Coupon (Cream Cheese)

 Want a coupon for 50% off your next purchase of cream cheese?

Yes, of course you do!!

Just CLICK HERE and enter your cellphone number. You'll get an SMS with a coupon.

Enjoy!

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Food Recall - Tara Milk

Tara Dairies announced that a small number of cartons of 3% milk, mehadrin kashrut, 1 liter cartons, with expiration date 24.3 do not contain regular milk. They were filled in error with chocolate milk. (Or was this an Adar prank? I wonder...)

The chocolate milk is safe to drink, but may not be what you expected will come out of the carton!

Consumers who purchased the mis-filled milk can contact customer service at 1-800-777-333 to arrange for a replacement.

Creamy, Cheesy Potatoes (Goat cheese version)

I wanted something decadent and cheesy this Shavuot. I'm not eating cow's milk right now, but I've been having some goat milk or goat cheese in small quantities without adverse reactions. A friend was asking about scalloped potatoes, so I was inspired by her to make a goat cheese version.

Here's what I did: 

8 or so thinly sliced potatoes

milk (I used goat milk)

1 cup water mixed with 1/8 cup flour, and salt and pepper (I used about 1/2 tsp salr plus a dash of pepper)

olive oil

garlic

goat's milk feta cheese


Place potatoes and enough milk to basically cover them in a saucepan, heat gently, then simmer about 10 min.

Prepare casserole dish by spraying with olive oil (misto-type sprayer is amazing), then sprinkle granulated garlic over the pan.

Pour flour/water/seasoning mixture into pan. Pour potatoes and milk into pan (carefully, they are hot!). Top with crumbled goat feta.

Bake for about 45 min at 200 C. Let stand 10 minutes before serving warm.

It helped me a LOT with my cheese craving!

Shavuot Snacks

Shavuot in Israel is just one day. It is SUCH a short, sweet holiday...

We tend to stay up late into the night learning and talking and noshing. For some reason, NO ONE ever stays up late learning without noshing. (In our family, we usually do not stay up through the night, for a number of reasons.)

So I figured I'd share some of the noshing things I will be keeping around...

This year will be a little different than previous years, primarily because I'm not eating cow's milk, but I'll probably still get some Ben & Jerry's for the rest of the family.

Other noshing menu items:

Caramel Popcorn, lots and lots of caramel popcorn (this stuff flies!)

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Homemade Crackers

Vegetable Sticks

Chummus

Watermelon

And anything else I find myself inspired to make. I'm leaving my oven on for yom tov, so I'll bake even on a whim!

What are your favorite snacks?

Shavuot Menu

I started planning my Shavuot menu over a week ago but got completely sidetracked, so now it seems very last minute! Oops


I'm actually a little disappointed, because I'm off cow's milk for health reasons and Shavuot usually showcases lots of dairy...

I can eat small quantities of goat cheese, but I'm not planning to serve a whole goat cheese-fest for Shavuot. It's actually quite expensive, so I'm nixing that idea before I give it any more thought. This IS supposed to be a frugal food blog, after all! And I am still trying to keep to my monthly grocery budget!

I want it to be a nice chag, in many ways. Foodwise, of course, and familywise too. So, I'm trying to do what I can to keep everyone in the holiday mood!

Foodwise, I bought some fish on sale. Not everyone in my family eats fish. But some do.
Fish without additives is hard to find, and quite pricey too. But it will get eaten, so I splurged, so together with the goat cheese, it's turned into a pricey chag for a one day event! But it's once a year, and even frugalistas need to know when to spend a bit more and just enjoy!

So here's the plan:

Shavuot night:

Challot
Split pea soup (requested by the 6 yr old)
Broccoli Quiche (made with goat milk and cheese)
Couscous with roasted garlic
Salmon with herbs and carmelized lemons
Butternut squash (not sure how I'll prepare it)
Salad - whatever vegetables we manage to get cheaply today.

Dessert -- see the post about Shavuot night!

Shavuot Lunch

Challot
Goat Cheese Lasagna with eggplant
Salmon and couscous from the night before
Salads

Sorry folks, no cheesecake here this year. But I'd love to hear about yours, I won't get sick from some vicarious cheesecake enjoyment!

