We move the middle of this week. This is the equipment I kept back to pack the night before:

* 2 sharp knives for chopping and general work (pareve and dairy) and two small chopping blocks, pareve and dairy.

* For cooking chicken soup, 1 pot, 1 wooden spoon, 1 ladle.

* For blending dairy soups and kefir milkshakes, the stick blender.

* The sandwich toaster.

Other dairy tools:

*1 small frying pan and spatula; 1 medium pot. 1 wooden spoon. (You should have seen me draining spaghetti without a colander the other day).

*1 finjan pot for coffee and 1 metal spoon.

*A corkscrew.

That’s it. I’m amazed at how I, the kitchen gadget queen, am getting along with so few tools.

I’ve bought only the chicken and fresh vegetables I need for the chicken soup. It reminds me of The Week Without Shopping, only then I thought we’d run out of food, and now I’m just pleased to see all the food get eaten up. A few meals the Little One and I have consumed, sitting wherever we can around the living room:

*Frozen blintzes topped with sour cream made a quick dinner once, and now they’re gone.

*A bag of frozen peas made a soup, with an onion, a tomato, two carrots, and celery, a bay leaf, and a little marjoram. This was blended with the ol’ stick blender. We had it twice.

*Grilled cheese sandwiches are on the menu for today, based on a loaf of basil bread I’d frozen about a month ago.

*Pre-washed salad mixes topped with cottage cheese and chopped nuts or sunflower seeds (these out of the freezer), or tuna.

*Thawed-out frozen sole fillets, quickly dipped into batter and fried, were tasty hot and good cold. The last of the potatoes went with them, steamed and drizzled with olive oil, s&p, paprika and cumin.

*Eggs – lots of eggs. The last dinner I gave for friends, we were already packing. Appetizer was scrambled eggs studded wtih chives and flakes of a pungent kashkeval cheese; main course was spaghetti with pesto. A big mixed salad with a hasty vinaigrette dressing. That was all. I felt a bit embarassed at the poverty of the menu, but our guests said they hadn’t had pesto in ages and were delighted. I  have polite friends.

*For snacks we’ve been munching on fruit and crackers.

We’re going out for dinner tomorrow night – Husband will probably order a plain tuna sandwhich.

On moving day, I’ll have Husband’s soup all packaged up in a spillproof container and bring it with us in the car. I’ve been gradually taking kitchen things over to the new place (the kitchen is all clean by now) and expect to be able to start cooking at least basic meals as soon as the fridge and stove are plugged in.

We’re all losing weight around here. This is a good thing. Even better, now that moving day is actually in sight, the fog of anxiety is lifting and I’m feeling optimistic about this move, remembering all the reasons I initiated it. We’re a smaller family now. Dad is gone and Mom has moved away. Where we are has too many sad associations; I’m really looking forward to starting again.

I have fantasies of making a celebration dinner next week. Shall I go ahead and knock myself out? Rosh HaShannah is around the corner and we have to start thinking of all those meals…what do you think?

Pea soup is so easy to cook, that it must be the origin of “Easy peasey, lemon squeezey.” For centuries, European peasants depended largely on the protein and carbs provided by their crops of peas. Wheat – flour – bread – was a precious foodstuff, not for every day, but peas (and beans) were the  foods folks survived on. Think of the old rhymes: “Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow…” “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold…” Amazing to think that the rents and taxes the peasants paid to the nobility and the Church, earned by backbreaking labor in the fields, were fueled by these same humble grains. Peasants, by the way, never saw a lemon in their lives.

A package of dried peas had  escaped the no-shopping hunt for edibles in the freezer. I turned it over in my hands, reflecting on how well-off we really are today; we’ve just lost the resourcefulness to use the abundance around us. A few hundred grams of dried peas that have been sitting in the freezer for months can easily become a potful of chunky, soul-satisfying soup. With the surprise return of cold, rainy days to our region and the plan to not shop again this week, I cooked it.

