It’s pantry week!

Since I paid $4.90/gallon to fill up my diesel VW last night, I think this week will be the week where we won’t go grocery shopping and just make stuff with whatever we have in the pantry. This may be difficult because, among other things this holiday week, we’re going to someone’s house later and we have to bring something.

Today I’m making my mediterranean pasta salad, the recipe for which changes depending on what we have stocked. Today I will use sun-dried tomatoes, black olives, feta cheese, a couple cans of tuna, red onion, some mint from the garden, and lemon zest. The tuna and tomatoes are from Costco, where we have been going more for basics. I was a little surprised that they had behemoth jars of sun-dried tomatoes, since my experience with most people @Costco is that folks go there to stock up on junk food and soda.

 

I love making this for lunch during the week. The best part is that you can eat it cold, and if you use whole-wheat pasta, it’s filling. No nasty office microwave necessary!

It was a hit…

SuperCook.com review and tips

I’d like to review this recipe site since I’ve been using it for the past week and the dinners I’ve been making have become the basis for my leftover lunches. For those unfamiliar with the site, it’s a recipe search but you can input whatever you have in your kitchen and SuperCook will give you a list of recipes (from a lot of sites such as RecipeZaar and Epicurious) based on what you have in your kitchen. So for the past week I haven’t been wasting time staring @a full pantry trying to figure out something to make for dinner. Big boo-yah for that. However, I did find a few quirks and I thought I would share them:

• When you put in certain ingredients, different ingredients can become keyworded. For example, I put “mustard” in as something I have, and I got recipes calling for mustard greens. I put in “spaghetti” and I got recipes for spaghetti squash.
• Don’t bother saying you have any kind of pasta if you don’t want some kind of pasta meal – if you do, all you’re going to get are pasta recipes. That said, I did make an awesome artichoke sauce I got from the site.
• It’s helpful to register for the site for two reasons:
  1. You can keep a running list of what’s in your pantry, which helps w/meal planning. It also has tag clouds with text that grows depending on the usefulness of the ingredient. So if you see a big “onion” or “tomato”, buying those next time you go to the store will help you out.
  2. You can save recipes – you may get many dozens or hundreds of recipes (who knew there were so many different mac & cheeses out there?) so saving recipes helps with being overwhelmed with options.

So overall, it’s a really quality site and I’ve been feeling very clever this week as I haven’t been to the grocery store once this week on a search for some obscure chili pepper or other arcane but suddenly necessary ingredient.