If you’re looking for a quick, simple pasta recipe that won’t let you down, this is the one you’ll want to keep handy. We used gemelli for this dish, but it would work equally well with rotini or any other full bodied pasta.  Gemelli just happens to be our recent new favorite, os we’re doing a lot of experimenting with it.

This particular recipe came about from the need to get something on the table quickly. my wife called and announced that she would be coming home for lunch on this particular day, even though she was supposed to be having a lunchtime meeting.  The result…  Well, in a word it was fabulous.  Or to quote Billy Crystal as Fernando, it was “Simply Maaaahhhvelous”.

This recipe is also my entry for the ninth edition of the Frugal Fridays food blog event, where myself and several other very talented people, including Ben, from What’s Cooking?  There are others working on the project with us, but I’m not at liberty to discuss them just yet.

The purpose of Frugal Fridays is for foodies or food bloggers to create a recipe that costs $10.00 US or less that will feed a family, and this recipe falls so squarely into that category that it really should be a crime.

But without further discussion or ado, I present to you…

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Welcome to the very first installment of Frugal Fridays, where I (and hopefully other bloggers) aim to prove that you can eat very well and still manage to keep a few dollars in your pocket book for good measure.  The Challenge of Frugal Fridays is to create a meal that will feed a family of four for $10.00 or less.  While I’m not expecting gourmet fare for this amount, I know that if anyone can whip up a meal on a budget that still tastes phenomenal, it’s a bunch of food bloggers.

This dish was a flash of inspiration from a conversation I had with my wife a few days ago.  She mentioned that her favorite seafood was crab and I had an immediate burst of inspiration on what to make. The dish itself is simple, promised great flavor and was planned to make my wife smile. What I didn’t know was if I could do it for under $10.00. It sounded like the perfect Frugal Friday challenge.

My first thought was to use lump crab meat.  Unfortunately, in this part of Texas a pound of decent looking lump crab would have used up my entire $10.00 budget.  I was stuck with using the best canned crab I could find.  Don’t get me wrong, I would have preferred the lump crab meat, but we’re going for a filling meal here, and I didn’t think 2 oz. of crab would do it.

The rest of the ingredients were straightforward and very inexpensive, including the shallot wich I admit took me by surprise.  As I’ve said, for a $10.00 the assumtion has to be made that there are some basic cooking ingredients available, such as oil, butter, salt, spices, etc. so that’s the premise I ran on. In the end I came in well under budget and made a remarkably tasty dish that would easily feed 4 to 6 people to the point of comortably full.

Just to prove that this came in under budget, here’s the complete list of what was purchased:

• Linguine – $1.09
• Crab Meat: – $4.17
• Mini French Loaf – $0.75
• Lemon – $0.59
• Shallot – $0.51
• Garlic – $0.30
• Parsley – $0.49
• ————————
• Store Surcharge – $0.40
• ————————
• Grand Total – $8.30

Not too bad for a seafood dinner for four with bread, eh?  I could have sprung for a salad, but I just wasn’t in the mood for it.

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This sauce was originally inspired by the classic Italian Bolognese sauce with a dash of my mother’s own ragu from my childhood. the result is neither one or the other, but has become my own unique creation over the years. For me this thick, deep and ever-so-rich meat sauce is one of the ultimate comfort foods, one I will pass on to my children and the powers that be willing, their children as well.

Just the smell of this sauce cooking is enough to give my wife hunger pains. While not as intensive as the classic 7 hour Bolognese, the simmer time of just about 2 1/2 to 3 hours is more than long enough to fill our entire home with the aromas of tomato, basil, oregano and thyme. Just after that the sausage begins to give off the wonderful scent of fennel, all in a wondrous symphony for the senses, and the resulting sauce does not dissapoint.

I prefer to cut links of sausage into roughly 1/2 slices for this dish rather than crumble it in. This gives the meat a bit more tooth, somewhat like tiny meat balls rather than just using meat as a component. Vegetarians may of course substitute an equal amount of cooked bulgar or mushrooms for the meat and use vegetable stock or mushroom stock instead of the chicken stock. I’ve made this combination and it works wonderfully.

