Frugal cooking this week

By Elizabeth Prata

I have never seen the Milky Way.

I am watching the History channel/Hulu show "Alone". It's involves 10 contestants who join the challenge to remain alone and surviving in the wilderness for up to 100 days. The production is extremely well done, from choosing the contestants, to the locations (Vancouver WA seasons 1-2 and Patagonia season 3). I'm unfamiliar with the show locations from season 4 to 6. I had heard that season 3 was outstanding so I started with that. I am completely absorbed in this quiet, interesting, educational, beautiful-on-the eyes show.

They show these beautifully photographed shots of the surroundings, from the jagged mountains, to snow dusted lowlands, to foggy lakes, to the many stars in the night sky, along with the Milky Way. I'd like to see that someday.

Speaking of the starry skies, something I set the alarm for and plan to try and see tomorrow morning at 5:05am is the Starlink satellites streaking across the sky. Starlink is a satellite constellation constructed by SpaceX to provide satellite Internet access. SpaceX is Elon Musk's company. The constellation will consist of thousands of mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).  As of 13 June 2020, SpaceX has launched 540 Starlink satellites, according to Wikipedia. Apparently the march of satellites across the sky is quite beautiful, say the people who have already seen it. I am hoping for a cloudless morning tomorrow so I can see it too.

I am taking advantage of the cool day. If it is cool out, I bake. In the oven right now is a bunch of mini-quinoa bites and some roasting broccoli. I also need to do something with the eggplant rolling around in the back of the fridge, and the marked-down picked chicken. I will look up recipes for "eggplant and chicken." Why not?

Found one! Is it bad that I gravitate to recipes that have the word "Easy" in the title? Easy One-Pan Eggplant Chicken Dinner. I have all these ingredients. Should be good! I also have some frozen shrimp defrosting for quick meals. Dinners for the next few days will be shrimp and broccoli and a boiled potato and also the eggplant dish. Lunches, I have deli meat and gluten free sandwich bread, the quinoa bites and also salad makings. A pot of vegetable soup is in the fridge, for either lunches or dinners, depending on how hungry I am.

It's hard to eat all of a pineapple before it goes bad. I found a solution. Freeze some of it. When I want some, I take it out of the freezer, chip some off, and blend in the blender with either banana or strawberry for a smoothie. Add a bit of coconut milk if you like, or just the fruit itself if you like it really thick. Sometimes I eat it thick and add crushed almonds on top, and eat with a spoon.

I'm all set with my frugal meals for the week!

I have church tonight, we are going through Hebrews. I am in the middle of several really good books with some more on deck. (Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs, and Phyllis Schlafly: Sweetheart of the Silent Majority by Carol Felsenthal). With my church event tonight, my books, and the the Alone TV show, I am all set for some good times today.  I hope you have a good day also!

Cheesy Quinoa Bites cooling. Soon it will be your turn, eggplant, soon.

PS, yes those are Smarties in the mason jar. I bought two bags on severe markdown after Easter. When I want something sweet but not too calorific, I mix a tube of Smarties with some peanuts for a light snack.

Frugal Cooking this week: April 30-May 5

By Elizabeth Prata

Since COVID-19 began, I've decreased my outings as mandated by the Governor. I only grocery shop once every two weeks, instead of every week like I did before this started. This gap in shopping introduces some mental gymnastics in scheduling and planning meals.

Just as you put the hardest vegetables in the soup pot first, the carrots, potatoes, etc,, and work backward to the softest, mushrooms, tomatoes...I do the same with planning meals for two weeks on the same grocery trip.

Plan a meal using the most perishable items first. Not everything will stay fresh for 2 weeks of course. Spinach will need to be used quickly (or cooked and stored for later). Strawberries need to be eaten first. I wash them and then core them and chop, putting them into a covered container. They keep well for a week. When I buy a bag of mandarin oranges I put half in the fridge to keep and half in the fruit bowl on the counter. They last a week or two. I buy two loaves of Gluten free break and put one in the freezer. Proteins don't last, so I either buy frozen like shrimp or tofu, which keeps a while. Root veggies like beets, turnips, carrots, and potatoes keep.

A friend stopped over and delivered a bag of fresh veggies that she could not eat.

The first week I ate meals using the delicate perishables, and this 2nd week tends more toward the things I can make with cans and the hardier perishables. This week I'm preparing:

Soup. Lol I always make soup. I prefer this type of 'everything but the kitchen sink' cooking because I can toss in whatever I have on hand without disrupting a balance of something or other. Casseroles, stir fry, soup, stews...it's more flexible for me.

