Writing that Rambling took most of my meal prep and planning time. Sigh.
Meals Breakfast: I used all the avocados for yesterday’s guacamole, so the children (grudgingly and with much complaint) ate bagel and cream cheese. I drank coffee and ate 4 deviled eggs. Lunch: Kids’ standard Homebrew Lunchables, me random stuff laying around. Snacks*: Water, Cheez-Its, pickles, olives, frozen mangos, ??? Dinner: Curry with chickpeas, leftover garlic kale from Saturday and leftover tomatoes and onion from the pico I made on Saturday, brown rice and roasted sweet potatoes. I tossed the sweet potatoes with melted butter and the contents of a bag of chai tea, which turned out pretty good. Dessert: We’re very low on dessert, which my children believe to be a fundamental human right (life, liberty and the pursuit of dessert). Child #1 had 5 Pocky from a Christmas package, and Child #2 had about a tablespoon of chocolate chips. I need to make cookies today (which is actually February 14).
*Snacks are both an accounting and frugality conundrum. My kids are locusts that graze on whatever they can find between 3:45-5:00, and a lot of what they eat is packaged food. Which is either expensive or nutritionally valueless, or both (and also part of an evil plot by multinational corporations to keep us sick and poor (this is a gross oversimplification, but essentially true)). I, of course, nag them relentlessly about the dangers of mindless eating like a Marge Simpson robot programmed to say “eat OR stare, not both” and I’ve made good strides in providing mostly whole-food, simple snacks (popcorn, pickles, fruit) but salty, white flour-based snack foods are still one of our major food expenses.
Shopping
Olives, pickles and frozen mango for snacks, English muffins and avocados for breakfasts, yams for tonight’s dinner. Total food expense: $20.07. Average over 4 days: $17.54.
Before I go any further with all of… whatever this is, I want to point out that I realize that I’m being disingenuous with my food “costs” because I’m not counting the cost/value of the food that I already have on hand.
This is one of the issues that drives me crazy about websites, books, etc. that provide recipes and costs for “cheap meals” by breaking out the cost by amount of ingredient used in the recipe. Frex, right now I’m looking a recipe for French Toast that’s (theoretically) $.92 per serving. It has 9 ingredients — bread, milk, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, salt, butter, oil and sugar — most of them less than 20¢ per serving. If you are an experienced home cook, you probably have all or most of these things on hand, and have a handle on how to use up the unused portions of the ingredients, making this a good, cheap (if not particularly nutritious) meal. (Also, the recipe sneakily omits syrup, which — who eats French toast without syrup?) But if you are an experienced home cook, you almost certainly don’t need a budget cooking website to tell you how to make French toast.
On the other hand, if you’re NOT an experienced home cook (i.e., the probable consumer of this recipe and hundreds of other like them), you’d have to go out and buy a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, etc. Off the top of my head, buying all the ingredients for this recipe as cheaply as possible would cost in the neighborhood of $25. Most inexperienced cooks are not cooking for a family of four, but let’s say you’re cooking for two and choose to make four servings because reducing recipes is a pain in the butt even for experienced cooks. You’d end up with a half a loaf of butter, nine eggs, most of a gallon of milk, 3 1/2 sticks of butter and basically all of the vanilla, cinnamon, sugar and oil — plus you probably wouldn’t be able to eat all the French toast, so some of it would go in the garbage. You’d’ve spent $12.50 per serving AND IT WOULDN’T EVEN HAVE SYRUP.
I don’t mean to pick on this particular recipe or the site it’s from (which is why I didn’t link it). This recipe is frankly better than most, because at least the ingredients are easy to use in other dishes and/or nonperishable. But the idea that people who are struggling to manage their food budgets will be meaningfully helped by recipes like this is ridiculous.