I”d forgotten how easy pea soup is, and how surprisingly versatile, too. Here are some ideas.

* With a few buttery croutons, pea soup complements a dairy meal.

*If you like to cook it with meat, brown 1/2 a kilo or so of beef in the pot before adding vegetables and the peas. Or slice some sausage into the finished soup and let it heat through. Hot dogs are also good.

*And if you like your food vegan, slice a zucchini or two, or half a sweet bell pepper, or both – or some mushrooms – into the soup when the peas have exploded into mush and the soup’s all done.

*Dress it up with paprika, a tiny amount of preserved lemon, a drizzle of olive oil.

*Put a whole, hot, boiled potato in the bowl before you ladle the soup in. Top everything with a tablespoon of sour cream. That’s a good, hot lunch on a cold afternoon.

*Any leftover roasted tomatoes, diced, would be a delicious addition to this soup.

Or keep it easy-going, like I did today.  Simple, simple, and so good.

Easy Pea Soup

Ingredients:

2 Tblsp. olive oil

1 cup dried peas (about 250 grams)

4 stalks of celery, well washed and trimmed

3 carrots, peeled and sliced thickly

1 large onion, coarsely chopped

1/2 tsp. marjoram or savory

A few dried mushrooms (I used a couple of black, strong-flavored ones that must be removed before serving)

1 bay leaf

1 1/2 – 2 liters water

2 tsp. salt

white pepper

Method:

Put the fresh, chopped vegetables into the soup pot and sauté them slightly. Put the peas on top. Add the dried mushrooms, if you have any, and the marjoram and the bay leaf. Do not add salt and pepper till the soup is done.

When the vegetables have started giving off a little cooked odor, add the water. It must more than cover the peas. Put the lid on the pot and let the soup cook for half an hour over a medium-low flame. After that, check every 20 minutes or so to see if the soup isn’t drying out (add a little more water). Stir when you check. Cook the soup for 2 hours.

In the meantime, bake biscuits or cornbread… or boil a few potatoes, one for each bowl. Or toss some large cubes of bread in hot butter till they’re toasty; sprinkle them with grated sharp cheese and you have croutons for the soup.

When the peas have entirely exploded and stirring the pot yields a rich, creamy, soup, it’s done. Add salt and pepper to taste. If you want extra soft vegetables like zucchini or sliced fresh mushrooms, add them now, cooking the soup another 10 minutes or so and keeping a sharp eye on it, stirring to prevent scorching.

Told you it was easy.

I decided early on to make honorable exceptions to the no-shopping challenge, based on our needs for fresh produce, dairy and eggs. Some items were bought for Shabbat, which is going to fall outside of  the week’s time limit.

We have four people at the table once a day at lunchtime, with 1-3 at the other two main meals plus snacks. Husband takes sandwiches and fruit to work; Daughter takes sandwiches and vegetables to school. None of us have the habit of picking up a snack on the street, grabbing a latte or a couple of bourekas to keep going. Home-cooked, regular meals keep each one satisfied till a reasonable length of time has passed and the stomach wakes up again. With due immodesty, that’s because there’s someone at home devoting several hours every day to shopping, cooking, and washing up – your faithful blogger.  I  enjoy doing that. Well, the washing up, not so much.

To those who might say, “Well of course, you work from home, so you have the time,” I will say this: in the past, I brought three children up alone, working full time and traveling those buses back and forth every day. I  fed my family home-cooked meals from scratch then too. It was simply cheaper and more nutritious. I have more leisure now, it’s true. Leisure enough to craft these blog entries for your entertainment and mine – but less energy to do the shopping, cooking, cleaning and energetic childraising that I did then.

Life has changed, and will continue to change. Not just for me.  For so many of us, complacency recently vanished, and in its place stands an unfriendly stranger: uncertainty. We felt entitled to a good life, looked forward to a good future – to feel uncertain of these things can sure make us feel anxious. Now, from the White House to our corner grocery store there are  signs of looking backwards to see how our parents and grandparents managed. How many of us have heard an elderly relative say, “I was brought up in the Depression…”? They are the survivors. We can learn from them.

