Walking Adventure: Go Speed Racer!

So I still live in a dinky apartment, despite getting married. It's a fairly good location. Behind us is a laundry mat, a Domino's Pizza, and a Panera Bread, which is great for lunches.

Our little corner of the world.

If you were to look around the immediate area, our neighborhood doesn't look like much. You'd find an assload of apartment complexes, some rundown houses split into apartments, etc. It's obviously a section that's geared towards student housing. 

However, not even two blocks away from where we are, you'll find the prettiest most, well kept upper-middle class homes in Springfield. 

I swear I saw this house on the Disney Channel once...

I have to admit, despite the racist classist issues these kind of neighborhoods represent, I just love walking around them. At first, I walked around because I like the aesthetics, because we're talking about people who have enough time to garden.

Although some have rather interesting tastes.
Or they forgot they live in Missouri.
Whichever.

But after you've walked the wide quiet streets, you begin to notice tiny things that you would usually ignore. Like the fact that Speed Racer lives a couple blocks from me.

Does that mean I get to see Chim Chim?

Or that some people are so invested into color coordination, they match their mums to their porch.

Or that some people consider their cars to be fashion statements.

Or that you can't believe it's pumpkin season already.

Although they're gonna have a hard time keeping those pumpkins with this little guy skulking around.

I guess despite what these neighborhoods represent politically, they still deviate somewhat and express their personalities in little ways.  And if you're willing to look for them, it makes the walk worthwhile. 

Flower.

Why Take Walks

For those of you who share the agony of being an unemployed millennial with two degrees that don't amount to squat, it becomes rather easy to become holed up in front of your computer with your browser tabs split between job search engines, social media, and YouTube. As you click between the uploading your resume for the bajillionth time and re-watching surprise kitten, it's hard to get motivated. I speak from experience. After a while, going outside becomes really, really, hard and it's easy to think that there's nothing outside that can help you, so what's the point, right?

The side effect of this line of thinking, at least for me, is that I become horribly depressed. Not going outside soon becomes, not getting dressed, which then becomes not taking a shower, which then becomes not getting out of bed because what's the point, right?  It's a toxic slippery slope for me and it's one I have to fight often. Staying inside is a lot easier. But the truth is, going outside doesn't take a lot either. In fact, it's a lot more fun than social media or YouTube. All you have to do is find the right setting and music and you can find interesting items from people's everyday lives.  It's like having an adventure in the surrounding neighborhood and it's so much fun.

So one of my little things is taking walks. I highly recommend it.

Update: Revamping the Blog Edition

So...it's been a while. I'm sorry for that. See, there's thing that happened in my life which kind of absorbed the past couple of months.

Nothing big, I promise!

During that time, I've been blogging over at my personal/survivor blog. The whole thing got me thinking about what I want this blog to be. The truth is, while I would love to dismantle the problems with New Domesticity, I simply don't have the money to make it happen. After all, one meal cost $60!!! I can get a substantial amount of groceries for that amount of cash.

So, in the interest of financial stability, I've shelved the New Domesticity project for now. I would eventually like to go back to it and show how it's still a movement for rich white hipsters (I mean, who are we kidding), but until then. I want to focus on....The Little Things.

The Little Things is exactly what it sounds like: observing and appreciating the little things in life--sharing a meal, going for a walk, petting a kitten, smelling the flowers--you name it!

Some of my posts will be the random paraphernalia I find on my walks. Some of them will be a meal I prepared and shared. They are just little things, but they make my life worth while. As a result, I want to share them with others and hopefully they can notice the little things in their life that makes their life worth while too.

Soon!

Soon.

Update

So...Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Things have been crazy! First, the dish from hell broke our food budget, so that happened. In addition, we had company last weekend with broke our food budget again. So here's what's going to happen.

1. I will try and update every other week, rather than every week. This way, Hunny and I can save money. 
2. I am going to try simpler dishes. Part of why the last dish broke the bank was because there was so much to it. 
3. I'm starting a new series called "Quick Flash." These are posts with easy dishes that won't break the bank (in theory). I'll post these whenever I feel like it or when the bank is too broke to make anything else, or both. 

So that's this here update.  My next big dish will be tomato and basil stuffed trout. Or catfish tacos. I haven't decided yet.

The Curse of the Ricotta and Chicken Sausage Stuffed Shells

To start, I'd like to apologize for my tardiness in this post. See, things were going along quite well on Saturday when this happened...