Very few people (at least, in my experience and including myself) enter adulthood knowing how to prepare more than a very few simple meals, mostly either uncooked or prepared in a microwave. A tiny fraction of those people have experience managing food — buying the correct amount, using all of what you buy, keeping track of perishables, knowing what to do with a LOT of something you got cheap, knowing what ingredients you can substitute and what you can leave out, etc. etc. etc. And there are VERY few resources out there to help people who need to learn — you’re just expected to learn by time-consuming trial and expensive, disappointing error. It’s no wonder most people turn to restaurants and packaged food! (And this is already WAAAY longer than I meant it to be so I’ll save the screed about how food companies make all of this so much worse for later.)
So, what I’m hoping this will turn into something that can help people learn to manage food, use it frugally and have confidence that they can go into a grocery store, spend less, get more, and bring it home knowing what to do with it. But being honest, I’ve never really thought about it holistically myself, and I suspect that there’s a lot in my own food management that bears scrutiny and improvement. So this is ALSO a record of my study of food management, the pitfalls I fall into and the mistakes I make — so that hopefully, when YOU make mistakes you won’t feel alone.
Meals I don’t know, I wasn’t paying any attention at all. Honestly, on the weekends there aren’t really any meals, it’s just endless grazing. The kids had avocado toast and there were several microwave popcorn bags laying around, so definitely that. Lunch and dinner we ate at my in-laws. I made pico de gallo, guacamole and deviled eggs (we have chickens so eggs are “free”, i.e. whatever it costs to keep chickens. I’ll price it all out someday, but with the cost of eggs these days I think it’s cheaper than store bought but definitely not actually free) and there was tons left so that’s what I’ll be eating for a while.
Shopping None! That puts my total grocery expense over three days at $50.08 — $16.69 a day.
Meals I forgot to be mindful and don’t remember what all we ate yesterday — probably the usual for breakfast (avocado toast for the kids and leftovers or coffee+nothing for me) and lunch (I usually forget lunch and/or the passage of time is a thing and the kids eat Cheez-Its and microwave popcorn and fruit until around 3:00, when they say “can I have lunch?” and then I feel like an asshole and don’t know whether to make them a meal or just make a different plate of snacks to hold them off until dinner).
Dinner was homemade pizza, which I have been failing at for about 10 years now — but I’m failing less spectacularly than I used to. I’ve got the dough and the sauce down, and I’ve given up on cooking the crust directly in the oven. Instead I make a sort of homemade Boboli by cooking the dough with a little oil in a very hot frying pan, then top and broil. It’s considerably more foolproof and less time-sensitive than cooking completely in the oven, and I can make 3-4 different pizzas. The crust is still a little on the soft vs. crisp side (esp. if I let it sit for any length of time), but it’s chewy and not too bready, as long as I keep it thin. It’s definitely a cheap meal — flour, yeast, salt, oil, a can of tomato paste, Italian seasoning, cheese and toppings. If you’re using leftovers for toppings, the only real expense is the cheese. I mostly used things I already had, with some sauteed garlic kale on the side.
Shopping We’re going to a Super Bowl party at my in-laws and I’ve been charged with bringing chips and salsa/guacamole. Avocados are crazy cheap here right now (which is why the kids are eating avocado toast for breakfast every morning).
[Please excuse the awful image quality — my phone takes garbage pictures.]
The candy was bought with my son’s allowance money, so the total food cost is $29.25. The cereal is LSH’s addition, the oranges and milk are for general eating, the kale and cheese were for dinner and the rest was for guacamole and salsa for the Super Bowl party. Total grocery expense over two days: $50.08. Definitely trending in the wrong direction.
Meals Breakfast: Kids ate avocado toast/avocado English muffin, bagel and cream cheese. I ate leftovers. Lunch: Kids packed lunches: homestyle Lunchables — pepperoni/salami slices, swiss cheese slices, Ritz crackers/Cheez-Its, orange slices, a small handful of Skittles. Me: more leftovers. Dinner: Taco salad. Pork carnitas, cheese, lettuce, sour cream, avocado, green onions, salsa, tortilla chips. I’d usually have olives and tomatoes, but I forgot we were out of olives and I forgot tomatoes were a thing. I made the carnitas using this recipe, except I didn’t have any orange juice so I sectioned some discounted blood oranges ($2.99 for 3 pounds) and I (wait for it) forgot the garlic. It would have been better with garlic, but it still turned out really well.