The soup: A friend dropped off some veggies, including kale. I like a kale and white bean soup, but due to FODMAP digestion issues I can't eat the white beans. I substituted chick peas. I added chicken because I had to use it up.

Quinoa bites. I used half of the rest of the spinach, quinoa, and cheddar cheese, plus a few eggs to make these.

Pumpkin-cornbread muffins. Jiffy Cornbread muffin mix whips up in a Jiffy, and cans of pumpkin are loaded with good nutrients, and also make the muffins more moist.

The recipe I have always makes a bit more so I offload the rest of the batter into a loaf pan and cook that too!

Lobster cakes: Since the oven was on I popped the last two into the oven to have for dinner tonight and tomorrow.

Tofu-green bean-rice noodle stir fry. This whips up quick so I didn't make it ahead.

Tuna/Salmon sandwiches or salads.

I cut up a bunch of radishes celery and carrots to have on had as a side dish or snacks.

So that's it!

Frugal Cooking: Lockdown Edition

By Elizabeth Prata

Hi everyone, how are you doing? We are in the mid-point (hopefully) of a government mandated/advised (depending on where you live) quarantine/self-isolation/quarantine (depending on where you live).

Our school was canceled from March 13 until April 24, with potentially reopening on April 27 (depending on what's happening with the virus).

Food prep: Week of October 28, Hippeas, baba ganouj, reading

By Elizabeth Prata

I didn't do any food prep last week. Sometimes you just get tired of it, you know? I also had a temporary crown on my broken molar and it hurt. I didn't feel like eating much.

This week will be a bit different than usual because we have a Fall Break from school starting on Thursday. I'll only be at work for 3 days. This week I did some cooking on Saturday and I'll finish the rest today.

Baked fish. Some white sole was on sale for 97 cents. Three fillets, so, 33 cents each. I baked them along with other stuff I was putting in the oven. Remember, the oven takes a lot of electricity, so if it's on, don't use it for just one thing. Stuff the oven with all ya got.

I roasted some butternut squash. I halved them, scooped out the seeds and strings, brushed each side with oil, sprinkled salt and pepper and cut side down, roasted them till soft. When cooled, I peeled and put into a container for later. They will be a nice side dish. Or, I might try making butternut squash pancakes.

I poked three small eggplants and put them in the oven whole. They are the last 3 my friend at church gave me from his and his wife's garden. When a knife goes through them easily, they are done. I let them cool and peeled the skin. Later I'll make baba ganouj, a Middle Eastern eggplant dip.

I also put in a gluten free pizza and ate that for breakfast and for lunch yesterday. :)

Later I'll make chicken salad. Kroger has picked, roasted chicken for sale in tubs, and I like that it's clean and I don't have to mess with cleaning a whole chicken or handling a raw one to cook. I'll also make chicken and vegetable soup for lunches.

Dinners: Baked fish fillets, butternut squash, baked potatoes. Also, I picked up some seafood salad and that will go on toast with a side salad. So this week proteins are the usual eggs, and chicken, fish, seafood salad, and one serving of leftover tofu (I'll stir fry with rice sticks and broccoli). I put a fried egg on top of a spaghetti squash with tomatoes and it was good. I think a fried egg goes good on anything.

Lunches: chicken salad, soup, fruit. I have strawberries and kiwis and some mandarin oranges this week.

Snacks: fruit, pumpkin seeds (loaded with protein and good for low FODMAP), Hippeas which are chick pea puffs I found on reduced sale, soy nuts.

Speaking of Hippeas, a bag containing 12 snack sized bags was on sale for $2.49. That brings each bag to 20 cents. That is a great price for a snack item. I like to spend no more than $1 for a protein serving,20-30 cents on a piece of fruit, and about 20-25 cents per snack. If you break it down like that I find it helps manage the budget.

I bought two bags of Hippeas. I brought one to school and left one at home.

I liked them, and they are gluten free and low FODMAP. Only 12 net carbs and 6 grams protein. Win! I never find gluten free stuff this inexpensive. So I looked them up online and they are massively expensive. The same bag of 12 on Amazon sells for $20. Kroger sells it for $16.

This week I see the bags are on reduced sale again, BUT, it was a bag of 6, not 2, for $3.50, not $2.50, bringing each small snack portion from 20 cents to 58 cents. Someone got wise. I am glad I bought the two bags when I did. Lesson: when you see an item you suspect to be normally expensive (like GF products always are), buy them and buy a stockpile there and then.

