Every Wednesday is Domestic Science day at Living Behind the Curve.

In response to my call for reader-submitted recipes, Jen wrote:

I must admit I got this from someone who got it from someone else, who adapted it from a medieval recipe.

I haven’t tried yet, but I’m going to mix together everything but the chicken
in a bag, and see if it works to just add it to the chicken in the crock pot and
cook it up.

It sounds delicious, and I’ve had several similar dishes, so I’m looking forward to trying this one. In my experience, recipes like this translate very well to slow cooking and SRSLY.

Medieval Spiced Chicken

Ingredients:

• 4 pounds chicken parts (thighs work well) - bone in, skin off
• 1 tablespoon each of cumin, cinnamon, and garlic powder
• chicken broth to cover 1″ of the bottom of the pot (about 1/2 cup in my slow cooker, 1-2 cups in larger ones)
• optional: raisins, sliced apricots, sliced almonds - 1/4 cup each

Combine all ingredients and cook on low for 4-6 hours.

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If you have a recipe you’d like to share, submit it via our contact form.

Thanks, Jen!

Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

We’ve had a fair amount of new traffic and subscribers this week, and almost all of it was for our cooking posts and, more specifically, our SRSLY system. No matter where you came from or what page you landed on when you got here, welcome! Please kick off your shoes, raid the fridge (or the slow cooker), and get comfy.

It just so happens that this food-related traffic coincides with our semi-monthly “not cooking” extravaganza. That to me is a clear sign that the planets are in the proper alignment for an 11 Things post dedicated to SRSLY, slow cooking, and general kitchen tips to make dinner (and breakfast and lunch) easy, breezy, beautiful…oh, wait, that’s the wrong commercial. SRSLY slices, dices, and makes Julianne fr…no, that’s not right either.

It’s all about time, folks, of which we all have precious little. Get ready to break out those tennis shoes and run out of the kitchen with these…

11 Things You Can Do to Make Cooking SRSLY Easy

1. The simple adaptability of the SRSLY method allows you to take virtually any slow cooker recipe and prep it the easy way. Take our idea and run with it! Check out Cooking Cache, RecipeZaar, and numerous blogs about slow cooking for ideas.

2. Do yourself a favor and plan ahead. I know, for example, that this weekend we’ll be prepping sweet and sour shin kickers, WTFBBQ, a new citrus and apple pork recipe, beef bourguignon, chili, lasagna, and macaroni and cheese. (The last two aren’t slow cooker recipes, but they are household favorites.) I know how many zip-top bags to have out, how many mushrooms to chop, and how much time we need. Because of the planning I’ve done, I expect that our prep (which will take about 2 hours) will be done before we head off to a picnic on Saturday afternoon.

3. While you’re doing all that planning, keep an eye on quantities and purposely create leftovers. Not only are they great for lunches, individual serving-sized quantities can be frozen and kept on hand for those nights when nobody wants to cook. (We all have them, and leftover stew is much better than a quart of ice cream.)

4. Your family and friends will appreciate the calm, zen-like state you achieve with the by-product of SRSLY, slow cooker aromatherapy. The only thing better than coming home to the smell of dinner wafting through your house is knowing that it’s real food, that it cooked itself while you were out, and that it requires minimal cleanup. That combination is enough to soothe even the most savage beast.

5. While we’re on the subject of pleasant aromas, I highly recommend that you familiarize yourself with your spice cabinet.  Knowing what spices taste like, what effect they have on certain dishes, and what you have hidden behind that 15-year-old tin of Old Bay are the key to making good dishes spectacular.  Find a dish that you make regularly, and make a minor tweak to the spices each time you make it, until eventually you get a “wow!” reaction.  It may become your signature dish.

6.  Another tool to add to your kitchen arsenal is a lack of fear.  It is OK to experiment and try new things, even if you screw up.  Some of our more interesting accidental creations have been hot dog and pea risotto, ramen latkes, and lasagna-free lasagna, which is what we had for dinner tonight.

To make lasagna-free lasagna, boil up whatever pasta you have handy.  (We used macaroni.)  In a microwave-safe bowl, combine 4 parts ricotta cheese, 2 parts shredded mozarella, and 1 part grated parmesan.  Season with your choice of spices (we prefer garlic, onion, basil, and oregano) and stir in 2 parts tomato sauce.  Mix well and microwave on 50% power for 10 minutes.  Serve over pasta.  Quick, easy, delish, and a complete gamble on our part.