Shopping
I had a short shopping list for meals for the next 24ish hours, plus a few non-food items. Usually I shop at Winco, which typically has the best combo of price and quality in my area, but today I went to three different grocery stores to check prices for the items on my list. I actually have 5 different stores in my town where I could buy typical supermarket items, plus a co-op, an Asian market and (May-October) a farmers’ market.
Rosauers
Safeway
Winco
Pink Lady apples, 1 lb
$1.49
—
$1.48
Granny Smith apples, 1 lb
$2.49
$1.49
$1.50
Avocados, each
$0.50
$0.99
$0.98
Electrical tape, 60 ft
$1.79
$2.99
$3.91
Taco blend cheese, 2 lb
$5.99
$6.99*
$6.98
Smoked paprika, .9 oz
$3.79
$4.99
—
Clabber Girl baking powder, 8.1 oz
$3.39
$3.79
$2.54
Dishwasher rinse aid (store brand), 8.45 oz
$2.99
$6.49**
$0.99
I purchased the red highlighted items. *Safeway had a digital coupon for $4.99 for taco blend cheese, but I’m not downloading their app. **Safeway didn’t have a store brand rinse aid; the price is for Jet Dry.
Rosauers: $3.70. 3 avocados ($.50 each) and a clearance bag of cough drops ($1.99). Rosauers is more expensive than Winco for most things, but often has good discounts on a few items, has a nice “natural foods” section and has the best quality meat in the area. Safeway: $1.69. 1.07 pounds of Granny Smith apples ($1.59/lb). To put it delicately, I LOATHE my local Safeway. It’s the most conveniently located supermarket for me, but I still avoid it. Their prices are consistently high (plus they use shady pricing tricks to make it difficult to tell how much things cost), quality is low, the store is dirty and they’re by far the worst local offender of the “special price for members/digital coupons/give us your data and we’ll give you food” trick. But in the name of science, I went in there today. As expected, their prices were overall high. I bought apples mostly because it felt weird to go in there and look at stuff and not buy anything. The price was good but only a penny better than Winco. Winco: $18.59. In addition to the items in the table above, I bought store brand English muffins (6/$1.37), lean boneless country style pork ribs (2.63 pounds discounted to $4.61) , bananas (1.54 lbs @$1.48/lb, which is about twice as much as they were pre-pandemic), and a tiny amount of bulk smoked paprika ($.24 for .04 lbs). Taco cheese ended up being more expensive at Winco than the other stores, but Winco was the last store I went to and I only bought a small bag of cheese anyway, so the cost difference was minimal.
Total food expenditure for today: $20.83. A little over the $16 target (4/person/day), but I don’t buy groceries every day so hopefully I’m on pace. My research pretty much told me what I already knew, which is that Winco is my best choice for price.
I’ve been thinking about writing about meal planning/food budgeting and management for beginners with limited food budgets for quite a while — basically running with the “SNAP Challenge/$4 per person per day” idea — but the thought of tackling a whole new blog or whatever was keeping me from even starting. I don’t care a bit about monetizing it (okay, maybe I care a BIT but certainly not enough to log into Instagram or learn what SEO means) and waiting for all the sample themes WordPress wants you to consider before you even start to write to load on my backwoods internet connection is unbearable (that sentence is very hard to read; my apologies). So I decided that budget meal planning is part of “food”, which is part of “food clothing shelter”, which I already have a blog about and I can just start typing!
I will someday write a longer explanation of what I’m trying to do (“what would you say you DO around here?”), but TBH I haven’t really sorted it all out in my head and trying to write it all down is taking away time from actually doing the thing. So I’ll just say that I’m working on a holistic approach to extreme food budgeting that takes into account ALL (or as close to all as I can think of) the issues and aspects of feeding a family when money is a (probably THE) significant concern. So many resources designed to “help” people who are struggling to put food on the table seem to think that it’s all just a matter of buying cheap groceries, when there is SO MUCH MORE involved. Frankly most of the websites and books I’ve seen that offer “cheap” recipes and meal plans, while (sometimes) well-intentioned, are extremely simplistic and naive.
