Lemony Cricket...or Jiminy Snicket?

After an excessively long break thanks to finals, spring break and me being awfully busy the following week and excessively lazy last week, Fruncoki returns to its regularly scheduled programming of maybe once a week!  This week I present lemon chicken I came up with more or less on my own after taking little bits of inspiration from some places, but that was mostly just figuring out how to bread stuff.

Now feast your eyes upon this excellence of lemon chicken on a mound of rice, sided with an excellent berry smoothie (because it was a good day).

Lemony Chicken

• Chicken breast (or thigh or whatever, as long as it's boneless/you can debone it (which is evidently a pain in the ass, I wasn't very good at it), skin optional) - price varies on how you buy it, probably about $3 for what you'd use assuming you buy it skinless and boneless, otherwise closer to $2
• 2-3 eggs - like $0.20 lol eggs
• Bread crumbs (panko is the Japanese word for it, if you buy from Asian markets.  Not sure if it has a Chinese equivalent) - I honestly forget.  I think a bag the size I have in the picture below is like $2-3 at most, so let's say $2.50, and I use about a fourth when I make this, so about $0.60
• Salt/pepper - if you don't have this please go buy some and have a wonderful six months with your purchase :)
• Onion - I think they're like $0.80 here
• Garlic - 2 bulbs/$1 here, so about $0.10 since you get at least 5 cloves per bulb
• Lemon juice - like ~$2 I think, but it lasts basically forever, so let's say you need $0.10 for this
• Rice - a $20 bag lasts like two months, so I dunno, probably a $0.25 contribution to this cost
• Optional, real lemons - no idea I don't pay attention to the price I kinda just stuff them into my basket and throw cash at the lemon stand

Total price estimate: $4.05/about 3 meals => $1.35/meal

Bonus smoothie recipe later, for anyone curious.  As far as the lemon chicken goes, to minimize downtime make sure your chicken's ready to be breaded before you start anything.  You can also set up the BREADING STATION, since that might take a couple minutes (which is a lot of time when you're frying stuff) if you haven't done it before.  What you'll want to do for that is crack your eggs into a bowl and beat them a bit (dead chicks can't say no, hey-oh), then put in a little salt/pepper and some lemon juice and beat it a little more.  Put some of your bread crumbs into a bowl, and you should be good to go.  Your chicken should be in small cubish shapes.

Chicken on left, bread crumbs in middle, beaten eggs on right,
final destination plate in blue.

With that ready, take your garlic and dice it pretty good, then sprinkle a pinch of salt on the garlic.  Heat your pan on medium-high, toss on some butter, and let it move around, then put the garlic on.  Chop your onion (I only used about half an onion, but you can do whatever) into whatever kind of size you prefer.  I like mine diced, if you can't decide yourself.  Add that to the pan and just kinda let those do stuff while you bread your chicken.

BAM

To do this, it's pretty simple.  Take your chicken chunks, roll them on a paper towel a bit to absorb the moisture, dip them in egg, pull it out and let the egg drip off a bit, then dunk it in the bread crumbs and bam, you have a breaded chicken chunk.  Rinse and repeat for entire batch of chicken.  When you're done you can add it to the pan.  The only tricky part about it after this is making sure it's cooked all the way, which I tested experimentally (because I'm fat and because I don't have an actual meat thermometer), and I'm not sure there's a better way if you own a thermometer.  Whatever.  Anyway, you basically just let this heat until it's cooked, and then it's pretty much done!  Toss that shit on some fooking rice, and scarf that because you can't appreciate good food when you're in college.  Just kidding, enjoy it, because you deserve it, you FUCKer.   (It sounds funnier to me than fruncokier, so I think I'm switching)

In case anyone was wondering about the smoothie, I have something similar to this, but not exactly, because I don't remember paying more than $40 for it...at any rate, I just tossed some raspberries, some strawberries, some ice, a bit of vanilla extract and some lime juice into my Mr. Coffee, put in some French vanilla coffee in the top and let it go.  What came out was fruity godhood, which could have been cosmic fruity existence with a wee bit of milk.  But it was still excellent.

If you have suggestions, complaints or comments for me, drop me an email or leave a comment!  Also, happy Zombie Jesus Day, everyone!

So uh, that's annoying.

Apparently the pictures for some old entries are exploding for some reason.  I don't know why this happens, but it seems to happen to some other bloggers.  I'll try to keep them updated when it happens as best as I can, but I don't know that I can scan through the whole blog all the time.

