I love home made pasta

So Bonnie Jean and I purchased a pasta maker to help reduce the amount of money we spend on pasta.  I tend to take pasta to work on a regular basis as my lunch, so even though it isn't all that expensive its still something we were buying all the time.  The basic recipie we were working with turned out so well that I decided I wanted to get a pasta cookbook to help us learn all the other crazy fun ways we could use the machine.  We've gotten one cookbook so far that focuses on how to make the pasta itself and we might get another focusing on how to use the pasta in recipies or how to make sauces to go with it.  It's been a blast.

So far we've made a
basic fettuchini
half whole wheat half white flour pasta
        Either of the above altered by adding in basil, marjoram, or Garam Masalla
Lemon pepper pasta
         served with either a dijon chicken or with a pecan/garlic/olive oil/bread crumb sauce
Lime pepper pasta
         Serviced with basil avacado sauce or with sun dried tomato pesto
Chocolate Pasta
          Served with mole on top
Spinach raviolis with a filling made of feta, ricotta, breadcrumbs, onion, and spices

All of these attempts have been smashing successes.  We also used the chocolate pasta to make a chocolate/strawberry lasagna, but that needs some more work still to get it right.

The lemon pepper and lime pepper doughs are surprisingly strong.  As in strong enough that if you eat them straight the aftertaste will leave your mouth burning.  But just combining it with another sauce mellows it out and still leaves a strong citrus flavor behind.

It does take some time to make these dishes.  If I'm not helping Bonnie Jean will normally make up the noodles the night before for dishes.  But they are also fairly cheap.  For the every day pasta that I will still take to work, the 50% whole wheat dough tastes worlds better than any store bought whole wheat pasta I've ever had.  I love getting to experiment with new cooking techniques and foods.  Even if it weren't going to be so much cheaper, the 60$ or so we spent on the pasta maker was well spent.

Poverty and Abundence

One thing that is kind of hard to forget sometimes is that I'm poor as things go.  Apparently, according to a website I found, only about 12% of the married households in the United States make less than we do.  With Mom and Dad and two kids, money doesn't always seem to want to stretch as far as we want it to.  Ignoring tuition reimbursement at my work, I'll probably only make $27,500 or so this year.  While all our basic needs are met, we'd still like to be able to afford life insurance, disability insurance, a better apartment or maybe a house, a real piano for my wife, and new clothes.  While we've worked hard to build up our savings, if anything happened to either of us our hard earned savings would evaporate pretty quickly.  But, last we checked, life insurance would probably be another 50$ a month expense or more depending how the insurer rated our health.  Disability insurance is available through my work- but again that's more money down the drain.  Our apartment is nice enough, but L sleeps in the laundry/storage room.  It used to be the laundry/storage/office room, but that got too impractical and the office part got shoved into our bedroom.  We had to arrange the room just right so that if an earthquake knocked the cans of food off our storage shelves they wouldn't rain down on L inside his crib.  The temperature only stays reasonable through the apartment if the doors stay wide open, which means at night when we close the door to keep it quiet so L doesn't wake up, his room can get really cold really easily.  Our electronic piano is wonderful and a big step up from the old one we had, but its still not a real one and doesn't play quite like a real one.  As for clothes, a lot of mine have holes in them.  Every once in a while we make another trip to the thrift store or something to update my outfits with things that fit pretty close to right even if they are a little too big etc.  But when I'm looking for clothing without holes in my closet, I have to pay attention-just randomly picking out stuff would get clothes with holes a lot of the time.  My wife's body has had the common changes with pregnancy, birth, and nursing.  Unfortunately, money has been tight enough that its hard to keep buying new clothing each time something changes and there are some types of clothing that she doesn't even have any that fit properly, she just makes them fit anyways.  Even after a couple of raises at work, it still feels like there just is never enough to make everything fall into place the way we'd like to.

At the same time, I sometimes just get possessed with an awareness of how much we have and how lucky we are.  We've worked hard to save money for emergencies and long term expenses.  And as a result we have about $18,000 in normal bank accounts.  We don't live paycheck to paycheck.  Our retirement accounts are worth about $29,500- nothing to brag about in the long run but the point is I'm still fairly young and that money is growing.  Both our kids have 529 education trust funds set up for them.  Granted there isn't much in either of those trust funds, but each kid gets $5 a month added to them and when times are better for us we'll start adding more.  At the moment I do have a considerable amount of student debt, but there's actually less student debt than I have money in the bank and we have no other forms of debt.  So our retirement savings is close to our actual net worth.  That means that we're in the 76% percentile for net worth of people aged 29-30, according to http://www.4cdg.com/cgi-bin/calculators/wealth2.cgi  We've worked extremely hard to be able to build up our savings and I tend to be really proud of what we've accomplished on paper.

