Good golly, I had to take a Taxi yesterday to get from an airport to a hotel.  $20.00.  Gone.  Yikes!  I think we drove several miles.  But I’m not sure, I just watched the meter and enjoyed every inch of pavement that I could.  Which in case you’ve not been in a car before, is not really a high-pleasure experience.  I’d like to thank the taxi driver for the fine Cubanisimo music his iPod was playing.  It really gave me great pleasure to enjoy the latin grooves that the whole ensemble was playing.  There is nothing quite as refreshing as a latin groove in exepensive transportation.  Four out of Five dentists polled recommended it to their patients.

So after paying the fine man for driving me a distance and then being fare about it, I met up with a colleague, walked to a somewhat nearby eating establishment and then nearly bled from my eyes when the bill for a hot dog and a soda came to just under $12.00.  For that price I could almost get to the airport!  Fortunately the food gave me sustenance enough to maintain me for long enough to make it to dinner where someone else was paying.  But seriously?!  $12.00?  It wasn’t even a big cup!

And thus, as I leave off here I want to make this one reccomendation: never leave your homes, and by all means never travel.  Traveling is expensive and there isn’t much good that comes from it except that you can see new places and have new experiences in life.  But that’s over-rated.  You can have new experiences by eating dirt and trying new food.  Oh, and if someone else takes you out to Del Frisco’s I LOVED their crab cake and I LOVED their potatoes aug gratin.  I hesitate to call any food perfect, but I don’t hesitate to call these perfect, they were that good.

These English Muffins are awesome

My wife makes great food, she bakes all sorts of goodies (or can, if we’re not being dietarily restricted by one thing or another) and she’s just a general blessing in the kitchen.  She checked out a cookbook called Real American Breakfast at the library recently that was focused on breakfast foods.  This book has been renewed and renewed by her.  I’m inclined to buy it for her since she 1) has used it over and over and 2) every recipe she’s tried has been amazing.  Seriously.

One recipe she’s made a couple times, including tonight, was for English Muffins.  This very simple recipe requires basic baking goods and a griddle (though I’m sure other cooking surfaces could be used) and costs a fraction of retail prices to make… and tastes amazingly good.  The prep time is small, the cook time is small, but the taste it big.  No store bought english muffin can touch these treats.

Several recipes exist online, here’s one from Food Network that is similar.  Check it out, save money, eat cheap!

My wife and sister came up with the idea of the Pantry Survivor competition wherein they would attempt to go to the store once in an entire week (at the beginning of the ’stunt’) and then combine that with whatever was already stashed in the pantry to create meals for the family for as long as possible.  The super-challenge in all of this is that it is four adults and two children (plus one on the way - no, not us, my sister).  As previously stated somewhere my sister and her husband are staying with us until they can move into a new condo they’re buying.  So the food needs to feed the whole family and last as long as possible until they just have to go to the store.  The competition stands to see what they can create, what they can make stretch, and what they can concoct out of substitutes as needed.

The first step was to organize the pantry and make sure that there was an inventory.  My sister handled this, which was good because we had a pretty crazy pantry.  I unfortunately only have pictures of the post-organizing results.  My sister, whom I will refer to as ‘Preggers’, had a pad of paper and listed item-by-item what was in the pantry and fridge so that when she and my wife went to the store they could only buy what was needed for some basic meal preparation.  Preggers is actually a great cook, as is my wife, so this isn’t a huge challenge because they have a lot of ideas between the two of them.  The challenge is that they had to have enough of a plan to have bought enough food at the store to complement what we already had to make up enough meals to last a targeted ten days with one meal having company of another family of three.

Day One:  Smoked Pork ‘Que
Alton Brown of the food network enticed me to put together my own frugal smoker last year and so we smoke meat every couple months.  This last week we smoked some Pork Butt and it has been a cheap way to add protein to salads, sandwiches, and in this case, a barbecue pork sandwich.  I have directions and recipes for those who are interested - just shoot me an email to randy@watchmymoneymaker.com.

Day Two: Chicken Pot Pie a la ‘Preggers’
My sister made a tasty variation on chicken pot pie, but instead of making an actual pie, she made a chicken soup type dish and some tasty, tasty crust rounds with a cookie cutter. You placed the soup in the bowl and garnished them with the crust ‘cookies’ (not sweet, but oh, so tasty. Have you noticed I think they’re tasty?).  Preggers did a great job with this dish, but since she made it up I have no recipe.  It did contain white pearl onions which are one of my favorite soup ingredients.

By the time anyone reads this we’ll be on day three with a week left to go.  I don’t know what we’ll run out of, but I’ll post the results as we go through the experience.  I challenge you to try the same and see if you can clear out any old ’stuff’ that you have in your pantry to keep your budget frugal, and your frugal budget interesting in the kitchen.