For my 4-day school break I plan to read. I got Beautiful Swimmers from the library. When I was living aboard our sailboat and cruising through the Chesapeake, the book was recommended. It's about the Chesapeake watermen, as the oyster and crab fishermen of that region are called. I guess since I've waited 20 years to fulfill that recommendation, it's time to actually read the book! I got it from the library on inter-library loan. (free!)

I noticed I had slowed down on reading so I made another reading schedule. It is so easy to come home and veg out, watching mindless TV (Current fave: Flipping Boston, a home renovation show). My schedule isn't as demanding as in the summer, obviously, since I am working now and am legit tired when I arrive home. So I eased up my normally aggressive reading schedule a bit but did put a schedule on the fridge, minus a page number count, just as a reminder of which book I want to read more of that day.

Saving Cinderella by Faith Moore
The Believer's Joy, M'Cheyne
Margaret Paton Letters
Selina Duchess of Huntingdon
Biblical Doctrine, JMac
Idols of a Mother’s Heart by Christina Fox
Internet Inferno by Michael John Beasley
The Vanishing Conscience, JMac
Beautiful Swimmers: The Chesapeake Watermen

Some of these are books from summer I have not finished. Time to get them read, and not let 20 years go by! For I do not know what tomorrow holds!

Here are the winners of the The Winners Of 2019's Wildlife Photographer Of The Year Competition Have Been Revealedcontest, they are cute and funny!

And the winners of the Comedy Wildlife Photography competition

Have a wonderful week ahead everyone!

Frugal Cooking: Scallops, pea greens, tomato and avocado

By Elizabeth Prata

I posted this photo of my dinner with commentary on Twitter and Facebook:

Bay scallops sauted in lemon butter, atop a bed of pea greens, with garden tomato and avocado topped with salt and pepper.

It looks good to me, and I hope to you. Light, fresh, maybe even expensive.

Here is why it wasn't. It was a frugal dinner.

The scallops were $8 per pound. I bought a quarter of a pound for $2, and split them into two meals. I try to keep my proteins to $1 per serving.

The pea greens were part of a huge tub on sale that also contained baby spinach and baby kale. It's called protein greens. As you might know, if there is a sale sticker on it, I buy it. I had never had pea greens before but it didn't matter, I buy what's on sale and worry about liking the item later. It turned out I loved the pea greens and I look for the sale sticker every time I go now. $2 and I'm in. Normally it's twice that price so that was a great deal. I used about 30 cents' worth to put under the scallops.

The tomato was a garden tomato with juice and taste just this side of heaven, and was a gift from a friend. Free.

The avocado was part of the regular sale at Kroger, one of the produce items on markdown in the red net bag. Those cost 99 cents for anything in them, and in this case it contained three huge Florida avocados. I used 1/3 of the avocado. At 33 cents per avocado but using only a third of it, it cost 10 cents on the plate.

Throw an estimate of using about 20 cents' worth of butter and negligible amount of lemon juice to saute the scallops, and that concludes the cost per plate portion of the roundup.

The total cost of the meal was about $1.75.

I didn't plan ahead, I had the scallops and time restrictions for using up fresh fish governed my choice of the scallops for dinner tonight. When I was given the tomatoes today I determined to eat one of them immediately! I looked around the fridge and counter and thought what would be good paired with tomato. I wanted to keep the tangy deliciousness alive and not cook the tomato nor drench it in salad dressing. I saw the avocado, which also has a short shelf life, and decided the creaminess would be good with the tang of the tomato.

Finally, just adding scallops to a plate isn't all that appetizing. They are manila and drab looking. So I threw some greens on the plate for color and crunch. That's literally how I came up with the dinner for tonight.

Use what you have. Use what will go stale first. Don't be afraid to cook without a recipe. Also don't be afraid to buy what's on sale and figure out what goes with what later.

This was a good, light, inexpensive but satisfying dinner. Buon appetito!

Simple cooking and smashed avocado toast

By Elizabeth Prata

My parents had money and I grew up with some of the finer things of life. One thing that was popular starting in 1963 was Julia Child's new cooking show. She was personable, relatable, cheerful, and brought explanatory French cooking and other styles to the housewife in Peoria (or East Greenwich). My mother loved to cook and was a good cook. She experimented with new recipes on us kids. We also ate out at restaurants a lot and we were encouraged to get whatever we wanted on the menu. Growing up I tasted dishes like or had suppers like Lobster Thermador, Japanese cuisine, frog's legs, caviar, Baked Alaska, gourmet cheeses, and the like. I was so grateful for the expanded palate my parents allowed me to develop and the interest in world cuisine I"d gained.

