The Exact Same! Except Totally Different!

With the official start of fall last week, I've started to feel a resurgence of interest in my garden. Most of the summer it was too hot, or too wet, or too bug-infested for me to spend the proper amount of time and attention on my little plot. Who knows how much awesomer it could have been if I'd actually worked on it...at all...during July and August?

My tomatoes are basically toast at this point, and I'm not talking about bruschetta. The wet spring made them all catch early blight, and I didn't think they would make it. Well, most of them have survived, although at this point they are so sick that none of the fruit will ripen. It starts to rot around the stem before the fruit ever gets ripe. So needless to say - in the spirit of NO WASTE! - I'm making green tomato chutney today.

Here's the original recipe I based my version on. Only thing is, I'm missing a lot of the ingredients! So here is my as-made version:

2 - 3 lbs green tomatoes, chopped

1/2 Spanish yellow onion, chopped

1 T olive oil

1/4 c brown sugar

1/4 c white sugar

1/2 c apple cider vinegar

1/4 t ground ginger

2 T fresh rosemary, chopped

Heat oil in a large saucepan. Add onion and saute until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the rest of ingredients, bring to a boil, then turn heat down and simmer for about 45 minutes, until mixture is thickened, tasting a few times and adding more of anything to taste. Remove from heat, let it cool, then store in the fridge.

I'll be using it on a pork loin roast for dinner tonight. YUM!

Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte

OK, this isn't quite as wonderful as Starbucks, but given that I would have to drive 20 minutes for a fix, here's the do-it-yourself pumpkin spice latte I made this morning. Much cheaper AND fewer calories.

Strong, dark coffee - 8 oz

Milk to taste (I used 2%; whole milk would have made it a lot creamier)

Pumpkin pie spices to taste - about 1/4 teaspoon

2 packets of Splenda

Like I said, it's not an exact match. But it will do the job!

Getting Creative In Minimizing Waste

I haven't posted in a while because real life has taken over. But I did want to share my latest forays into the realm of "Waste not, want not." I'm having to get creative.

Home made bread seemed like a great way to cut costs, so I've been experimenting a lot there. My one attempt at "Five Minute Bread" was quite successful; my home made sourdough using Oregon Trail starter, much less so.

Maybe my expectations with regards to sourdough are just to high, hmm?

Luckily for us waste-avoiders, there are lots of uses for sourdough bread that's gone stale due to disappointment. The majority of it will go to croûtons. A smaller amount went into this summer squash casserole recipe. Which was OK, though not fabulous. Keep an eye out for more summer squash recipe reviews here: I have a bumper crop and I'm ALREADY sick of it, even though the season has barely started!

Another "I Don't Know What to Cook for Dinner" Website

I previously posted about RecipePuppy and Recipe Key as the antidote for the last-minute trips out for dinner because you don't know any recipes for the ingredients you have on hand.

But the bloggers over at LifeHacker have turned up a new one, that's even better! Why? It suggests other ingredients, based on the recipes being returned by your search results! I present: SuperCook!

It doesn't have a lot of the nice filter options of Recipe Key, but the "Do you have?" feature is priceless. If I have "chicken breast", I won't necessarily think of "worcestershire sauce" as another ingredient. But the two together is all I need for an easy blackened chicken recipe. Yum!

Better than that, it's additive. When I added "honey" and "mustard" to the search, the blackened chicken recipe still showed up, rather than being filtered out just because it didn't need those additional ingredients. Wonderful!

Reduce, Reuse... Recycle?

Dinner tonight: balsamic salmon, rice, and wilted micro greens with pecans and dried cranberries.

Which is the gourmet way of saying "I couldn't bear to just throw away all the broccoli, cauliflower, and celery that I started indoors and then didn't have room to plant in the garden, so I cut off the leaves and sauteed them in sesame oil with baby spinach."

And it was good.

Waste Not: One Squishy Banana

Whenever we have three bananas which have gone brown, everyone in the fam gets excited. Three brown bananas means mommy will soon be baking banana bread! (For the record, I use the recipe out of Cook's Illustrated Best Recipe collection, with one secret ingredient: substitute sour cream for the yogurt. SLURP!)

But what do I do if I only have one squishy banana? This happens a lot, and I have been stumped as to the best use for this one banana. I can always save them in the freezer for future banana bread awesomeness, but using frozen bananas instead of fresh COMPLETELY changes the texture of the bread.

And then: I realized. One squishy banana = smoothie!

1.) Freeze the banana for at least a few hours.
2.) Chop it into smallish pieces, and blend with some orange juice, some yogurt, and some fresh fruit of a flavor compatible with the yogurt. (A lot of smoothie directions say to use plain yogurt, but if you are making a strawberry smoothie and strawberry yogurt is what you have, then why not?)
3.) If the smoothie is too thick, add more orange juice; if it's too thin, add more fruit; if it's not cold enough, add some ice cubes.

Voila. One squishy banana saved from waste!

(And one more banana peel to add to the compost bin!)

Waste Not, Want Not

So what do we do with seven leftover corn bread muffins? I made an extra big batch over the weekend, thinking the fam would eat them all.

Not so much!

Tonight, we will be eating corn bread muffin casserole!

1.) Crumble the corn bread and pack it into the bottom of the casserole dish.
2.) Layer on some cooked white rice.
3.) Layer on some beans (refried, kidney, pinto, whatev).
4.) Layer on some browned meat, cooked with some kind of yummy seasoning (like taco).
5.) Sprinkle on some cheese!

Bake till cooked through - 350 for 30 minutes? Might want to cover it with foil until the last 10 minutes so the cheese doesn't over-brown.

Top with sour cream, chopped tomatoes, onions, or whatever sounds good!