'Tis a flesh wound!

Everyone was okay, but Hunny has since learned to be more careful at red lights. Needless to say, neither of us wanted to do anything for the rest of that day. Especially cooking. And it was for the best because OMG, this project was a doozy from start to finish. 

This week's recipe can be found here.*

The Shopping

Unlike my last adventure, this time I got to make it to the Farmer's Market!!! And found nothing I needed except the wrong kind of onion and some granulated pepper. I did get some treats though like arugula and strawberries, so that's a win. The rest of the ingredients were purchased at Mama Jean's. There we found everything that we needed and then some. It was like this dish was intended to be made at higher end organic markets. Hmm...

The Cooking

When starting out, I decided I was going to be on my game. I wasn't going to rush the chopping like I usually do when I think I'm being  efficient. (Pro tip: chopping and cooking simultaneously is not efficient no matter how much you think it is.) The "method," as the recipe calls it, says to make the filling first, starting off with roughly chopping your pre-cooked chicken sausages. So I started chopping and got exactly what I thought I would: discs of sausage meat. I guess by roughly chop they mean chop, then tear apart so this shit can actually work.

Observe.

After chopping (or tearing) my sausages, I "zested" my lemon. And by zest, I mean I tried using a good old fashioned grater and injured myself in the process.

Obligatory "blood, sweat, and tears" reference.

This process went as well and you can expect, in that it was a horrible idea and I should have put a lemon zester on my grocery list. So yeah, that didn't go very well. My solution to this dilemma was to take a small paring knife and whittle thin strips of lemon zest and then mincing them down. It was all I could do under the circumstances considering neither Hunny nor I wanted to go near our car.

Try not to think about it.

I should probably add here, that all this trouble over zesting a lemon didn't make a damn lick of difference in the end. But more on that later. In my grating adventures (pun intended), I also learned the difference between the grating side and shredding side. I learned this the hard way while prepping my asiago cheese. Did I mention that we're still just making the filling? Let's fast forward a bit. Here is your shit before mixing.

This is going to be great!

And here it is after.

Well, that was anti-climactic. 

I wasn't discouraged yet. I knew this was one part down, and I was only twenty minutes in. It didn't matter that the smell of pre-cooked sausages lingered in the air, like cheap hot dogs. Once I made this sauce, it's down hill from here. So I diced my onion. I minced my rosemary. I chopped my garlic. Then, a new challenger approached. The Portobella.

How do I mushroom?

Turns out, you don't just cut up a 12 oz. mushroom. You got to get rid of the big honking stem first. Which begs the question, why do they even sell it with stems? but no matter. After you break off the stem, you have to de-gill it. The gills are the dark brown flappy bits underneath. You attempt to do this with a spoon.

He's dead Jim.

A nifty web video said to cut marks on top of your mushroom, but it's just as well that you go ahead and chop what you need of it. At long last, I was done prepping! I had finally reached the promised land! Now the cooking can commence, right? It's only been, like, an hour since I started this damn dish. It's just down hill from here. 

I wish.

I want to share the rest of the excursions I went through, but I value your time too much. I also get exhuasted just thinking about it. I will add, that the "sauce" is really just a tomato-glazed hash with wine. And although your end result will look pretty...

Ooooo!

...it doesn't taste as good as it might look. Non of those flavors meshed well at all. And the chicken sausage just overpowered the rest of the dish so that I couldn't taste any of the ricotta, asiago, or even the fucking useless lemon zest. I want to say that maybe fresh chicken sausage will make a difference, but I'm too unimpressed to even try this again. Especially with how much it cost...

The Cost

Monetary cost

I don't have alternative prices for you this week (sorry not sorry). But after I tell you how much this fucking dish cost, I'm sure you'll appreciate it. Over all, this dish cost around $65 (that's including what I got at the farmer's market).  Among the most expensive items were the chicken sausage ($7.99) and the wine. The cheapest ingredient I bought was the onion at $0.55. And if the monetary cost doesn't sway you, wait till you see...

Temporal Cost

From start to finish, this dish took over two hours to make. Half of that time is spent just prepping. That's right. You have to spend an hour just sorting out your ingredients before you can even apply heat to them. And the end result doesn't even taste good. My friend Hummingbird made a good point during this process saying, "Dishes like these are meant for stay at home moms...with nannies." I couldn't agree more.