What I've been enjoying here in Georgia is learning about simple food, hearty food, and different food, than I have previously been used to. Yes, the South has a cuisine all its own! Plain, hearty farm cooking is also terrific.

There are two older ladies who had or have cooking shows on Youtube or Facebook I want to introduce you to. Clara Cannucciari, a dear lady at the time who was near 90, and who has passed on now, became an internet sensation 12 years ago with her grandson's productions of her Depression Cooking channel. She shows how to prepare dishes they ate during the Depression while telling stories of what the times were like. She was charming and her stories were simple, like her cooking, but powerful in the starkness of her first-hand retrospective.

Joyce Woods of Momma's Easy Country Cooking on Youtube does the same as Clara with her Depression cooking- show how to make simple, down home Georgia dishes popular with families. She's also an older lady and tells her local history of the dishes as she's creating them.

Simple, ya'll. I like both kinds of cooking - the fancy French cuisine Julia introduced to us, and the simple but hearty foods from Clara and Joyce. Check them out!

Momma's Easy Country Cooking Channel

I had never heard of pear salad until attended my first Southern Baptist Covered Dish supper, but this simple salad is so yummy!

Momma's Easy Pear Salad

Clara Cannucciari Depression Cooking-

Here is my breakfast of late. I had oatmeal every weekday morning last school year, then changed to Groats every day during the summer, but I think my body got tired of the grain-type of breakfast. I switched to an egg and that seems to be tiding me over better until lunch. I think having an egg on toast or even a sandwich is a bit heavy so I am trying an alternative. Smashed Avocado Toast, except the avocado isn't smashed and I don't have any toast. Now, hang with me here.

I mentioned before that I like Charra's Tostadas. They are 6-inch, no fat, low carb baked tostada shell. For a snack, I enjoy a couple of them with tomato and cheese and a bit of hot sauce, broiled, making two large nacho chips. Well of late I've been trying them with a scrambled egg on top! Super! This morning I was too lazy to even scramble the egg and instead I fried it on my griddle. I had an avocado about to go overripe so I halved it and then decided I wanted "Smashed Avocado Toast- with Egg." But I don't have toast, just the chip. If I smashed it, I'd smash the chip. So let's call this recipe "Gently Cubed Avocado on Tostada- With Egg."

I fried an egg and cut it in half. Voila, here is one of the two chips I ate for breakfast:

As Julia would say, bon appétit!

The Story of a Frugal Dinner

By Elizabeth Prata

I scored this week on the Free Friday Download.

Kroger grocery store has a program where they have one item for free every Friday. Usually it's a small bag of candy, or chips or other snack food. Occasionally it's real food like yogurt, or this week: Queso Fresco, fresh cheese.

Queso blanco, with similar cheeses including queso fresco, is a creamy, soft, and mild unaged white cheese, commonly used in the Iberian Peninsula, several Latin American countries including Mexico, and many parts of the United States. The name queso blanco is Spanish for "white cheese", but similar cheeses are used and known throughout the world. ... It is similar to (if slightly more acidic than) pot cheese and farmer cheese.
Queso blanco is considered one of the easier cheeses to make, as it requires no careful handling and does not call for rennet or a bacterial culture. Wikipedia

Hmmm, what can I do with fresh cheese? Googling this query brought me to a recipe for cheesy enchiladas.

Being gluten free, I've tried corn tortillas before but they always taste so bad to me. Then a few weeks ago having dinner at a friend's house, corn tortillas were part of a make-your-own taco bar. I added really juicy tomatoes to my plate and when the juice mixed with the corn tortilla, it was transformed.

Seeing the recipe for enchiladas, the explanation section called for heating the tortillas, which I always did, and then giving the tortilla an oil bath or dredging it in enchilada sauce! Remembering the tonato sauce transformation, I thought Bingo! Let's do this!

I followed the recipe and added enchilada sauce to the bottom of my baking dish while my tortillas were heating on the griddle. I dredged both sides in additional enchilada sauce, and added the now crumbled fresh cheese. I placed these babies seam side down, and added chopped onion to the top, then the rest of the cheese, topping with the remaining enchilada sauce.

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes or so. You can top with avocado and sour cream, both ingredients I had on hand. A gluten free, inexpensive dinner! Win-win!

The take-away: I started with the free ingredient and made it the main ingredient. I built the dish around the cheese. Then looked for recipes featuring that ingredient where I also had most of the other indgredients on hand. The avocado, sour cream and onion were in my pantry and fridge. I only had to buy the enchilada sauce. It took a minimum of effort and time toput it together. I did it on a school night. It took 20 minutes to assemble and 25 minutes to heat through in the oven.

Cost:

Fresh Cheese: $0.

Tortillas: A packet of 30 of them is $1.50, so 6 tortillas would cost 3 cents each, or for the 6 I cooked, 18 cents.

Enchilada sauce, $1.50. I used the whole can.

Onions: negligible. I  used a bit of one large onion. Shavings, really.

Avocado: on sale for .77 cents each. I used half of one with my meal.

Sour cream: on sale for 99 cents.

My serving was three enchiladas. So the cost for this meal was roughly $1.50. You can add Mexican rice to the meal as a side dish, but I figured the tortillas with the cheese and avocado were rich enough, and I had a pot of tea going on the side, so, I cut it off there. For Friday night's meal of the remaining three enchiladas, I might add rice to the festivities, but for now, it's time to eat (frugally)--

Buon Appetito!

Frugal Cooking: Cherry Tomatoes, the Tightwad Gazette style

By Elizabeth Prata

I've mentioned before that Kroger has a policy where they reduce some produce items and put them in a special spot for sale. Anything in the red mesh bag will be 99 cents. These items might be a bunch of oranges that are a tiny bit soft, brownish bananas, eggplants with one wrinkle, or a sealed pint of cherry tomatoes with one cherry tomato gone moldy. Normally the items are still at near-fresh capacity. Or at least they seem good enough to me. If I can buy a $4 cauliflower for 99 cents by shaving away one pinpoint of brown spot, you better believe I'm going to do it.

I learned about thrifting in the 1990s. I'd bought into the 1980s culture of 'more is better' and 'greed is good' rhetoric. Well maybe not the greed part but the prevailing position of Americans that upward mobility is a given and that accumulating more is always better.

One thing that attitude did for me was instill a hard work ethic and a savings mentality. My husband and I bought a house with 18% down, at age 24. In those days putting 20% down was expected, none of these loans with no percent down. We filled our brand new three-bedroom raised ranch with furniture, stereo equipment, large screen TV, and golf clubs, and two cars in the garage of course, one new and one used, and felt we were living the American Dream. And that was the dream, then.

The husband left a few years later, seeking another, better, American Dream, as Ecclesiastes says we vainly do. I was left paying the mortgage in a beginning teacher's salary.

Uh-oh.

It was a struggle. A life that had seemed shiny and new and appropriate was now a millstone, a burden, and a terror. The first of the month with the mortgage payment was enough to give nightmares. I took on a second job, then a third, then a roommate. A mini-economic downturn happened and the real estate crashed. I was stuck with a house that wouldn't sell, tired of working 7 days a week, and wondering if this was what life was all about.

Eventually I sold the house for what I'd bought for it, barely, and decided to pursue another mind-set. Frugality. I'd tracked on the American Dream of husband, house, career with no thought, because that is what you did, after college. Now I was older and wiser and decided to make more thoughtful decisions about my lifestyle, sans pressure from society.

That's where frugality entered.

From 1990 to 1996 A Maine woman named Amy Dacyczyn (pronounced like decision) wrote and published a little newsletter called The Tightwad Gazette. The sub-hed to the newsletter was: Promoting Thrift as a Viable Alternative Lifestyle.

This was news to me. You mean accumulating stuff was not part of an upwardly mobile lifestyle? Buying - or not buying - into the spendthrift economy was a choice? Living with what you have, and making do was a real thing?

Her newsletter was revolutionary, literally. I was living in Maine and so was she and her family, the proximity made me curious, the useful tips hooked me.

Being thrifty was good. Being frugal left me open to spending what I wanted to spend on, not having to spend on a credit card debt and not paying a mortgage, but travel, books, and this new thing called the internet.

Here is the Amazon link to Amy Dacyczyn's Gazette and she also wrote three other books.

So anyway, what a long introduction to my dish about tomatoes!

I look for marked down produce and the other day I found these pints of tomatoes. Normally $4, $3 if on sale, these were marked down to 50 cents each!

