I'm starting to think I'd do all right on the show MasterChef, especially on those Mystery Box Challenges, since apparently I face the basically the same thing at home on a fairly regular basis! Just the other day, I had a half pound of ground venison that needed to be used up, an abundance of summer squash, an assortment of other garden veggies, and kids that wanted spaghetti for dinner. I came up with a super hearty and delicious spaghetti sauce that it barely needed the spaghetti to make it a meal! I only ended up using half the box of spaghetti to feed the whole family! Keeping that in mind, using garden veggies, homemade tomato sauce, and venison my father-in-law gave us (we ran out of what my husband got. Guess I need to send him out more to hunt this year!), this whole meal cost under $1 to feed the whole family!
Another nice thing about this meal is that it is super quick! Start it when you start your water to boil for the pasta and by the time the pasta is ready to serve, so is the sauce!
Harvest Spaghetti Sauce
1/2 lb ground meat
1 small onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
1 small summer squash, pared (if desired), quartered and sliced
2 cups plain tomato sauce
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried basil (or 1 tbsp fresh)
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tomato, chopped
Brown ground meat with onion and green pepper. Add summer squash and saute until squash just begins to soften. Add tomato sauce, garlic, basil, oregano, and tomato. Simmer about 10 minutes. Serve on pasta, topped with grated Parmesan cheese.
I've been looking over your info on how to stretch a chicken. I feel I should tell you that my husband was about ready to quit buying whole chicken because he felt he wasn't getting much out of the small birds sold at the store.
ReplyDeleteSo two days ago I asked him to pull the meat off a freshly roasted chicken, claiming a sore wrist (which was true, I think I sprained the stupid thing again). He began to express a bit of awe as he pulled off more and more meat. He pulled off everything he could find, and served half of it for supper that evening.
After dinner, I surprised him by turning the carcass over and pulling more meat off of it - effectively pulling off half again what he had already removed. He was sold at that point, but I had the last final trick up my sleeve - I boiled the carcass (including the skin, which we hadn' eaten - we're both trying to lose weight), and came up with four cups of rich-looking stock that, frankly, smelled and looked much better than the stuff he has been buying from the store.
He's hooked now. He told me yesterday he'd bragged about it to his coworker, who's now going to go home and try to convince his own wife to switch to whole chickens, LOL!