Survival Sunday 15

The Filthy Casual has in fact forgotten to cook for you this week. My bad. Sorry.

There's still plenty to talk about, though!

One of the biggest issues I had as a kid was that we had the same menu, more or less, every month. Pizza on Friday is always good (even if it's always the same exact pizza), but it can get pretty boring to have chicken and green beans with mashed potatoes ever third Wednesday. Every single one. For over a decade.

So how do you keep things fresh when your ingredients are limited?

Yes, I grabbed this from Google.
No, I don't ever expect people to have such a cornucopia.
Do you know how expensive this stuff is?!

When I was younger, my family had to live by a fairly strict diet based on both our budget (like everyone else on earth) and by what my dad wanted to eat. My dad's diet consists mainly of two food groups: brown foods and white foods. We had a lot of meat growing up, because that's what my dad likes, but he's not overly fond of chicken.

One of the ways my mom began changing up the menu was by alternating what cuts of meat she made. Sometimes our beef was ground and showed up on the table in the form of homemade meatballs, meatloaf, or burgers, or shepherd's pie. Same ground beef, different packaging, different flavors. Different is good! Sometimes we had bacon with breakfast, sometimes our pork came in the form of ham lunchmeat, or sometimes it was a pork loin roast or ribs. Sometimes the chicken was a whole roasted bird (which she'd make herself, since it was cheaper than buying a pre-cooked one), sometimes it was breast meat that she cooked in one of her Pyrex dishes, and sometimes it was homemade crispy chicken tenders with a cornflakes coating. Turkey was reserved for holidays and lunchmeat.

So meat is pretty easy to change up. It comes in a lot of shapes and forms, so it's easy to work with. Unfortunately, veggies were almost always either steamed, boiled, or baked in with the rest of the food. Unless they were potatoes, our veggies were always painfully boring, and don't get me started on how much most of us hated the canned beets. I still don't like beets, and I'm far less picky than I used to be!

Potatoes are easily the most versatile of veggies. They're the titans of tubers. They're pretty darn good. You can, as the hobbits say, "boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew...", you can bake them, broil them, fry them... it's pretty amazing how much you can get out of a potato. We ate a lot of mashed potatoes, which we used to put ketchup in and call "bloody mashed potatoes" as kids, but it was only recently that my mom started even changing those up! Two words, my friends: Cream Cheese. It's a game-changer. Unf.

Of course, you don't have to make every kind of potatoes yourself. Tater tots, french fries, hash browns - all potatoes are good.

And now you're all certain that the Filthy Casual is a little more Irish than anything else... which is fair. Most people in this area have a heaping helping of the British Isles in them. We're not special :P

But how to make those soggy canned beans, limp carrots, or cruciferous crowns taste halfway decent?

Add things to them.

Butter's pretty darn good, but your arteries do need a break every now and then. If you're a spice-hound like Z & me, then a dash of cayenne can cover up a multitude of textural sins. If you're not into heat, then you may want to turn to garlic, onion, or even ground mustard to add some flavor. Believe it or not, honey mustard goes amazingly well with baby carrots and broccoli. Then again, I put honey mustard on everything. Basically, if you enjoy a condiment, spice, sauce, or vinegar, add it to your veggies. Do not listen to celebrity chefs who tell you that the thing you like doesn't belong on a bed of kale. If it gets you eating something healthy and it's not going to kill you faster, then do it. Splash soy sauce on your green beans, add a dollop of spicy brown mustard to your broccoli, and load those carrots up with a heaping helping of balsamic.

Food should be enjoyable. You should like what you eat.

I'm going on a rant here, so I'll switch over to the joys of the Spice of the Week.

Why no, I didn't have a plan for today. Why do you ask?

Parsley flakes are just dried, chopped parsley leaves. This herb is mostly used in Italian cooking, so I've seen my mother pour it into her homemade meatballs (which are maybe a bit lethal when fresh from the oven, even if they're delicious), mix it into store-bought sauce she found too bland for our spaghetti, and I've even seen it added to pizza.

I don't know how to describe parsley's flavor to you. When it's fresh, it tastes to me like the way a dark evergreen color looks. It's weird, and I may have minor synesthesia now that I think about it... Regardless, it's good stuff, if a little earthy. It may not appeal to everyone, and I know that it's not that uncommon an allergen. If you're allergic, of course you shouldn't risk an adverse reaction just to find out what it's like in any particular dish. You matter more than a recipe.

I think I'll be using parsley in future dishes, but don't hold me too it.

I'm going to let you guys go now.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC