Week Four: Grocery Inventory, Shrimp, Chicken, and Deviled Eggs

Be sure to check out Week Three's entry! This week was a two-for-one due to midterms.

One major part of menu planning is the grocery inventory. Knowing what you already have will help you to plan what you need to buy. I’ve saved $20 on weekly menus because I keep track of what I already have. Very often, I look at a menu, write down what I don’t have, and find that in order to make Mu-Shu Pork, I just need to buy the pork. Keeping track of what you have does in fact save you money. This is especially true of spices and herbs, which can be incredibly expensive, let alone when you buy them and don’t need them yet. Keeping a food inventory is simply keeping yourself up to date on what food items you have available to you to use this week. Here are some key ways to maintain a food inventory:

1. Organize refrigerator, freezer, cupboards, etc; so that similar items are grouped together. This means actually using your vegetable drawers for vegetables, and your meat drawer for meat. The reason for this is so that you can just glance inside the fridge and see how much of what kinds of meat you have available to you, or how much of what vegetables and fruits are still unused. This helps so that you use what you have, which helps you save money because less food goes to waste, and thus you waste less money buying things you already have.
2. Every three months, clean your refrigerator, your cupboards, and your freezer. Take note of what foods you still have that maybe were buried behind those cans of tomatoes, or that box of noodles. Then, either make a menu that will use the older items, plan a day to donate them to a food pantry, or if they’re past their expiration date, throw them out. Do this for your condiments, too. Do this every three months – mark it on your calendar.
3. If you have a large chest freezer, you might try making an actual inventory list for the door. Go through every shelf, and write down what food is on what shelf. When you use that pound of frozen beef, cross it off your list. When you buy more pork chops, add those to the list. Attach and pen with a string to this list to make it more convenient for you to keep track of these things. Renew your list every month or so, because a quick look at it will help you plan out your menu for that week, and will save you time in the long run when you no longer have to dig through it for ten, twenty minutes every week to see if you have something or not.
4. Keep menu planning! Weekly menus will keep you buying only what you need, and so you save money and waste less food. In Cheap. Fast. Good!, the Desperation Diners say, “We were startled to discover that the average American household throws away 470 pounds of food every year and that as much as 12% of purchased grocery items are never used.” By menu planning and grocery inventorying, you can cut down the amount of food thrown away in your home, and cut back on how much is never used.

Now, onward to this week’s fast and cheap recipes!

This Week’s Recipes Are: Easy Shrimp Scampi, Chicken and Apples with Dijon Cream, and Delicious Deviled Eggs.

Guest Recipe & Review: Apple Butter, submitted by Jill B.

Easy Shrimp Scampi

Photographed by me.

Serves: 6 to 8 Start to Finish: Under 25 minutes

Ingredients:

· 1 lb. frozen, shelled, de-veined shrimp

· 1 package long pasta, such as angel hair or thin spaghetti

· ½ cup butter

· 4 cloves fresh garlic, or 2 tbsp. bottled minced garlic

· 1 cup dry white wine

· ¼ tsp. ground black pepper

· ¾ cup parmesan cheese

· 1 tbsp parsley

1. Boil salted water with noodles until al dente. Drain well and return to the pot. Rinse the shrimp under cold water to thaw, and then remove the tails. Set aside.

2. While the noodles are boiling, melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When butter is melted, stir in garlic and shrimp. Cook, stirring constantly, for 3 to 5 minutes.

3.Stir in the wine and pepper. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for 30 seconds while stirring.

4.Pour shrimp and sauce over drained pasta in pot (or serving bowl), and sprinkle with cheese and parsley. Serve at once.

Review-

This was one of the first recipes I learned how to make once I started cooking. I believe I found it originally on allrecipes.com, but there are a lot of good recipes there, so you never know. My fiance loves this recipe, being the big fan of shrimp and seafood in general that he is. This recipe is a very simple way to make shrimp scampi, and it works very well. The time consuming part is de-tailing the shrimp, but if you do that beforehand, this will go much faster.

I know a very good way to cheat if you don't have any garlic, and most college students can do this pretty well. If you have garlic butter from pizza orders saved in your fridge, you can add those to the butter mixture to get that garlic flavor. :) It's a shortcut that I've tested time and again, and it gets rid of the garlic butter that gets saved.

Chicken and Apples with Dijon Cream (pg. 150 of Cheap. Fast. Good!)

Serves: 4 Start to Finish: Under 25 minutes

Ingredients:

· Salt for cooking the rice

· 1 1/3 cups long grain rice

· 1 lb. skinless, boneless chicken breast halves

· 8 ox fresh button mushrooms

· 1 tbsp. vegetable oil

· 1 tsp. butter

· 1 small onion

· 2 large tart cooking apples (I use Granny Smith)

· ¾ cup apple juice

· ½ cup dry white wine, such as Chardonnay, or ½ cup additional apple juice to substitute

· 1 ½ tsp. sugar

· 1 chicken bouillon cube

· 1 tbsp. Dijon mustard

· ¼ cup half-and-half or heavy cream (heavy whipping cream in many stores)

1. Bring 2 2/3 cups lightly salted water to a boil in a covered medium-sized saucepan. Add the rice, stir, and reduce the heat to low. Cover the pan and simmer until the rice is tender, about 20 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, if the chicken is frozen, run it under hot water so you can remove the packaging. Place the chicken on a microwave-safe plate and microwave, uncovered, on high power for 3 minutes to partially defrost.

3. While the chicken defrosts, rinse, pat dry, and slice the mushrooms, removing and discarding any tough stems. Set aside.

4. Heat the oil and butter in an extra-deep 12” skillet over medium heat. Peel and coarsely chop the onion, adding it to the skillet as you chop.

5. Cut the chicken (fresh or partially defrosted) into bite-size pieces, adding them to the skillet as you cut. Cook, stirring occasionally, while you cut each apple in half and remove the core. Without peeling them, cut the apples into ¼ inch slices. When the apples are sliced, add them to the skillet along with the mushrooms. Cook, stirring, until the mushrooms just begin to soften, about 2 minutes.

6. Add the apple juice, wine, and sugar. Crush the bouillon cube between your fingers or with the back of a spoon and add it to the skillet. Stir well. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook until the sugar has dissolved and the chicken is no longer pink in the center, about 4 minutes more.

7. Stir in the mustard and half-and-half. Cook, stirring, until the mixture is warm throughout, about 2 minutes. If you use half-and-half, do NOT let the mixture boil. Serve at once over hot rice.

Review-

This recipe is one of the easiest “fancy” recipes I’ve ever tried. You can make this recipe fairly quickly, with almost no multi-tasking, and yet it comes out with a fancy, restaurant quality taste to it that will keep anyone from doubting your abilities as a cook. This is one recipe that I call an ice-breaker recipe, in that people may not believe you’re going to make this, but once you have, they’re ever so grateful for it. I wouldn’t enter into any professional cooking competitions with this, because it is incredibly simple, but this could probably take a local competition with minimal effort.

This recipe brings together three unlikely flavors in one amazing dish. The taste of the apples, chicken, and that hint of Dijon mustard is anything but bland, and the interesting combination will have you eating more just to keep experiencing it. A must-have in any contemporary recipe book.

Delicious Deviled Eggs

Makes: 16 Deviled Eggs Start to Finish: Under 25 minutes

Ingredients:

· 8 large eggs

· 5 tbsp. regular or reduced-fat mayonnaise

· 1 tbsp. Dijon mustard

· 2 tsp. apple cider vinegar

· 1/8 tsp. black pepper

· Salt to taste

· Paprika to taste (optional)

1. Place the eggs into a 2-quart or larger saucepan and add cold or lukewarm water until all eggs are covered. Lightly salt. Place pan over high heat and bring the water to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and boil, uncovered, for 10 to 15 minutes. Remove pan from heat, and place eggs in strainer to cool, running lukewarm water over them.

2. In the meantime, put mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, and black pepper into a bowl. When the eggs are cool, peel them and cut them in half lengthwise. Remove the yolks and add them to the mayonnaise mixture. Mix together until smooth, seasoning with salt to taste.

3. Spoon the filling into the egg whites. Dust the filled eggs lightly with paprika if using, and serve.

Review-

I’ve been a fan of deviled eggs my entire life, and I have to say that this recipe blows my old method (mayonnaise, yellow mustard, dash of whatever vinegar is around) out of the water. These are stupendous, and will be a big hit at any party or pot luck. The only person who I have had try these that didn’t care for them was my fiancé, who doesn’t like things with mayonnaise as a base ingredient. That said, this recipe works just as well for egg salad, and in whichever form I make it, it’s all gone by the next day. When it comes to sides, you can never go wrong with some nice, delicious deviled eggs.


Apple Butter Guest Recipe & Review by Jill B.
Serves: 6+ Start to Finish: 1 hour and 30 minutes

Ingredients:

• 6 large granny smith apples (or baking apples if you want it sweeter)
• 2 cups apple cider
• Cinnamon
• Honey

1.) Put the two cups of apple cider in a pot large enough to accommodate the apples and set on stove to boil

2.) Peel the apples and cut into cubes or smallish pieces

3.) Once the cider is boiling, carefully add the apple pieces. Sprinkle with cinnamon and honey and stir

4.) Turn the heat down to low and cover, simmering gently for an hour. Stir occasionally and add more honey and cinnamon to taste

5.) After an hour, remove the pot from heat and let sit for about ten to fifteen minutes to thicken

6.) To serve, simply dish it into a bowl and enjoy!

Review:

This recipe is one I discovered in a colonial cookbook one Christmas and I decided to give it a shot. It's now a family favorite and requested at all of the family gatherings! Over the years, I've tweaked it, added a few spins of my own (adding the honey and cinnamon in at the beginning for example so the flavor cooks right in), and it's one of the few things that I can cook without screwing it up somehow. So I hope you enjoy it as much as my family and me!