Cheap eats

So my focus on the rest of this school year and all of next year is going to be cooking good food at a much cheaper price. Ways that I did this when I cooked at UC was I bought jarred sauces and added different spices and maybe a meat or two to them. One of the cheapest things you can make is pasta, hence why that was a majority of what I made this year.

30 hour famine really struck a chord with me with showing me that a meal would cost only $.25 for a person to have a full meal in different countries. While this is pretty much impossible to do in the US, I have been trying to cut down my costs and do things cheaper. Next year I’m going to use my cooking as a fundraiser for this, charging people to eat and then donating most if not all that money to go towards feeding people overseas. I will also carry this over to my restaurant and have days where the entire day’s profit will go towards this. It is something that I think I can help out with and it is directly in line with my passions for cooking.

A can of sauce is somewhere between $2-4 depending on what kind you get, which will be a little cheaper than making your own from scratch. I usually buy different flavors of marinara sauce and add different spices (get the store brand…it tastes the same and is a few bucks cheaper than the better known brand). Sometimes I add either a meat such as grilled chicken (in the meat section there is pre grilled chicken in boxes for about $4) and recently I did a recipe with sausages (store brand) or a vegetable such as broccoli or asparagus. You can also do a white wine sauce with fish (this will be a little more expensive but not by that much if you buy small filets). One thing I really want to is cook with truffles, however seeing as they are at their cheapest $400 a lb, I will have to try and cook with truffle oil. This will run for about $15-20 a bottle so maybe I will get my mom to buy it ;). This is a rather gourmet ingredient so the higher price is expected. This will be part of an ongoing quest to make more gourmet meals at cheaper prices to enjoy. It will be a long but fun road and this summer is going to help me experiment with this J

"You smoked em!"

Above are the words of Dom Presutti referring to Danny, James and I "not just beating, but SMOKIN" the girls at Iron Chef Intervarsity. This was the first time I cooked competitively (even if it was a friendly competition) and I really enjoyed it. I really just let my passions for Italian cooking take over and make some really good Italian food for only really just starting to get into cooking. Some things I learned:

• Cheese is MAD expensive. Buying 5 different cheeses took up a majority of my budget.
• Less is more, having a less cluttered kitchen and a few focused teammates is immensely more helpful than having a bunch of people looking for new things to do.
• Adapt and change, I realized half way through the meal I didn't have a strainer, I always used Erin's when cooking before. So instead James went through the slow process of manually scooping out penne with a slotted spoon. Also the sauce wasn't turning out right in the beginning so I added more spices and more cream and it turned out really good.

Right from the start I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do. Since Italian is my forte I designed a simple appetizer and main dish around this. The appetizer is my own Crostini variation that I came up with. Crostini is basically small pieces of toasted bread with different things on top. They can be like a very simple bruschetta to something very fancy with fish and meat. I wanted to do something in the middle ground with this, so I layered prosciutto, mozzarella and sliced roasted red peppers on top in that order. It turned out very good and I'm pretty sure everybody enjoyed them.

The main course I did was a modified Penne Quattro Formaggio (Penne with a creamy four cheese sauce). The recipe called for four distinct flavored cheeses to be the sauce; Parmigiana, Mascarpone, Fontina and Gorgonzola. Since the store didn't have Fontina cheese, I used Fontinella, a cheaper and similar tasting cousin to Fontina. I also used light instead of heavy cream, although I used more than the recipe called for so the sauce would work. I also added grilled chicken, which was not in the recipe.

Overall I think the dishes turned out very well and were liked by judges and the girls side equally. I look forward to cooking more in the future and expanding into some new culinary areas outside of pasta, although that may have to wait until I am out of school and have a better budget. Below are the recipes for the Crostini and Pasta dish so you can make them your selves. The ingredients for the pasta dish have been doubled for the competition, so for a meal that will easily feed 4 just divide everything by 2. The crostini dish yields many servings so you can use that at a party if you would like.

Appetizer: Crostini with Prosciutto, roasted red peppers, mozzarella.

· 2 day old Ciabatta or French Baguette

· Olive Oil

· Roasted Red peppers (1 can)

· ¼ lbs prosciutto

· Sliced mozzarella

Preheat oven to 350. Thinly slice the bread and cut into quarters (just slice if using French Baguette). Drizzle slices with olive oil. Lightly toast until crisp (about 5-7 mins). Layer with small pieces of prosciutto, mozzarella and peppers. Plate and serve

Main Course: Penne Rigate a Quattro Formaggio con Pollo – Penne pasta with four cheeses and chicken

INGREDIENTS (below ingredients have been doubled)

2 lb. penne rigate
2 tbsp. butter
1 cup heavy cream (Light also works fine, may need to use more however)
8 oz. fontina cheese (fontinella also works), crumbled
8 oz. gorgonzola cheese, crumbled
1 1/3 cups parmesan cheese, grated
4 oz. mascarpone cheese
Salt, to taste
Fresh ground white pepper, to taste
Flat leaf parsley, chopped
Grilled chicken strips àI used the pre packaged kind you can find it in the meat section.

INSTRUCTIONS

In a small, non stick sauce pan, melt the butter and cream over low heat. Add the fontina, mascarpone, gorgonzola and parmesan cheeses; stir with a wooden spoon until the cheeses have melted into the cream completely. (THIS WILL TAKE A WHILE)

Since the sauce takes a while to melt and heat up, I would wait a little while to start cooking the pasta. The sauce will be very chunky at first (almost looking like curdled milk) this is normal! Keep stirring to break up the cheese. Once it is moderately to almost fully broken up I would start to cook the pasta. I personally add salt to the water before hand because it makes it boil faster and the pasta tastes better.

Once you throw the pasta in the boiling water start heating the chicken by putting them on a frying pan with some olive oil, flipping every now and then. This won’t take long.

Drain pasta and place in bowl. Add the chicken on top of the pasta, and then finally add the cheese sauce on top and mix it into the pasta completely. Season with salt and white pepper to taste, and garnish with a sprinkle of chopped parsley. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!!!

Much Love,

Steve :)