This weekend I decided to try and cook a bit more frugally than I normally do. We have a grocery store here in the Dayton area called Dorothy Lane Markets, and they are wonderful. They have the best produce, great meats, wine, cheese…you name it, they have it, and good quality, too. Problem is, their prices are pretty exorbitant as well. I spent almost $100 a couple of weekends ago on three dinners. So, this weekend, I decided to try and cook Saturday, Sunday, and Monday dinners (with leftovers) for $50. I knew that in order to do so would require less expensive cuts of meat, and no expensive ingredients. So, no $20 a pound prosciutto or pancetta or Parmagiano Reggiano, no leg of lamb, and definitely no exotic ingredients like walnut oil (which is fantastic drizzled over greens with a fried egg, but I digress).
So, whilst in the shower Saturday after my bike ride, I started coming up with good but inexpensive food. I didn’t have a load of time to cook, so it couldn’t be slow food, either. For Saturday, I came up with a completely grilled dinner. This turned out quite nice. I butterflied a whole chicken, rubbed him all over with olive oil and salt and pepper, and threw him on the grill. Next, I did the same treatment to some red onion sliced thickly, cored and halved tomatoes, and a bunch asparagus (olive oil and salt and pepper is a fantastic, simple preparation for almost anything grilled). I timed everything so that the chicken came off first and rested for a bit, and then grabbed all the veggies off the grill. I diced the onions, and threw them and the tomatoes into a bowl with 6 oz of goat cheese and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese (the cheapo Kraft kind), and then threw in hot farfalle pasta, and mixed it up. I served the asparagus alongside the chicken. It all worked out better than I thought it would, with the pasta being wonderfully creamy and tangy with all of the goat cheese.
For Sunday, I decided to try my hand at some fish, something I don’t cook very often. Fish is tricky, for me anyway, and I’m almost never totally happy with the results. But I knew we could get some inexpensive cuts of fish, maybe some nice white filets such as catfish (my wife ended up buying some very nice Tilapia), so I figured that would be on tap for Sunday. I figured I would throw some pecans that I had in the freezer into my Cuisinart, chop them fine, and then mix them with some cornmeal and some chile powder to spice things up a bit. I also wanted a side different from potatoes or pasta or rice. So, I settled on sweet potatoes; I’ve never cooked with them before, and they just sounded good and different.
I threw a handful of pecans in the Cuisinart, and kept pulsing until they were minced very fine…almost like pecan flour. I put them in a bowl, and threw in about 2 tablespoons of cornmeal. To that I added 2 teaspoons of Penzey’s Ancho Chile powder. I didn’t want to get too nutty with the spices, and overwhelm my nice Tilapia filets. I whipped 3 eggs together, and dunked my first filet into the pecan mixture. It turned out great, a nice even coating of pecan mixture on the filet. The next filet, though, was problematic…the egg from the first filet had dripped into to the pecan mixture, so the second filet got coated in big chunks instead of a nice, even coating. That wasn’t the worst of my woes, though. After filet number two, I had nothing left for the third filet. Luckily, Susan suggested we use some bread crumbs, and I jumped at the idea…it would be perfect for my son Nick, and I didn’t have time to make more of the pecan mixture.
For the sweet potatoes, I decided that instead of just baking them, I wanted to go for a sweet/salty/spicy thing. So, I took my two sweet potatoes, peeled them, and sliced them into quarter inch rounds. Then I took about 4 tablespoons of butter, and melted that over medium-low heat in a large sauté pan. When the butter was melted, I threw in about 1 ½ tablespoons of brown sugar, ¼ teaspoon of cayenne pepper, and 1 teaspoon of coarse sea salt. I let that all cook for a bit, and then threw in the sweet potatoes, and tossed to cover with the butter mixture. I left that on medium and let that cook as I tended to the fish. I melted 1 tablespoon of butter in a large cast-iron fry-pan, and popped the fish in.
The actual cooking did not work out as planned. My sweet potatoes got done a lot faster than I thought they would, so I had to take them off the heat and cover them so that they didn’t get too squooshy (that’s a technical cooking term). The fish were taking far too long just pan-frying, so I took my wife up on her suggestion to pop them under the broiler to speed things up. That worked like a champ, and got the fish done quickly.
To make a long story short, the fish was just OK….more like a foul ball than an actual hit. The pecan coating was far too bland…I hadn’t put enough of the chile powder in to get past the pecan flavor. If I had to do it over again, I would put in at least a tablespoon of the ancho chile powder, some cayenne, and some sea salt.
On the other hand, the sweet potatoes were fabulous. They had exactly the sweet/salty/spicy kick I hoped they would have. Those were an absolute home run. Some of the rounds developed this awesome brown/buttery exterior with a soft interior, and had some of the sea salt stuck to them for a very nice salty crunch. While I could have gone for a bit more heat and salt, my wife Susan loved them just the way they were.
So there you have it…one foul tip and one out of the park. One of these days I’m going to try that fish again, only this time, I’ll make more of the pecan mixture, put in more spice, and also put into a rimmed baking sheet so that the egg from one filet doesn’t goober up the next filet.
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