Everyone that knows me knows I did the single mom thing for the majority of my parenting life.  Seventeen years, to be exact.  And every single mom knows how large of a hurdle food is on a daily basis.  Even if you’re not pinching pennies and nickels, it’s still challenging to find the time to address meals on a daily basis.  And if you’re trying to eat cleanly, you have another giant challenge.  That fast food drive through becomes a monumental temptation.  If you have all three food hurdles like I did….small funds, no time, processed food problems….then I take my hat off to you.  Being commited to feeding your kid well with no money or time takes tenacity.  I had a few tricks up my sleeve.  And I might have had an advantage.  I learned about food from my gramma, who survived the Depression alone as a teenager when her mother died.  My gramma could make a whole chicken last an entire week.  You should have seen her pick a turkey clean.

First….the tricks.  The processed food system has changed since I was a kid.  My own child was born not long before high fructose corn syrup was introduced.  Hyper flavors were starting to appear.  Preservatives started becoming a concern and chemical food additives in general were making ingredient lists longer and longer.  I found myself getting educated on processed foods and I wasn’t liking what I was learning.  I had to adapt.  The first thing I did was limit processed foods to cereals and crackers and made sure those were organic.  It was a sad day to say goodbye to my Lucky Charms, but it had to be done.  And when a box of organic cereal costs six bucks, I guarantee you’ll give your kid less of it and cutting back on sugar…organic or not…is always a plus.  I didn’t skimp on two things….milk and maple syrup.  I bought the whole organic milk and the real maple syrup.  The fake stuff is just pure corn syrup and did you know that maple syrup has some health benefits?  I still used it judiciously because it’s expensive.  Whole organic milk, surprisingly, lasted longer in the fridge than the regular stuff.  I hate pouring out milk because it went bad.

Pancakes happened on weekends and I replaced bowls of cereal with whole fruit.  Apples and bananas are your friends.  Kids and textures can sometimes clash and apples can be texturally tricky.  I went with Gala apples.  They stayed crisper longer and rarely got powdery whereas Red Delicious apples always seemed to either already be powdery or got there quickly.  I talked to my store manager about sales.  When and what is going to be on sale next?  It’s good information.  I shopped with a list and stuck to it.  Nine times out of ten something on your list can wait until it goes on sale.  It helps if you bring a little homemade goody to your store manager once in a while, too.  They’ll flag you down to tell you about anything exciting going on sale soon that might not be in the circular.  In fact, sharing food in general will make you friends with food people that can help you facilitate your no funds clean eating adventure.  To this day, I still share food items with friends and food vendors of all kinds.  Last week, I sent forty five pounds of tomatoes to a coworker of Hubs and got back several nice packs of line caught halibut from their fishing trip.  I give my butcher pickles, tomatoes, and sorbet.  He gives me catfish.  It goes on and on.

I often had to pull together a dinner with odd bits and bobs from the fridge and freezer.  Soups and stews were handy here and could be served over rice or potatoes and a big pot could last a week.  Frozen vegetables are far superior to canned and a cheaper alternative to fresh.  Whatever you don’t use can be sealed with a chip clip and put back in the freezer.  I always kept frozen broccoli, corn, green beans, peas, and chopped spinach on hand.  Costco carries organic corn, broccoli, and green beans in giant sizes for about five bucks each.  You can’t beat it.  Chopped spinach is about a buck a block and it’s the same for a bag of peas at the grocery store.  Frozen peas can be leveraged into all kinds of dishes with zero effort.  Some well placed fresh herbs and some minced garlic can make frozen veggies magical and they cook quickly.  Growing up on canned vegetables, I learned a lot about the ways with frozen vegetables.

Here’s a post from my single mom days in recipes of the past:  (look at that terrible pic!  eegads!)

Today, in avoidance of going to the grocery store, I looked around the house to see what I could make for dinner…or for a few dinners as we would have it.  I have two refrigerators.  Not because I’m fancy, but because the one my rental house came with was really really small, sad, and dilapidated.  Being that I don’t own it, I couldn’t toss it, so I moved it to the laundry room (where it now serves as a back up fridge space) and promptly got a used fridge from the appliance repair guy down the street.  It took 3 units to get one that actually worked, so it was kind of a hassle, but for under 200 bucks I can’t complain about my new to me fridge in the kitchen now.  It’s not stainless, it’s not gorgeous, but it holds my son’s drawings and  an amount of produce we’re used to keeping in it.