7. Take that lack of fear and use it to bend your mind around the outside of a cubical container (think outside the box).  I love lasagna (can you tell?), but I hate boiling noodles just to prep a casserole.  Long before pasta companies started making special “no-boil” lasagna, I was making my own raw lasagna.  To this day, I make it this way, and I can’t believe anyone pays extra for those silly pleated noodles.

To make raw lasagna,  grease a 13×9″ pan.  Make 3 cups of your favorite lasagna filling (I use eggs, ricotta, parm, mozzarella, and spices) and set aside.  Pour 1 cup of your preferred tomato sauce into the bottom of the pan.  Layer raw (traditional) lasagna noodles on top of the sauce, breaking noodles if necessary to cover the bottom of the pan.  Do not overlap.  Top with 1 cup sauce.  Add a cup of your cheese filling, spreading evenly over the noodles.  Top with 1 cup sauce, noodles, 1 cup sauce, 1 cup cheese, 1 cup sauce, noodles, 1 cup sauce, 1 cup cheese, noodles, and finish with 1 1/2 cups sauce.  Cover tightly with foil and rest overnight in the refrigerator.  Bake for 1 hour at 350 degrees.  Remove foil and top with shredded mozzarella cheese; return to oven for an additional 20 minutes or until cheese is GBD.  This recipe uses a bit more sauce than traditional lasagna, but it’s necessary because that’s where the noodles get their water to cook.  The result is a tight, dense lasagna that holds together very well.

8. Learn which foods are worth your time, and which aren’t.  For example, I always, always, always buy frozen pre-chopped onions.  It’s more expensive than cutting them myself, but cutting onions is such as hassle that it’s worth the extra money to me.  Instead of dragging out a cutting board, pausing to clear my eyes, and cursing the fact that I don’t even like onions, I just open a bag and dump it into another bag.  Easy peasy.  I also adore raw broccoli, and I’ve found the the price per pound at our local grocer is lower on pre-cut florets than it is on whole heads of broccoli, once you figure in the loss to stems.  (I’ll eat chopped, peeled stems steamed, but not raw.)  As my mom likes to say, “keep your eyes peeled.”

9. Impress your friends!  My co-workers are constantly amazed at the yumminess I bring to work every day.  They don’t understand how I have the time to cook *and* work *and* be a student.  I’ve tried explaining, but they don’t seem to grasp the wonders of slow cooking.  They remain, however, completely jealous of my goodies.  I just smile and eat my shortribs.

10. Use the gift of time!  Since we started SRSLY, I estimate that we’ve gained about 8 hours every week that was lost to cooking and cleaning up after dinner.  That’s enough time to take a class at your local community college, start a new hobby, play with your kids, start meditating, start exercising, hit the local library, or just sit on your ass and contemplate the crockery.  It doesn’t matter what you do — it matters that you can.

11. Become an Internet superstar.  Well, not quite.  Maybe a fleck of dust in the ring of one of the Internet’s moons?  We’re always experimenting with new SRSLY recipes, but we can only do so much before we run out of ideas.  Plus, we can only eat the same 20-dinner rotation for so long before it gets tiring and we head for the Hot Pockets section of the frozen foods aisle.

So, dear readers, we implore you: send us your SRSLY/slow cooker recipes, and save us from crock pot monotony!  We’ll credit you, link back to your blog or website, and praise your name when we ladle your dish out of our cooker.   (Quality of praise not guaranteed.)  Submit your recipes here, or email interact at living behind the curve dot com.

Also, if you have any questions about SRSLY, or have any suggestions of what we can add to the FAQ, we’d love to hear from you.

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I’ll be back on Monday with a freezer full of SRSLY goodness and part 2 of my post on health insurance and my plans to cash out my 401(k).

Enjoy your weekend!

Every Wednesday is Domestic Science day at Living Behind the Curve.

For some unknown reason, many people see beef bourguignon as a mysterious, complicated, unattainable dish, placing it firmly alongside coq au vin in the “things you only eat in restaurants” category. Maybe it’s the name that’s intimidating; if so, call it beef burgundy and get on with life. This wine-based beef stew is excellent fodder your your slow cooker, and the acidity of the wine plus the slow cooking time means that you can safely use a nice cheap cut of meat. We like this over rice or egg noodles, with a healthy dollop of sour cream on top.

Slow Cooked Beef Bourguignon

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. bacon, cooked and chopped
• 3 lb. beef roast
• 375 ml. (1/2 bottle) red wine
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 lb. celery, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 shallots, diced
• 1 bay leaf
• salt and pepper to taste

Standard Slow Cooker Method:
Combine all ingredients in a slow cooker on low and cook for 4-5 hours.

