cold syrup on hot pancakes (or my dad will send the hot food police after you, he hates that).

Eat your fill while they’re hot on day 1, then put the leftovers in a plastic bag in the fridge and have for snacks or breakfast for the next day or two.

Yum eee.

Party Food

We had our annual board retreat for The Scrap Exchange on Saturday, and because of my weird aversion to potluck, I offered to make lunch again this year. Last year the food was great but I made way too much of it — I was eating leftovers for a solid week. This year I did a much better job. Less is enough.

I promised my fellow board members I’d post recipes, so here they are.

These recipes are all good, and two out of three are cheap. So you can spend the money you save on the first two on the cookies.

Thanks to my friend Jill for the fabulous sesame noodle recipe. I don’t know who Deb is but she gets a gold star from me. This recipe is killer good and incredibly cheap and easy. I actually make a modified version of it, but I haven’t nailed down the details yet so I’m going to post the original.

[In case you're wondering... My main change is I use a toasted sesame oil (rather than sesame oil) in a much smaller amount, and add more tahini to make up for any sesame flavor that's lost from cutting back on the oil. This last time, I added a little bit of a canola oil to get the volume and texture right. I'm still working out how much tahini and how much canola oil I should use (or if I should add or substitute something else). This weekend's wasn't quite right. But everyone ate it anyway, and I managed to refrain from telling everyone what was actually wrong with everything I made when they told me it was good. I'm getting better.]

Once I get everything figured out with the revised recipe, I’ll post the final, but in the meantime here’s the original recipe. Thanks Jill (and Deb!).

Deb’s Cold Sesame Noodles

1 cup soy sauce
1 cup sesame oil
1/4 cup wine vinegar
1/4 cup balsalmic vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
3 cloves garlic – crushed
1 Tbsp ginger – grated
1 Tbsp sesame paste (tahini)
2 lbs pasta – linguini or spaghetti
——
1/2 cup sesame seeds – toasted
1 bunch scallions – sliced thin
——

- Cook pasta
- Mix all ingredients except sesame seeds and scallions – Drain pasta – don’t rinse
- Add hot pasta to marinade and let sit overnight in fridge – Add sesame seeds and scallions just before serving

Note that this version of the recipe makes a GIANT amount. For this weekend, I cut it in half  and cooked about 20 oz of pasta (1 full package plus about a quarter of another package) and had exactly the right amount for lunch for 10 people plus a care package of 1-2 servings for a friend who loves this recipe.

When I’m making this for myself (not for a party) I do about a quarter of the recipe, so the final revised version I put up will be to go with about 8 ounces of pasta.

The other two recipes come from The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook edited by Michael Bauer and Fran Irwin, which is a really nice cookbook my aunt and uncle gave me for Christmas a bunch of years ago.

The first is a simple summer salad. I was going to do a cucumber salad but decided this one looked better.

Sweet and Spicy Zucchini Salad
from Brad Levy of Firefly Restaurant

4 medium zucchini, preferably 2 green and 2 golden
1/2 cup distilled white vinegar
4 Tablespoons sugar
1-1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp Chinese chile paste with garlic
1 Tablespoon coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
1 small carrot
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced

Trim the zucchini, cut in half lenghtwise, then cut into 1/16-inch-thick slices on a 45-degree angle. Combine the zucchini, 1/4 cup of the vinegar, 2 tablespoons of the sugar and 1 teaspoon of the salt in a bowl. Toss well and let stand at least 1 hour.

Drain the zucchini well. Add the remaining 1/4 cup vinegar, 2 tablespoons sugar and 1/2 teaspoon salt, the chile paste and cilantro; mix well.

Peel the carrot, cut in half lengthwise, then slice as thinly as possible on a 45-degree angle. Blanch the carrot slices in boiling water for 10 seconds, then transfer to ice water to stop the cooking. Drain, pat dry and add to the zucchini. Add the onion and let stand 30 minutes before serving.

Serves 6 to 8

And the second is I think the first Marion Cunningham recipe I made. These cookies are really amazing, but at $8+/lb bulk in the grocery aisle and $12+/lb bulk in the spices aisle, crystallized ginger is not a bargain item. Plus the cornflakes adds some cost, especially if you wouldn’t normally eat cornflakes. But worth it — these are GOOD!!

Ginger Jack Cookies

1-1/4 cups vegetable shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups cornflakes
1 cup uncooked oatmeal [rolled oats]
1-1/4 cups finely chopped candied (crystallized) ginger [approx 4.5 oz.]

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease baking sheets.

Put the shortening into a mixing bowl and, using the back of a large spoon [or an electric mixer] cream it around the sides of the bowl. Slowly add both sugars and continue to cream and blend until the mixture is smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix well.

Combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt; mix with a fork until mixed. Add to the creamed mixture and beat until thoroughly mixed. Add the cornflakes, oats, and ginger. Mix well.

Drop by teaspoonfuls 1-1/2 inch apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bake about 8 minutes, or until the edges of the cookies are lightly golden. Transfer the cookies to racks to cool.

Store or freeze in airtight plastic bags.

Yields about 7 dozen 2-inch-diameter cookies.