Now where were we?  Oh right.  Dinner tonight.  So here’s what I have on hand:  A pound of ground pork, a can of kidney beans, a package of frozen spinach, a can of tomato paste, a chicken carcass with no meat on it, a questionable green bell pepper, some baby bok choy that has passed it’s hope of ever being in some stir fry, a half of a drying out lemon, some onion halves from various other meals, some floppy carrots, and a jar of minced garlic.  Mmmmmm…..sounds delish.  Not.  I came across a recipe for a pumpkin stew that used ground pork like what I had in the freezer, which I usually confine to using for sausage gravy with things like biscuits and or chicken fried steak type dishes.  So then I thought, “What else can I use this ground pork in?” and googled.  This brought up a lot of recipes for a white bean sausage type stew soup thing with tomatoes, all of which called for cans of stewed tomatoes and prepared chicken or vegetable broths, of which I had neither.  What to do?

So I took my floppy carrots, my chicken carcass, the onion ends, that sad little half of a lemon, a tablespoon of minced garlic and I threw it into my stockpot.  I cut the yucky parts off of my green bell pepper and trimmed any non~green parts off the baby bok choy and tossed those in as well.  I added a sprig of rosemary and a sprig of thyme, just to be fancy.  I usually keep a handful of fresh herbs in my fridge because I consider them to be a staple.  I filled my stockpot with water and boiled it on high until the liquid had reduced by two thirds.  Voila, I have chicken stock.  Ish.  After straining out all the solids, I added my little can of tomato paste.  It’s not stewed tomatoes, but I’m not a fan of canned tomatoes anyway.  I usually have some of my marinara sauce lurking in one of my freezers, but it seems I’ve used it all on other things.  Dangit.  My science project chicken veggie stock will do just fine.  Gramma would have been so proud.

So for the actual soup stew thingy, I used more stellar produce.  I fine chopped a medium white onion and threw it into my enameled cast iron pot with the sausage and browned it together with some large peeled and chopped carrots.  To that I added the tomato chicken broth, the frozen spinach, and the can of red kidney beans.  All the recipes called for a can of white beans, but I used that last night in my leftover hambone and navy bean soup. Then I boiled up a cup of elbow macaroni and tossed that in as well.  Lots of the recipes called for potatoes of some sort and one even called for pumpkin, which I’m totally going to try another time.  But I wasn’t in the mood for potatoes in my soup.  Frankly, we eat a lot of potatoes because they’re cheap and I get tired of them turning up everywhere in our dinners.  But we DO love potato chips.  A lot.  So I think I’ll make some homemade potato chips later and top the soup stew thingy with them if any of them actually make it to dinner.

Whew! And My slap It Together Sausage Soup Stew Thingy

1 lb ground pork

1 can tomato paste

2 quarts chicken or veggie broth or 1 of each

1 quart water

1 medium white onion fine chopped

1 box frozen chopped spinach

1 can red kidney beans rinsed

1 cup dry elbow macaroni cooked

4-6 large carrots peeled and sliced or chopped

Fresh thyme leaves

Salt n pepper to taste

Bay leaf

Splash of white wine (optional)

Method:

Saute sausage, onions, and carrots until sausage starts to brown in a soup pot.  Deglaze the bottom of the pot with white wine or broth.  Add broth, water, and tomato paste to the pot.  Boil on medium high heat for at least an hour or two.  Add in frozen spinach with most of the water squeezed out and thyme leaves.  Add in beans and cooked pasta.  Boil on medium high heat for about another 30 minutes.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Top with anything from croutons, to grated parmesan cheese, to homemade potato chips.

*Note:

What’s great about this dish is that you can use a variety of different beans, a variety of different types of sausage, and a variety of different greens, etc. to make it your own.  I simply used what I had on hand.

Yes, I know cherry season is over and this post is late.  But I’m busy okay? And everyone knows I’m often late in virtual world.  I mean, this entire site is practically two years in the making.  Life happens.  And then there’s cherries.  This salad is so easy and it’s a tasty way to eat cherries and get through some of your tomatoes at the same time.  The two are surprisingly complimentary.  You can use cherry tomatoes or regular tomatoes.  Whatever you do, don’t try this recipe with store bought tasteless tomatoes unless they’re heirlooms….. AKA Ugly Tomatoes.  The dressing is a snap.  Use a high quality honey because you’ll be able to taste the difference.  You can have this recipe together in minutes and it’s quite impressive.