SRSLY Method:
Combine all ingredients in a gallon-sized ziptop bag and freeze.  When ready to cook, cut from bag and place directly in crock pot, frozen.  Cook at low heat for 6-8 hours.

Every Tuesday is Kitchen Sink day at Living Behind the Curve.

Yesterday at PFAdvice, a reader named RobertL wanted to know:

I’m single male and I keep reading that it’s less expensive to cook your own food. I would love to save money, but I find that it is almost always cheaper to buy prepared food. What am I doing wrong and am I missing something? Is the advice only meant for those with families and not for a single person living on his own? What is the best way for somebody who is single to save money while still preparing nutritionally balanced meals?

With a little poking and prodding, RobertL revealed that:

• His monthly food expenses total about $250.
• Most of his grocery budget goes toward prepared food.
• He does not want to keep large amounts of food around, because he will eat anything that’s in the fridge, including leftovers. It’s good that he knows his boundaries, but he’s losing out on the advantages of bulk-cooking.
• Part of his monthly expense is lunches out with his buddies, which he is not willing to give up.

Everyone, including me, threw lots of ideas at him, but you know what? RobertL, you’re doing pretty darn good already, given the circumstances. Your monthly food budget includes lunches out, and you’re still averaging about $8.33 a day in food, which is quite low for a single guy (bonus points if you’re between 18 and 30.) Young, single people traditionally spend enormous amounts of money on food. Having said that, there is definitely room for improvement.

My first question to anyone in this situation, RobertL included, would be, “What are you currently paying for food?” A plan to cut costs from 10 bucks of take out every day looks a lot different from giving up a freezer full of TV dinners you picked up for $1.50 each.

Regardless, we’re big fans of bulk cooking. For instance, chili freezes very well (particularly if you make a bean-free version), and if you bulk it up by serving over rice, with some cheese on top, one large batch can become 12 or more individually frozen servings for your future microwavable convenience. (The rice doesn’t freeze well, but for fast rice prep, check out our post on microwaved rice.) My favorite brew works out to about 50 cents a bowl.

Some other great meals that freeze nicely are lasagna, homemade macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, soup, and sloppy joes (meat and sauce only, please - freeze your buns separately.) Recipes for plan-ahead freezer meals can be found on almost any online recipe database, and there’s an excellent series on freezer cooking at Mom’s Budget. We also have our own tongue-in-cheek take on bulk and freezer cooking, SRSLY.

When planning freezer meals, it’s sometimes helpful to know what doesn’t freeze well. Those items include sour cream, fresh mushrooms, lettuces, eggs, pasta (if not in a casserole), and potatoes. The University of Illinois provides a comprehensive list of things that do not freeze well here.

If you’re truly set against bulk cooking as RobertL seems to be, this is what I would recommend:

1. Research
   Pull up your favorite search engine and start looking for easy recipes that sound appealing to you.
2. Experimentation
   Pick one night a week to try something new. See how easy it is to make and how much you enjoy it. If it’s not a recipe designed for solo cooking, play with the ingredients a bit to scale it down.
3. Creation
   Don’t be afraid to get creative with your food. You don’t have to be a culinary genius to find new dinners for your hectic life. One of the classic tricks is to re-purpose breakfast food - some eggs with cheese, a few vegetables, and a slice of toast or a piece of fruit, and you have a well-rounded meal that’s healthy, easy, fast, and perfect for just one person.
4. Documentation
   Once you have an arsenal of preferred recipes, keep them where they can be easily referenced, whether that is on your fridge or on your laptop.
5. Preparation
   Now that you have an idea of what you will be cooking, try to keep the non-perishable items on hand.

When Dani was single and living alone, one of her favorite meals was a “Pork Sack“. Lay a single pork chop on a piece of aluminum foil about three times larger than the meat. Top with canned green beans, breadcrumbs, and grated Parmesan cheese. Crimp the foil closed and bake. (A toaster oven works well for this.) The moisture from the pork steams the beans, and the Parmesan melts into the breadcrumbs to create a crunchy topping.

As with any other aspect of frugality, it all comes down to what you truly want to achieve. If RobertL’s priority was eating well on a low budget, he may have been more willing to compromise. No matter how inflexible the situation may seem, however, there are always small steps we can take to move toward our goals — and that’s a lesson we can all stand to learn.

Image courtesy of Image*After.