The Spending O' The Green- 3/17/09

After tonight's meal, I started a blog post about traditional St. Patrick's Day dishes but quickly realized that I had nothing new to add to that discussion. So in the spirit of the day of green, I will introduce the next component that I want to add to this blog. How much green am I spending to make these dishes? Both Richard and I assumed our grocery bill for the month would go up while I was making all the recipes from each month's Gourmet magazine. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Gourmet usually has a number of recipes that use obscure and often expensive ingredients. This month, however, that has not been the case. Although the Korean meal I made last Friday did have a number of non-traditional items, surprisingly, nothing I purchased was very expensive. The biggest cost is usually for meats or seafood and that menu used only short ribs and shrimp. Neither are very expensive. So instead of just assuming I am spending more, I want to come up with an approximate cost for each Gourmet dish I make.

Tonight I made only one recipe from my March Gourmet magazine, Downey's Soda Bread, on page 17. This recipe fit in well with a traditional St. Patrick's Day menu of corned beef and cabbage, champ, and chocolate-whiskey souffle tarts. As for the cost of the soda bread, it was an extremely pantry friendly recipe. I did not have to put a single item from this recipe on my weekly shopping list because I already had every ingredient. I must be honest, my buttermilk had an expiration date of February 27th, but buttermilk is actually sour milk anyway so it's perfectly fine long past the expiration date. I figured an approximate cost of this dish at $5.50 for the recipe as it was written and I actually halved the recipe as I only needed 1 loaf for dinner. I figured this total by simply looking up the cost of each ingredient and dividing or multiplying to find the actual cost in this recipe. For example, this recipe called for 1/3 cup of dark brown sugar. A 16 ounce box of of Domino Dark Brown sugar is on sale for a $1.oo at Acme. That works out to about 6 cents an ounce or about 16 cents for the third of a cup that the recipe calls for since a third of a cup is essentially 2.6 ounces. I won't do all the math for every ingredient here. As for the flavor of the soda bread, I really enjoyed it. It was not as dense as many soda breads I've made before. I thought I'd miss the raisins and caraway seeds I usually add but the whole wheat added a nice complexity.
The other three recipes I used tonight came from the website Epicurious.com. I love this website because of the variety of ways you can find a recipe. You can search by ingredient, type of cuisine, or even look for whole menus. The three recipes I choose were all listed under Irish cuisine. The Corned Beef and Cabbage was a very traditional but very easy recipe. Simply add the beef with some carrots, onion, cabbage, and spices and let cook for 1 hour per pound. It was excellent and I invited some friends for dinner who had never had the dish and they liked it too. Champ is basically mashed potatoes with scallions but again basic was good.

The dessert was a little more challenging but still easy for a souffle. You made the crust and souffle and then froze it before cooking. My only complaint was removing the frozen souffle tarts from the tartlets pans before cooking was really tricky. Several tarts baked with telltale fingerprints in the sides. It was a great dessert though and I added a little green food coloring to my whipping cream in the spirit of the day. Also, just for fun, I totalled up the other components of the menu. The Corned Beef and Cabbage totalled $12.50, the Champ was $5.00, and the Whiskey Tartlets were $14.00. The entire meal cost approximately $34.00 for six people, working out to about $5.67 a serving. You can't tell me that wasn't a whole lot cheaper than going out to eat. Whoops, didn't add the beer. A six-pack of Guinness : $6, six-pack of Harp: $7, A half and half on St. Patrick's Day: Priceless

Downey's Soda Bread Flavor Grade: A

Cost: $5.50