The no-shopping challenge is a reflection of our times. I’ve personally learned some good things from it.  I hope I’ve also grown up some through taking it on.  I am not going to give advice here, although I may rant a little, just report the thoughts that crossed my mind while pushing my unique family, in our unique circumstances, through the Week Without Shopping.

The most important thing I’ve learned is to be realistic, honest with myself. I tend to let my imagination catch fire in the supermarket while I’m inspecting the shelves. Will I really make that gourmet granola, or will those luscious, expensive dried fruit and nuts just sit in the freezer forever? Do I really need more pesto, or should I just pass the packaged basil by?

I can dig a little deeper into myself and ask if my need to stock up is really a need or just a carryover from the days of little cash and lots of anxiety, when the sight of a full fridge and overflowing pantry gave me peace of mind. Doesn’t my peace of mind come from other things these days – shouldn’t it?

Peace of mind is often interrupted by wars,  in Israel. Every so often, the Home Front will mail us a pamphlet advising us what to do in case of missile attacks, chemical attacks, or nuclear attack (G-d forbid). The pamphlet also tells us exactly how much food and bottled water should be in every home, according to the number of inhabitants. If we’re smart, we do as advised.

That is a given. These foods and water have to be used up and rotated, is all. I was ashamed to find a 6-pack of bottled water whose expiry date was a year ago. Alright, I watered my plants with it, wondering if it was really still safe to drink all the while. The next lesson I learned was to keep track of my stock to avoid wastage. Keep it where I’ll see it, or make a point of going through my supplies once a week.

I came to doubly appreciate the small, home-prepared preserved items I just reach for while cooking. Dried or frozen slow-roasted tomatoes; ghee, herb salt, rosemary oil, duxelles, dried nettles, dried thyme and sage, chutney, kefir, jams, pickled lemons, sourdough, pesto, wine, frozen stock – things I’ve blogged about here – and others. I have this thing about creating food from the most basic ingredients. The action of yeast upon sugars is magical to me; dipping a spoon into a bowl of yoghurt-like kefir topped with my own jam fills my soul with content. I’m grateful for that, for the products of these hobbies make cooking so much more pleasurable and tasty, and they’re not expensive compared to the same things bought in the supermarket.

The next big thing was the importance of planning ahead. Now I don’t see myself making out two week’s menus ahead of time and shopping to suit. Seasons are too short here for some foods, like peas, rhubarb, and the tiny wild artichokes called akub, for me to puzzle out the produce so far ahead.  And frankly, I’m not all that disciplined. No one is calling on me to become so. But shopping for canned and packaged staples can be trimmed down and made more orderly.

I should go back to preparing certain things ahead of time. Cornbread and pancake mixes, for example. I used to spend 20 minutes sifting and measuring the dry ingredients, then dealing them out into plastic bags for freezing. With a beaten egg and a cup of milk added to either mix  I could put hot, home-baked cornbread or pancakes on the table very quickly.

Have I gone through anxiety as supplies diminished over the Week Without Shopping? Yes, some. Have I gone without items I usually count on? Well, to eke out fresh tomatoes, I used dried or frozen. I managed without cottage cheese for most of the week, getting my quick easy protein lift from eggs or leftovers. That wasn’t hardship. The hard part was stretching my creativity. Like, how much semolina can I make my family eat? How to satisfy my husband’s love of meat when there are only two chicken thighs and two wings in the house? If you’ve been reading along here, you’ll have seen that it took some thinking, but it was done.

The amazing thing is that the freezer still isn’t empty; the cupboard is still far from bare. Until Passover, when I’ll really have to clean everything out, I intend to find ways of using up my existing supplies.

