Last night, I either did something sacrilegious or I did something that would make Julia Child glow with pride.
Like so many people these days, my household is on a strict low-cost diet. Meals are carefully planned for optimal nutrition at the absolute lowest cost. A dish has to get a lot of mileage for it to be approved. Soups tend to be the most economical – a large 8 quart soup pot will provide a healthy low-fat, high-taste vegetarian meal that can last seven days. So we eat soup. A lot.
But this blog entry isn’t about making soup. It’s about making do.
As much as I love soup (and I do love, love, love soup), in between pots it’s nice to eat something else – sometimes anything else. However, my budget this week could only handle the fixings for split pea soup (total cost: $5.00), and some extra necessities (eggs, butter, soymilk, bath soap and t.p.). So, here was my dilemma – what to make that isn’t soup using what I have on hand in the house. Like most homesteaders, I turned to the bible for answers: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.
It does seem like an odd choice to reach for this particular cookbook when you are living on the cheap, but right there, on page 175, was the answer to my culinary prayer. Using eggs, flour, water, butter, salt, pepper and a pinch of nutmeg (all ingredients languishing in my cupboards), I whipped up a batch of puffs (took me about 15 minutes to prepare and about 30 minutes in the oven plus some resting time while I prepared the veggies).
For the filling, I sautéed zucchini with garlic and tarragon in a bit of olive oil, and garnished the finished meal with parsley from my garden. Oh, my gosh, it was so delicious. Yummy, yummy, yummy – my mouth just waters from the memory of it. And it was so far from soup that soup feels new again. What more could you ask from a meal?
By the way, the cash outlay for this meal:
$1.14 zucchini
$0 1 clove garlic (a gift from my neighbor’s garden)
$0 tarragon & parsley (a gift from my garden)
$4.00 at most for the flour, eggs, butter, salt, pepper, nutmeg, olive oil, which were just sitting around the kitchen.
Plus there are leftovers…