So I’m hoping to (over a considerable period of time and trial and error) create a more realistic resource for learning how to manage food and cooking that understands that — while money is the biggest issue — time, bandwidth, living situations, health concerns, all the emotional issues around food, and so many other things have to also be taken into account. AND YET, I absolutely believe it’s possible for anyone to develop the CONFIDENCE that they can manage their food budget — to know you’re squeezing the most possible value out of the dollars you have.
With that in mind, I’m going to start by practicing extreme intentionality in my family’s food budget. I’m going to use my extra time (that I’m incredibly lucky to have) to study the food that’s available to me and lay out the best ways to manage it to 1) save money and 2) take into account or at least acknowledge that “$$ per calorie” is not the only ball to juggle. I’m going to keep track of all the food we buy, all the food we eat, and all the food we throw away. And I’m going to be honest about when it doesn’t work — because if I know anything, it’s that a lot of time, this won’t work out how I expect it! And now I’m going to stop pontificating and start actually working.
I generally buy produce as I need it, but every so often the price on bagged potatoes or onions or whatever is soooo good that I buy the bagged stuff. And 90% of the time, I end up with a bagful of sprouted vegetables.
Sprouted potatoes are no big deal; just cut the sprouts off and cook the taters (the sprouts and any green bits are mildly poisonous and not good for you but any parts that still look like a regular potato are fine to eat). Sprouted onions, on the other hand, are smushy and moldy and gross and I usually compost the whole bag and have a quiet rant against Big Onion (see? Mad at everything).
But you can actually salvage a lot out of a bag of sprouted onions if you have a half hour or so to kill (if, on the other hand, you decide that your time is worth more than the buck-fifty you spent on the onions, I will not blame you).
Here is the pile of onions that I mostly already processed before it occurred to me to take some pictures:
LEFT: Broken-off tops and bits that can be used in place of scallions (sometimes they’re strong; taste a bit before using one-for-one). CENTER TOP: An onion that was mostly okay after I peeled off a few gross layers (if there are parts that are still firm and white, they’re fine to use). CENTER BOTTOM: A sprouted onion sliced and ready to be cleaned up. RIGHT: Sprouted onion centers cleaned and ready to root.
To clean the sprout to its center, cut a slit vertically not quite halfway through the onion, as per the photo above. Peel off all the grossness. The grossness may be stinky, slimy, and/or moldy. Do not falter. Compost the grossness, or throw it out.
Most of the onions in this bag had two sprouts in the center:
Onion with two sprouts.
You can try to break them apart but I usually end up breaking one off the root entirely, so I recommend gently separating them and cutting the root between them with a knife. Do separate them; they won’t grow well if you don’t and getting two onions from one is the most satisfying part of this whole endeavor.
Once you’ve got your onion centers with the root end still attached, you want to put them in some water until they’ve grown white roots about an inch long. Unless you got every little bit of yuckiness off the root area, it’s best to try to keep them just lightly damp because if they’re too wet they’ll get gross again and STINK. The easiest solution would probably be to trim the tops so that they’re all basically straight (leave at least 2 inches or so of green), tie them into a bunch so the root ends are all level-ish, and set them in a glass or a dish or something with stones and enough water to just touch the root ends.
I didn’t do that.
Instead, I took a 1-liter and a 2-liter soda bottle, cut the bottom off the 1-liter and the top off the 2-liter. I took a paper towel, folded and rolled it into a “wick” about two inches long and jammed it into the spout of the 1-liter bottle so that most of the paper is inside the bottle. I then arranged the onions around the wick so that each one is touching it.