JUST SO EVERYONE KNOWS.

Brotteccine Manfredbro

It is a known fact that any word that can be mashed with any of the following words: man; bro; dude; brah, is recognizably funnier than any counterparts.

I felt really Italian last weekend when I went grocery shopping with my mom, so I bought four boxes of fettuccine.  Overkill?  I say nay.  Looked up a recipe for alfredo sauce, and about sixty-three bucks of infinite groceries later, I was home!  And then I made tea and used some of the half & half I bought because Lipton's is awesome with a dash of cream.

Really simple, like most college pasta dishes:

• Fettuccine (obvs)
• Half and half or some sort of heavier-than-milk cream
• Parmesan cheese (note, if you can find this in blocks and just grate it, do so, much better than shredded stuff that I have to deal with because I can't find parmesan at Kroger...)
• Garlic cloves
• Parsley
• Butter

This won't be a long post, because this is really easy.  Sorry.  Absolutely delicious though.  Also, recipe for sauce more or less shamelessly jacked from here.  

So, standard fare with the fettuccine, just get some water a-boilin', then dunk your pasta in that water, keep separated with a fork every couple minutes or so.  No big deal.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING.

While that's heating up, you need to either chop garlic (just a clove) or parsley (you only need a quarter cup, so really not nearly as much as I have on the right).  This is a nice trick for peeling garlic bulbs, as an aside.  There's really no trick to these, you kinda just put them on a cutting board and...cut.  

You will also need to take your butter (1/4 cup, half a stick) and start melting it in a sauce pan on some level of heat less than the hottest so you don't burn your butter.  When it's all melted, pour in a cup of your cream (hehehehe) and let it simmer for about five minutes.  Your pasta should finish in this time, so go deal with that.  When it's been about that long put in your garlic and parmesan, then stir it with the fury of a thousand angry gods (bonus points for no splatter).  Once it looks sufficiently heated/is sufficiently thick for your tastes, off the heat, put in your parsley and mix it up a bit.  You now have alfredo sauce, and fettuccine!  

Mine looks a little...too green, but I added like...3/4 a cup of parsley instead of just 1/4 because I'm bad at guesstimating measurements.  Still turned out really good though, even if it smelled a little too green.  You can add some meat and make it proteiny, and you could probably add a fried egg if you're more an egg person than a meat person.  This makes a decent amount of sauce, so you can save some for lunch or dinner, or just eat big dinners like I do sometimes.

So, this post has taken a while and it's kinda short, but I figure if I just made spaghetti it'd be kind of bland and old and everyone knows how to make spaghetti.  So here's an equally delicious but slightly out of the ordinary pasta!  It's also fairly cheap and everything used here can be used in other stuff (personally I can't survive without garlic or butter somewhere in my kitchen), so it's not like it has to be for a special night of dinner or anything.  Unless you do something weird like bake tilapia and use that as a meat.

(that isn't a plan at all)

Hope you've enjoyed this week's Fruncoki, 'cuz I sure did.

The Granule of Civilization

History

Many moons ago, in the time before Sigourney Weaver, humanity was on edge.  They had realized, through thousands of years of experimentation, that they could grow wheat.  Despite all of this, they were unsure of what to do with the wheat.  They had silos upon silos of wheat with no use (as whales and sharks had not yet been domesticated), and these great, ominous entities didn't even pay taxes despite the profound effect they had on ancient human politics.  Little did they know, however, the Great Wheat Age was about to unfold before their very eyes.

It was around the time that Jupiter ate its once closest moon that a scientist named Abraham Lincoln decided to devote his entire life to the study of wheat and the resulting forms of government.  It came to pass that as he ascended to the ripe old age of twelve, he ground the wheat into a powder, and then combined the powder with water.  Then he placed it into a toaster oven, and the first bread was made.  He was later made famous for his dissertations on primitive oligarchies and because he made a cannon that repels primate feces.

That's the basic story of bread as we know it today: the ground powder of grains or cereal with a liquid (most commonly water, but other options are available such as milk, beer, etc.), potentially altered with things such as leavening agents (yeast, baking soda) to make it lighter and fluffier.  Beyond that it's mostly  just extras!  You can add fruits and spices and other flavorful things.

The Twist!


So I took the original pictures for this one a while ago, but they were rather lacking (as in I forgot a number of steps and felt like I'd be an ass if I didn't take more at some point).  So now we finally get to the integral method of making BREAD, finally, and because of the similarities in creation, I'll be showing you how to make pizza from (mostly) scratch, too!