Mal appetit!

*Seriously, don't make this dish. 

Announcement

I won't be able to update this week like I thought I would. I'm going out of town to visit family. I promise next week there will be sausage stuffed shells!

Adventure No.1: Risotto

I must admit, this is the second time I've made this dish. However, this time I made it a bit different from the original recipe found here. For starters, I didn't use peas because I don't like their disposition. I also don't like their taste. Secondly, I didn't use pearl barley (although I did the first time). No, I wanted to make a traditional risotto made from rice.

The shopping

Ideally, I would have made the risotto today so I could get most of what I could at the farmer's market.  Alas! My hunny's grandma is turning seventy-five today and we're going to her BBQ. So I went to a local organic market called Mama Jeans.  This place is a local hotspot and sells all sorts of goodies for hipster foodies and new domestics. I think my favorite item I found was the powdered peanut butter (why?).  As expected, everything was twice as much as you would find at a supermarket. But they also displayed where the produce came from, which was pretty cool. As far as I could tell, all of the produce came within the United States, and some came from within the metropolitan area.

So I started off with the rice. Turns out, you can't make risotto with just any rice. You have to make it with an Italian sounding rice called arborio rice. NBD, I thought. They might have it.

Holy Frack! That rice better have some special powers!

To say the least, Josh and I were very careful of how much we put in our bag. We put at least a pound in, which is about two cups, which, I found out later, was twice as much as I needed. But whatever. The rice was definitely the most expensive item on the list. The rest weren't exactly cheap, but we weren't checking to see how much they weighed. Especially since most the rest of the ingredients didn't cost per pound (minus the onion). 

After we left Mama Jean's, Hunny and I continued are regularly scheduled grocery shopping. For this risotto, I decided to make my own vegetable stock. I bought those ingredients at the regular supermarket for two reasons: 1) it's cheaper, and 2) I didn't see any carrots or celery at Mama Jean's. (I want to note, I was at the smaller location. Their main store has all the things including carrots and celery.)

The Cooking

So, making a stock isn't nearly as hard as you would think. I mean, when you think about making a stock as opposed to just buying some, it sounds much easier to just say, "Screw this hard work! I'm buying Swanson's TM." But really the whole "work" part is a sham. The most work you put into it is cutting the vegetables. And because it's stock, you don't even have to do a good job at it. The recipe I looked up required:

• 3 onions (I used one HUGE one)
• 3 medium sized carrots
• 3 celery stalks, minus the leafy bits
• a bulb of garlic (I just used a large clove)
• a bay leaf for aromatics (I used rosemary and thyme)

I chopped up my veggies and placed them in a stock pot with four cups of water.

T'was a thing of beauty.

The most intensive part of making a stock is time. After you finally bring this bad baby to a boil, you simmer it--forever! Or at least an hour. Stirring isn't an issue, but it helps to check up on it (and also smell your aromatics).  I really enjoyed making a stock as opposed to buying it and definitely loved the scent it left in my kitchen.

Once an hour had passed, my stock was ready. I drained it into a mixing bowl, then put it back in the pot on low for the risotto. It was at this point I realized I totally pissed away all my prep time for actually making the damned dish, so it say there for a bit while I did my prep work.

Prep work for risotto doesn't involve a lot, but it helps if you know how to finely chop an onion. I possess no such skills, so I just chopped it up as best I could. The recipe called for a single onion, but my onion was GINORMOUS, I only chopped a quarter of it.  Then I sauteed it in a table spoon of olive oil.

I recommend doing this on a medium heat, otherwise you end up burning your onions (which was what I learned the last time I made this dish). I stirred the onions often, but took the time to finish my prep work in chopping my chives. When I got my chives out, I realized something was wrong.

The didn't quite look like the chives I bought for the last dish. There were thick, flat, and wide. Not thin, round, and skinny. I turned over the package and realized that they were garlic chives not onion chives. And for a brief moment, I panicked. I weighed my options. I could a) scrap this project 2) go out and buy non-local onion chives, or Spoon) use them anyway. I went with Spoon and found that it didn't make a lick of difference. I then asked Hunny to mix my chopped chives with 4 oz. of cream cheese. He obliged.