And now it’s time to attend to my challah – roast that chicken – get three meals ready for Shabbat. Thanks for following me on this journey, readers. I wish any of you taking on the Week Without Shopping, great discoveries.

So I went to the supermarket. This is what I bought:

*2 kg. all-purpose flour

*a package of fresh thyme sprigs, for drying and storing

*1 bunch of scallions for Chinese pancakes

*1 kg. filleted chicken breasts (shnitzels) to freeze for next week

* 1 kg. chicken wings for soup

* 1 whole chicken to stuff and roast

* 5  tomatoes

* 1 kg. oranges

* 2 red onions

* 1 yellow bell pepper

* 2 sweet potatoes

* 3 cans of tuna fish, because tuna was on sale and Husband eats a lot of it

* 1 large bunch of bananas

* 2 heads of lettuce

*5 cucumbers

total cost: NIS 164.49. On Tuesday I had bought some fresh veg – forgot to mention 4 containers of cottage cheese and shiitakes then – to approximately NIS 70.That’s NIS 234.49 of groceries this week.

At today’s exchange rate, that was US$56.15.

I’m amazed. There’s still food left over from previous meals – not much, but enough to make light dinners or snacks.

Dinner last night was shakshuka built on tomato sauce left over from the  semolina pizza night. The sauce was reheated in a skillet, chunks of kashkeval cheese melted into it, and eggs poached in the savory mess.  With slices of a whole-wheat sourbread I’d baked, we had a fine dinner no extra cost.

I’m not suddenly so attached to frugality that I could say, “And it all tasted so much better knowing how cheap it was”…that kind of thinking has always made me cringe. Anything smacking of miserliness makes me want to turn around and run away. Food created from good ingredients, made with  integrity, that’s what satisfies. Reflecting on its price takes the taste away for me.  But I’ve learned a thing or two since starting this challenge.

It’s been a meditative experience, this  Week Without Shopping. I hope to share my thoughts on it tomorrow.

What happened in my kitchen today was a couple of unexpected guests. My middle daughter dropped in this afternoon with my Mom in tow. They had planned a grandma-granddaughter lunch out, but the elder of the girls wasn’t feeling up to it. Could I give them lunch? Of course I could.

I had just returned from the supermarket.  I could cook the chicken breasts. The original plan was to freeze them for next week, but I could spare them. That was the quickest option. If I’d had some advance notice, I would have made pea or lentil soup, cornbread, and a big, varied salad with nuts and cheese in it. The ingredients, except for the salad vegetables, would have come out of stock I’d had before shopping. But forget the challenge -  it was already lunchtime, and all of us were hungry.

There were some egg noodles in the pantry that had been sitting there for a couple of months. The fridge yielded half a red pepper, celery,  shiitake mushrooms. I took an onion,  sliced all the vegetables thinly, and stir-fried them.

Since the Quasi-Japanese Sauce was so successful on fish and it was fresh in my mind, I quickly made up some more and in it marinated the chicken, which had been sliced into strips. The chicken strips sat in the marinade for about 10 minutes, while I prepared a tossed salad.

Salad ingredients: lots of fresh lettuce, a large cuke, and two tomatoes. Dressing was a vinaigrette I’d made before and used only half of, from the fridge.

Stir-frying the chicken took about 10 minutes.  Seeing that the chicken released a certain amount of liquid in the wok, I added about 2 tsp. of cornstarch while it was cooking, and a little balsamic vinegar as well. This created a thin, sharp sauce.

The noodles took 3 minutes to cook.  I went with the reduced-water idea and they came out fine.  After draining them, I drizzled a little sesame seed oil and soy sauce over them, stirred, and served.

Lunch was tasty, satisfying, and plenty for the four ladies who sat down at table – The Little One was home too. It wasn’t photographed because it irks Mom to have me hovering over the table, turning my plate around to get different angles on the food and holding everything up till I get the photo.  (Irks Husband too, but he’s married to me and has learned to put up with it.) I opened the last bottle of pomelo wine, and what with good food, good wine, and good company, life looked optimistic, there at lunch.

