Chicken and Chickpea Tagine is a pretty easy weeknight meal that makes tons of leftovers that you can eat for lunch for the next couple of days. You just brown the chicken, throw everything into a dutch oven, and let it braise for an hour. The recipe is outrageously inexpensive to make and is full of protein from both the chicken legs and the chickpeas.

This Chicken and Chickpea Tagine recipe makes 6 portions at $1.40 per serving.

I prefer using dried chickpeas in this recipe because I think they hold up a lot better than canned chickpeas during the braising process. Preparing dried chickpeas is pretty easy: you just soak them overnight and then do a quick boil the next day before using them in your recipe. It is a tiny bit of extra work but I think the results of knobbly and firm chickpeas in the tagine is worth the effort, and dried chickpeas are cheaper than canned ones too.

I like to put in a big 800g can of whole tomatoes with all the juice in this tagine recipe to make extra sauce. While my tagine may be a bit soupy and not very traditional according to the recipe writer Mark Bittman, I think the extra sauce tastes really good when mixed together with the couscous. I also don’t bother putting the vanilla seeds and pods in the recipe because I’m not sure it is worth the cost. We have made it both ways–with or without the vanilla–and I don’t really notice that big of a difference so we just go without.

When using chicken legs or thighs with skin on them, I like to really brown them before I put them into the sauce to braise. Making sure that they are thoroughly browned doesn’t impact the taste or texture of the chicken, but it does allow you to pull the chicken skin off much easier than if the legs are just barely browned. In this recipe, I pulled off the skin before putting the chicken in to braise so there wouldn’t be any unnecessary fat in the dish. When the tagine was finished cooking, I took out the chicken legs and shredded the meat which I then returned to the sauce. I prefer having all of the chicken off the bone when I eat my tagine because it is easier to mix the sauce and couscous together, and the shredded chicken also makes it a breeze to eat as leftovers the next day.

When I made the tagine this time, I added a big tablespoon of harissa in the sauce for some heat. For those of you who don’t know what harissa is, it is a North African hot red paste made out of chili peppers with cumin or coriander. It is an incredible condiment to have in your fridge because it adds great flavor and heat to pretty much anything that you can think of. We have roasted chickens rubbed in it, made scrambled eggs with it, and of course, put it in sauces like this tagine for a little kick. I think perhaps most things taste better with a little bit of harissa in it.

These delicious Lemon-Raspberry Cupcakes are the perfect springtime treat, especially with Easter coming up in a couple of weeks. The tartness of the fresh lemon and the sweetness of the raspberry jam combined with moist batter = cupcake perfection.

This cupcake recipe makes 12 cupcakes at 35 cents per serving (that is if you can limit yourself to just eating one).

This batter is really moist and light from the buttermilk and confectioners sugar that you use. It tastes great being licked off the whisk as much as it does once it is cooked.

Many of the reviews on Epicurious suggest that instead of putting the raspberry jam on top of half the batter in the cupcake liner, you should put down 2/3 of the batter so the jam doesn’t sink to the bottom. I guess I must have put in more than 2/3 of my batter in each cupcake liner because I had the problem of the jam coming through the top of the cupcake! I’m not sure what to recommend aside from seeing what works best for you through trial and error.

While my cupcakes don’t look quite ready to be on the cover of Bon Appetit magazine like these cupcakes were on the April 2008 issue, mine still taste yummy. I just need to work a bit more on my icing skills.

If I had to plan my perfect Saturday morning, it would include a long run around Town Lake in Austin followed by a Tex-Mex breakfast at Magnolia Cafe (because you know that calories don’t really count after running 10 miles ).

Unfortunately, we now live in Las Vegas, but I can still capture that feeling of the perfect Saturday morning by whipping up some Huevos Rancheros in the kitchen. This recipe immediately transports me back to Austin and it has become one of our favourite recipes to make on the weekend.

You can feed 4 people with this Huevos Rancheros recipe at $1.08 per serving (with a sensory trip back to Texas included at no extra cost).

Instead of using roasted chipotles in adobo sauce, we use chipotle flakes to add some smoke to the recipe and a fresh red chili to add some heat. This swap saves some money since the remainder of the can of chipotles always seems to go bad in our fridge before we can use it again. It also lets you control just how spicy you want the ranchero sauce because that adobo sauce packs some serious heat.

If you want to have a lazy weekend morning, you can prepare the ranchero sauce the night before and just heat it up while you fry up the eggs in the morning. We like sticking our corn tortillas in the toaster grill to crisp them up instead of frying them in oil as the recipe suggests.

Happy Saturday y’all!

Thai Beef Salad is the perfect lunch for a gorgeous spring day with the nice contrast of the tangy chili and lime dressing, and the freshness of the different herbs in the salad mix.

This recipe makes 4 large servings at a cost of $2.88 per person.

Carlo grilled the skirt steak on the bbq with just a touch of salt and pepper to season.

I bought a big box of mixed organic greens at Costco for $3.49 and used that as a base for the salad. We chopped up some mint, basil, and cilantro to add to the mix, as well as some fresh spring onions. The herbs added a great fragrance to the salad and cut the heat of the chili dressing.