Menu for the week

Everyone has been complaining about the 9 Days being upon us! I mean, seriously, does everyone besides us eat meat and chicken all week long?

We basically only eat chicken on Shabbat, and all week we eat dairy and vegetarian. So the 9 days doesn't actually seem any different (food-wise) to me than usual.

What's different right now is that I *MUST* find motivation to pack. And am trying hard not to shop much, and I don't want to cook complicated foods - that would just monopolize my time and limit my ability to pack (I hate packing, though, so it's tempting).

So here is my low-energy menu for the week - this is just a "skeleton" plan, I'll probably have to add things to most meals.

Sunday
Lunch: Sandwiches, cut veggies
Supper: Pasta with tomato sauce, cottage cheese, watermelon

Monday
Lunch: Pancakes (eggless), cut veggies, yogurt with fruit
Supper: Pizza (homemade), baked "french fries", carrot sticks

Tuesday
Lunch: Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, tomatoes and cucumbers
Supper: Veggie hot dogs (yes, bought some Tivol hot dogs on sale), 

Wednesday
Lunch: probably pancakes again
Supper: Cottage Cheese and spinach pancakes, green lentils with potatoes and veggies

Thursday
Lunch: sandwiches, cut veggies
Supper: Pasta with alfredo sauce,

Eggless Whole Wheat pancakes!

We've decided to go more or less egg-free. 

I've got no problem making most foods egg-free, but for some reason, I had a lot of trouble with pancakes. They just were NOT coming out right!

Some kind person pointed me to this vegan pancake recipe, which inspired me to try again. I discovered that my biggest problem was probably my lazy measuring - sometimes when I cook I am too lazy to pull out a measuring cup. That does not work well for pancakes!

So, here's my egg-free but dairy pancake recipe. It was a big hit!

2 cups whole wheat flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
3 tsp. sugar
2/3 cup of whey or orange juice
1 cup milk
2 tsp oil

a bit of oil for the pan

 
First, mix dry ingredients together in a bowl, then add liquid ingredients and stir briefly. It can be lumpy.

Coat your frying pan with a very light layer of oil, and heat to med-high heat.

Make pancakes!

Enjoy!

We served these with maple syrup.

Weekly meal plan!

Here's my meal plan for the week, assuming we don't go grocery shopping until Friday.

This is just using whatever I have in the house, my plan for now is to try to use up the staples I have in my pantry so we can start fresh after we move (more on that another time).

Sunday:
Lunch: pasta with alfredo sauce, cucumbers
Supper: Sandwiches, salad, and watermelon

Monday:
Lunch: Sandwiches, carrot sticks and tomatoes
Supper: homemade pizza, home-fries, cucumbers

Tuesday:
Lunch: Lentil and potato stew with vegetables, garlic bread sticks, make-your-own salad
Supper: Grilled cheese sandwiches, spicy roast carrots, stove-top grilled peaches with leben

Wednesday:
Lunch: vegetable soup with potato dumplings, crackers with chumus and homemade leben cheese with zaater
Supper: Pasta with tomato sauce and cheese, roasted cauliflower, salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, purple cabbage, feta cheese)

Thursday:
Lunch: anything leftover from the week
Supper: Tomato soup, salad, lentil-sloppy sams on homemade rolls

For snacks we'll have popcorn, various muffins, and whatever fruit we happen to have on hand...

Shavuot Menu!

I must begin by thanking my husband for helping me make it through the entire sfirat ha'omer this year! I counted every night with a bracha. And, honestly, it's been a long time since that happened. You see, he used to count when he davened and then at some point in the evening, he'd casually remind me to count. But I was always busy with something and just never could remember to count each night!
But this year, he made a big change. He didn't count when he davened maariv. Instead, he waited a bit and we all counted together. Each night. So I made it, with his help. I wouldn't have done it without him, really!

And now Shavuot is nearly here.

And in Israel, it's such a short chag!

So I'm making a random menu and I'm pretty relaxed about it... haven't started cooking yet, but I have decided it IS worth leaving the oven on for Yom Tov. So I can cook some things on the chag, if I want to.

Here's my plan, same menu for the night and day meals. I'm just realistic that I won't have time to make two menus!