Once the onions were translucent, I added my rice. You need a cup of rice for every four cups of stock (and vice versa). I sauteed the rice like the instructions told me (because I didn't go into this blind) then added my stock, and then stirred. Then added some more stock. Then stirred some more. Then stock, then stir. Stock, stir, stock, stir. I did this for twenty minutes, so you know. My arm hurt. And just to cut off any questions, the way you know to add more stock is when the rice is looking creamy.  Be sure to stir constantly, because that's how the expensive magic rice releases it's starch.

STIR MOTHERFUCKA!

Risotto needs to be al dente, which means it's firm to the bite, but not crunchy. It took me about 20 minutes to get it to that point. When it was firm enough, I added in my chives which were mixed in with the cream cheese. Adding the cream cheese made the creamy risotto that much creamier. For a moment, I was scared that there was too much liquid and my risotto would become soup. It didn't. 

Yummy!

You have to eat the risotto *immediately* otherwise it get's all gluey. It tasted great, but needed a little salt. Over all, I don't think I did too bad.

The Cost

Monetary cost

At first glance, the cost of the organic ingredients didn't seem to much. My total at Mama Jean's came to about $12.72. So about $13 if you want to round it up. Here is the itemized cost.

• Onion- $1.74 ($1.49 per pound @ 1.19 lbs)
• Cream cheese- $3.68
• Chives- $2.49
• Magic rice- $4.25
• Tax- $0.56

It doesn't seem so bad, until you realize that this risotto could serve 4 people max. So it's a little over $4 per person per serving. Let's look at some alternatives from other stores.

• Onion- $1.68 ($0.88 per pound @ 1.98 lbs from Walmart)
• Cream cheese -$1.19 (from Aldi)
• Chives- $2.24 (from Walmart)

The only exception to the rule is the rice. Although you could make risotto our of long grain rice, it won't have the right consistency since it's not made from dreams and gold. It also won't release the starches. Regardless, at Aldi, 3lbs or long grain rice goes for about $1.79.

And this isn't even adding in the cost of the stock which came to a total of  $8.84 (w/o tax), including the aromatic herbs. Minus the herbs, it cost $4.36 (w/o tax). 

Temporal cost

This dish costs a lot of time. I mean a *lot* of it. Even if you don't make your own stock, it's thirty minutes for cook time. With the stock, add over an hour. Prep time for both the stock and the risotto cost about 20 to 30 minutes give or take a few. It's long, arduous, and it wears your arm out.

Conclusions

I won't lie, this project showed me a glimpse of why new domesticity is so popular. Making this dish was fun and yummy! The aromatics of the stock, the taste of the risotto, and the satisfaction of my belly all made for a good time and it did make me feel good. But I have the means to have such fun. I have the time and the money. Most don't have that. So the score is thus{

New Domesticity- 0 

Reality- 1

Next week: Sausage stuffed pasta shells.

The New Domisticity Movement

A few years back, I read a book by Barbara Kingsolver titled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.  In it, Kingsolver chronicles a whole year of eating locally: buying at farmer's markets, raising her own turkeys, and making her own food items. I remember being entranced by the idea of making and eating wholesome foods and knowing where your food came from. At the time, I could find no fault with Kingsolver's disposition on eating locally and engaging in new domesticity.

Not so much, now.

As the new domesticity movement gains momemtum, I'm more aware of the problems within.  It is, by and large, a very classist movement. It is no longer an economical advantage to can your own food, sew your own clothes, make your own items. The idea behind new domesticity is that it provides alternatives to corporate materialism and encourages environmentalism and overall improves the life of it's participants. But who can participate?  Not everyone can buy fresh fruits and vegetables at their local farmer's market. Not everyone can afford a decent sewing machine or even the materials. And that's just currency. Only a few can afford the time it takes to make artisan bread in a Dutch oven or cut out a pattern. The New Domesticity seems to be made for folks who can afford it so that they can feel better about the lives they live. It doesn't really do much for anyone else.

So my purpose in creating this blog is to show just how much time and money it costs to do it the "old fashioned way."

Rules I've set out for myself:

1. I will do one project/update one project once a week.
2. I will buy locally when I can. That means if it's available and affordable locally, I'll buy it and use it.
3. If I cannot fulfill rule #2, I will buy it where I can find it. 
4. I will monitor the cost of time and money for each project.

My first project will be cooking. Once a week, I will cook a meal made from scratch and blog the entire process from buying materials to the finished project. Each project will tabulate the cost for both time and money and will also weigh this against the alternatives for those who cannot afford it.

First up: Cream cheese and chive risotto.