Another cheap and cheerful recipe from the Tortoise & Hare kitchen.
Flank steak is a relatively inexpensive cut and is easy to cook.
The tortillas in this recipe take a little bit of effort, but once they melt in your mouth you’ll be glad you took the time. If you’re not feeling that ambitious, this is a quick week night meal with store bought tortillas.
You can prepare the salsa and marinated the meat the night before. When you get home just grill up your meat and tuck in!
Trying to keep both my grocery bill and my meat consumption down these days. I’ve been on the lookout for cheap and cheerful meals that make the most of less.
This pie took leftover chicken and veg from the garden and turned it into decadent delishiousness for a couple more meals.
Please feel free to use whatever veggies you have in your fridge, garden or freezer. The amount of chicken is also totally up to you. Our goal here is to clean out the fridge and use what we have on hand.
Waste not, want not!
It’s finally September. My hubby and I spent the weekend working on bringing in the last of the harvest. Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, onions.
There are always a handful of onions that aren’t really big enough to bother curing. I hate to waste the fruits of my husband’s labour so I found a lovely way to take these unassuming little throwaways and turn them into little gems of oniony goodness.
You can use any small onion for this. We used small storage onions, small sweet Walla Walla, pearl onions and Cippolini.
Feel free to fiddle with the recipe. More vinegar for more tang, more or less honey to suit your sweet tooth.
These onions are delicious hot or cold. We ate ours warm with a fresh loaf of crusty organic country bread from A Bread Affair. The onions are so tender, they spread like butter, and the bread was perfect for mopping up the sauce.
They are equally good cold with a sharp white cheddar, in a sandwich (grilled cheese!) or as part of an antipasto plate.
That is, if they last that long.
If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would find myself tip-toeing up to my 29th birthday, married, expecting a baby and living as a housewife, I would have scoffed.
I started university young, a wide-eyed 17 year old, and spent my time there making art firmly rooted in a feminist tradition, taking classes about the women Art History 101 forgot to mention, writing papers on The Cult of Domesticity. My coffee cup back then proudly proclaimed “Domestically Disabled”. And I was, no word of a lie.
I am still a feminist, through and through, and (I hate to admit it) am still slightly handicapped when it comes to efficient housekeeping. And yet, here I am.
I have spent much of the last two years reading and writing and talking about living differently; of knowing when enough is enough, learning to say “when”. Of slowing down, of making time for what really matters . . . But despite my reading and writing and time in the kitchen and the garden, I haven’t been living that way.
As you may have gathered from my last entry, in this time of economic hardship and uncertainty, I up and quit my job.
Now, instead of just reading about making do with less, my family and I are living it. Despite the stress and challenges, Jeff and I are determined to build a better life on one income than we had on two. We have a baby on the way and we are intent on being the ones to raise our child, which means I won’t be going back to work outside the home any time soon. So we are learning to make one income enough. And perhaps live a more joyful life in the process . . .
My not working has already removed a lot of unnecessary expenses from our life. Immediately the “latte fund”, so necessary when you need to escape from the hectic office for a shot of rocket fuel to keep you going, became moot. The cost of only one (of my many) daily trips to Starbucks keeps me in tea for weeks at home. Then there’s the lunches with the girls, and after-work drinks. The endless parade of office charity drives, birthday collections, retirement lunches. The 80 dollars a month to ride the train downtown. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars spent to stay in the latest business fashions. All those expenses – gone.
Unfortunately, the last few months at home have been spent mostly with my head in the toilet, thanks to the joys of morning sickness, but now that is passing even more economic benefits of me not working are becoming clear.
My not working means I suddenly have time to do things that lessen our families need for money even further. With one person at home, suddenly there is time for the garden, time to grow and put by food that now doesn’t need to come out of the household budget. There is job security, and then there is the security of having 12 liters of homemade stewed tomatoes in the larder. No drop in the stock market can affect the levels in my pantry!
Being frugal takes time and thoughtful planning. Neither of which are easy to come by when you’re working your brains out. Our weekly grocery bill has gone from about 150 dollars a week, down to about 60, simply because I have the time to plan and cook cheaply. In the process we are eating even better than before because we are eating simple, home cooked meals. Homemade bread, soup from scratch, potatoes a million ways.
I will have more time to tend to our chickens, who are now bringing in a tiny income in egg sales. And with luck, our garden will continue to provide not only food for our table, but dollars for our budget at the same time. I have time to knit durable, inexpensive clothing for our unborn baby, and I hope to learn how to sew. I’d love to start making homemade cheese and yogurt.
It isn’t going to be easy. We live in Vancouver, with one of the highest qualities of life in the world, and one of the highest cost of living. Our mortgage is still due every month, and the property taxes aren’t going to get smaller no matter how I scrimp and save. There is an enormous amount of pressure on Jeff as the sole provider, but I am confident that as we move forward, with practice and creativity, we will be able to build a satisfying life and maybe even learn what it truly means to have enough.