Circumexcellence


So pizza turns out to be pretty cheap, all things considered, as everything makes at least two, unless you just really love cheese/sauce/pepperoni/your favorite topping.

So here's our list:

• Flour, unbleached all-purpose (for the bread I ended up making tonight I used wheat, but I have no idea how well this would work with pizza dough...I might try this next time)
• Salt
• Olive oil
• Sugar (unpictured, because I'm bad)
• Yeast
• Pizza sauce
• Probably mozzarella cheese
• Any toppings you want, baby

Kinda looks like soup.

The annoying thing about bread is exact measurements (or pretty close to, at least) are pretty important, so you can't wing it quite as easily.  Also, note that parenthesized measurements will be for bread, unparenthesized for pizza dough.  LET'S GET STARTED.

Modern art.

Take 1 1/3 cups warm water (2 cups) and a tablespoon of sugar (same with bread), dissolve into the water, and then add 1 1/2 tsp yeast (1 1/2 tbsp).  Let it proof (the term for...letting it sit) until it looks like a creamy foam kinda thing (right), and then start adding flour about a cup at a time.  None of the recipes I've ever used were right about how much flour you end up needing, so I've just started adding it one cup at a time until it gets where I need it.  At some point (no picture, my bad) when the dough has started to become like one object instead of a bunch of clumps in some liquid, you'll want to start kneading.  If you have a bowl as I do at right, you can knead in the bowl, but otherwise you'll have to countertop it.  All you really do is spread some flour on a surface, your hands and the dough, then start working the dough by pushing it out and folding it in half, adding flour when it gets sticky.  Doing it in the bowl is basically the same process.  Eventually you get something similar to the second picture, which does not stick at all to your hands, at which point you want to lightly oil a big bowl (I just use the same one I knead in, no consequences so far), turn the dough ball to coat, and cover it with plastic wrap, or a moist paper towel/cloth, or something like that.  Then you let rise until roughly doubled in bulk, which should take anywhere between half an hour to an hour and a half.  So what do I do while my bread rises?

Mah-fucking Skyward Sword, bitches.

One of these days I'll get a real hobby.  Probably the day before I die.

Look ma, no hands, OR sides!

BOOM, adorable.  And wheaty.

Best circle ever.

After an hour or so of valiant evil-vanquishing (evanquishing?  Sounds too much like evangelist), and just as my Wiimote was running out of battery, the dough had risen quite a bit.  The next step, though, is punching, and I was so excited to punch I forgot to take a picture.  It's fairly self-explanatory though - you just take the dough and punch it down.  Lots of fun, you can even get the kids in on it.  Sometimes I go hunt out a hobo and have him punch my dough and count it for community service.  With dough punched, the path now splits between just bread and pizza.  With bread, there's more rising - take however much you have, split into two, and put into two 9x5 loaf pans.  The pizza dough, though, you can just toss onto a pizza pan and start spreading, as below.  With the bread, let it rise another half hour or so, during which I just made some edits to the draft of this post I had before, and added some real directions.  With the pizza dough, though, you can just start topping, but you might want to preheat your oven to 475F (246C, for those non-Americans...which apparently exist reading this blog) before you do so you're not waiting for preheating after you have a topped pizza.  Once you've topped it and you have a preheated oven, stick it in for ten to twelve minutes, or until the crust is golden.  The bread dough, once risen, should be in at 350F (176C) for about half an hour.  

So, I don't have a receipt for any of the pizza stuff nor a decent estimate of the prices, so I'll hold off on cost analysis until my next trip to the grocery store, which should be this week unless I find a way to stop eating. Which I won't. Hope you've enjoyed this entry of Fruncoki, readers! Also, you should follow me on Twitter @ Fruncoki, now that I've remembered my password to it and will be able to post from it!

One, Two, Tea, Everybody Loves Me

Hello again, Fruncoki readers!  I'm trying to get these back on a regular weekend update schedule, so here's to trying for a Sunday post.

This entry is a bit of a gear switch, as I won't be talking about food.  Instead, this post is about my favorite beverage that encompasses a gigantic range of different kinds, that is also potentially healthy for you, very frugal, and excellently delicious - tea!  This next statement is obviously hyperbolic in nature but might as well be true.  The possibilities with tea are pretty much endless.

