How to Make an Awesome Lunch With Ramen Noodles

Known as a cheap meal, ramen noodles sometimes get a bum rap because of their salt content and maybe just because they're cheap.

While it's true that the bouillon flavoring that comes with ramen noodles has a lot of salt, so does any kind of bouillon, unless you opt for the pricier, low salt version. I still don't know how omitting an ingredient makes a product more expensive, but I digress.

Ramen noodles can make the basis of a really good and really quick lunch.

Use two packages of noodles for a family. Bring a pot of water to boil, using about half what the noodles call for.

Other than that, you will need:

2 eggs, beaten
A double handful of chopped raw greens of your choice: spinach, collards, dandelion greens or other wild greens.
1 cup of frozen mixed vegetables
1 cup of chopped, cooked meat or crumbles like ground beef. Meat can be anything you have: Poultry, ham, beef, etc. Leftovers are great and a combination is fine.

Put the frozen vegetables in first because they take the longest to cook. Chop the greens and meat and beat the eggs while the vegetables are cooking. Add noodles and greens at the same time, wait a minute or two, then drizzle the beaten egg into the boiling soup, stirring gently as you do. Add the meat last and cook just enough to heat through.

Serve with crusty bread and condiments like pickled beets or other vegetables and/or cheese slices.

There you go. There's a hearty, almost healthy and entirely cheap meal.

I did it!

How many times have I tried to make crackers that were crispy just like the kind you buy? Answer: Lots! I lost count of how many times I've tried, but finally I took a recipe and made it my way and it worked.

The recipe called for a cup of butter, milk, vinegar and baking soda, then salt. As I was putting it together, I realized that plain buttermilk would substitute for all the ingredients except for the baking soda and salt. The first batch turned out good, but not crisp. So here's what I did:

To 2 cups of flour, add a half teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of baking powder and a half teaspoon of baking soda. Mix it up, then add enough thick buttermilk to make a dough that can be handled on a floured board. Roll it out as thin as you can. I wound up using a pasta machine made for rolling noodle dough. I put the rolled out dough on a parchment paper on a cookie sheet, scored and lightly salted it, then baked at 275 for somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes.

Voila! Crackers. Finally.

My own butternut squash soup recipe

With the garden winding down, it's time to pick squash! I love this time of year in the garden. The heat of the summer is just a memory and the hardest work is done. Tomatoes are ripening so slowly that I don't have to worry about keeping up with them, cucumbers can be pulled up without guilt now and the lettuce and radishes are crisp and waiting.

The vines on the winter squash are drooping and thinning in the cool nights. I'm finding squash that I didn't even see in the lush growth of summer. Acorns and butternuts are piled high in a box in the basement and it's time to eat them!

So... I went looking for butternut squash soup recipes and found tons of them, from simple to elaborate. After awhile, the sheer abundance of recipes for squash soup was confusing! After skimming through several that seemed to be similar, I decided to wing it. Here's what I came up with, after three attempts. It's so good that I had to stop myself from eating all of it.

One average butternut squash, roasted.
One half large onion, coarsely chopped
About four cups of chicken stock
A couple of tablespoons of butter.

Saute the onion in the butter and add the chicken stock. Let it simmer while you peel and chunk the squash. When the onion is tender, remove about half of it and set aside. Add the squash and heat through, then put it into your blender or use a potato masher to puree it. When it's all smooth, return to the pot and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes. Add the reserved onion back in, add salt and pepper to taste.

You could add crumbled bacon and/or chopped, cooked vegetables to it, but I like mine just the way it is.

You can freeze this for later, but don't attempt to can it. Like pureed pumpkin, it's not safe to do in a home kitchen.

Bread: Frugal staff of life

Some people are bread people; some aren't, just like some people love chickens or horses or fast cars and others are just not impressed.

I'm a bread person. I love to experiment with bread, and with the prices still going up (will it ever stop??), baking your own bread can be a money saver.

I said can be, but it isn't necessarily so if you use a bread machine, a bread machine mix or buy expensive flour and yeast. I have never used "bread flour," and I've never bought expensive specialty flour, either. I mill my own flour and my bread is always well received - and even asked for.


I use this basic recipe most of the time:

1 tablespoon (or one package) yeast
1 tablespoon sugar, or brown sugar, or maple syrup, honey, etc.
1 teaspoon salt or sea salt or flavored salt such as garlic or onion
2 scant tablespoons of fat: butter, shortening, lard, vegetable oil, olive oil, etc.
1 cup of liquid: milk, water, half water and half milk, potato water or even part cream.
Flour as needed, usually 3 - 4 cups per loaf, with extra for kneading.

Put the salt, sugar and yeast in a large bowl and mix together.

Warm the liquid with the fat in it until it's slightly warmer than is comfortable to put your finger deep into it.

Add to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Let it set 5 or 10 minutes for the yeast to start working.

Add flour, a cup at a time at first, then less until you have a fairly stiff dough. Turn it out onto a floured board and knead for 3 to 5 minutes, until it's smooth and not sticky, adding flour as necessary.

Let it rise once or twice, then form it into loaves and put it in loaf pans. Let it rise once more, then bake at 400 for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down and finish baking at 350 for 30 to 40 minutes more.

If you mill your own wheat, it makes a heavy whole wheat loaf. Bread is supposed to be heavy. Real bread is the staff of life, not a piece of fluff that you surround your meat and cheese with. Bread was originally (and can still be!) the major part of a meal.

Bread should be nutritionally important, not just white fluff. Leave the fluffy air for cake and other nonessentials and you'll fill your tummy for less - and be happy doing it.