The commitment one makes if buying these items, is to actually use them (thus NOT denying another person their opportunity for a favored fresh vegetable) and to use them right away so they don't go bad. So I halved all of them.

I was going to roast them which would have been great, but I didn't feel like turning on the oven. I use it for storing cookie sheets, muffin tins, griddle, huge saute pan, and three baking dishes, and I just didn't feel like hauling them all out of the oven. I chose to grab a large stock pot and do the cherry tomatoes on top of the stove instead.

Vegetable oil, salt, and pepper and we are good to go. I let them cook, covered, for a while till the tomatoes were soft and there was a lot of juice. I added some mushrooms I had on hand, also a frugal buy.

At the end I threw in some fresh basil, also a frugal buy, and now I have a large stock pot of tomatoes and mushrooms in sauce. If I ate pasta, I'd have boiled some penne and used it for a sauce. Also can toast a baguette hard and put some on top with a bit of cheese. But instead gluten-free me made some quinoa and used the tomatoes as a side dish. Can also add rice, or any other grain you like. Or simply have with a bit of cheese for a side dish sans grain, veggie only.

Were there any bad tomatoes in the 4 pints I bought? Yes. But only 1 or so in each pint. This was the waste:

Not a bad deal at all! I've eaten this dish every day this week. I had it with fish, with shrimp, with cheese, and with quinoa. And all for $1.98. Thanks, Amy Dacyczyn!

Frugal Cooking: Tomato soup, strawberry muffins, Christmas parade, more

When you are paid once per month, pay day is a highly anticipated event, and going grocery shopping is like a celebration. For a little while at least, the fridge is going to feel FULL! I've got choices!

I've mentioned that Kroger Grocery Store has a marked down bin where they place produce. Any bag of produce in the bags on that bin are 99 cents, no matter what is in the bag. Most of the time the produce is perfectly fine. Once in a while there might be one tomato in a bag that has split, or one small dark spot on a head of broccoli. I'm of the ilk that I'll just shave off the dark spot or dispense with the one tomato that's split and use the rest.

Yesterday I hit the bin at the right time. The workers must have just added a bunch to the shelf, as they periodically do during the day. I came away with a bag containing a head of broccoflower, a bag of two pints of cherry tomatoes, a bag of 6 large tomatoes, a bag of two tomatoes and two avocadoes, and a tray of strawberries.

I do feel strongly that I only take what I can actually eat, and not to take all of it. Other people depend on the lower priced produce, too. Whatever I do take, I always use.

The strawberries were not moldy but pretty ripe. I knew I would not be able to eat all of them before they went over. I decided to use half of them in a muffin recipe. I enjoy the pineapple sour cream recipe I make, so I decided to look for a recipe using sour cream with strawberries. Found one! What did we do before Google?

As for baking them, I used half of the flour called for and subbed almond flour. I also found out I didn't have enough butter so I added oil to make up the rest. Substitutions like these usually deflate or even ruin a baking recipe, but I'm by myself here and I'm a "Ach, close enough" kind of cook so... They taste OK, they are just crumbly.

Two cherry tomato trays plus 8 large vine tomatoes were also going to be a lot for me to get through if I ate them individually. A recipe was called for. I can eat cherry tomatoes pretty quickly, and I set two large tomatoes aside to use in salads. The remaining 6 tomatoes I cut up and put in a pan with some thyme, and guess what, I roasted! Not roasted dry, I had no parchment paper or any other way to get the tomatoes above the juices they'd shed while in the oven. But roasting is always good to draw out flavor. I decided to pop them in and use the heat from the oven to roast them as long as other stuff was cooking, and finish the tomatoes into a soup. Flavorful, fresh tomato soup will be great for this rainy day!

It's December 1 and the weather is cooperating with winter, southern style. It's a hard driving rain today with temps hovering at 50 degrees at midday. Tomorrow is supposed to be 74 and sunny. That's kind of a shame because the Comer Christmas Parade is scheduled for today. This is a huge event and it's a really good parade. Along with the parade is a Christmas edition of the Comer Farmer's Market and inside Comer Elementary School (very close by) are Christmas vendors selling gifts, crafts, and food wares. There are floats, school choruses singing, and more.

The parade is scheduled to go on no matter what, rain or shine, but it is a cold, driving rain and a lot of the participants have backed out. So it will probably be less of a joyful day and more of a plodding, soaking commitment. Here are a few pics of past Comer Christmas parades in better weather.

Enjoy your weekend!