Also won't be pictures, because I'm lazy and tea is really easy.  If using teabags, even easier.  Take water, boil, let sit for about a minute, pour onto teabag that is in mug, add whatever you want that seems like a good idea.  If not using teabags (in which case you probably know how to do this already, but for completion's sake), put tea leaves into strainer, boil water, let sit for about a minute, pour onto tea leaves, let steep for some amount of time dependent on the tea but pretty generally around a minute to a minute and a half, but only thirty-seconds for green tea.

That's all you need to have yourself some tea.  Good things to add include sugar, honey, cream, more tea - which works especially well with, say, herbal teas you've already used, just add a different kind and add more hot water, so excellent - cocoa powder (not much though!), cinnamon, cayenne pepper (again, not much), vanilla flavoring (I usually do this when I make pitcherfuls of tea with six teabags, a couple tablespoons of sugar and about a teaspoon of flavoring, ends up really good), pretty much anything you can think of has a chance of tasting good in tea.

Generally for black, jasmine, oolong and green tea I just drink them straight, but sometimes I'll add a bit of milk or lemon juice to my black tea.  I almost refuse to drink any other kinds without adding honey, though, partly because it feels better for my throat when I'm sick which is usually when I drink other teas, and mostly just because it's so damn tasty.  It's kind of ridiculous how a tablespoon of honey changes a mug of herbal tea.

As far as making it and what you can do with tea, that's about it.  Now, the pertinent question is, why should you drink tea other than for its taste?  For one thing, it's actually rather cheap - I drink a metric fuckton of tea and I haven't had to buy any new tea for at least two months.  This is partly due to the fact I have no less than ten containers of tea in my kitchen (most of which are boxes of bags, but whatever) and like to mix it up a lot, but still.  For someone who drinks far less tea than I do, restoration periods will probably be about the same length for like, a big loose leaf thing of black or something (I highly recommend loose leaf where possible, teabags are basically packaged, low-quality dust that comes from loose leaf stuff, and is thus weaker and has a different taste), or if you, like me, have an iron stomach and are able to handle just about anything, you can buy a 100ct of Lipton's black for less than five bucks, probably less than three usually.

Another reason is for the caffeine content.  Some teas are pretty low in this regard, like white tea, but black, green and other non-herbal teas have an amount on par with sodas most of the time.  I would go on a bit of a tirade on why caffeine is basically a legal form of crack with severely reduced withdrawal symptoms, but if you're reading this, you're probably in college, so you know anyway.  And shame on you if you drink decaf tea, that's just grody.

That's all I have for this post.  If you want to know more, feel free to drop me a message or a comment and I'd be happy to expand on anything I can, or find you a reliable site that does it better than I could, and thanks for reading!

Taste of the Orient #1

Hello there again readers!  I apologize for this blog post coming rather late, I've been rather busy this past week and it'll probably stay fairly busy for a while.  As such, I'd like to apologize in advance for any future delays in posts.  Also, happy Valentine's Day (or, for people like myself, Single's Awareness Day!)!

With all that out of the way, today we're going to delve into foreign lands a bit.  Today's entry is something that my mom vaguely described to me once when we were grocery shopping at the wonderful little Koyama Shoten  (in Dublin on Sawmill, for those local readers).  She said my dad (the Japanese of my two parents) used to make a funky summer dish that was really fast, really simple, and really good.  Clearly, the weather would have us believe it's not summer, but if you're like me and you keep your room at around 74F with a space heater (my birds seem to be happier at this temperature), it can always be summer.

The things you'll actually need:

• Tomato (just one is fine)
• Cucumber (again, one is fine - I actually only used half)
• Green onion (unpictured)
• Soy sauce (regular variety soy sauce is fine, but I prefer light soy sauce for this)
• Somen (you can probably only find this in a Japanese/Asian market, in the noodles section)
• A pair of chopsticks

The other things are just heavily recommended items to also get if you venture to an Asian market, because damn.  The two little containers next to the curry box are rice seasoning, which is fantastic and fairly cheap for how long it lasts.  Curry blocks are also excellent.  Rice, well, duh.  The little sealed can contains azuki (Japanese red bean), an excellent ingredient for desserts and smoothies!  You can seriously put it in just about any smoothie (pre-blending, of course) and it'll be the most interesting deliciousness you'll ever get from a smoothie, in good ways.  I also highly recommend getting ginger, which I also use for this entry even though it's not necessary, because it's delicious and good for sinuses.  Wasabi powder recommended if you ever want to try making your own sushi (which is balls hard, I would just like to throw out there).  

GREENSSS?  WHAT'S GREENS, PRECIOUSSSS?

That said, let's get this started!

