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scattered thoughts

In the interest of saving money, breaking the cycle of eating fast food twice a day, and cleaning the detritus from my pantry, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to trim my grocery budget to ZERO and commit to eating whatever I had in the house until it runs out. I had bought a bunch of 50% off stuff from an Albertson’s closing down a month or two ago, and my cupboards had been overflowing since then anyway. I’m just buying staples, which for me is milk and Coca-Cola.

Two weeks later, I’m just barely beginning to get to the good stuff. Bear in mind I’m quite clueless about cooking, though I’ve been watching Alton Brown a lot and dreaming. I came up with this from only stuff I’ve had around for a while.

Stephan’s invention: white trash risotto
Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

* 1 package of Farmhouse Long Grain & Wild Rice. No idea when I got it. Prepared according to directions.

* 2 italian sausages - first bought in a six pack in February for making pizza and frozen since then - started thawing them yesterday with no clue what I was going to do with it. Googled what to do with them, decided to cut off the casings and fry them up in:

* olive oil from one of the 3 or 4 unfinished bottles floating around. Just a little bit - my first chance to try this awesome cast iron pan - part of a whole set I bought from a thrift store for $50 a while back. While that was cooking, I got the idea to try something I had heard of, but wasn’t sure what it was: deglazing. Huh, says you can use water, but wine is best. I drank all that… except

* A mini bottle of Delicato White Zinfandel - 187 ml, a four pack of crappy wine my ex-gf bought and drank only one of. Perfect!!! I spent like 5-10 minutes pouring that in and scraping while the rice finished cooking, and even added a little teeny bit of:

* flour - left over from my bread machine experiments. Ooh, this is working, I’ve got a sort of tasty little sauce going on here! WTF! WWAD? (What Would Alton Do)

* Kosher salt. I have no idea if this did anything useful, but I put some in. Alton puts it in everything. OK, one more item, something to pretend I’m being semi-healthy. Aha!

* A can of peas, drained. Again, no clue where I got this or how long it had been on the shelf. It might’ve come back from Burning Man. I threw the rice back into the deglazed pan, threw back in the sausage (which I had drained), and put in the peas. I heated the whole mixture up in a pan, and am eating it from a bowl, and it’s pretty yummy.

Did I do this "right"? I have no clue, but it’s edible and totally from what I already had in the house. I’m pretty proud of myself!

Honest, it’s been two weeks, I’ve only eaten outside food maybe three times, and I’ve still got 2 packages of tuna, 2 salmon steak, 1 crab, some sea scallops, 2 more sausages, chicken wings, frozen burgers, bread machine mix, frozen potatoes, soups, rice, noodles, etc. Amazing the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated.

So I’m thinking I can go another two weeks of zero food budget, which is going to save me an insane amount compared to what I usually spend on restaurants, frozen meals and the like. Seems healthier.

I’ve even got at least one or two more servings of this stuff!