Why You Should Always Read Ingredient Labels

Now that I've shared my preposterously easy and highly authentic Black Beans and Rice recipe, let me share a story, the moral of which is this:

Always read ingredient labels. At least glance at them.

Long time Casual Kitchen readers will recall from elsewhere in this blog how I've encouraged you to make all recipes by the book at least once before attempting any recipe modifications. Well, this time, going “by the book" kind of backfired on us.

But because I usually try and follow my own rules, this meant blindly following the instructions on the label of a can of Goya black beans, which is where I originally found this delightful and simple recipe. So when the recipe called for "two packets Sazon Goya without Annatto," I obediently grabbed a box of Sazon Goya packets. I was already in the Spanish foods aisle anyway, and hey, I was only following orders.

Unfortunately, after Laura and I had finished dinner, we started to feel just a tad bit hypotonic. I take that back. It was more like we'd been hit by a rusty shipping container-full of sodium.

Laura picked up the box of Sazon Goya and started reading the ingredients:

INGREDIENTES:
Glutamato Monsodico
Sal
Ajo en Polvo...

(Whoops! Wrong side.)

INGREDIENTS:
Monsodium Glutamate
Salt
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder
Spices
Spice Extracts
Natural Color
Tricalcium Phosphate (anti-caking agent)

Now I understood why we felt so woozy. Not only does this spice mix contain a lot of salt (as the second ingredient listed), but it contains even more MSG--salt on steroids! And I'm still trying to figure out what tricalcium phosphate is, but in any case we weren't even trying to make cake.

Needless to say, we made our modifications for the next time, and this second-order spice mix was left out of the recipe.

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Black Beans and Rice: Laughably Cheap Comfort Food

Black beans and rice is a favorite comfort food for us here at Casual Kitchen. Our recipe, which I’m going to share with you today, is authentic, vegetarian, laughably cheap, and highly scalable.

It’s also a really quick and easy meal to make: from start to finish, you should be able to make this dish in 20-25 minutes. Enjoy!
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Classic Black Beans and Rice

Ingredients:
4 Tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 1-lb 13-ounce can black beans, undrained
1 cup water


Spice mix:
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon oregano (more or less to taste)
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
Optional for a spicier sauce: cayenne pepper to taste

Directions:
Heat oil in a large non-stick pan, add onion, green pepper and garlic, and saute for 5-7 minutes until tender. Add all remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes. Serve over rice.

Serves 4-6. Can be easily doubled.
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A few brief recipe notes:

1) Feel free to experiment with the mix of spices in this dish. One alternative we’ve used is adding 1 1/2 Tablespoons of the dry spice mix (adobo seco) from Daisy Cooks!, which I’ll share with you here (we've modified it slightly, in part to reduce the salt content):

1 Tablespoon salt
3 Tablespoons garlic powder
3 Tablespoons onion powder
3 Tablespoons black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons ground oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin

Makes about 12 Tablespoons of mix; use 1 1/2 Tablespoons per batch of black beans.

You can keep any remaining spice mix in an airtight container for the next time you make this recipe.

2) Let’s quantify the risible inexpensivity of this recipe, shall we? The total cost of this dish runs approximately $3.50, which works out to about 65-70c per serving (!) including rice. God, I just love recipes like this.

3) Tune in a few days from now and I’ll share an embarrassing story about the very first time we made this recipe.



Related Posts:
Why I'm a Part-Time Vegetarian
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Mock Wild Rice: An Insanely Easy To Make Side Dish
Three Easy, Delicious and Inexpensive Homemade Salad Dressing Recipes

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Spending to Save: Frugality and Expensive Food

My post the other day on Kona coffee met with an interesting reaction from a couple of readers who suggested that it was flat-out hypocritical, even insane, to buy coffee at $25.95 a pound and at the same time blog about how to cook frugally and manage food costs.

Now, being called insane is nothing new for me. But I do take umbrage at being called a hypocrite. Therefore, I'd like to use this post to discuss frugality and how we think about it here at Casual Kitchen.

But first, I'd like to put the issue, as I see it, in the form of a broad question to my readers:

Is it possible to enjoy expensive things and yet still be frugal and financially responsible?

For us, the answer is a clear yes--but obviously the expensive things must be done in moderation. But I would love to hear reader thoughts and opinions on this question, especially if you have a view that differs from ours.