The first thing you need to do, as with most noodles, is get some water to a boil.  For one clump of somen, I believe they say six cups is good, because you need to be able to submerge the whole thing fast, you'll see why later.  While your water gets up to a boil, take your three veggies (you could experiment with more) and chop them into roughly quarter-discs (see right).  Put them all in a bowl...and then you basically wait for the water to finish getting to a boil.  No big deal.  Eventually it'll get there, and then you want to put the noodles in there and submerge them as fast as you can without breaking them.  Then you want to keep the noodles separated with your chopsticks as best as you can for about two and a half minutes.  Once it's been that long, dump them into a strainer and rinse those bitches with cold water.  From there, you can just add to your veggies, put in a healthy amount of soy sauce, stir 'em up a bit, put in a few pieces of ginger if you like, and then refrigerate it for about half an hour.  From there you can keep it refrigerated, preferably covered, for a day or two (second time I tried making this I made some to give to a friend, gave it to her on day three...first and only time I've had a complaint about my cooking, stuff had started fermenting.  I still feel bad about that SORRY TIFFANY).  

That's pretty much it!  Quick, easy, and delicious!

With that, a couple of other announcements:

First, I kindly ask that if you've read this far, you read the post previous to this one, or at least this summarized take-away from it: please, PLEEEEASE criticize me!  I know I'm not perfect and I can't please everyone, but I can't even try to do that if no one tells me what they don't like about what I'm doing here!

Second, if you didn't respond to my Facebook post about it, please let me know if you would be interested in a blog about learning how to program, as I'm considering doing one as a side project in my extra spare time, which I may or may not have until the end of this quarter.  It won't take priority over this blog, so no worries on that front.

Okay, I think that's it for today.  Oh, and my birthday's in two days.  I accept cash, credit, Steam games and Japanese foil Magic cards.  I'm just kidding.  But seriously Japanese foils.

Just a Checkpoint

Hey there readers.  This post doesn't have anything terribly special, just a couple things I'd like to point out.

First, I finally got my first piece of critical feedback today.  While this is unfortunate that I am not perfect as I would like to be, I do appreciate it, because now I'm aware that some of the humor I tried to inject into my posts seemed really contrived and irrelevant, which detracted from the overall quality of posts (according to unnamed reader).  As a result, unless a bunch of people say something against this idea, I'll probably cut that out from future posts.  The big point here is that I do have feelings, but they're being invested elsewhere, so you don't have to worry about hurting them if there's something you don't like.  Criticism is a necessary part of the creative process, which is a category I believe certainly can and does include blogs.  So give me feedback, PLEASE.

That's the serious thing.

The second point is that I am even more of a fool than previously thought, as I realized while reading something today that food prices are not universal at all, and as a result my cost analyses are not universal.  Probably should've come to this rather obvious conclusion earlier, but alas.  A couple of things can happen with this from now on: I can continue to do a personal cost analysis for each entry with the caveat that it does not necessarily extrapolate to all areas, or I can just stop doing them altogether.  I learn towards not doing it at all, because it's easier for me that way to not have to keep and scour for receipts, but I am writing to an audience, so the audience should decide.

That's it for this little snippet, and thanks for reading!

This is the Way the Delicious Ends

History

Long ago, there was an ancient civilization of Mexicans who lived in Portugal.  They were the Mayans.  The Mayans were great geologists, predicting cosmic events through the use of geysers spouting in musical numbers, most of which correspond exactly to the tunes of Enrique Iglesias.  To this day, modern science has been unable to ascertain exactly why the Mayans were okay with this.

Perhaps the most impressive event predicted, however, was the eventual rise of the dinosaurs.  The dinosaurs, convinced of their own superiority, waged a bloody war against the Mayans, forcing them to migrate from Portugal to Mexico.  The dinosaurs thought the Spanish were pretty chill, so they got along, at least until Pope Ivory (sp) III began the Spanish Inquisition.  Modern sources attribute the event to a meteor.

Once they had arrived in Mexico, the Mayans came to the sudden and terrifying realization that they had no idea what Mexicans ate.  They decided, as a final proverbial middle finger to the dinosaurs who had led them to Mexico, they should use some of the dinosaur meat and some of the native fauna to make a dish to survive the ages.  With this, tacos were born out of ground dinosaurs, and a very convenient selection of spices.  They concluded that their stores of dinosaur meat would run out around the time currently decided to be the year two-thousand and twelve.

...Oh shit.

Making the Frugal Magic Happen

Passive-aggressive tea mug.

