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You spend hours clipping coupons, comparison shopping and stretching a dollar until George Washington’s face is no longer recognizable.  You want to make your family healthy dinner recipes without blowing your grocery budget. Don’t let that effort go to waste by wasting your leftover food. We’ve all had that odd baked potato left over, 1/2 cup of mashed potatoes, or a couple of tablespoons of breakfast hash browns. It’s not enough to save — but you don’t feel comfortable throwing it away.   So don’t. Turn the power of potatoes into soups, dumplings for stews or put the potatoes to the rescue in recipes.

Baked Potato Soup

You can do this with actual baked potatoes or mashed potatoes.  It also works with hash browns, but you’ll have crispy bits in the soup. Chop the baked potato into 1/2 inch cubes, skins and all.  Set aside.  Roughly chop one small onion and sauté in a tablespoon of cooking oil until the onions are translucent.  Add the potatoes. Mash down the cubes or the hash browns. Add 1 cup of chicken broth, or 1 cube of bullion and 1 cup of water, for every cup of potatoes.  Let simmer for 10 minutes. Whisk together 1/2 cup of mil, or cream, with 1 teaspoon of flour.  Add to the potato mixture. And here comes the fun part.  Set out toppings of bacon bits, chopped chives, grated cheese and sour cream, just what you’d put on a baked potato.  Add crunchy bread and a green salad and you’ve made a hearty lunch or satisfying supper from leftovers.

Potato Dumplings

Save mashed potatoes until you have 2 cups.  Normally potatoes don’t freeze well, but in this case go ahead and tuck the leftovers in the freezer until you have enough. Thoroughly defrost before using.  Add 1 beaten egg, salt and pepper to taste, 1/2 cup bread crumbs (optional) and 1 cup of flour to the potatoes combine well.  Roll into balls half the size of a golf ball.  Top a simmering stew with the dumplings. Press gently into the liquid with the back of a spoon. Cover and cook for 30 minutes. Slice a dumpling in half to make sure it’s cooked through. Dumplings may be cooked in soups or salted water as well as in stews.  Serve with melted butter and sprinkle with parsley.

Recipe Rescues

Cooked potatoes come to the rescue of dishes that are too salty, too spicy, or too thin.  Drop in chunks of cooked potatoes into a dish that’s over salted.  Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring every so often.  Remove the potatoes and some of the salty taste will be removed as well. Potatoes have the same capacity for taking out spice from an over-seasoned dish.  Thicken up spaghetti sauce, chili or soups, by adding in mashed potatoes a tablespoon at a time.  Stir well and cook a few minutes. The potatoes won’t add any odd flavor.

Interesting Facts

Potatoes are tubers and hold everything needed to grow a whole new plant.  That’s exactly what the “eyes” on a potato are — baby potato sprouts.  A green skin on the potato means it’s about to sprout. Potato plants like tomatoes are a member of the nightshade family.  The tubers are safe to eat but the plants are toxic.

January 24, 2011

Do you think you’re being virtuous by wrapping up all your leftovers and organizing them neatly in the refrigerator, only to find them turning into alien life forms at the end of a few weeks? If that sounds like you, don’t waste that money you saved by couponing.  Prevent leftovers in the first place.

Learn What a Serving Is

Restaurants, especially fast food restaurants, have led us to expect that a hamburger must weight 1/2 pound; a plate of pasta holds two cups and drowns in sauce, or a rack of ribs should overflow the plate.  Portion control cuts down on leftovers and grocery expenses for that matter.  A serving of protein — that hamburger — is about the size of a deck of cards, a regular 52-card deck not the 82-card pinochle deck.  If you can’t picture a deck of cards, use your palm, not including your thumb, as a guide.  Figure on 4 to 5 oz. of meat per serving. Pasta and starches serving are one cup or 8 oz. Vegetables are full cup and fruit servings are a half cup.

Plate in the Kitchen Not Family Style

I know it’s less work to let everyone serve themselves from common dishes in the center of the table.  The problem is that our eyes are bigger than our tummies.  While your teenage son may eat that mountain of mashed potatoes he put on his plate, your grade schooler won’t.  It’s not sanitary to save the food that’s half eaten.  So prevent over-serving in the first place. Put the food on each person’s plate in the kitchen based on normal serving sizes.  If someone wants more, they can serve themselves from the kitchen.

Cook Just What You Need

When transitioning a family from big portions to normal portions, cook just what you need. I know that it’s tempting to cook two chickens so you have dinner for later in the week, but how often has that second chicken been half eaten during the first meal? Cooking just what you need means there aren’t any leftovers to deal with.  If your family fusses, saying their still hungry when dinner is over, cook normal portions of meat and starch and add an extra vegetable.  Or start dinner with a salad or cup of soup.

January 15, 2012

Cooking healthy meals is a good way to start the New Year, especially if you’ve overindulged during the holidays. All those cookies, special drinks and nibbles can pack on the pounds, as well as upset your digestive system. Get back on track to healthy eating with one simple trick.

Use spices and herbs instead of salt.  You might not realize it but most Americans consume double the amount of salt they require.  If you eat one fast food burger you’ve consumed all the salt for the day, half the calories you require and all the fat.  Only 15 percent of the salt most people eat is consumed by salting their food while eating or cooking.

Cut down on the salt by reading labels.  Did you know one serving of a popular canned chili has 30 percent of the salt you’re allowed for the day? And a serving isn’t the entire can it’s one cup.  Make your own chili and freeze it in meal-size portions.  Pick up low sodium cheese and use no-added sodium roast deli beef for sandwiches.

Most people have an acquired taste for salt. Parents actually salt their purchased baby food because the food tastes flat to them.  The baby of course, not being used to eating salt, doesn’t mind the taste. The easiest way to readjust your taste buds is to go cold turkey for three or four days. That means not only not adding salt, but preparing meals from salt-free ingredients.  It will take some extra time but at the end of the time period you’ll recognize just how salty most food is. You might even lose a few pounds because you can’t eat fast food that’s loaded with salt and fat.

Replace the salty flavor with strong tasting herbs such as rosemary, basil, dill or oregano.  Add heat instead of salt by adding in diced fresh jalapenos, cayenne pepper or even hot pepper sauce.  Boost flavor with spices such as fennel seed, cumin or cinnamon.  Try cinnamon in meat dishes such as chili or meatloaf.

Make your own dips using fat-free yogurt instead of sour cream and mayonnaise. A quick and easy dip that can be thinned with apple cider vinegar to use as a salad dressing is to mix one cup of fat-free yogurt with 1 tablespoon of dill seed, 1 teaspoon of dried onion flakes or 1/2 teaspoon of onion powder (not onion salt), 1/4 cup of chopped scallions, 1/4 cup of minced cucumber, throw a tablespoon of fresh chopped dill if you have it.  You won’t miss the salt or the extra calories in purchased onion dill dips with this recipe.