Homemade Vinegar Potato Wedges

My wife loves salt and vinegar potato chips.  And we both really love oven baked potato wedges.  So we had a bright idea—what if we could make vinegar flavored oven baked potato wedges.  As soon as that brainstorm hit we both started salivating.  And there are virtually no recipes out there for how to make them.  The only one I found called for “painting” the wedges with a vinegar solution half-way through baking.  Bleech!

Vinegar infused potato wedges ready to eat

So I came up with a technique to “infuse” the flavor into the wedges and the results are fantastic!  If you think you want to try it, here’s the recipe which really only has one extra step to it than making regular oven potato wedges.  Here’s the recipe for 2 dinner servings: Continue reading

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Everybody Loves Donuts! Cheap Bastid Makes Baked Donuts!

Everybody loves donuts, right?  They’re tender and warm and sweet.  I especially love raised donuts as fresh as I can get them.  And recently I started to wonder if I could make my own.

But, I don’t do a lot of deep frying and most donuts are fried.

There’s a couple of reasons for it.  I’ve got a small kitchen.  It’s messy.  It tends to stink up our apartment.  And, the biggie is that cooking oil for deep frying gets expensive.  You use quite a bit of oil and keeping it until the next time you need it is pretty inconvenient.  So I try to come up with other ways of accomplishing the same thing such as sautéing or baking.

baked donuts

But I get a craving every now and then for donuts. And, recently I came across a recipe for baking them.  These are raised yeast donuts and they are tasty without the trace of oiliness you get from regular raised donuts.  A dozen of these with their holes are a morning treat. Continue reading

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Homemade Artichoke Pizza

Remember yesterday when I did a post on homemade Friday Night Pizza?  Here’s a link:  http://www.cheap-bastid-cooks.com/homemade-pizza/

Well the pizza in that post was from last Friday night.  Last night I thawed out the dough ball that I stuck in the freezer last Friday and made another version.

We’ve been trying to get more vegetables into our diets recently so we thought we’d load up with veggies on this week’s pizza.  Now I’m a confirmed carnivore so I just had to have some meat on it so this has about 6 ounces of ground beef.  But I guarantee you that the next time we make this particular pizza that it will be all vegetables.

Here’s what it looks like:

The toppings on this (in addition to the ground beef and cheese) were red bell pepper, fresh jalapeno pepper, onion, mushroom, zucchini and marinated artichoke hearts—all with a light sprinkle of “Italian Seasoning” from the dollar store.  The total for the toppings was about $2.50 and that’s because I used half a small jar of marinated artichoke hearts that cost $1.99.

This was just flat out tasty.  Give it a try.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!

 

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Friday Night Homemade Pizza

It’s Friday.  That means it’s Pizza Day.  I don’t know why, but we’ve probably been doing Friday Pizza Day for the better part of 30 some odd years.  The only exception was living in Sturgeon Bay, WI when about every other Friday we’d go out for Friday night perch fry.

Maybe that’s because so often there would be activities on Friday nights—things like kids going out to the movies or a small town basketball or football game for which I’d be a chauffeur for junior high school girls or the whole family would go when the oldest kid was playing for his high school.  But all those Friday nights would begin with pizza. Now we make incredible, homemade pizza.

Homemade pizza fresh from the oven Continue reading

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Whew! No Pink Slime at Stater Brothers

For the last couple of weeks, “pink slime” has been in the news.  This is something that I’ll refer to as a “beef by-product” which is added to much of the ground beef sold in the U.S.  I think that’s a polite enough term although the American Meat Institute insists on calling it beef.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, the purpose of this being done by Beef Products, Inc. is to stretch the ground beef supply by using this left over connective tissue and trimmings and generate additional profit.  But, of course, that’s just me talking.

There has been a lot of media attention and a lot of people have gotten very concerned about the quality of the ground beef they have been eating.

So, here’s the good news.  I live in Southern California.  I shop at a grocery chain called Stater Brothers.  Well, I called their corporate headquarters today and had a nice chat with a young woman who assured me that Stater Brothers absolutely does NOT use any “pink slime” or “finely textured beef” or “boneless beef trimmings” in their ground beef.

stater brothers truck

(photo from Google Images)

I’ve had a lot of hits the last several days on this blog and on another blog where I also write of people searching for “pink slime” and “Stater Brothers” and “does Stater Brothers use pink slime.”

I’m really glad to say that they have assured me that they do NOT. There is no pink slime at Stater Brothers.

I’ve always been impressed with their meat department and how helpful and professional their staff is at my store on Santa Fe in Vista, CA.

But, if you’re still concerned, do like I do—but a bottom round or boneless chuck roast when it’s on special and ask the guy behind the counter to grind it into hamburger for you.  He’ll be happy to do it—at no extra charge.  There.  Now you know that you’ve got really good quality hamburger and it should be cheaper than the packaged ground beef in the meat case.

Thanks Stater Brothers.

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