Then I set it in the bottom of the 2-liter bottle [every time I try to type ‘bottle’ I must first type ‘bootle’. I don’t know what that means about me] and added water. Make sure the water level stays below the root ends of the onions and you should be in good shape. Or you could just do the first thing I said, which is probably easier. The wick technique is nice because the water-level is a lot more forgiving, but it’s also sort of ridiculous.
Keep an close eye on the whole shebang — the longer they stay in water the more likely it is any residual yuckiness will metastasize all over your new roots, paper towel, etc. If you see the root area getting brownish, mucky, or starting to smell bad, take the onions out, gently clean the root ends, wash or replace your containers and put it all back together.
You can continue to use the tops as green onions — trimming won’t hurt them. Once they’ve developed nice roots and it’s spring-y outside, plant them in some dirt or dirt-analog (bury the white bits, leave the green bits showing) and put them outside. Sun, water, all the standard stuff, harvest when the tops start to wither and die, and Bobsyeruncle with just a little effort and 6-7 months of waiting you totally didn’t waste that bag of onions!
(If you find yourself with sprouted onions and it’s not getting on to spring, you can keep them in water for quite a while, but do remember about keeping them clean. You can also try to plant them in pots and grow them indoors, but I suspect the results would be disappointing.)
(NOTE: I actually made the cookies and started writing this post about four days ago, but hadn’t managed to finish it. I was too busy caring for my family and frothing at the mouth over bumper stickers.)
There’s a story to why I invented these, but as I was writing I realized it was a very boring story, so let’s just skip to the how. I also have a cookie-inventing-related rant (the more I blog, the more I realize how angry I am about SO MANY THINGS) about “healthy” food and “clean” food and trendy ingredients and socioeconomics and fat shaming and probably the patriarchy but I already spent all my rant chits on drive-by moral instruction (argh, I’m *still* rage-typing) so, later.
These cookies are made out of ingredients that are inexpensive and common in my pantry, and good for using up bits of stuff you might have left over from other baking endeavors. They are on the dry side (next time I make them I’ll leave out the flour and/or add another egg because owning chickens=always having too many eggs), but good with coffee or milk. They also aren’t *great* keepers (they get crumbly fast), so keep them in an airtight container or freeze them if you’re not going to eat them in a day or two.
As far as nutrition goes, in order for something to be healthyish in my book it mostly just needs to have a minimum of added sugar and no white flour. These have no “added” sugar, but that’s totally a lie because I did use Jif peanut butter and sweetened coconut and chocolate chips. My my math says they have about 10 grams of sugar per cookie the way I made them, which is the same as the packet of Belvita cookies I was trying to replace. (NOTE: these are in no way similar to Belvita cookies; it’s just that we ran out of Belvita cookies from the Costco and LSH declares them too expensive to buy at the regular grocery store. I can neither confirm or deny this, but anyway cookies.)
This recipe makes just six large (about the size of a hamburger patty) cookies. If you love them, you can always make more.
PEANUT BUTTER COCONUT BREAKFAST COOKIES
1 egg
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup chocolate chips (or other sweet nuggets like dried fruit, or leave them out if you’re particularly ascetic)
1 cup shredded coconut (I used the regular sweetened variety; you could use unsweetened, but then the cookies would be, you know, less sweet)
1 cup peanut butter or other nut/seed butter
1/4 cup whole wheat flour (I *think* you could leave this out and no harm done but I was worried they needed a bit more binder than the egg. I will try these without soon and report back with updates.)
Preheat oven to 350° F. Put a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet if you want, or don’t. You don’t need to grease the cookie sheet either way.
Mix all the ingredients together.
Form into six large balls, flatten slightly and place on the cookie sheet. They won’t spread much so you don’t have to worry about that.
Bake for about 12-15 minutes; start checking around 10 minutes if you’re paranoid like me. You don’t want to overbake these; you just want the bottoms to be slightly browned.
Allow to cool and eat.
There you go, a recipe without context. I have become the thing I most fear, and it’s only been 5 days. At least I haven’t got any bumper stickers.
NOTE: What follows has absolutely nothing to do with food, clothing, shelter, or anything even adjacent to those things. Occasionally I just have to get something off my chest or I will EXPLODE.
