Tag Archives: Salads

Eggs, Healthy, Less than 5, Main Dishes, Meal Plans, Salads, Vegetarian

Salade Niçoise with Quail Eggs

April 3, 2019 BudgetEpicurean 4 Comments

This cold salad lends itself perfectly to meal prepping, or a quick weeknight dinner. Pulled together in under 20 minutes, you can have this light, fresh, tasty salad anytime.

With the hearty ingredients and a little babying of the fresh greens, these salads can also hold for 3-4 days in the refrigerator.

Naturally Whole30 compliant, paleo, low-carb, Mediterranean.

Prep once, enjoy twice.

And, the best part, you only need 1 pot! Boil all the ingredients, staggering the start time, to be ready all at once.

This recipe makes 2 giant salads. Feel free to double to be covered for lunches all week long!

Ingredients:

2-3 small redskin potatoes
1 large tomato
2 packs or tins of tuna
6 quail eggs, or 2 regular eggs
1 cup fresh green beans
Optional: 1/2 cup olives
4 cups salad greens (lettuce, romaine, spinach, mixed)
Dressings of choice

Step 1: Dice your potatoes into 1/2 – 1 inch chunks. Bring a large pot of water to a boil.

Step 2: Cut the ends off your green beans (you can also use canned, drained green beans).

Step 3: Boil potatoes for ~5 minutes. Then add the fresh green beans and boil another 3 minutes.

Step 4: Add the quail eggs, and boil a final 3 minutes. IF using chicken eggs, add at the same time as the green beans. Drain all.

Step 5: Fill 2 large salad containers with 2 cups of whatever greens you like. Cut the tomato into eights, put half into each salad container. Add half the potato and green beans and olives and eggs.

Step 6: Keep the tuna and the dressing separate until the day you serve the salads.

To keep the greens from getting slimy, add a paper towel or cotton towel to the bottom of the container to absorb excess moisture.

Enjoy within 4-5 days!

Vegetarian: Omit the tuna; add chickpeas or white beans if desired
Vegan: Omit tuna and eggs. Add chickpeas, and/or tofu
No red potatoes: Use whatever kind you have; or use roasted or boiled pumpkin, squash, or sweet potato
No olives: For salty flavor add capers, anchovies, or feta. For fat add avocado, olive oil heavy dressing, or cheese

Price Breakdown: $4.73 – $2.95

For the cost per salad, there is of course a range based on the ingredients you choose. For the “Highest Quality” I checked out the prices of individual ingredients from the Produce Box, which is all local NC produce, and similar to what you would find at a farmer’s market. For the “Lowest Price” I checked current ads for Harris Teeter and ALDI to see what the lowest price on items is. You choose the range that makes sense for you.

	Highest Quality	Lowest Price
1 lb green beans: need 1/5	$0.50	$0.20
1 lb red potatoes: need 1/2	$0.98	$0.67
tomato 3: need 1	$0.75	$0.50
lettuce: about 2/3	$3.00	$1.99
tuna pouches: need 2	$3.00	$2.00
olives: 1/6 the jar	$0.39	$0.39
eggs: (free) 2 from store	$0.83	$0.15
Cost for 2 salads	$9.45	$5.89

This is a powerful example of how cooking for yourself at home saves you money over time. A similar salad out at a cafe or restaurant would cost you $12 – $20. By making it at home, even with the highest quality ingredients, you save $7 each time.

Administrative, Breads, Breakfast, Healthy, Holidays, Informative, Less than 5, Main Dishes, Snacks

Weekly Eating – 3/11/19 thru 3/22/19

March 24, 2019 BudgetEpicurean 2 Comments

Hey y’all! Welcome to the series Weekly Eating.

Here is where I’ll talk about the week’s meal plan versus reality, what we ate for the week, and how we did budget-wise. I hope it gives readers a behind-the-scenes look into our life through the lens of food, and it’s also a way to keep us on track with meal planning and grocery budgeting.

Feel free to share your wins and lessons in the comments below!

Whoops, missed a week there! Sorry guys. We’ve got a lot and not a lot going on at the same time.

The coop is making steady progress. We got 4 pallets for free, plus some dumpster-diving got me a half sheet of plywood. For about $40 I bought a roll of hardware wire and chicken wire, and all we need is nails, staples, and time.