So, just as a forewarning, the pictures will include ground turkey for this recipe, but I actually don't think it's worth substituting for ground beef.  The texture is off by enough that I don't think I can do so, but you may think otherwise!  Anyway, LET'S GET COOKING!  Here's basically the bare minimum, with not much spiciness (and what the pictures reflect, mostly, but I'll indicate where you can add more stuff):

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.

• Most importantly, ground beef (pictured as turkey, because I suck), minimum 1 pound
• Onions and other sorts of non-leafy vegetables that aren't potatoes.  Pretty much any type of pepper will work here, anaheims and habaneros for maximum intensity
• The following spice names have been mostly jacked from this recipe I found a while ago and loved
• Cumin
• Chili powder
• Garlic salt
• Basil
• Oregano
• Cayenne pepper (not strictly necessary, but who wants tacos that don't have a bit of a punch at all?)
• For extra spicy, red pepper flakes
• Shells of some sort, or, you know, tortillas
• Whatever you like on tacos, yo!  I can't eat them without cheese and salsa.  I think sour cream is blasphemous, but I know some people appreciate destroying their food...

This is how I feel in the morning.

This one's hella easy.  Take yo meat and brown it, which is basically putting it in a pan with some oil (see right) and breaking it up into smaller little bits.  Flip around (safely, with a spatula and stuff) for even browning of meatiness.  While this happens you can chop your onions and peppers and stuff, preferably into fairly small pieces so that you don't have to worry about that when you're nomming this deliciousness.

This is how I feel after sitting on a frying pan for fifteen minutes.

Once you've browned it (and it should look similar to the picture at right), the hardest part is basically done.  At this point you just add some spices (I never actually measure, but use your best judgment - basil and oregano are fairly strong compared to the other stuff, so use them with a bit more sparing than the others.  Chili powder and cumin are the more important ones here, so don't be afraid to use a decent amount), the veggies, and just a touch of water, enough to let everything mix up a bit, and then you go back to stirring it around over heat for a few minutes.

THE FINAL STAGE

When that's done, you should get something very similar to this, at right.  The second hardest part is now done, and oh man does it look fantastic.  I like to let mine heat up long enough that most of the extra juice has evaporated, as I'm not a fan of messy tacos, but if you're doing something else with this like taco salad, you might want to keep it.  

With this done, you have no more actual "cooking" left to do - it's all funsies from here!

Tell me you ain't jelly.  TELL ME. YOU AIN'T JELLY.

Take a tortilla (or for taco salad, your chips) on a plate, spread some amount of excellence on it, top with cheese, salsa, sour cream, whatever you like, and BOOM.  Best part?  You know what's in this taco, and it's all good.

This stuff is great for parties (obviously use more meat though), although that being the case you might want to get some more hot sauces (Mexican and Indian stores would be good for this, they're generally cheaper than supermarket varieties, and a lot more effective) and maybe even consider getting/making hard taco shells for those strange people.  (Link here - note that when using allrecipes.com, the comments are just as valuable as the actual recipe, someone suggested just spraying tortillas with cooking spray and baking draped over the oven rack until crispy, which sounds legit to me).  

So, now that the method is done being described, let's do some cost analysis!

Frugality

• Ground turkey - $2.20/lb, assume ground beef is about $1.20 more per pound?  $3.40/lb, I can get two meals out of a pound, so $1.70/meal
• Onion - $.58/1, $.29 to use half
• Tortillas - $1.79/8, 4 per pound -> 2 per meal -> $.45
• Cheese - $1.59/bag, 10 meals out of this would equate to $.16 per
• Salsa - Not sure, but I don't think $.25 per meal is too much to estimate
• Spices - psh

Add it all up, and you get something in the neighborhood of $2.60/meal.  Peppers are pretty cheap (I can get anaheims at $5/lb and habaneros at $1.20/lb at the Kroger nearby, and you don't need anywhere near a pound for these), and hot sauces would be in the same "psh" category as spices since they should last at least a year or two and cost becomes close to negligible.  So, maybe not the most frugal option that will ever be on here, but still pretty good compared to, say, campus, or Taco Bell.  Plus, the options are limitless, and you can have a lot of fun just mixing and matching various ideas at pretty much any point in the game.

So, that's frugal homemade tacos for you!  Hope you've enjoyed this entry of the Frugal Undergrad College Kitchen, and feel free to leave any comments down below.  I think when I made the last entry it was restricted to only people with Google accounts, so that's been changed I believe, so you can make anonymous comments now.  Happy Fruncoking!

