Emergency Lunches and Bakery Outlet Stores

I'm finally starting to explore the area after almost five years at my office. I knew about the H&S Bakery outlet store and had been there once but I didn't realize just how close it was to my office until we started ordering lunches from Attman's. The outlet store is so much fun. They've got discounted bread on the edge of their expiration dates. There's all kinds of bread, rolls, cakes, pies, cookies, donuts and the trays of unpackaged bread. I walked out of there with nine loaves of bread for $8.30. 1 half loaf of marble rye with a sell by date of tomorrow, 1 loaf of white bread (I hear that people eat this stuff), 2 loaves of multi-grain bread (BOGO), 4 loaves of unsliced raisin bread ($1 each) and a steaming hot loaf of unsliced multi-grain. I strongly advise checking out your local bakery outlet, if you have one, to help stretch your grocery budget. Yes, it would be better to make your own bread...but I'm not baking bread so I can make bread pudding.

As I've mentioned before, I like to cook multiple batches of food then freeze the leftovers for future meals. I have containers of various soups, baked pasta, and things on rice sitting in my freezer at home; but I don't have any at work. DBF and I went over to our friends' house for a monthly gathering and I made a batch of tuna tofu patties. I packed up a lunch for DBF but didn't pack one for myself because I thought that we were ordering out at work today. We ended up not eating out so now I'm eating this California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizza for one and a Naked Red Machine that I picked up at Safeway. The moral of the story? Don't eat the last emergency lunch at work without replacing it.

Happy cooking! - KP

Applied Laziness

One of the basic tenants of my meal planning philosophy is "Cook once, eat 2+ times." I have a number of friends that work in the IT sector and they sometimes use the term "applied laziness." I'm sure the term has its own meaning in the IT and engineering world; but in Kitchen Penguin HQ, it means minimizing my per-meal effort. Preparing and cooking a double batch of something generally does not take twice as much effort as making a single batch. So I plan my weekly meals around maximizing my resources to produce as many meals as possible from each kitchen adventure. It does help that I have a separate freezer in the garage and DBF doesn't mind eating leftovers.

Example #1 I have a hunters stew that I like to make but it usually takes me at least an hour to do all the prep. I have to cube the stew meat (it's generally cheaper to buy a roast), cut up bacon, cut the kielbasa, slice the onions, slice the mushrooms, peel and slice the apples, and rinse the sauerkraut. Then there's two hours of simmering everything until the meat starts to fall apart. So I make a triple batch and freeze any leftovers in both single serve containers for grab-and-go ("oops I forgot/don't have leftovers to pack a lunch" or "honey, I have to go out of town/have a doctor's appointment after work this week and you're on your own") meals and larger containers for a lazy weeknight dinner.

Example #2 I'm making corned beef hash for dinner tonight. I know that one can of corned beef, half an onion, two medium sized potatoes and an egg makes enough corned beef hash patties for both of us to have dinner and a lunch the next day (assuming DBF doesn't decide to eat more than usual). I cook two cups of rice, make some extra vegetables and we're set for two meals.

I made a double batch of pizza dough on Monday night so we had four medium sized pizzas. Enough for dinner, lunch the next day (with enough to share with my Minion), and a whole pizza left for dinner on Thursday.

This is how my kitchen works. I haven't had to prepare a separate meal just to pack lunch in over a year and that makes me happy.


Happy cooking! - KP

Friday Gear: Fire Extinguisher

While is is always best to have a fire extinguisher and not need it, it's very bad to need one and not have it. As Mr. Brown says, the fire extinguisher is the only uni-tasker allowed in the kitchen. According to the National Fire Protection Association, cooking fires are the #1 cause of home fires and home fire injuries.

For those of you that didn't pay attention during fire safety month, usually October, in elementary school; a fire needs four things to burn (the fire tetrahedron): oxygen, heat, fuel and a chemical reaction between the other 3 elements. Take away any of those and the fire should go out. As I mentioned previously, we had a small oven fire in my kitchen a couple of weeks ago. We closed the door to the oven and the fire stopped but when we tried to open the door again, the fire came back. Why? Closing the door deprived the fire of oxygen but opening it again completed the tetrahedron. We probably could have just closed the door, turned off the broiler and waited for the oven to cool down (taking away the heat side of the tetrahedron).

I have two, I had three, fire extinguishers in my house and I know how to properly operate them. They come in different varieties but an ABC will take care of most fires in the home. Be safe, use your brain; it's better to ruin a meal than to watch your dwelling go up in flames.

Please be safe when you cook. - KP

Spoke Too Soon (re: Gear Friday)

I took a couple of hours on Saturday to plan out future posts for this blog and it turns out that I don't have nearly as many gear related thoughts as expected. So, to supplement the Friday Gear posts I'm going to alternate them with Friday Challenge posts.

What's a Friday Challenge?
A Friday Challenge is an opportunity for my readers and I to try out different ingredients, styles or techniques. I will suggest something on Friday and we have the weekend to make something to share and discuss on Monday. I'll try not to pick expensive or completely obscure items because I want everybody to have the opportunity to participate in the Friday Challenges.

I am also taking suggestions for Challenge or Gear items; please drop me a comment and I'll add your suggestion to the list.

What else is new?
There's an About Kitchen Penguin page and a Friday Gear page. Links are at the top of the blog. Safeway is having a really good sale on London broil and top round roast, $1.99/lb, so I stocked the freezer. Speaking of Safeway, they discontinued their United Airlines partnership yesterday. I heard that it's because Safeway wanted to focus on offering better prices; we'll see how that pans out.

Friday dinner was pork fried rice and leftover rotisserie chicken. Saturday dinner was chopped steak and rice. Sunday breakfast was pancakes and bacon. DBF marinated and broiled one of the London broils on Sunday and started a small fire in the oven. Perhaps I should have started the Friday Gear posts with a fire extinguisher because it's more important than an apron. I have three fire extinguishers in the house: one in the furnace/laundry room adjacent to the kitchen, one in the dining room next to the sliding glass door (it's part of the BBQ equipment), and one upstairs in the linen closet. Everything and everybody is fine but DBF is going to be doing a thorough cleaning of the oven tonight.

Be Safe. - KP

Hibernation Weekend

I have a friend that likes to say that she hibernates during the winter; she watches a lot of DVDs, takes naps, reads and basically turns into a homebody when she isn't at work. I'd say that that "hibernation" was a good way to describe my weekend. On Saturday morning, my phone woke me from a dream about cooking pasta as I was saying "there are some days when I wonder if I'm wasting my life in an office." That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately but that's for another post.

R picked me up to do some grocery shopping on Saturday; a new MOM's Organic Market just opened up and I wanted to check it out. R likes grocery shopping with me because I usually know some recipe that uses some ingredient that she's never seen. Then I get all excited because they sell bulk tofu. I picked up some bulk green split peas and yellow popcorn (I wish I could find other popcorn varietals locally). Everything was shiny and new but it's a smaller store than the David's Natural Market on the way home from work so there was much less selection. I had hoped to pick up some bulk almonds but they only had raw and tamari almonds, I wanted some unsalted roasted ones.

Then we went to Aldi's. R is still building her pantry so she got some spices and canned tomato products. I picked up ingredients to make meat loaf and salad for dinner. I'm not a huge fan of canned and processed foods but I love shopping at Aldi's. The quality is good and prices are even better. There are some canned products that I keep in my pantry for "emergencies": canned mushrooms (they're a quick and easy way addition to spaghetti sauce), corned beef (nuke a couple of potatoes, slice up some round onion and add an egg to fry up some corned beef hash patties), baked beans (add some yellow mustard, brown sugar and Vienna sausage then serve over rice), Vienna sausage (for baked beans or with breakfast), corn (usually purchased from Wegmans because they offer a salt free variety), and of course SPAM. There's some other things but I don't want to go through the list today.

But the end result of this story is that I made meatloaf, salad and rice for dinner last night after spending the better part of the day on the couch watching Netflix with R. And I repeated the process today while DBF had his friends over. Tonight's dinner was fresh corned beef (as opposed to from a can), potatoes, carrot and cabbage. DBF had purchased some corned beef while it was on sale last year and we needed to eat them before the sales start up next month.

It occurs to me that it'll be difficult to have a cooking blog if I'm not cooking...I'll need to work on that. I also need to work on getting some photos posted here.

Be Excellent to Each Other! - KP

Snowed In

We're getting quite a bit of snow in the DC Metro area this year. Being snowed in for the better part of the past week has taught me a few important things:

• I need a better non-electric coffee brewer. I, sadly, rely upon other people to fuel my caffeine addiction and even the electric coffee machine is a POS. *Mental Note* Grab my French press from the parents' house. (I am done drinking "sex in a canoe" coffee.)
  
• I miss having a gas stove. We lost power for 12 hours on Saturday and having an electric stove means no cooking. Fortunately, I have an indoor safe butane stove so I was able to keep DBF and I fed.
• What I missed more than my oven and multiple burners was hot water on demand. Washing dishes, especially after cooking bacon, is not easy with only cold water and soap.
  
• I miss grocery shopping. I haven't been to the store since Thursday and although I can feed the two of us for over a week out of the freezer and pantry, it isn't nearly as much fun.
• The insulated pump thermos was one of the best investments I never made (free from work). We had hot water for tea and coffee and I didn't have to use extra fuel to boil water every time we wanted a refill.

For the record, I was one of the crazy people at the grocery store on Thursday trying to buy milk and eggs. But in my defense, I was actually running out and had planned to do some baking while I was snowed it.

To your health! - KP