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There’s simply nothing better on a cold windy day than a good bowl of piping hot soup. Add a bit of drifting snow to the equation and it’s almost mandatory that a good hearty soup come into play. Thursday was that day. Though the snow never did stick, the temperature shifted from the mid 70′s to a crisp 28 degrees. Add wind-chill and you’ve got 20 degrees and a pot of soup on the stove was the perfect way to take the chill out of the house, and us.

This variation on the classic chicken noodle soup gains a lot of flavor from the addition of chorizo, both to the broth and as an addition to the finished soup. The addition is simple, but the flavors the spicy little sausages adds to the broth is amazingly rich, deep and filling in ways that no “normal” chicken noodle soup could ever be. The broth is also made with a bit of cilantro for a further depth and the addition of a slightly earthy flavor that is just a bit unexpected in a bowl of chicken soup, but is immensely satisfying.

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One year ago today this blog posted its very first recipe. That first dish was truly “by the seat of my pants” cooking, and though not the most glamorous I’ve ever done, it’s still something I’m quite fond of. The photo… Horrible. That first day saw three visitors. My wife, a friend of the family and myself. All of us were amazed that I’d actually started this thing, though I’m not sure any of us thought that what I was doing would last for more than a few weeks.

In the twelve months to follow this blog has come a long way. It has done so because of the support of the food blogging community, its readers and of course, my wife, who has supported this venture unwaveringly throughout the past year. (not necessarily in that order.) Without all of you, I would never have stuck with this, but I am so very glad that I have!

There are many people I should thank for their support, but to be honest, I couldn’t name them all in a post you would be willing to read through. There are those who made a huge impact when I first started, so please let me take a moment to thank; Elise, Jasmine, Lis, Bryllin, Lisa of Homesick Texan Fame, Shawnda – the Foodie Bride and of course, Dr. Biggles. All of you helped me keep movin’ on at the beginning.

As for the rest of my fellow bloggers, though I may not have time to mention you all here, just let me say this:

You freakin’ rawk!

In celebration of CbsoP’s first blogiversary, I decided to revisit that initial recipe. This time around wasn’t so very seat of my pants, but I did change it up significantly. For one thing, I wasn’t in the mood for mozzarella and asiago, I was in the mood for feta.

The introduction of feta cheese brought with it a need to change out some of the other ingredients as well. For one, I don’t think feta goes well with broccoli, so I just increased the amount of spinach. …Feta with reg-lar ol’ breakfast sausage… Not happnin’, we’ll just skip that part altogether. As for the rest. Well… I winged it. but hey, that’s what this blog is all about, isn’t it!

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Coming up with ideas for a simple yet hearty meal during the holidays can be a bit difficult, so why not try this approach?

I’d made some farfalle with broccoli, cauliflower and a sour cream sauce a few nights before, and was looking it over for lunch, but I wasn’t feeling any love for the dish as a leftover. since we’ve been doing holiday meals over the past week or so, I also wasn’t in the mood to find yet another way to recycle more turkey or ham. the simple solution…

Make a frittata!

Any pasta will work for this application, though I personally tend to stick to those with a white sauce. Amounts will vary depending on the amount you’ve got on hand, but this is a good general guideline.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, I make a lot of chicken dishes. This is partly due to the cost. I find it wonderful to think dark meat is so out of vogue that they just dump it off in bags for around $6.00, and most of the flavor of a chicken is in the darker meats, which leaves me happily trying out new combinations.

This particular recipe like many others I’ve posted here, was born from necessity. Mrs. seat of her Pants had picked up some fresh pasta (Linguine) a few days earlier for something that she had been planning to make, and then forgotten about as deadlines loomed. It was up to me to save those lovely, fresh strands of yumminess!

The big question was… What was I going to make it with?

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Perhaps a little on the low brow, college-dorm side of life, but quite tasty nonetheless! This is a take on a dish that I usually make with smoked sausage or polska kielbasa. Not what I’d call light fare in either case, but it does have a good amount of veggies thrown in.

In truly Seat of my Pants fashion, this dish was cobbled together with whatever I could find at the ready when I discovered that I had not only forgotten to pull anything out for dinner, but that it was very late in the evening and I needed something for Mrs. Seat of Her Pants to eat in a hurry. Read more…

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