Here's how we think about expensive purchases at Casual Kitchen: we actually use expensive purchases to encourage ourselves to be more financially responsible rather than less. Let me explain with some specific examples:

1) We use expensive purchases as a reward for an accomplishment. This works in two ways: we might celebrate large successes (like funding a two-year emergency fund or quitting a crappy job) with a really fancy dinner out, or we might celebrate small successes (like making it through a particularly hard day of work) with a glass of single malt scotch--with the size of the glass depending on the difficulty of the day.

2) If the purchase is a durable good, we usually hesitate a bit and try and make sure it's an item we are likely to use heavily. Then we make sure we buy a high quality item that we are confident will last a long time. That way we are much more likely to get our money's worth out of the purchase.

3) If the purchase is of a service or an experience (e.g. travel, an expensive dinner out, or even fancy Kona coffee), we try never to let it any aspect of it be an afterthought. We try to make these types of purchases carefully and mindfully, so we can maximize our enjoyment of the entire experience.

In my view, the real villain appears when one starts taking the nice things in life for granted. Once you start accelerating on the so-called hedonic treadmill, it gets much harder to manage your spending. Furthermore, a hectic life spent bounding from one fancy experience to another can be surprisingly bereft of mindful, positive experiences. For those of you who are interested in pursuing these issues beyond the realms of food and cooking, I recommend reading Juliet Schor's book The Overspent American.

Readers, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this complicated subject. Do you agree with me? Why or why not?

Related Posts:
How to Be a Satisficer
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices
Cooking Like the Stars? Don't Waste Your Money
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
How to Defeat the Retail Industry's Ninja Mind Tricks





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CK Food Links--Friday October 17, 2008

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting food-related links from around the internet.
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How the Blind Cook from Chocolate and Zucchini
Clotilde at C&Z interviews one of her readers who cooks--despite being blind. That's right, blind. Read this post if you are in need of some serious inspiration.

Total Disclosure from Alosha's Kitchen
This was one of the most moving posts I've ever read from a fellow food blogger. It's amazing to feel the sheer joy, happiness and pride simply bursting out of Alosha as she tells us her experiences learning how to cook. To me, this is what food blogging is all about.

Savory Roasted Grapes from I (heart) Kale:
"I know it sounds weird--but hear me out. Grapes are in season right now, and while they're plenty delicious just popped in your mouth as snacks or fermented into wine, sometimes autumn abundance just cries out for a little innovation. So last weekend, we decided to give grapes our household produce spa treatment, i.e. dousing them with olive oil and salt and roasting them. This resulted in a surprising and delectable addition to our game night buffet: savory grapes, warm from the oven and addictively salty-sweet."

Going Against Type at Caustic Musings
Are you going against your body type--and thus beating your head against the wall--when it comes to your goals for your physique? A great article from Maggie Wang's blog.

In Search of Nutrition Nirvana at Caustic Musings
Another really good post from Maggie on motivating yourself to eat healthy foods: "Instead of forcing myself to eat things I couldn't stand and setting myself up for failure and misery, I should have been circling all of the foods I truly liked on the approved list and building my menu from those."

Chocolate Espresso Fudge Cake at Use Real Butter
Jen's own version of a cake from Death by Chocolate by Marcel Desaulniers. I think the best way to describe this recipe might be Annihilation by Chocolate. Sounds like paradise to me.

Five Ways to Save on Wedding Food at Cheap Healthy Good:
A thought-provoking post from Kris on how to put on a great wedding but cut out some of the really expensive things that really aren't worth the money. My suggestion? E-L-O-P-E.

Third World Cash
A new blog I've started reading that I thought worth sharing with you all. A personal finance and frugality blog written by a woman in the Philippines. She shares many of the same goals and applies many of the same concepts that you'll find in the typical US-based personal finance blog--except that her monthly income (after tax) is $400US.

Steak au Poivre at The Fumbling Foodie
I love recipes that sound (and taste) fancy but in reality can be made with ease. Dave shows us how to put together a recipe that, despite the haute classe title, is surprisingly easy to make.

Carrot Salad with Preserved Lemon Juice, Parsley and Thyme from Cream Puffs in Venice
Ivonne brings us an amazingly simple yet original carrot salad from her exceptional blog. I can't wait to try this one.



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Calling All Coffee Addicts: 100% Kona Coffee

I've talked about coffee a few times on this blog, sharing our favorite coffee store and our favorite way to make coffee. But until now I've never shared with readers our absolute favorite type of coffee.

This post is for those of you who truly love coffee, particularly if you prefer it strong, dark and bitter. Let me introduce you to Hawaiian Kona coffee.