The frame is built and the floor is braced and wired, we just need a run for some hinges and a way to keep the door shut. Then the final pieces are putting on the door and roof, and the babies have somewhere to move to when they are no longer babies (which is like, in 2 weeks!)

They have grown so much bigger, and have upgraded to a larger feeder. They are also on a mix of chick and regular flock food, and I use a bigger mason jar for their waterer. They’ve begun to start jumping and bouncing, and trying out their wings. And we had our first escapee when I opened the screen to feed them the other day!

And we (i.e. just the boy) have started adding back in food groups to see if any spark reactions. We had cut out everything but meat, fruit, vegetables, and nuts & seeds. He added back in grains first, and had oatmeal, my homemade bread, and pasta all in one day. No problem.

Then dairy, so I stocked up on kefir, milk, butter, and plain Greek yogurt. Made a huge pan of the tastiest mac n cheese you ever saw. Again, no problems. He did say that he missed dairy way less than he thought he would, so that’s nice. Corn is back, without issue. I think soy is the only thing left, and we don’t use much added sugar products anyhow so I don’t mind permanently dropping those. He will go back to adding honey to tea, for instance.

Gardening

The seedlings I started have not come up yet. I am concerned that this week of 30-s overnight will kill them… it gets quite hot inside during the day, but not if there is no sunshine. Come on, actual spring! I need warmth so my fig can finally go in the ground.

On the bright side, I found some surprises in the garden. I had planted some brassicas and root veggies last fall, but they are super slow growing due to next to no sunlight… and they overwintered quite nicely, such that I may actually get to harvest some kale, cabbage, carrots, and/or radishes soon!

And, this is the first year I have annual flowers coming up. I bought three packs of bulbs on clearance last fall, and planted them even thought it was a bit late in the season. I figured, why not. And now, all these lovely irises and hyacinths and tulips are coming up! It makes me very very happy.

Food Swap

March’s Food Swap was awesome, it was at Hi Wire Brewery in Durham. I had never been, so I was pleasantly surprised with how huge it was, all the indoor lawn games, crazy wall art, and delicious beers on tap. It was Spring Break for UNC and Duke, so it was blessedly empty of students. AND on Mondays they sell a LITER of their own beer for $7!

I made pickled quail eggs the week prior in expectation, one batch turmeric and one batch beet pickled. It was like Easter come early with the fun egg colors. I also took a few jars of my candied orange peels.

I ended up going home with a half dozen chicken and a half dozen goose eggs, some jam, garlic pickles, homemade yogurt, Irish Car Bomb cupcakes, enzymatic orange cleaner, beef jerky, and preserved lemons! Quite a bounty.

Breakfasts:

Egg sandwiches – since I got oodles of eggs and also my quail keep giving me at least 2 a day, we eat more eggs now than ever before. And what better way than on homemade bread?

Cinnamon sugar toast – speaking of homemade bread, if you’ve never had cinnamon sugar toast on hot out the oven bread, you need to get you some right away! It’s magical.

Breakfast burritos – you can see why grains were the first thing the boy wanted to add back. It brings things like toast, pasta, and wraps

Snacks:

Apple with almond butter & raisins –this has definitely become my top favorite snack. It is great for the morning, when it’s ten and I will die if I have to wait one more hour for food, or afternoon when it’s 2 or 3 pm and I need a lil something to tide me over until dinner. Peanut butter works too, but I prefer almond.

Nut bars – I’m glad a friend with a Costco membership let us go with them once and buy a ginormous box of these bars. I have one in every bag, car, coat, and purse, and it has saved me more than once.

Gummy bears – another Costco purchase. I know these are in no way healthy for me. And we also didn’t realize until we got home and opened it that they are not a huge bag of gummies, but a billion individually wrapped packages of like 5. I was crushed. Wasteful and full of HFCS… no use crying over spilt milk, they’re already bought and opened so now we gotta eat them all.

Lunches:

Greek salad – Been trying to get more salads into my daily diet, and to make it more interesting I opened a jar of kalamata olives, and combined with grape tomatoes and cucumber from my Produce Boxes, made a couple delicious Greek salads.