But there are every day reminders of this sense of affluence as well.  If something goes on sale at the grocery store, we don't have to sit around wishing we had money to take advantage of the lower price.  We have spare money to buy in bulk when sales come around.  If the item in question is perishable, we can still save money on it because we have a chest freezer that we were able to purchase with our savings.  When the option to use cloth diapers came around to save money we didn't hesitate because the initial purchase of modern cloth diapers can be over a hundred dollars in just set up costs.  We had the money to do it without really hesitating.  When WIC doesn't give us enough bread to eat we don't buy it, we make it from scratch with a host of kitchen gadgets at our disposal including a kitchen aid, a wheat grinder, and bread maker.  Recently we've been struggling to make our food budget work.  One area in which we spend a lot of money seems to always be our pasta, which we eat pretty much every day.  We decided we'd see if we could make our own pasta, and had the money to shell out $60 using Christmas money on a nice pasta machine.  Though we haven't run the numbers yet, I expect that making our own pasta will probably be cheaper than buying it at the store.  Regardless, the home made pasta we've tried so far has been superb tasting.  When we make bread or pasta, I feel like some how I am changing from a position of poverty eating cheap pasta and bread from the store to a position of privilege- eating excellent quality home made foods that are cheaper than anything I could buy and often better quality than anything I'd care to afford.  Granted, we do these things because the money is tight, but I don't feel impoverished by my cooking experiments.  I feel enriched.

When my wife and I were first married and we started developing our own family cooking traditions, I remember being in awe of the number of pasta's we had in the cupboard.  There was the elbow macaroni, lasagna noodles, large and small shells, angel hair, spaghetti, rotini, and acini de pepi.  I didn't grow up eating a large number of different types of pasta or even really much pasta in general.  I hadn't even know most of these types existed.  So when I looked in that cupboard I felt like I was crazy wealthy.  I couldn't believe how blessed I seemed to be staring at a cupboard full of pasta that promised so many different flavors in their different recipes.

Depending on if you focus on my income (12% percentile of married couples) or my net worth compared to my age (76% percentile), you could argue am I either  wealthy or poor.  On the one hand, very few make so little money as I do.  On the other hand, not as many people have as many cash resources as I do and their net worth can be close to nothing.  In the end I'm both affluent and very poor.  If we spent money as if we were affluent we'd have none left over and the savings would promptly disappear.  As we spend money as if we didn't have cash to spare and can only afford to occasionally invest in some cost savings measure or other, then the savings continue to pile up.  I'm really both poor and affluent at the same time.  It's just one of life's little paradoxes.

Kidless

So we're kidless for the first time in 10 months or so. Feels quiet. I miss my little Uriel, but it will only be so long before Talesin shows up.

In other news, both BJ and I LOVE cheese and spinach curry. I made the cheese myself!

Clean Kitchen

Well, this is cool. I had to jump ship from IE Mobile to make blogger work, but here I am.

So exciting news. Two nights ago I stayed up till midnight and did something special. I completed all the dishes.

This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds. With temper tantrums every time we even tried to do dishes, it was extremely difficult to do them with kids around. By the time they left, most of our dishes were dirty and had to be washed prior to each use. So the sink hadn't been completely clean for easily 3-4 months. And now it is and has remained so for several days! Bonnie Jean was so happy!

In other news, I was hungrily eyeing a spiced potato stuffed bread, but haven't made it yet. We'd have so much food making that along with other stuff I'd want to invite someone else over to share it. But, I don't know how or who to invite. In a family ward everbody has kids and I couldn't fit them all in my kitchen... And as always Bonnie Jean and I integrate into new wards very slowly. But oh well, my stuffed bread needs to await another day anyways.

Be careful what you boast...

So a while ago Bonnie Jean and I went to Ihop and we tried some of their crepes. I don't recall the name of the dish, but I recall telling Bonnie that I was pretty sure I could make it better myself. Imagine a crepe filled with scrambled eggs, a few vegetables, and covered with holandaise sauce. At that point my taste buds are screaming, way too much egg, where's the seasoning?, and why can we only put a very few different vegetables on any given dish? So Bonnie Jean started craving this dish, and remembering that I claimed I could do better so she asked me to give it a whirl. I kept the scrambled eggs in the middle, but a lot fewer of them, seasoned with a little italian seasoning, and mixed with onion, green pepper, and mushroom. Along side the egg went avacado, tomato, swiss cheese, and chicken marinated in a lemon pepper sauce. I replaced the holandaise sauce with a garlic and oregano flavored white sauce. The marinade was Bonnie Jean's idea, and really made the recipe.

I definitely like my creation better than Ihop's, but I'd better be careful with my boasting at restaurants, Bonnie Jean might ask me to pull through with it again, and even if I succeeded experiments like this are a lot of work.

37 Pounds of Meat

So there were these really awesome sales on meat at the local grocery stores this weekend. Most of the sales I ignore because I find Walmart's normal prices beat sale prices elsewhere. But this week I actually found other stores undercutting Walmart's normally excellent prices by about half or even more. So, to complement the cheese that is filling about 1/4 of our freezer we bought the following:

5 lb of ground beef
20 lb of chicken breasts
12.5 of chicken thighs.

The freezer is honestly full now.