We discovered Kona coffee a number of years ago on a visit to Hawaii, but to be honest it took us a little while to acquire a taste for this earthy and particularly strong brew.

And we'll probably never acquire a taste for the cost of this coffee, which is a rather unseemly $25.95 per pound. You can't get any further from laughably cheap than that, so obviously we don't drink this stuff every day.

Instead, we drink it on special occasions. Perhaps we'll treat ourselves to a pot of Kona after hard week, or I'll surprise Laura with a cup of it on a Tuesday morning (it's her longest and most grueling day of the workweek) as an extra incentive for her to leap forth and bring home the bacon. Any time we need a so-called happiness booster, a caffeinated kick from a strong pot of Kona coffee always seems to do the trick.

Let me also share the brand we typically buy: Hawaii Mountain Gold Coffee, from the Ferrari Coffee Company. Our favorite is the 100% Kona Dark Roast (a note to readers: this is simply a recommendation and not an affiliate link--we've been very happy with the quality and service of this company after years of ordering and drinking their coffee).

Finally, there's also a more affordable Kona coffee option available: Kona blend, which is a striking and rich tasting blend of Kona and regular coffee. And at a more reasonable $14-15 a pound, it's a lot easier on the wallet.

What is your absolute favorite brand of coffee? And have you ever tried Kona coffee? What did you think of it?

Kona Coffee Resources:
Ferrari Coffee 1-800-288-1542 (We buy the 100% Kona Dark Roast, at $25.95 in the bean or ground.)
Royal Kona Coffee

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Top Ten Most Popular Posts of Casual Kitchen

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Crispy Tangy Pierogies

The pierogie (sometimes spelled pirogi) is a type of dumpling common to eastern European cuisine that can be filled with a fascinatingly wide variety of fillings. In today's post, I'm going to talk briefly about this highly flexible and interesting food, and then I'll share an unusual and easy preparation method for pierogies that give them a sharp and tangy flavor that I'm sure you and your family will love.

Let me also say what today's post is not--it's not a recipe for making pierogies from scratch. While it can be fun to make pierogie dough and filling and put together these delicious dumplings, it's a labor-intensive process that doesn't scale well. Thus thus it's the kind of cooking we typically try and avoid here at Casual Kitchen. However, for those of you who are interested, I've prepared a list of some excellent pierogie-making recipe sites below.

Instead, we usually buy them pre-made, either at our grocery store or at our local Polish ethnic food shop. Pierogies freeze very well, so we often keep a stash of them in our freezer for those nights when we need to throw together an easy meal.

Finally, let me make a few quick comments on the amazing flexibility of the simple pierogie. You can eat them for breakfast, lunch, dinner--even dessert, as you'll see in a moment. They can have traditional fillings like mashed potatoes, meats, or cheeses, or they can have more creative fillings, like mushrooms, cabbage, sauerkraut, or any combination of whatever vegetables or greens you have fresh on hand.

Pierogies can even have surprisingly unusual fillings, like fresh seasonal fruits or other sweet dessert fillings. In fact, the single greatest pierogie I ever had in my life was one filled with fresh blueberries at Damis Restaurant in the Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Today's pierogie preparation method won't mesh particularly well with a fruit-filled or dessert-style pierogie, but it will really jazz up the simple and traditional "meat-and-potatoes" type pierogie. Try it and see what you think!
*********************
Crispy Tangy Pierogies

1) Boil frozen or fresh pierogies as directed. Drain well.
2) While pierogies are draining, heat a small amount of olive oil over medium heat in a large non-stick pan. Add pierogies to pan. Make sure each pierogie has room to lay on its side--if there are more pierogies than will fit in this way in your pan, cook them in batches.
3) Brown and crisp the pierogies on each side (roughly 4-5 minutes per side on medium heat).
4) Then, turn the burner up to high, wait 1-2 minutes, and then add 1/2 cup of vinegar along with about 1/4 cup of water. Let the pierogies simmer for 4-5 minutes, or until the liquid is nearly boiled away.

Serve immediately!
*********************
Three brief recipe notes:

1) Remember our post on using local ethnic food stores to save money on spices? Well, if you are lucky enough to have a Polish food shop near you, here's an excellent additional excuse to visit it. You'll likely find delicious home-made pierogies there at great prices.

2) This meal is an example of a limping dinner, a laughably easy and often laughably cheap meal made with staple foods that are easy to keep around the house. Pierogies can be easily frozen and stored for those inevitable days when you don't have the strength or the ambition to whip up a complicated dinner.