What about breakfast – dinner? Well, the one was a kefir/banana smoothie, the other pretty much didn’t happen because the youngest got a craving for falafel while she was out with her Dad. Dinner for me can be leftover quinoa with mallows, plus poached eggs, or an Israeli chopped salad of tomatoes and cukes, topped with cottage cheese and minced scallions.

That’s about all I want to say about the Week Without Shopping tonight. Now here is a little eye candy for you – the beautiful flowers of mallows. More on cooking mallows at a later post…for now, folks, goodnight.

We’ve been managing fine with very few new purchases, all this week.  I deliberately didn’t tell my husband about the challenge till today. Neither he, our daughter, or my Mom, who eats with us most days of the week, has noticed any difference in the quantity or quality of the food I serve. I’m the one who’s been racking her brains, but hey – I chose this.

Yesterday I did buy some stuff, as noted before. Let’s see: bag of carrots,2 artichokes, 2 liters of milk, a dozen eggs. Tomorrow I’ll have to add: 2 kilos of flour for bread, one kg. of turkey or a  chicken, cucumbers, tomatoes, more milk to get us through till Sunday. I don’t think I’ll need anything else. Very small shopping for a family of 4 (including Mom), isn’t it? Fortunately we were well stocked with detergent, toilet paper, bath soap, etc. This is because I do buy these things in bulk. I make a special trip to the discount supermarket about once every two weeks for them.

If I were to run out of any of those, I’d just go and buy it. The no-shopping challenge doesn’t require that we go without the essentials of civilized life.

This experiment is teaching me that my needs are smaller than I thought. I can buy less and feed my family very well. My cooking emphasizes fresh ingredients, bought a little at a time over the week. I can do this because I live in a small country where farms and dairies are very close to the markets. And food, relative to US prices, is not expensive. I think that to reduce my grocery bill, I don’t need to change my buying pattern, just eliminate over-stocking. I’ll try to total up the cost of my exceptional purchases in the summing-up, next Sunday.

So for today’s meals.

Husband loves his meat, so although The Little One and I prefer vegetarian/dairy, I cook poultry or meat about three times a week. There was no chicken or turkey of any kind around today, and I was feeling a little anxious. But wait! In the freezer there were several pieces of raw chicken taken off birds I’d cooked previously. Knowing that we never eat a whole big chicken in one go, I took off thighs and wings and froze them, rather than have to deal with leftovers later. Stock, I thought. But there was enough for a meal. So, although I usually make this dish with an entire chicken, I made a small Arroz Con Pollo – Latin American rice with chicken.

With the chicken pieces, I made a soup. One onion, one long carrot, one celery stalk, one dried Shiitake mushroom, two cloves of garlic, two halves of dried tomato. Dried tomato, because there are only two fresh ones left.  A little salt. Left the soup simmering for about an hour while I did other things.

When the soup was ready, I infused some saffron in it, as in the rice I served with Fish In Coconut Milk.

Next step: a sofrito of  onion, red bell pepper and garlic in the pot for Arroz con Pollo. Salt. Added the rice and toasted it a little. Removed the chicken from the soup, added it to the sofrito. After a few minutes, the saffron-infused soup was ready to be added. The rice in arroz con pollo should be softer than plain rice. My mother taught me to use three times as much liquid as rice for it, whereas a plain rice dish uses only two.

The finished dish…

The Little One and I eat more fish meals than Husband, so I went shopping in the freezer again. A package of salmon steaks came to hand. On the eGullet forum, a member contributed a recipe -  skewered fish and chicken glazed with a Japanese sauce. It looked easy and delicious, so I copied it, using only fish. Here’s my variation.