The Leviathan or the Egg

Today's entry brought to you by egg salad, and also tea tumblers.


History


The first egg was discovered as a fossil somewhere in the Russian wasteland of Minnesota.  The scientists who uncovered it debated its purpose for some time, not entirely sure why anyone would need something shaped sort of like a sphere but not really, because until then all they worked with was spheres (hence the current bias in modern physics for perfect spheres in problems, and also because you can put them in your pants and look Mongolian, which was a compliment in those days).

Finally, after the egg fossil had been passed around a while, a Biblical scholar by the name of Raymond Banes decided it had to be the intended offspring of the Leviathan.  The egg was revitalized with voodoo magic, and from it came a chicken.  Raymond Banes took credit for this discovery, and then doused the second ever chicken in Greek fire.  It turned out to be delicious, and Raisin' Cane's was born.

Professional Egg Salad


Okay, so it's not, per se, professional.  It is, however, pretty good for minimal effort (I got in a couple levels of Super Mario World 2 in the downtime), cheap, and it'll last a while.  So what'll you need?

• 6 large eggs
• Mayonnaise
• Salt and pepper
• Lemon juice
• 3 stalks celery
• Some chives
• Bread
• Grey poupon mustard

I can't wait for Christmas!

Also as pictured, because I'm a swell guy like that.  You can also see my new tea tumbler I got today, which I'm very excited for!  

Now, note that this stuff, for the most part, is either hella cheap or you buy it once and replace it like eight years later.  I use mayo like once a month, maybe, which is somewhat un-frugal since it doesn't last as long as I would like it at such a rate, but eh.  

Now, the first step is to hardboil these suckers.  The problem with such an idea is that there are about a thousand different ways to hardboil eggs, apparently.  I was Googling for about fifteen minutes just trying to find some consistencies between any two besides "put water on eggs", and I was having a lot of trouble just doing that.  Finally I just picked one and (mostly) went with it, and I couldn't find anything wrong with it.  SO!  How does one hardboil?  Easy: get some eggs, put them in a pot, fill that pot with cold water (yes, order apparently does matter), bring it to an uncovered boil, then cover, turn off the heat, and let it sit for about fifteen minutes.

See also: a really big pot, a clock, our eggs, and my tea.  Because I NEED TEA.

Thus making it even easier to believe that eggs don't really require much culinary finesse to prepare (which is wrong, but shut up).  While your eggs get to a boil and after you cover them you have a lot of downtime: I got to chop the celery, slice my bread, and get my tea steeping while they got to a boil (okay, that last one isn't hard.  whatever).  Once you get the eggs a boilin' and covered, turn the heat off and put a lid (much easier than a ring) on it.  At this point you should get a bowl of cold water and stick it in your freezer so that you have uber cold water for when the eggs are done.  If you have a timer or whatever, make use of it - otherwise, you have a cell phone so really you still have a timer.  This was when I booted up my SNES and relived some of my childhood.

In a childhood far, far away...

Ah yes...those were the days.  Fifteen minutes later, after the second one of these...

I thank God for this one.

And the eggs were basically ready.  In actuality, you can get an extra couple minutes in here, since you need to put the eggs into the cold water you should have stuck in your freezer and let them sit more, for about three minutes or so, long enough to stop the cooking.  Meanwhile, help poor little baby Mario some more!  

Once that's been done, you need to peel some eggs.  This isn't actually that hard, the worst part is just getting the first crack in the egg so it peels off right.  If you take a spoon and lightly tap it against the same spot, you should eventually make some headway and you can pull off the rest of the shell to reveal the now tasty, murdered chicken embryo!  If life starts at conception, chicken life is oh so delicious.

If you look at it, it looks like a pure white butterfly on a celery field.

I dip them in the (formerly) cold water bath just to make sure they're pretty much clear of debris, then toss them in.  Here's where you can add the salt and pepper and dried chives and other stuff.  Also, before you start mashing, it's actually a lot easier if you mash, and then add the celery...I'll make better notes of things like that before taking pictures next time.

Anyway, take your fork and mash that shit down.  Once you don't have any obscenely large chunks left (but before it's down to a pulp...you violent person), add in the celery and start adding in some mayonnaise, a tablespoon at a time.  You want it to stick, but you don't want all the grossness of mayo in your egg salad.  That's just grody.  Add in a squirt of lemon juice or two, and bam!

I uh, I got a little something on the edge of the bowl.  It's not what it looks like.