3) Finally, a question for readers: some pierogie variations work really well, but some just don't work at all (after all, the freedom in any highly flexible dish is also a liability: you can always take things too far). What kinds of pierogie fillings are your personal favorites, and what kinds of pierogie variations have you tried that simply didn't work?

Pierogie Recipe Sites:
1) Pierogie Recipe at Epicurious
2) Potato-Jalapeno Pierogies at My Food Blog
3) Quick Potato Pierogi at Smitten Kitchen
4) Ezycook's Pierogie Recipe
5) Potato and Cream Cheese Pierogies at Allrecipes
6) Pierogies with Potatoes, Cabbage, Cheese and Leeks at Cooks.com
7) Wikihow's Pierogie recipes (includes recipes for potato/cheese and mushroom fillings)

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food

With the odds of a recession next year approaching 110%, and global equity markets seemingly heading straight to zero, it's probably a good time to think of extra ways to save money over the coming months and years.

Here at Casual Kitchen I spend a lot of time writing and thinking about ways to save money on food, and today I thought it would be a great time to run a retrospective of some of our best and most read articles on the subject.

Feel free to peruse the links below for posts on how to cook more efficiently at home, ideas on how to eat well on very little money, and other articles on how to save money in the kitchen.

And if you have thoughts you'd like to share on these subjects, please feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email. I'm just hiding under a blanket over here anyway.

Recipe Ideas:
All CK Recipes Filed Under "Laughably Cheap"

Money-saving Tips and Ideas:
Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices
Mastering Kitchen Setup Costs
Eight Tips to Make Cooking At Home Laughably Cheap
How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Cookbooks

Longer Essays on Food Costs:
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
Why Spices Are a Complete Rip-Off and What You Can Do About It

Tips on Saving Money while Eating Healthy:
What's the Most Heavily Used Tool in Our Kitchen? Our Rice Cooker.
How to Make Your Own Inexpensive Sports Drink
How to Create Your Own Original Pasta Salad Recipes Using the Pasta Salad Permutator
Two Useful Cooking Lessons From Another Cheap and Easy Side Dish
Fresh Herbs Part 2: Solutions to the Waste Problem

Cooking Strategies and Tactics:
How to Team Up in the Kitchen
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
More Applications of the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Curried Pork With Apples

When I published my linkfest of apple recipes last week, one recipe immediately jumped off the page: Curried Pork with Apples.

We're always on the lookout here at Casual Kitchen for recipes that combine regular ingredients in unusual and original ways (dishes like Groundnut Stew and our Mole Sauce are textbook examples). And I could tell that today's recipe, with a spicy curry sauce set off by slightly sweet and tender apples chunks, would have a lot of promise.

It didn't disappoint. And better still, this recipe is easy, quick (prep time is around 15 minutes and total cook time is well under an hour), and relatively inexpensive. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
***********************
Curried Pork with Apples
(slightly modified from the original at About.com)

Ingredients:
1 pound lean pork, cut into 1-2 inch cubes (can use ground pork)
3 tablespoons olive oil

2 apples, peeled, cored and chopped
1/2 cup chopped onion

2 tablespoons flour
1 to 2 teaspoons curry powder, to taste
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder (or one clove garlic, pressed or minced)

2 cups chicken broth or vegetable stock
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Directions:
1) Brown the cubed pork on all sides in oil, on high heat, in a large non-stick pan, about 4-5 minutes in total.
2) Turn heat down to medium-high. Add apples and chopped onions to the pork. Saute for 4-5 minutes, until starting to brown lightly. Add flour and dry spices, stir well and continue sauteing for another 1-2 minutes.
3) Add remaining ingredients, cover and simmer for 35 minutes. Serve with rice.

Serves 4.
***********************
Recipe notes:
1) We made some minor modifications to the spices; here's a link to the original recipe if you'd like to compare the before and after versions.

2) We ended up adding another 1-2 Tablespoons of flour to the sauce to get it to just the right thickness.

3) Make sure to stir the simmering sauce every 5-10 minutes or so, otherwise it may start to stick to the bottom of the pan.

4) The original recipe claims it serves 4-6, an optimistic claim if I ever saw one. Try "serves 4." But keep in mind that this dish is highly scalable and re-heatable and thus a great double-batch candidate.

5) Finally, a few thoughts on possible modifications that you can make to this dish. First, attention all non-pork eaters: this dish could very easily be made with chicken instead of pork. A vegetarian version could include 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of chickpeas or perhaps 12 ounces of very firm tofu (although I'd add the tofu in at step #3 to prevent it from breaking up too much). You could also add nuts to this dish to add an interesting layer of textures to the sauce--I'd consider 1/4 cup of mild-tasting nuts like almonds or walnuts.