Broiled Salmon Skewers with Quasi-Japanese Sauce

Serves 2 – can easily be doubled or tripled

Ingredients:

2 Salmon steaks

1/2 cup sweet wine – the recipe calls for Mirin, a sweet rice wine, but I used a semi-sweet mead

1 Tblsp. soy sauce

1 Tblsp. honey

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2 tsp. minced ginger root

2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed

1 Tblsp. sesame oil, or other oil (not olive)

Method:

First, have ready 4 skewers. If you’re using wooden ones, it helps to soak them in cold water for 10 minutes or more, to keep them from burning in the broiler.

Then, make the sauce.

1. Put the wine, soy sauce and honey into a wok or deep skillet. Light a high flame under it and start stirring. Get it to boil and then lower the flame, stirring the while. You want the liquid to reduce to about half, but not evaporate away.

2. Add the lemon juice, ginger, crushed garlic, and sesame oil. Cook another 5 minutes. Turn the flame off and let it rest.

3. Cut each salmon steak into chunks. Put the chunks into the somewhat cool sauce and let them marinate about 5 minutes. Turn the chunks over a few times to let them soak the sauce up.

4. Thread the salmon chunks onto the skewers, turning the skin side up to let it char deliciously under the grill.

5. Broil for 10 minutes, skin side up, then 5 more minutes on the other side.

6. While the salmon is broiling, go back to the sauce. Boil it down to almost a syrup. There should be only 3 or 4 tablespoons left when you’re done. Glaze the salmon with this, and save any left over to spoon onto the fish at the table.

The side dish is quinoa with mallows. I’ll post about that separately.

It’s a waffle recipe, actually, which accounts for the large quantity of fat in it – I used corn oil.The original recipe calls for melted butter, and I’m sure the flavor is wonderful, but that’s too rich for me.

We liked these pancakes, which have a rougher texture than ordinary-flour ones and have a slight crunch. Although they’re not sweet, they didn’t need much syrup or jam. Nice for a change.

Yeast Semolina Pancakes

Ingredients:

1 cup milk

1/4 cup water

1/2 Tblsp. active dry yeast

1 tsp. sugar

1 1/2 cups semolina

1/2 cup oil or melted butter

1/2 tsp. salt

1 beaten egg

1/2 tsp. baking soda

Method:

1. Warm the milk and the water together.

2. Dissolve the yeast in the warm liquid.

3. Add the sugar, semolina, oil and salt, in that order, mixing well after each addition.

4. Cover the bowl and let the batter ferment for 3 hours up to overnight at room temperature.

* Note: since it’s winter, I let this sit out overnight. In our torrid summers, I would have put it in the fridge.

5. Beat the egg. Add it to the batter, then add the soda and mix well.

6. Fry up as usual – or make waffles.

Pizza, now. This site provided the recipe for the crust. I modified it a bit, and it appears below.

Some ingredients. You’ll see the package of active dry yeast I was keeping Just In Case. The Case is here: my preferred fresh yeast in cubes was used up last week.

Toppings were:

* A quick  sauce made of two fresh, chopped tomatoes sauteed in olive oil with 3 cloves of garlic. When the tomatoes were cooked to a semi-liquid, I added tomato paste, wine, s&p, and some tired basil leaves, plus a dusting of dried oregano. All was mercilessly blended by my kitchen ally, the immersion blender, to an acceptable smoothness. I’ve found you can get all kinds of foods past picky eaters if they’re blended to death. The foods, that is.

*Sliced onions, carmelized with a little frozen duxelles – a mushroom essence – and herb salt.  I would have preferred to use red onions, but white was what I had.

Duxelles…

* A little bit of sheep’s milk feta that I’ve been hoarding since starting the Week Without Shopping. Some Kashkeval cheese also, put aside for another purpose but which I’m happy to sacrifice to the cause.

* Sliced olives out of jar that I’ve been trying to use up already.