Stuffed potatoes – I had some cheese sauce left from the mac n cheese, so we did a baked potato and sweet potato bar. Mmmmm.

Lentil soup – lentil soup is super quick, easy, and good for you. It’s a perfect “kitchen sink” meal, because you can toss in whatever veggies or herbs need to be used up soon. This one had celery, carrots, leftover mashed potato, onion, and kale.

Dinners:

Pesto pasta – pesto is one of my all time favorite ways to get anyone to eat greens, and use up any leafies or herbs that are wilty. Things I’ve successfully mixed into pesto: basil, parsley, cilantro, kale, spinach, collard greens.

Colcannon – we went all-in on the Irish for St. Patty’s Day. We are not Irish by heritage but you know I love me a good food holiday. I made a corned beef brisket and some colcannon, which is basically mashed potatoes with cabbage in it. I’ve heard you can also use kale. It’s a great way to sneak in veggies.

Taco bowl – since it’s starting to warm up and finally feel like spring some days, we’ve been eating outside on the weekends. Once rice was allowed back, and tortillas, you better believe burritos are back in full force too. And I keep adding in salads.

Lentil sloppy joes/janes – one of my alltime favorite vegan meals, these are so easy to prepare and crazy healthy for you. I told my grandma I ate mine with pickles and sauerkraut and evidently that is insane? What do you put on a sloppy joe?

AYCE Sushi – got a bunch of friends who love sushi as much as I go together and went out to RocknRolls sushi! It’s a conveyor belt style all you can eat place, for $12. I love it so much. We put down 73 plates worth of sushi and sashimi.

Food Total: $206.68

Weekly Produce Box = the Harvest Box 2 weeks in a row. Winter strawberries grown in high tunnels, green beans, blueberries, lettuce, cucumber, zucchini, grape tomatoes, corn, onion, sweet potatoes, and purple cauliflower!

I’ve started baking bread again, and we’ve gone through about three loaves in a week 1/2! So when flour was on sale for under a buck, I was not about to let that pass me by. I stocked up on some sugar free sausages and a few roasts, plus some organic cheeses and dairy for adding those back. Most of the produce we got from the boxes.

4.92 lb brisket	colby & cheddar brick cheese	3lb flour x3	3lb mandarins
pork sausage patties	Greek yogurt	dipper chips	Bananas 2 bunch
85/15 ground turkey	Fairlife milk & choc milk	flax wraps	Simply orange juice
2lb peeled shrimp	Plain kefir	canned tomatoes	Canned diced pineapple 2
lunch meat	Kerrygold org slice cheese	grapeseed oil for mayo
Angus sirloin 3lb		Org raisins
		2lb brown rice
		Dry chickpeas x4 lb
		Flour 5lb x2
		Sugar 4lb

Lessons Learned

Cooking from scratch is always the best. The boy could have bread back because I made it, and without added sugar. I tried to find bread at the store that didn’t have honey, or sugar, or high fructose corn syrup, and it was impossible. But also, convenience foods have a place in life. Sometimes when you’re super busy or just not in the mood to cook, it’s really nice to have something you can just pull out and microwave or otherwise not think too hard.

That’s why I try to make my own “fast food”. I batch cook a huge portion of black beans, or pinto beans, or rice, and have it in the fridge or freezer ready to go. Then you just pull out a tortilla or bowl and pile things in and you have ready to go food! And especially with the boy, he will eat whatever is the absolute fastest and easiest. So the easier I make healthy eating (cutting up fruits and veggies ahead of time, portioning out healthy meals into individual containers) the more likely we will eat healthy.

How about you guys? Did you have a learning week or an awesome week of wins?

Administrative, Informative, Main Dishes, Meal Plans, Salads

Weekly Eating – 2/4/19

February 10, 2019 BudgetEpicurean Leave a comment

Hey y’all! Welcome to the series Weekly Eating.

Feel free to share your wins and lessons in the comments below!

So, how did everyone enjoy the #SuperBoringBowl? Seriously, I don’t enjoy watching football at the best of times, and this game was a snooze fest. The commercials weren’t even good, and the halftime show was awful. At least the people we were hanging out with were fun, it was nice getting to know our neighbors better.