Related Posts:
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Spicy Eggplant Ratatouille
What's the Most Heavily Used Tool in Our Kitchen? Our Rice Cooker.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

50 Delicious Recipes Containing Apples

It's the heart of apple season. And for the past two weeks, I've been on a mission to scour the internet for recipes using apples as a key ingredient. Today's post is the result of that mission: a linkfest of fifty (fifty!) of the internet's best apple-related recipes.

These recipes range from the really easy (Baked Apples), to the unusual (Curried Pork with Apples and Apple and Cumin Lentil Salad), to the downright weird (How to Make An Apple Doll Head--note: that one isn't really a recipe), to the sublime (Apple Stuffed Pork Loin Roast).

A few blogs have multiple mentions here (Smitten Kitchen and 101 Cookbooks are prime examples), and that's simply because those blogs have too many spectacular apple recipes to mention just one.

As with other recipe linkfests I've published at Casual Kitchen, I have looked over each and every one of these recipes with a critical eye for quality. I hope you enjoy this post as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

PS: If you have a blog with an apple-related recipe you'd like to add to the mix, please leave a comment about it below!

PPS: For those of you who arrived here by searching for info on Gwyneth Paltrow's kid, there is nothing of interest here. Move along now.
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The Apple Recipe Linkfest

1-10:
Baked Apples at CheapHealthyGood
Baked Apple Pancake at Apron Strings
Baked Apple Tarts at Hot Off the Garlic Press
Caramel Toffee Apples at Hot Off the Garlic Press
Apple Chips at Blissfully Domestic
Can't Mess It Up Apple Crisp at Stalking Sarah
Caramel Apple Salad at the Healthy Hostess
Homemade Apple Pie at Sweet Savory Southern
Apple Stuffed Pork Loin Roast from Paula Deen at the Food Network
Grilled Apple Sandwich from Paula Deen at the Food Network

11-20:
Estonian Apple Cake at Kitchen Parade
Apple Pierogies with Caramel, Raspberries at R&I Magazine
How to Make An Apple Doll Head at AppleDolls.org
Spiced Honeycake with Caramelized Apples at Baking and Books
Apple Cheddar Quesadillas at Off Her Cork
Red Delicious Oatmeal at For the Love of Oats
Apple Oven Pancake at About.com
Curried Pork with Apples at About.com
Festive Spiced Apple Juice at About.com
Pork Chop Apple Bake at About.com

21-30:
My Apple Cinnymuffins at RhodeyGirl Tests
Apple Cider Pound Cake at Recipes from the Riverside Cafe
German Apple Pancake at The Zachs
Mango Apple Crumble at Chocolate and Zucchini
Apple and Cumin Lentil Salad at Chocolate and Zucchini
Apple and Pistachio Tart at Chocolate and Zucchini
Pork Roast with Spiced Cabbage, Apples, Prunes at Chocolate and Zucchini
Apple and Sausage Pie at Simply Recipes
Apple Squares at The Waking Hour
Apple Bread at Sweet Hour of Prayer

31-40:
Whole Wheat Apple Muffins at Smitten Kitchen
Apple Cranberry Crisp at Smitten Kitchen
Apple and Yogurt Cake at Smitten Kitchen
Simplest Apple Tart at Smitten Kitchen
Homemade Apple Sauce at The Paupered Chef
Fresh Apple Salsa at 101 Cookbooks
Apple Coffee Cake at 101 Cookbooks
Curried Apple Couscous at 101 Cookbooks
Apple Pie Bars at Food&Wine
Apple Dumplings at Food&Wine

41-50:
Spiced Apple Cider Sorbet at TheKitchn.com
Weekend Apple Pancake at TheKitchn.com
Perfect Tarte Tatin at Chefs Gone Wild
Grandma Bernie's Rustic Apple Bars at Vanilla Bean
Hot Spiced Cranberry Apple Cider at Mimi's Garden
Quick Apple Chutney at Veggie Test-Drive
Apple Crostata with Caramel Sauce at BettyCrocker.com
Southern Apple Crumble at BettyCrocker.com
Homemade Apple Cider at Better in Pink
To Die For Apple Crisp at Gather.com

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How to Make an Apple Pie with a Perfect Flaky Crust
Top Ten Most Popular Posts of Casual Kitchen
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
The Crockpot: A Siren Call for Single People

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.