If we see another sale we'll have to buy a mini freezer to stock up on something more. There's only so much room for our money saving bonanza. Things we have in our frozen bulk section now are cheese, meat, broccoli, bananas, and rhubarb. Kind of an eccentric collection. It goes along perfectly with the eclectic non frozen section comprising honey, cream of chicken soup, cream of mushroom soup, chicken broth, tomato products (Italian style diced, normal diced, paste, and sauce), pears, basmati rice, peaches, corn, wheat, flour, peanut butter, sugar (normal, powdered, and brown), tuna cans, canned chicken, and hot chocolate.

The really crazy thing is we've done all this without once thinking about it in terms of building up a food storage (with the exception of the wheat). We're just trying to save money by buying in bulk when the best sales happen.

Turkey bone soup

I learned tonight that marjoram flavored homemade pasta fresh out of the pan is heavenly.

Many happenings

Well life has been interesting the past few days. First off, low prices on ebay were too hard to resist and I have replaced the palm pilot and so far the new set up is working marvelously, though its been a learning experience getting the bluetooth stuff working since I've never used the technology before. The current model Ipaq I bought is much more sophisticated than the palm I had before.

My new bike helmet finally arrived. Not the most stylish thing in the world, but it got top ratings on consumer reports for safety testing. The old helmet had been through its share of crashes and had developed a few cracks running through it. At that point you know its time to replace because if it gets hit instead of crushing it'll just split. So I'm glad to have the new helmet.

And, tonight I tried a new Indian recipe. The technique was different than I've seen before. Boil potatoes, poke them full of holes and deep fry them, then create a spicy cream sauce and boil them in that for a while. BJ says it ended up like baked potatoes. I was really impressed by this recipes ability to actually get the spice flavor into the potato, which very few recipes do. Probably one of the most delicious potato recipes I've ever done. I would never have though to combine ginger, garam masala, cinnamon, coriander, cloves, fennel, chili powder, and cumin in the same dish. In any case it was absolutely amazing tasting

Cooking, and gifts

We've been having fun this week. While at my parents house for Christmas we've been doing lots of Indian cooking. They buy the spices, we do all the cooking. Lots of joy for all. Not often you get guests who do most of your cooking for you.

We were a little surprised when my parents told us we could keep the spices they bought. And then even more surprised when they gave us jars to put them in (we brought a few jars for mixes we would blend, but why do spices come in such massive plastic bags?), and then gave us book ends for our shelves, ties, a dress coat, and a blazer. The ties were available because my dad won't wear them once they start showing wear, and the other clothes because he outgrew them but fit me perfectly. And for while we were here they stocked my old bird feeder, which had been lying empty, with premium birdseed from a specialty store. Growing up I used to pay for the birdseed myself if I wanted something nicer than standard grocery store blend.

And this is after the official Christmas presents had been sent.

Streaks of generosity are welcome, but this kind of blows my mind sometimes.

Thanks :)

Clever worms

A friend at work had an apple tree raining apples on her lawn and invited us to come pick apples. I brought home 3 bags full and made apple dumplings last night. But to my dismay, the worms were cleverer than I thought. I was trying to pick out apples with no wormholes, but apple after apple after apple showed my ignorance. Worms can crawl in through the very base of the apple where it normally looks like a hole anyways because that's where the flower was. So I had to cut around quite a few little maggots former homes.

At least I made Bonnie Jean laugh when I opened the first surprise and told her I had disturbed a monster of the deep.

Victory

Orange Shrimp Fettuchini

I've probably been salivating over this shrimp recipe since fairly soon after we got married. Bonnie Jean has told me I'm free to make it whenever I want just so long as we cook a separate dinner for her so she doesn't have to eat it. That always felt like it would be too much trouble, so I never did. But BJ had a relief society social on Wednesday that included a dinner, so I used it as an excuse to cook shrimp. Very tasty. Most Shrimp recipes either seem to overwhelm the flavor of the shrimp or mildly adds to it. This one had a strong flavor, but seemed to bring out the taste instead of hiding it. I shall have to keep this one in mind for the next time Bonnie Jean has a dinner event.

Dinner

After a long time waiting to eat it, Curry Apple chicken is very good. I'm going to have to keep my eye open for another spice sale, I'm almost out of curry powder again.

Cream of Wheat

FYesterday morning Bonnie and I cooked up some whole wheat cream of wheat for breakfast. It will definitely fit into our long term use of wheat storage and turned out quite well, if a little watery. I didn't expect it to froth so much as I poured the coursely ground wheat into the water and it boiled over some, so not sure what caused that. Otherwise tasted just like I remember.

Buckets

My mother in law is pondering bestowing additional home storage wheat upon us. I spent a good deal of time this morning trying to find if one could purchase food grade buckets online. That way its weevil proof and more or less moisture resistant and food grade so you don't find out afterwards your food has been poisoned by fumes from the bucket. I found I could buy 1 five gallon bucket for $21 or I could buy 300 buckets for $2 a piece. I found people trying to assure me their dyed buckets were really FDA approved (that's not likely). But I couldn't find just plain old cheap buckets. At all.

Its easier to find a water valve made out of food grade plastic than a bucket.