Crackers, Again

A disclaimer: These are still not the same as the saltine crackers you buy and I haven't made ghee yet to try, as one of the comments from this post recommended, but I will, one day. I can only eat so many crackers!

Anyway, the cracker recipe I wound up liking best doesn't make very many crackers. I made some changes to the original. Maybe after a few more tries, they'll be better.

• 2 cups flour
  
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil (I used canola on one batch, olive oil on another and couldn't tell the difference)
  
• 1/2 teaspoon salt. I made it a generous teaspoon.
  
• 1 teaspoon yeast. Again, I made it generous.
  
• 1/2 cup of cold water. I skimped on this the first time because the dough seemed as if it would get too mushy, but the second time I used it all and the crackers crisped a little better.
  
• Extra salt for the tops wasn't mentioned in the recipe, neither was pricking them, but I did both.
  

Add the yeast and salt to the flour and mix it well, then pour the oil into that and mix. I wound up using my hands for this part, so be prepared. Add cold water a little at a time, mixing to keep the dough as smooth as possible, then cover and let it rest for at least 15 minutes. I found that a half hour was better.

Roll the dough out very, very thin, and try to not get the edges much thinner than the middle, because they will brown too fast. Sprinkle with salt and cut into squares or other shapes. I used a pizza cutter, but a knife should work fine. Bake on a cookie sheet in a 350 degree oven for 12 - 16 minutes.

As I said, they're not like store bought, but that's a plus in many ways. I doubled the recipe successfully. They do tend to crumble easily. I've had some stored in a plastice container for about two weeks and they're still fresh.

About that Evaporated Milk...

The post "What You Don't Know..." had a reference to evaporated milk and how to use it. I'm not sure, but it seems that powdered milk is more popular than evaporated when it comes to shelf life. Evaporated milk can be more expensive, but it keeps better in humid conditions, doesn't have to be stored all in one place and sometimes you can find a good sale on it, so I use it at times.

You can use evaporated milk like you use real milk in just about anything, but its unique flavor works better in some things than in others. Even if you stretch your imagination thin, it doesn't taste like "real" milk, though.

• In coffee, of course.
• Reconstitute it and use when you bake cookies.
• It's good in dark cakes (reconstituted), not so good in white or yellow cakes (But you might think differently).
• Use it in scalloped potatoes.
• In the summer when yellow sqash is cheap or free, boil chunked squash and chunked potatoes together, then add evaporated milk.
• Take the potato and squash a step further:Slice them and mix them in a casserole dish layered with crushed cracker crumbs, then pour a can of reconstituted evaporated milk over them. Cover and bake until tender.
• Yet another potato dish: Start with peeled, cubed potatoes and diced onions in just enough water to cover. Simmer until tender, add salt, pepper and evaporated milk. With a pan of cornbread, this is so good!
• It goes very well with potatoes, but if you like the taste, try it with bananas and a little sugar (bananas and "cream") or put it on your breakfast cereal.
• Use it in chowders or cream soups of any kind.
• Any kind of creamy based dish, like stroganoff or creamed meats or vegetables.
• Use evaporated milk to make cheese sauce or macaroni and cheese.
• Many desserts have been created just for this canned milk. Pet Evaporated Milk has some really good dessert recipes, so I won't try to duplicate them here.

Watch for sales when you can stock up. I've also found that generic or store brands of evaporated milk is just as good as name brands that sometimes are twice the price, so it literally pays to look around.

A Better Cracker

My plea (Home Made Crackers) brought a few recipes to try and I finally got around to them this weekend. I wound up actually reading the ingredients on a box of saltine crackers, then going with a recipe that most closely matched that. The recipe called for butter, but I used vegetable oil, because the box said oil.

They turned out pretty good! Not quite as crispy as I'd hoped, but crispier and better tasting than the other batch.

Here's the recipe I followed and the changes I made:

2 cups flour
1/2 cup butter (I used a scant 1/2 cup of vegetable oil)
1 teaspoon yeast
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup of cold water

Mix the yeast and salt into the flour, then pour the oil into it. Mix it in well (I wound up using my hands), then add cold water, a little at a time, until a stiff, but workable dough forms. (I kneaded it a few times to smooth it.)

Let the dough rest fifteen minutes, then roll thinly, pierce all over with a fork and salt the top. Cut it into squares or other shapes and bake at 350 12 - 16 minutes, until it begins to slightly brown.

I divided it into two batches and didn't get the full amount of water into the first batch. It came out ok, but the second one, with more water, was flakier. Not crispier, but flakier.

Is it back to the drawing board? I dunno. I've eaten so many that I'm tired of crackers for now. Not eating them at all will save some money, so it wasn't a total failure.

Homemade crackers

Crackers are kind of like mayonnaise. I know there's no secret ingredient that commericial manufacturers use, but why can't I make a cracker as thin and crisp as those saltines that come from the package?

The recipe I used goes like this:

4 cups of flour
1 cup of fat (I used half butter and half lard - mind you, this isn't healthy eating!)
3/4 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons vinegar
1 generous teaspoon of baking soda
extra salt for top

Cut the fat into the flour, then mix the vinegar, baking soda and salt into the milk and pour it over the flour, then work until it's a soft dough. Roll very thin, prick all over, lightly salt the top and bake at 375 for 10 - 15 minutes.

It's very simple, and I liked the results... but it's not the same. It tastes a little like salty pie crust.

Does anyone have a good recipe for plain saltine crackers? If you don't want to post it in a comment, you can email me through my profile. I will be eternally grateful!