Semolina Pizza Crust

3 thin, crisp crusts, each yielding 4 slices

Ingredients:

2 1/2 tsp. active dry yeast

1 cup warm water

1/2 tsp. sugar

1 cup semolina

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. salt

a little olive oil

Method:

1. Stir the sugar into the warm water and reactivate the yeast in that liquid. Let it sit till its foamy, about 5 minutes.

2. Combine the flours and salt. Make a well in the middle of the bowl and add the yeast mixture.

3. Mix the dough till it’s well combined.

4. Flour a flat surface. Take the dough ball, put it on the floured surface, and knead it well – about 10 minutes. It should become smooth and elastic.

5. Return the dough to the bowl. Dribble a little olive oil over it. Turn it over a few times to make sure the ball is coated with the oil.

6. Cover with plastic wrap and let it rise in a warm place. The instructions said 45 minutes – I let it go for 2 hours, till it was very light.

7. Preheat the oven to 450 F -  230 C. Prepare your pizza pans by wiping them down with olive oil or by strewing some semolina over their surface. Alliterative, that.

… Bear with me, having to think and write about this Week Without Shopping is making me meshuggy.

8. Punch the dough down and pull it into three pieces. Dust a surface with semolina and roll each piece out thinly. Place the pieces on the baking pans and cover them with toppings of choice. Bake 20 minutes.If you have to stagger the baking, it won’t hurt the pizza to wait around till you can take the preceding one or two out of the oven.

*

Pizza topped with tomato sauce and grated cheese and rapidly disappearing…

In the end, the olive pizza didn’t have takers – the kids were too full. I cut rough triangles out of the prepared pizza, folded them over, and baked four primitive-looking calzones.  They’ll go in the freezer for a dairy lunch next week.

The grown-ups pizza, rolled out thicker and without sauce. My favorite of all was the half pizza with feta cubes and dots of pesto. Husband liked the onion topping.

Note: red wine goes well with pizza…

I was pleased with this semolina experiment. The pizza crust was much more flavorful than any other I’ve made or bought – faintly nutty, somehow more wheaty. Of course, if I’d been making this for guests, I would have rolled out neat circles. But since I’m only posting these photos to the World Wide Web, who’s going to notice?

Tomorrow, pancakes.

There were 800 grams in the bag of frozen cauliflower: too much for one pot of soup. I used half of it, thinking that I’ll make fritters out of the other half. Rooting through the dried herbs and spices, I saw some black mushrooms – the kind you use like bay leaf, for flavor only. And at the bottom of the fridge drawer, a lonely sweet potato looked up at me hopefully. OK. Soup.

The ground turkey I was counting on for hamburgers hadn’t finished thawing out, and Husband was due home soon. I put the whole block in a skillet with a little olive oil, covered it, and let it steam over low heat till it released its juice and became crumbly – about 15 minutes. This isn’t my usual way of making picadillo, but it worked. Chopped onion and garlic, plus some tomato paste from a jar that was already open in the fridge, a bay leaf, a tsp. of curry powder, two good dollops of soy sauce, some red wine- the last of a bottle of Merlot. (I drank some of the wine before adding the remainder to the picadillo.) Salt and pepper. Stirred and cooked another 20 minutes on a very low flame, and it was done.

Brought out the noodles, which had been doused in the drippings from the grilled lamb chops and mixed with roasted oyster mushrooms. I’m not a fan of warmed-over pasta, but it went down fine.  The plate:

A tasty, satisfying and balanced meal, with no specially-purchased ingredients. I was doing OK on this challenge so far. But it was only Monday.

*

It’s Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the month of Adar. Purim month! In honor of which, my Mom has invited me out to lunch. Husband will be at work, Daughter at school. I have only dinner to plan.

Now Daughter is bringing her best friend over tonight, the famous red-haired Feigy.  She and Daughter have been close since kindergarten. She’s bright, musical, full of whimsy. We adore her. There’s only one problem: she eats  very few foods. Cornflakes. Chicken soup without any chicken pieces or vegetables in the bowl. Anything junky. Most starches. A few select vegetables, preferably out of cans. Over the years, I’ve learned how to feed her: buy prepared shnitzels and fry them; open a can of corn; slice up cucumbers and tomatoes.  I can’t bring myself to put out cornflakes for dinner.