Chocolate bread? Or challah. I'll poll my kids in the morning.
Cajun-style fried fish
Spinach and Feta cheese quiche (making my quiche eggless, so maybe it should be called a pie?)
Roasted kishuim (summer squash)
Carrot muffins
Make-your-own-salad
Apple crisp
Ice cream for dessert
(and cookies if I get to them)

Yes, you saw correctly. No cheesecake. Most of my family won't eat it, so I am not making one this chag. Will someone out there PLEASE share a piece of yours with me? (I love cheesecake)

Printable Coupons (Israel)

Tnuva has added some new printable coupons to their coupon page!

Low Salt Cottage Cheese for 4 shekels, coupon valid thru May 31

Chocolate Milk 30% off, coupon valid thru June 30.

Printable Coupon (Israel)

Do you buy those big jugs of yogurt?
You know, the ones with the handle?
Plain, drinkable yogurt...

Here's a coupon for a 1.5 liter bottle of Tnuva's Bio-Yogurt for 12 shekels!

Valid thru April 30, 2013

Whole Grain Breakfast Muffins (Dairy)

I know, I usually do a lot of vegan baking, but these have dairy. They are extra-moist and truly a great way to start your day, if you're ok with dairy. If you want to make them vegan, just substitute 1 cup of soy milk or other non-dairy milk for the leben. It will work. My kids preferred the dairy version, though, so I'm sticking with it for now!

Whole Grain Breakfast Muffins (Dairy, but no eggs)

4 T. flaxseed
1/3 cup boiling water
2 bananas, mashed (or about 2/3 cup of your favorite fruit, pureed or mashed)
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
200 ml leben (I used Gil) or yogurt
1 cup orange juice or other liquid (I used the whey that was left after making cream cheese)
3 cups whole wheat flour (or your favorite whole grain multi-grain mix)
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Start by mixing flaxseed and boiling water, and allow to cool for 10 min. Add the rest of the liquid ingredients, and mix well. Add the dry ingredients, mix, but don't overmix. Transfer to muffin tin, lined with baking cups. Bake at 350 F for about 25 min (although I suspect my oven may not be registering the temp properly, check yours at 20 min!).
Makes 12 medium size muffins.

Note: you can use 2 eggs instead of the flaxseed/water mixture if you prefer

Lemon Quick Bread Recipe

We have a lemon tree, and it is producing an amazing number of lemons this year. Probably twice as many as last year! Which is odd, as our orange trees are producing about half as many oranges as last year... strangely opposite cycles, it seems.

I looked at my lemons, and just KNEW I needed to come up with something to make with them.

3 of my 4 children enjoyed this quickbread (which was gone before I took a picture, sorry).

Lemon Quick Bread

2 tablespoons ground flaxseed  
1/4 cup boiling water
1/4 cup oil
2/3 cup sugar
1 package of leben (gil or eshel, whichever. I bought eshel because it was a few agurot less) (if you live in area where leben is hard to find, use 6 oz of plain yogurt instead)
1 tablespoon freshly grated lemon rind
juice of 1/2 lemon (or if your lemons are small, juice a whole lemon)
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Instructions:
Mix flaxseed with water, allow to cool for 10 min.
Add oil, sugar, leben, lemon rind, and lemon juice. Mix well. Add dry ingredients, and mix briefly.
Pour into a baking pan (loaf or cake pan) (I lined mine with parchment paper, I recommend it!). Bake at 350 F / 190 C for 35-45 min.
You could also use this recipe to bake muffins, if you prefer. Muffins bake for a much shorter time (20 minutes or so).

Enjoy the aroma while it bakes, and have a cup of tea with it!

I'd love to hear what you think!

Mislabeled Ice Cream!

Some 2 liter containers of Strauss Chocolate with Cookies/ Vanilla with Chocolate Chips were mislabeled PAREVE on the top of the container, and are actually DAIRY. The containers ARE labeled dairy on the bottom.


They are being pulled from grocery store shelves.


The affected products have expiration dates of April 17-18, 2014.

Consumers with this product at home can call 1-800-77-00-88 to arrange a refund.

Super Fast Garlic Bread Sticks

I needed something to round out a meal, and I immediately thought of garlic bread. Of course, I had no bread around, and no time to wait for a yeast dough to rise.

So...