—
Am I the only generally live-and-let-live, you-do-you person who can be driven into a frothing, fantasizing-about-scrawling-swears-into-a-dusty-tailgate rage by certain types of bumper stickers? Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker in a parking lot that said “I’m not driving slow, you’re speeding” and there rose up in me an unholy fire to smash out their windows with a tire iron. And I even AGREE with them – – I’m totally one of those people who goes 55 in a 55 zone (but not, not never ever, in the left lane. I’m not Satan or anything).
The thing is, message bumper stickers are just crazy covert-aggressive – – forcing me to listen to your (and of course, I mean “your” in the sense of “everyone save Thee and Me”, Gentle and Lovely Readers) opinion while your back is turned is patronizing, high-handed and cowardly. And don’t try to tell me that it’s not ‘forcing’ – – suggesting that a person behind you at a stop light doesn’t have to read your bumper sticker is 100% equivalent to siblings in the backseat doing the whole “I’m not touching you” thing. It’s like propping my eyelids open and forcing me to read your Twitter feed with the Reply button disabled. It’s ANTISOCIAL.
What proves to me that it’s the medium and not the message is that I reserve the same wrath for wildly divergent opinions – – that “coexist” with all the religious symbols (which is not ‘warmly inclusive’ and is in fact directly translatable to “ALL YOUR BELIEFS ARE EQUALLY RIDICULOUS, RELIGIOUS WHACKADOODLES, btdubs) is as red-misting as “America: WE SPEAK ENGLISH HERE” (OMG, the mist is rising just THINKING about that one).
So, please. If you are using the back of your car to instruct strangers on how you think they ought to drive their cars, interact with the world, or live their lives — DON’T. Seriously. Remember how your Mom told you if you can’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it behind their back? Try that. If you absolutely, positively can’t stop yourself from emblazoning pithy reductions of complex issues on things, get a t-shirt. At least then you have to look your audience in the eye.
Ah, a new week. A fresh slate. Etc., etc. I am doing a little better, medication-induced-bad-place-wise. Enough that I can envision doing something other than the absolute bare minimum to get all the others creatures around here to leave me alone to wallow and watch old Doctor Who.* Whether or not I’ll actually DO any of the somethings I’m envisioning is an open question, but at least I can envision it.
So. Today is a good day for making lists, taking care of ticky-tacky administrative tasks, replying to phone calls and sending emails (both of which I fear worse than death for some reason I really ought to discuss with a therapist), sorting through the food in the house to see what we can eat this this week (stove is fixed hooray!)
Speaking of food, can I talk about recipes and food blogs and such for a sec? Like everyone else who eats and has the internet, I never have any good ideas for dinner and so I’m constantly Googling variations on “dinner recipe quick cheap easy vegetarian or maybe lamb i guess leftover rice no onions why did my daughter suddenly decide she can’t swallow meat i just want some nice spicy thai food or maybe some seafood but my kids only eat ramen noodles and pizza and have you seen what fish costs anyway i’m not even all that hungry.” But I’m always disappointed with the results; the recipes call for stuff I don’t have, or foods we don’t eat, or one tablespoon of some random ingredient that I then have to find a use for the whole container of (hello mascarpone cheese (note: mascarpone cheese is friggin’ delicious and it’s good in everything)) or it’s just WAY too complicated.