The deviled quail eggs that I made were an adorable, tiny, hit. The one good thing, besides hanging out and making new friends, was that the game was over earlyish and since we were just across the street, we were home and in bed by 10!

I also batch cooked a bunch of potatoes and sweet potatoes, and some rice and beans and a whole chicken. We also had leftover pulled pork, and 2 racks of ribs from our Costco run. Plus 2 giant bags of spinach and mixed greens, so you’ll see a lot of salad and leftovers this week.

Monday:

Breakfast – chocolate peanut butter black bean smoothie!

Yup, it has: 1/2 can black beans, 1 banana, 4 tbsp PB2 powder, 1/2 cup almond milk, handful frozen pineapple, handful of dates, handful of spinach, cocoa powder, flaxseed, and amla. Add water to desired consistency, serves 2.

Lunch – gigantic rainbow salad

Dinner – leftovers from the super bowl party

Tuesday:

Breakfast –green smoothie: spinach, kale, kiwi, mango, pineapple, flax, and coconut water

Lunch – leftover goat cheese sliders with tomato soup and a salad. Oh, and I finally got this set of bamboo utensils that I’ve been eyeing for a long time! There is a fork, spook, knife, and straw with straw cleaning brush included in a canvas wrap. All biodegradable when eventually they are unusable. I love it!

(This blog participates in the Amazon Affiliate program. If you click that link above, and buy something, this blog gets a small commission which doesn’t change the price you pay. The commissions go towards paying for hosting and whatnot here, so if you choose to do that, thanks!)

Snack – strawberries and mandarin oranges

Dinner – chicken and rice with a salad

Wednesday:

Breakfast – quail egg and bacon breakfast burrito

Snack – salted peanuts

Lunch – baked potato with black beans, spinach, pulled pork, and salsa

Dinner – leftovers

Thursday:

Breakfast – green smoothie: spinach, blueberries, mango, kiwi, pineapple, flaxseed, and coconut water

Lunch – white bean and barley with rainbow carrot soup

Dinner – more leftovers!

Friday:

Breakfast – smoothie of whatever was in the fridge

Lunch – baked sweet potato with spinach and black beans and salsa

Dinner – we had a bonfire, so I made a bunch of pizzas and a pasta salad. Everyone also brought apps and snacks to share and we had a super fun night.

The Weekend

Well Friday we had a bonfire (honestly because we had a huge pile of boxes to burn, but it had been too long since we had a thing too) and stayed up way too late. So Saturday was a lazy day of nothing doing. Sunday is part relaxing still but also part getting adult things done.

Food Total: $61.71

This was a Produce box and a HT run for some yogurts, almond milk, and DiGiorno’s were on sale. Frozen pizza is the boy’s favorite thing to have on hand for emergencies. Meaning I’m out doing something and there is no dinner planned. 🙂

How about you guys? Did you have a learning week or an awesome week of wins?

Finances, Healthy, Informative, Main Dishes, Meal Plans, Vegan, Vegetarian

Weekly Eating – 1/7/19

January 13, 2019 BudgetEpicurean 4 Comments

Hey y’all! Welcome to the series Weekly Eating.

Feel free to share your wins and lessons in the comments below!

Well I got to go mushroom foraging with my friend finally! I’ve been wanting to since last year, but finally we both had time, hunting season was over, and it had just rained, so I got to frolic in his acreage and benefit from his knowledge.

And what knowledge he has! This friend has been in the food business for decades, and foraging for many years. It was quite eye opening to have all the things pointed out, like light and tree types and ages and water and elevation. What kinds of things to look for at what time of the year.

And when we found a cache of oysters, what they should smell and look and feel like. We then compared them to two different books when we got back, just to be extra sure. If he says it won’t kill me, I’ll eat it.

I also made a big batch of pierogi because since I took them to a food swap last year people have been asking for them again. I did 3 types: mashed potato, sauerkraut, and applesauce; all the fillings were also homemade.

Oh, and totally nailed my first vegan lasagna! The boy even said the cashew-tofu “cheeze” tasted “ricotta-y” haha I followed this recipe pretty much to a T. Full disclosure: pretty sure the noodles were not vegan. But the “cheeze” and lentil “meat sauce” was delightful.