Okay, it's mayo.  You caught me.  :(

This is what I like my egg salad looking like, but if you want more mayo (ick) then I guess that's allowed.  Just don't come back to this blog.  You icky person you.  How do you live with yourself.

From here, it's a simple matter of slapping onto bread and putting stuff on top of it.  I personally just need some dijon mustard, but lettuce works well too.

And that's egg salad!  I expect mine to be able to last for at least six sandwiches, which is three meals or so. Let's do a little cost analysis:

• Celery - $1.36, 8-10 stalks (~3 batches) -> 45 cents
• Eggs - $2.75, 18 (3 batches) ->  92 cents
• Salt/pepper - how do you not have these already
• Mayo - I'm not sure, maybe like $4/32oz jar?  If you use 3 tbsp each, then about 10 batches per jar     -> 40 cents
• Lemon juice - $2.19, a lot?  (assume like 20 batches I guess?) -> 10 cents
• Bread - I don't remember the cost of store bread, but I think my homemade is like 20 cents a loaf, after cost of gas probably 25 cents, and you get about 10 sandwiches per loaf if you slice thin -> 15 cents
• The grey poupon mustard is a little pricy, $3.39 per 12oz, but you can cut that out if you're hellbent on maximizing frugality, but assume 30 sandwiches (you don't need much) -> 11 cents

So take each item price and divide by how many batches it makes and you get that item's contribution.  Totalled up, without fancy mustard is $2.02 per batch, with mustard is $2.13.  Divide by three, you get right around 70 cents a meal. This would cost like, what, five bucks at Kroger?  You just cut your cost into a fraction, made a tastier meal, AND have something to write home about.  What's not to love?

Thus, the first blog entry of Frugal Undergrad College Kitchen comes to an end.  If you have something to say, be it "YOU'RE WRONG", or praise, or complaining about how much you hate eggs and why did this first FUCKing blog entry have to be about eggs, just put it in the comments!  I'll probably be checking obsessively for the next few hours while pretending to do homework, so don't let me down (please!).  I hope this has been a good reading experience for you, and happy Fruncoking to all!

Welcome to Fruncoki!

Hello world!

Been a while since I've typed that.  Anyway, world, welcome to the Frugal Undergrad College Kitchen!  (Note the first letters if you're wondering why in the world I chose those four words)  The reasoning behind each of those words is simple, other than the fact they acronymize into, well, you know.

Frugal: this blog is intended to be about saving money...

Undergrad: while being an undergraduate...

College: college student...

Kitchen: by making your own food!  (I mean you usually do this in a kitchen, mileage may vary)

You might be asking yourself "But Fruncoki writer, what makes you think YOU can talk about it?"  Well, let me tell you.  A year ago I thought "cheap food" as a college student was mostly limited to ramen and whatever in your fridge would taste good with ramen.  And I still ate out a lot.  Like, a lot.  At least once a day.  And at some point, I realized a couple things.

1) Eating out is expensive.  Holy crap it is a lot of money to be budgeting five bucks for a lunch, let alone eight to ten when you eat as much as I do (the Ohio State campus is gigantic and my two majors are centralized on almost opposite ends of campus, so I walk a lot).

2) I was getting really tired of all the places on campus, and I didn't even eat the "campus-brand" food - just the slightly higher-quality fast food next to campus.

Now, I like my food.  It was around the time I started getting tired of the campus-area convenient food that I decided I should eat, you know, real food.  From my kitchen.  I knew I could at least not disgrace recipes easily, because I've never heard a word spoken against my teriyaki chicken (which isn't actually mine, but I've made it enough that I have the recipe memorized, so whatevs).  So the potential was there, clearly.  I just had to stop being a lazy fat undergrad college kid.  

So that's mostly what this blog is about, my trials and tribulations in becoming a frugal fooding student.  There'll probably be other tangents of frugality in this as well, at some point, but it'll be either related to food or just a short and mostly inconsequential bit.  I'm going to try to be pretty broad in scope, focusing mostly on what kind of food college students dig, starting from a couple of bare essentials (like bread, pizza, etc.) and moving along up to more complicated stuff (like pizza with toppings).  No actual content sans introduction for this entry, but that should change in the next couple days or so.

Also, if anyone's dissuaded from the idea of making most of your own food because of time constraints, I'm a dual-degree student who's also working and I can do this (so far).  Just gotta learn to be efficient.

With that, I end this post to make some tea.  Until next time, happy Fruncoking!