WotamIgonnado tonight? I won’t sabotage my no-shop week to buy shnitzels. Well, there are plenty of tomatoes and cukes, thank goodness. And too much semolina. I found no less than 3 kg. of semolina in my supplies – don’t ask. So I went online and printed out several recipes from this site, planning to cook the ones that call for the most semolina. Guess what – there’s a recipe for semolina pizza crust! And one for waffle batter, which could easily make pancakes.  Dinner and breakfast tomorrow solved. If those turn out well, I’ll post recipes and photos.

All this is tending towards what I believe is the real, underyling motif of this challenge: to save money from the household budget, you have to stay up to date with your supplies and plan ahead. I’ve never been good at either, as the oversupply of semolina (and couscous) show, plus the undersupply of plain flour. But I’m learning, and sharing the experience here with you.

Other issues arise through the week of no shopping; the emotional side of stocking up is one. I would like to post about that and other thoughts, at the beginning of next week, when the 8 days are up.

I did spend some money on groceries yesterday. The Honorable Exceptions: milk, eggs, and vegetables (bag of carrots and two artichokes).  I limited the milk to 2 liters, one being meant to make a new batch of kefir and one for drinking. Let’s see how far that’ll go.

Two got scrambled with cubes of feta cheese and sliced olives, then stuffed into pitta halves. The Little One took them to school.

One got poached and set atop toasted leftover challah, and with a tomato, that was breakfast for me.

The last one – that last one – should I save it for the new batch of challah come Thursday night? My challah only takes one egg. Or should I just add eggs to this week’s (very) short shopping list? I had decided that eggs were an honorable exemption to the no-shopping challenge….how seriously do I want to take this, anyway?

I’m reminded of my grandfather‘s autobiography, We Made It Through the Winter (out of print but still available at more than one online bookstore). Grandpa tells of his tenth year in the Minnesota of 1906. In late winter, he and his sister would go down to the cellar where the apple barrel stood, turning over each withered apple and choosing the best ones for that night’s treat. I’m starting to realize that if shopping became difficult for any reason – lack of cash, long distance to travel, supplies in shortage – we would all revert to that pioneer way of life in a flash.

I certainly feel more conscious of not wasting my resources. Although I have plenty of starches stored, I didn’t throw away yesterday’s bowtie noodles – they’ll be added, with the roasted oyster mushrooms, to a potful of kasha for today’s lunch. Frozen ground turkey will be made into hamburgers. There’s a bag of frozen cauliflower that lost its appeal to me a while ago and has been sitting there reproachfully…cauliflower soup to start the meal.

That soup, now, will use up an onion, one of the four potatoes I’ve had from the start of this challenge, and possible a dried tomato or two. Spices and herbs I always have – a couple of leaves from my windowsill sage, some chives from the same place. Looks like today’s menu is taking shape.

An Israeli reader commented that she couldn’t take on this challenge, as she needs to supplement her bulk purchase every so often through the week. So do I. It seems to me that eating and shopping in a different way from Americans, we have to adapt the idea to local conditions.

Myself, I was astonished at the quantities of prepared foods shown in the photos sent to eGullet. FatGuy, who opened the challenge, plans to eke out his supply of fresh milk with powdered. Jeepers – you can’t even get powdered milk here. Kosher, that is. I’ve seen cans of the non-kosher imported stuff in the Carmel Market. But why anyone would want to keep expensive powdered milk around here, when fresh is abundant, affordable, and safe to drink, is beyond me. See…there are differences.

Baroness Tapuzina, in another comment, says she’s cut down her food expenses by 1/3.   I’m not sure if I can shave that much off, but I’m willing to see how much I can do.