Previously prepared post. Thank you all for your concern. Luckily we do have electricity and water now, unlike many of our neighbors. I am taking some time to get things cleaned up and back to “normal.” Be back Monday with a new post! Thank you again for your well wishes! -Katie

There are times when bagged lettuce is an easy, fast way to get dinner or a side salad on the table. However, when budgets get tight, something has to go. Since the fresh, healthy presence of salad on the dinner table shouldn’t be excluded, it’s time to think outside the bag box.

Having grown up on bagged salad, I was a little intimidated the first time I bought a head of romaine instead of several bags. However, once I had the right tools, it was a pretty easy transition and now I find it difficult to buy bagged lettuces over fresh. My Zyliss lettuce knife and salad spinner are my tools of choice. The lettuce knife works through the lettuce as easily as my chef’s knife but keeps the stems from turning brown as quickly.

First, chop the lettuce, throwing away the damaged outer leaves and stem. Put the chopped lettuce in the basket of the salad spinner inside the bowl, and fill the bowl with cold water. Then shake and aggitate the lettuce in the water, and remove the basket leaving the dirty water in the bowl. Dump and refill, then wash again until the water left in the bowl is clean. Then dump the water and place the basket back inside and spin! The remaining water will be whisked away leaving you fluffy, clean, dry lettuce. The best part is the whole thing goes right into the fridge to store your lettuce for about a week. Making side salads or packing work lunches on the fly is easy: just grab a few handfuls of clean, dry lettuce and go!

Have you tried:

• Strawberry Salad with Sweet Onion Dressing
• Sweet and Sour Green Apple Salad
• Romaine Hearts Drizzled with Spicy Ranch

There are very few dishes as easy as preparing a corned beef. You can simmer it in a pot on the stove top or you can cook it in a slow cooker while you are out. I generally make mine on the stove top because I can’t seem to get the slow cooker started early enough. Corned beef is great fall comfort food for me; the perfect meal for those chilly, busy fall days. My mother simply puts the brisket with the seasonings from the package in her Crockpot and fills it with water to cover before going to work-it’s that easy. I make mine with a few extra ingredients because I like the depth of flavor.  Click here for the recipe »

This post was written a couple of weeks ago before Hurricane Ike took down our power and took out our stores of frozen and refrigerated foods.  It is a the first of a series on preparing meals from ingredients already on hand.

Welcome to the Pantry Challenge! Anytime the grocery budget runs dry before payday, whether it be days or weeks, it’s time for a pantry challenge. The pantry challenge basically consists of making tasty meals out of all the stuff you’ve already got in your pantry, fridge, and freezer, without running to the store for a bunch of new ingredients. You can approach the Pantry Challenge as an emergency guide when there is an unexpected expense that eats up the grocery budget prematurely or as a list of great items to keep on hand that will yield dinner under any circumstances.

If you are like me, chances are you have all kinds of stuff hanging out in your cabinets and freezer, and in the back of the fridge and the floor of the closet, and probably the garage and the trunk of the car as well. Most of this stuff was bought with a purpose in mind, a purpose that fell to the wayside due to your busy life. Now it’s just odds and ends and embarrassingly useless ingredients. Now it’s days till payday and there’s no money for take-out or even a run to resupply. You’ve got to figure out how to make a dinner out of all this stuff.

Usually you will have a particular ingredient in mind-whether it’s the half of a container of sour cream in the back of the fridge or the last three tortillas going stale in the breadbox-to build your meal from. In my case it was the tortillas. I knew there were three giant burrito sized flour tortillas in the pantry that had been there, leftover, for weeks. I knew if we didn’t use them soon they’d be trash, but what does a family of five do with three tortillas? I did a quick food blog search for “quesadillas.”

As I browsed the recipes, I thought about the proteins currently on hand: deli meats, some frozen chicken breasts, fish fillets, etc… I remembered there was half of a bag of frozen cocktail shrimp somewhere in the freezer, which led me to Simple Recipes’ Shrimp Quesadillas recipe. So I didn’t have most of the ingredients Elise calls for in her posted recipe, but I knew I had tortillas (check!), shrimp (check!), cheese (check!), and various tex-mex condiments (check! check!). So shrimp quesadillas were on.

Part of the challenge of the pantry challenge is the fact that rarely will you have all of the ingredients a recipe calls for. So you have to wing it. In my case, I had cilantro but no peppers, no green onion, no avocado, no Monterrey jack. Because of my huge small wine and cheese obsession hobby I knew I had some Asadero cheese which would be a great substitute. I also always keep garlic, onions and bottled lime juice on hand. A recipe was forming…

I offer you:

Shrimp Quesadillas

• 1/2 lb medium shrimp, peeled, deveined, and cooked
• 1 tbsp lime juice
• 1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1/4 red onion, chopped
• 6 oz Asadero cheese, or other Mexican melting cheese
• Flour Tortillas, Burrito size
• butter, oil or better butter

1. Start with your shrimp. Prepare and cook them or, if you keep them already cooked and frozen, thaw in a bowl of cold water. It doesn’t take long, in the time it takes you to chop your cilantro, garlic and onion they will be done.
2. Give your shrimp a rough chop and add to a bowl with the cilantro. Splash with lime juice, salt and pepper.
3. Heat your skillet or griddle over medium-high heat and saute your garlic and onion in a little butter or oil until soft. Add to the bowl with shrimp.
4. Shred your cheese or if your cheese is already shredded take a moment to be thankful.
5. Heat about a tsp of butter or oil in your skillet and place a tortilla in the center. Spoon 1/3 of your shrimp mixture over half the tortilla and cover with a handful of shredded cheese. Fold over the empty side of your tortilla to close and fry until the underside is brown and crisp and cheese is melty. Flip.
6. Continue frying until other side is also brown and crispy then transfer to a cutting board.
7. Repeat with remaining ingredients. Use a pizza wheel to cut each half moon into quarters.

If the tortillas in your pantry are the smaller fajita size you can make these by sandwiching the ingredients between two tortillas instead. You can serve these on their own or if you need to stretch them make some rice and some frozen corn or leftover black bean and corn salad to go along side. Congratulations, you made a meal out of “nothing.”

Some other Pantry Challenge meals:

Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Goat Cheese and Garlic

Status: 3 days without power

So you may know that we were hit by a major hurricane Friday night.  Luckily, my family was on vacation at the time so we were not home during the storm-although we would have evacuated had we been.  Thank you so much to all of the wonderful friends and neighbors who called us in the hours before the storm hit to see if we needed any help checking on and preparing our house.

I write this from our hotel in Florida which has power, water, food, and air conditioning.  We are very lucky to have been here for the last three days instead of at home without all of those things considering our flight home was scheduled for last Friday afternoon.  Unfortunately we cannot stay forever-we will be returning home tomorrow (unless the airport is still without power and fuel).  At the time of this post we are to expect “several weeks” without power.  That’s several weeks without air conditioning, cooking, or cold food.  I have several posts prepared in advance which will go up on schedule.  That will bring us to over 10 days without power.  At that point I will check in when I am able.

I am really nervous about the coming weeks but I am grateful that we are all safe.  Our friends and neighbors are safe and the damage to our homes is manageable.  That’s the good news.  I will post pictures and information as soon as I can.

Have any of you been through something like this before?  Any tips?