Garlic, and shopping at the Asian grocery

I gave up on fresh garlic a long time ago. It's annoying to peel, garlic presses are a pain to clean, and garlic goes bad too quickly to keep enough on hand for the amount that I use.

Instead, I use minced or crushed garlic in a jar, the wet kind. It really tastes the same, is cheaper, it's easy to load up in a dish (spoonful after spoonful...mmmm!), and it keeps for a long time. No one has ever noticed the difference, and it's light-years tastier than garlic powder. It's saved me a lot of time, money, and aggravation. I also use ginger in the same format; we are ginger addicts here, and I never disappoint a guest with my cooking.

If you really want to find inexpensive garlic in a jar, try the Asian market. I pay a lot less for many ingredients, including coconut milk, canned specialty vegetables (bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, baby corn), dried mushrooms, produce, fresh mangoes, and sauces (tamari, vegetarian oyster, stir-fry). Some of them are up to 50% less than in the standard grocery store, and there is little to no difference in quality. We hit up the Indian grocery for staples like basmati rice, dried chickpeas and lentils, and spices (cardamom is especially inexpensive, and it's a great place to get pre-blended spices like garam masala).

Good food is important in our household. We eat a LOT of vegetables, and our friends really enjoy visiting for dinner. Because we're fairly poor, our food budget does not allow for much dining out, and fast food places are not vegetarian-friendly anyway. Lunches usually consist of leftovers, and snacks are cheap stuff like yogurt, dried fruits, cheap pretzels, and bulk nuts (almonds, walnuts, cashews, pecans--I am allergic to peanuts, but okay with tree nuts). We're definitely not "junk food vegetarians"; we couldn't stand to eat so unimaginatively!

Organizing Your Recipes

This idea was part Catt's, part mine. When she is looking at a magazine, and she sees a recipe that she likes, she'll tear out the page(s) containing the recipe rather than keep the whole magazine. Or, she'll cut out the recipe if it's small.

The result was a pile of snippets and pages, so I tamed the pile by hole-punching the whole pages and sticking them in a binder, then taping the snippets to either a full size sheet of paper that I hole-punched, or to an index card. I know that a lot of people intend to write the whole recipe out on the index cards, but who really has the time for that, especially if it's one that you haven't tried yet? Taping it to the card works just as well--you can wrap it around the side of the card if it's a long snippet.

The next step is to keep track of the ones you try. If it's a keeper, move it to a different binder marked "Keepers". If it was indifferent or crappy, rip the page out, throw it in the recycle bin, and be done with it.

Also, if you're trying stuff out in a cookbook, feel free to take a pencil to that sucker. I am merciless with my cookbooks, marking the recipes in a star-rating system, and commenting with adjustments or alternative ideas. I can never leave a recipe well-enough alone, so making notes right in the book helps me keep track of what I've done, what's worked, and what I shouldn't bother with again.