Hot, Cheap & Easy

You would think that I came from hunger.

I stockpile like a squirrel in autumn. (And like squirrels, I sometimes forget where the hell I stockpiled my treasures, but that is another matter for a day when we are discussing organization. Today, we are not). I don’t feel safe unless there are plenty of foodstuffs laid by, whether for unexpected guests, an emergency supper,  the coming of The Apocalypse, or the nuclear winter. I’m a Cold War baby and that’s how I roll.

There’s nothing I like more than a pantry full of stuff with which to make meals, except a freezer full of stuff that is already made (by me, of course, because the supermarket has freezers full of simulated-food garbage I won’t pay for, cause it’s  simulated food garbage I won’t eat).

Thus, this meatball recipe – a variation on my dad’s excellent meatballs. We call them

This Cioppino recipe includes an element of redemption.

Adriana — my dear friend from way back when in Puerto Rico, and now another single mom by choice and an essential part of my New York life,  has made numerous appearances on Hot, Cheap & Easy. But even more of our fantastic meals together have never made it to these pages. We like to blame it on the kids. It’s one of the things children are good for.

It’s not as though we don’t try. We start out dutifully recording the ingredients; me glaring across the counter at Adriana waving the appropriate measuring implements at her, grabbing the bloody and limp plastic wrap from the butcher as she is trying to throw it out so I can write down the exact weight of the meat, and giving her the evil eye every time she starts to improvise before I have a…

Happy Thanksgiving all! Regular readers will recognize this post from LAST Thanksgiving!!! See you soon; I am off to make broth…

My favorite quick dress-up for food that takes me from workaday-dull to bright and shiny: dried cranberries and walnuts.

My take-to-work breakfast? Plain nonfat yogurt, swirled up with some honey, a handful of cranberries and another handful of walnuts (bought in big bags at Costco – they last and last). Crunchy, creamy and sweet – oh yeah.

At home, I add them to spike up instant oatmeal. I also substitute half the raisins in oatmeal raisin cookies with cranberries for a brighter flavor and add walnuts for crunch and depth.

Boring salad? Add handfuls of cranberries and walnuts and make it fancy-schmancy (especially good with orange/clementine segments, red onion and feta – separately or in combination).

Today I incorporated them into my leftover turkey salad. Zippy!

Leftover Turkey Salad

leftover turkey, removed from bone, gristly…

And finally, almost 13 years after I started working on it, my culinary dictionary is available!! I am so excited (Thanks Carlos Matos of Forsa Editores for getting on board with me and guiding me through this new adventure!) to finally, after years of writing for newspapers and magazines to actually have my own book out, with my name on it (the cover you see here is not quite the actual image, but you get the idea). It feels really, really, great.

Eat Your Way Through Puerto Rico: A Culinary Dictionary is my contribution to the foodie word world.

(Update: Eat Your Way is now available on iTunes too!)

What is does is take the words and phrases we use in Puerto Rico for produce, local dishes, meats, fish and seafood, as well as how we get a table at a restaurant or get our steak cooked to order, and…

This one is for my homies: my readers here on Long Island. All the rest, rest assured that once I fix the weird photo upload problem that is cramping my blogging style, I will have a bunch of new recipes to share!

Local, Fresh and (pretty much) Organic: We’ve been getting our eggs and Thanksgiving (and sometimes Christmas) birds from Makinajian Poultry Farm in Huntington for a number of years now. We didn’t discover them by ourselves; once we joined C.S.A. – first at Sophia Garden and now at Restoration Farm – eggs and Thanksgiving turkeys were optional shares. It’s a good thing, as a drive to their farm in Huntington is kind of a hike for us to do on a regular basis – 30-40 minutes from our house. It’s a nice place to go though – farm animals in the front yard, coops out the back and a…

September 28th, 2012

I found an unusual butcher today in Smithfield Meat Market – Wesker and Son.

I hadn’t noticed this stall before, but the meat did seem to be exceptionally fresh.

I was quite tempted by some of the more exotic items,

though I wasn’t entirely sure about the offal.

The hands were good value,

at £5 each

– they did seem to have a run on them,

in fact they’d almost run out.

I may have to go back for more tomorrow, though in general the prices seemed a bit higher than my favourite butchers, Theobalds, but they had some good recipe cards.

Wesker and Sons are open for business today (28th) and tomorrow, 29th September 2012. After that there’s no hope left…

Body parts provided by Sharon Baker

Further info

Hi! I’m back from my short holyday in Paris. I had a wonderful time, despite the weather… I walked a lot and ate a bit too much, but hey! It was France, what was I supposed to do?

Anyway, I left with a French recipe and I come back with a Spanish tapa. This is like one of the most popular dishes in Spain.

For me, a real Spanish tortilla only has eggs, potatoes and onion, that’s it. Some people don’t like onion and that’s ok too, you can take those out, it still will be right. But that’s just me, you may add other things if you like, courgettes, aubergines, peas, chorizo…bearing in mind that you have to try it at least once without any additions.

Ok, that said it seems a little silly from me to give you any recipe, because it is really simple and there are…