I threw together my homemade whole wheat biscuit recipe, and instead of cutting circles, I cut it into strips. I slathered olive oil on my baking pan, and I transferred the biscuit strips to the pan, then flipped each strip, so there was now olive oil on both sides, and some funny shapes, that the kids loved.

I sprinkled the tops with freshly crushed garlic.

I baked them at 450 F in a convection oven, for 10 min.

And we had quick-bread breadsticks that got devoured!

Mocha Monkey Bread

 Dough:

3 cups whole wheat flour
1 T. baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 c. oil
1 c. milk

Mix together and knead for 2 min. The dough should be fairly well formed.

Topping:

3 T. instant coffee
1 c. sugar
1/2 c. cocoa powder
2 T. oil

mix the topping together. It will be crumbly

Form balls of dough and place 1 layer of them in a lightly greased baking pan. Spread 1/2 the to topping over the dough. Layer more balls of dough on top and spread the rest of the topping over this layer.

Bake at 375 F (my toaster oven is Fahrenheit, sorry!) for about 30 min.

I had some of it with my coffee before I took the picture, so you can't see it in it's full glory (also, I made a super small batch, as I just used the leftover dough from another food experiment. I have to say, the monkey bread was the more successful of the two!) If you want the mocha to be more runny and less crumbly, I suggest doubling or tripling the oil. I wanted to cut back on the oil, though. It was still really yummy.

Spinach and Cottage Cheese Pancakes

Ok, I splurged. Spinach is not on most frugal shopping lists in this country.

Here's what happened: I was at Mega for a 10% off day (Friday, select locations only) and I decided to splurge and buy a bag of frozen spinach. First I checked the fresh produce section to see if there were any suitable fresh greens that would work out cheaper. But there weren't. They had chard, but the bunches were small, buggy, and wilted. And cost 8.99. But I decided against that in favor of spinach, because once I cleaned, chopped, and wilted the chard, it would have been a lot of effort, and not so much chard.

So I bought a bag of frozen spinach, for just over 20 NIS with the discount.

My family likes spinach, so I justify the purchase of a bag of spinach every so often.

I wanted to stretch it to last a few meals, so here's the first spinach recipe I made, using about 1/3 of the bag.

Spinach and Cottage Cheese pancakes

2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/3 package of spinach (about 265 grams - maybe 8-9 oz?)
400 g cottage cheese (approx 1 lb)
2 cups whole wheat flour
salt, pepper to taste
nutmeg if you like it

Mix well. It will be pretty thick. Spoon heaping spoonfuls into a hot, oiled skillet, and brown on both sides. Serve hot.

Ok so this is not the best picture. But as you can see, I used very little oil to cook these in my enameled cast iron frying pan. And I really like that blue pan. I have the same in green for pareve, and one in red for meat. I also have a regular, not enameled cast iron frying pan. That one is pareve, and gets used almost every time I cook!

Variations: you can lower the cost of this by using less expensive greens than spinach. Sometimes chard or beet greens are a lot cheaper. Here in Israel, you might try lowering the cost of your cottage cheese by subbing PART of it with Eshel or Gil .

If you have a couple extra shekels, these are really amazing when you use 1/2 cottage cheese and 1/2 feta cheese. This will raise the cost a bit, as feta DOES cost more than cottage cheese, so this is not a good option when looking to lower your costs.

Price-Controlled Food in Israel

Good news! Even if you are buying Badatz dairy products, they ARE price controlled (well, the dairy products that are regulated - two kinds of milk, two kinds of leben, sour cream, butter and two kinds of hard cheese) and the price you pay cannot be above the maximum price defined by law.

This was decided today by the Finance Minister, Yuval Steinitz, and you can read the article about it here.

The full list of regulated items is available here.

The list includes several types of bread, salt, cheese, sour cream, butter, eggs... check it out! I know people who carry the list with them to be sure they are not being overcharged.

A Note of Explanation

We basically follow a lacto-ovo-vegetarian lifestyle (that means we do include dairy and eggs in our diet), and we even eat chicken on Shabbat. I know that there are others out there who do the same, and for those of you who eat more meat, well, you can always use my ideas to expand your repertoire of vegetable-based dishes! For those of you who are vegan, I will have to refer you to my friend over at Vegan Start, although many of my dishes can be adapted as you like.