For your next Trader Joe's Trip

Here's a great article about the best and worst finds at Trader Joe's. Nothing is more demoralizing for the home cook than wasting money on food you think you'll like but won't.

So happy shopping across the bridge!

The Daily Meal's Best and Worst Products from Trader Joe's

Beer and Doughnuts -- I have a "hard" life

On Thursday, as the sun was waning over the marsh tidal creeks in the Historic Navy Yard of North Charleston, I visited a more industrial side of the complex, a factory filled with bright tanks, tubes and large sinks. That's right, I made it to Coast Brewery for their Thursday happy hour tasting.

I joined Lauren Vinciguerra and Amanda Woodward (who I both hope will be guest blogging here in the future), and soon, we met a new favorite combo -- sunset, beer, and a doughnut, a Diggity Doughnut to be exact.

The Food Network famous doughnut, along with my favorite Coast taste,  32/50 Kolsch

I had a peanut butter and siracha doughnut, and it was Thai-tastic. Lauren opted for chocolate and Amanda stuck with classic cinnamon and sugar, and we munched, learned about venting CO2 and traded roasted chicken recipes. In short, spending time with these ladies was a serendipitous gift!

Do-it-yourself Home Cook Challenge

One of the biggest complaints I hear from people who are frustrated with cooking is "You buy all these ingredients, use a little in making the dish, and then that ingredient, ginger or cilantro or manchego cheese or fill in the blank, goes to waste. What else do you do with it?"

Enter the do-it-yourself home cook challenge. I see this as an opportunity to not only be frugal and avoid food waste, but also as an excuse to try something new. The only judges are your tastebuds, and the only criteria is whether or not the taste exceeds the trouble of making it.

I present to you a weekday case in point.

1. The ingredient: buttermilk. Now buttermilk isn't that expensive, but I am serious about the food waste thing. Use it! Buttermilk has a long shelf life, and a couple of weeks ago, I bought some local buttermilk to make buttermilk pies as thank yous. The local brand only came in a half gallon, and five or six pies later, I still have half of that. So, another tactic was called for unless I am OK with being the "what kind of pie?" lady.

2. The challenge: find a recipe that uses more than 1/3 c. of buttermilk. And not biscuits, OK. I know I can make them, but do I need to be eating an entire batch? I think not.

3. The bookshelf: the indexes of cookbooks are vital to this challenge. Ah. Found recipe in trusty Martha White Cookbook for Whole Wheat Cardamom Bread. 1 1/4 c. of buttermilk. We have a contender.

I had all the ingredients on the shelf except whole wheat flour. Previous attempts at making whole wheat bread had for me resulted in dry bread that eventually went to feed birds, so I was cautious -- and frugal -- and purchased only what the recipe called for from the bulk bin at Earth Fare.

And look what came out of my oven!

Crusty goodness

I substituted dried cranberries for raisins, and pecans for walnuts, and I have a new breakfast bread to add to my rotation. This is a quick bread, so there's no yeast involved, and it mixed up in literally 10 minutes.

Challenge successful! And I have enough buttermilk for another loaf ... what ingredient do you have right now that you could "use up"?

Saturday Lunch

Leftover steamed garlic broccoli. Watermelon radish, peeled and sliced, with kosher salt and butter. The remnants of a cheese plate from the always-good Lana Restaurant. And suddenly a Saturday afternoon alone doesn't seem so, light streaming in and everything feeling brighter ...

A Dubious Battle Hamburger Steak

As of late, I've found a local source for ground beef. I have already professed my love for chicken on this blog, but I do eat beef a few times a month, so I was happy to find this great source for chili, ragu and the occasional hamburger steak.

There is a passage in John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle that describes in detail a hamburger steak with onions, and ever since reading this years ago, I've studded my steak with onions, a depression-era diner trick.

The other night, I was in a diner kind of mood, and with my trusty cast iron skillet, created a Steinbeck-worthy moment (well, with that and Instagram).

It was a thick, down on the picket lines kind of main dish, and I was needing some fortification. Reporting for duty, sir.

Composting -- fascinating fun with vegetable scraps

Food and fun are not the only things that come out of my kitchen. In fact, there is also a lot of trash. When you cook a lot at home, you have much more than just take out boxes to dispose of. But veggie peelings, onion skins, that bit of leftover rice that I can never seem to finish all make their way not into my trash can, but into my compost pile.

Now before you start holding your nose and running, realize two things: 1, that it is a petite pile neatly hemmed in with chicken wire at a far corner of the yard, and 2, it's a mix of leaves and veggie stuff, so it's not like it smells like a trash can. But yeah, sometimes it does, and you don't really put your face that close to it, especially in August.

When I started seriously buying more veggies from the produce section instead of the can or the freezer, surprise (!), they come whole. So you have to peel them, remove seeds, ends and cores. My parents had a compost pile growing up, and so I was used to the idea.

But now that I have my own, it's like my own local version of Planet Earth. Don't need time lapse photography of the rain forest floor here, just my leftover jack-o-lantern, slowly caving and changing colors. Or old cabbage leaves that begin to rot in my crisper drawer and then seem to stay perfectly half-rotted for the longest time in the pile under a thin layer of Bradford Pear leaves. It's a fascinating ecosystem that I feed, and then in spring, it feeds me back, all dark and rich and dirt-smelling with only an occasional avocado skin or newspaper shard to recognize.

And the most amazing thing? The size deferential between the amount of stuff I throw in there (asparagus ends alone account for pounds of discards) and how much rich dirt I get out. The breakdown is amazing.

If you're interested in starting your own, anytime is the perfect time:

http://web.extension.illinois.edu/homecompost/building.html
http://eartheasy.com/grow_compost.html
http://gatheringinlight.com/2007/10/15/how-to-start-a-compost-bin-in-the-city-with-little-money/