Most food blogs just present *recipes*, that seem to exist in a vacuum and are completely out of context of the idea of food shopping and budgeting and not wasting food. And even if there ARE meal planning blogs out there (and I’m sure there are), it’s an impossibility for someone else to make a meal plan that suits my family’s (or your family’s) specific tastes and needs. And while I can kludge together a recipe or two with an idea in my head to put something on the table, what I really need is more of a Dinner Lego Builder’s Manual, that shows me all the different ways to put basic foodstuffs together to make dinner. I mean, I know how to do that — I’m actually pretty good at ‘pantry management’ and meal planning and food budgeting. But at the end of the day when all I really want is for dinner to be OVER, the rubber just doesn’t seem to meet the road. [NOTE TO SELF: WELL THEN MAKE YOUR OWN FOOD BLOG THAT’S ABOUT MEAL PLANNING IN SOME MAGIC WAY THAT WILL HELP EVERYONE IN THE WORLD MAKE A PERFECT DINNER EVERY NIGHT AND BE HAPPY FOREVER AFTER]
And can I just quickly rant about “quick” recipes? Prep COUNTS. Anything that calls for more than one diced vegetable does not take “15 minutes or less”, especially if the veg needs washed. Any “30 minutes or less” recipe with 25 minutes of cook time is a straight-up lie unless the prep consists of nothing but the phrase “open cans/bags.” Anything that has 10 ingredients takes nearly 10 minutes just to find and measure all of them. Also, I don’t know what elevation these people are cooking at but at my house (2500 feet) it takes to 15-20 minutes for a 2 quarts of water to come to a boil, so trying to tell me pasta is ready in 10 minutes is pure BS.
Okay, it felt good to get that off my chest. Anyway, I have a quick, cheap, easy, delicious vegetarian recipe for you all:
Yellow Curry Scrambled Eggs
This is a great breakfast-for-one for when the kids actually finish theirs so that you don’t get any soggy Honey Nut Cheerios or toast crusts for breakfast. I don’t have a picture because I ate it (the eggs, not the picture).
Ingredients:
2 eggs
prepared yellow curry sauce/paste to taste
crushed tortilla chips or other crunchy thing
Preparation:
Mix up the eggs in a microwave safe bowl or measuring cup or whatever.
Microwave 30 seconds at a time, stirring between, until the eggs are softly cooked, about 1 minute to 1 1/2 minutes (for all that is holy don’t overcook them; eggs in the microwave are already kinda gross but I’m not going to dirty a frying pan just to scramble myself a couple eggs) (if you want to dirty a frying pan or if you have one of those little frying pans that makes sense to cook two eggs in, totes do that but I just have a giant frying pan that doesn’t really fit in the dishwasher)
Stir in your curry sauce/paste. You could absolutely use red curry, or green, or sriracha or fry sauce for all I care but, self-deprecating snark aside, yellow curry paste is actually really good with eggs so I recommend it. I use about a teaspoon of Mae Ploy Yellow Curry Paste. (And yes, I know I was *just* bitching above about recipes that call for a tiny amount of something that comes in a giant container and if I had to guess I’d say there’s about 10,000 teaspoons of curry paste in the Mae Ploy Curry Paste tub. But it’s cheap and it lasts for two years and all you have to do is stir some into coconut milk and you’ve got DELICIOUS SAUCE for almost anything.)
Smash up a small handful of tortilla chips or other crunch-delivery system. Bagel or pita chips would be good here. Stir them into the eggs. You could also add in pretty much anything else that sounds good. This is just scrambled eggs, after all.
TL;DR: if you’re hungry, eat a couple eggs.
*I’ve been watching the Dr. Who reboot with Daughter for a while now and she expressed some interest in seeing some of the older stuff, so I learned that they have all the old ones available on BritBox. I freely admit that I have not exposed her to enough black-and-white media, but she didn’t even make it through the opening theme before she declared it the worst thing she’d ever seen. I wanted to argue with her, but.
I first started watching DW while I was pregnant with Said Child back in 2009 and once I was caught up on the reboot I decided I was going to watch all the old ones. Which turned out to be 1) really hard 9 years ago; there was a lot of semi-legal BitTorrenting involved and 2) really hard in the sense that the early DWs are BAD. SO bad. Like, I’m super sorry if you love them and I know there’s so much interesting historical and cultural backstory, but the First and Second Doctors are just unwatchable and eventually I gave up. But now that they’re easier to get to, I’m trying again. And lately locking myself in my cloffice and binge-watching badly preserved black-and-white footage of women endlessly screaming at everything they see and an old man flubbing his lines seems more appealing than most of my other options.
foodclothingshelter 