This is the last recipe in our Thai red curry paste series of recipes, and I’m proud to say that we finished the jar of curry paste last night!

I found this recipe for Red Curry Salmon in this month’s issue of Women’s Health and it fit the bill perfectly for our red curry experiment and the fact that I had bought bok choy at the Farmers Market last week. Fish recipes are perhaps the hardest recipes in which to control costs because seafood is just generally expensive, even if it is on sale. However, I think the health benefits of eating fish far outweigh its cost, especially if you cook smart and supplement the rest of your week’s menu with some cheaper meals to off set the fish’s higher cost.

This Red Curry Salmon recipe feeds 2 people and costs $4.21 per serving.

I bought this great head of bok choy at the Farmers Market for only $2. Lots of recipes call for baby bok choy, but these are generally more expensive than the larger heads of bok choy and I don’t think the extra cost is worth it in terms of taste or texture. To get a really cheap deal on bok choy, head to your local Asian grocery store where they are on sale for significantly cheaper than your neighborhood grocery store.

The original recipe calls for red snapper, but when I went to Albertsons to buy some that was on sale, the red snapper looked anemic and mushy. I headed to Fresh & Easy instead and picked up two nice fillets of wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, which looked much more appetizing and were only $3.74!

The final result was tasty and filling, even though I would definitely use regular coconut milk next time instead of light to make the sauce a bit thicker.

This is the second of three recipes using Thai red curry paste. When buying specialty ingredients, using them only one time can drastically increase the per-serving cost of a recipe; finding ways to reuse them knocks it down, but it also gets you into the habit of thinking more than one meal at a time, which is a big help in making great food at low prices.

The reason why we started always having a jar of Thai red curry paste in our fridge is because of a recipe from Kerry Simon for Red Curry Chicken Kebabs with Minty Yogurt Sauce in the July 2008 issue of Food & Wine magazine. This recipe became an instant classic in our house — it’s so easy and so tasty. The chicken comes out fantastic, and the mint yogurt sauce cools the heat of the curry paste and adds some nice sweetness.

We typically eat the kebabs with another Simon recipe from the same article: Seared Romaine Spears with Caesar Dressing. Both go on the grill, and now that the weather is warming up for most parts of the world (or at least in Vegas), this is the perfect menu for an evening of grilling and hanging out with friends.

To feed four people, the Red Curry Chicken Kebabs with Minty Yogurt Sauce cost $2.20 per serving, and the Seared Romaine Spears with Caesar Dressing cost 60 cents per serving when you serve just the lettuce topped with dressing and parmesan cheese. The total cost of the meal is $2.80 per person.

Once I’ve marinated the chicken in the curry paste, I jam it onto the skewers. I don’t do this like shish kebabs, with the meat nicely spaced out, I push the pieces closely together, making a giant meat stick of curry goodness. I find this technique cooks the chicken quite well on the grill…

..as you can see here.

Romaine hearts, sliced in half…

…then, yes, grill them. Just a bit to crisp and singe some edges, and add some smoky flavor to the lettuce.

The finished article, curry-marinated grilled chicken with mint yogurt sauce, and the grilled romaine with homemade caesar dressing and parmesan. By the way, for me, the caesar dressing tastes much better than any I’ve bought in a store!

I find that there is nothing more annoying than buying some esoteric ingredient for a particular recipe and then never using it again (hello, pomegranate molasses still in my fridge!).

With that in mind, we are going to have a Curry Three For All to showcase three different recipes (one vegetarian, one chicken, and one fish) that all use one key ingredient: Thai Red Curry Paste. Thai red curry paste is pretty easy to find at most grocery stores in the ethnic food aisle. A jar cost $3.39 at our local Fresh & Easy, and it lasts for a while in the fridge, so you don’t have to worry about using it all up in one go.

The first recipe in the Curry Three For All is Cauliflower, Egg and Potato Curry. I was drawn to this recipe because I was looking for a showcase for the orange cauliflower that I bought at the Farmers Market. The recipe calls for a more Indian style curry paste, but I used the Thai red curry paste and it tasted great.

This Cauliflower, Egg and Potato Curry recipe made 4 servings at $1.94 a serving.

Perhaps the best thing about this recipe is its flexibility. Basically you could add a variety of different vegetables or legumes to this recipe and it would work. You just need to make the basic curry sauce and then let your imagination go crazy. I think adding some peas to this particular incarnation would taste really good.

I ended up using only 4 eggs even though the recipe called for 6 eggs, and I also used light coconut milk, which worked well and saved a few calories. You can monitor the heat of the curry by adding more or less Thai red curry paste. I, of course, added a bit extra and the curry had a nice fire to it just the way I like my curry.

When I was at Vons last week, I found some 93% lean ground beef on sale for $2.57 so I decided to make some spaghetti. I turned to a Jamie Oliver recipe that I have been using for the last 5 years or so, which tastes like an updated version of the Spaghetti Bolognaise that my mum made when I was growing up. As usual, it was really tasty and totally hit the spot.

Finding the beef on sale made this Spaghetti Bolognaise recipe, which serves 4, cost only $2.30 per serving.

Jamie Oliver’s recipe calls for 10 slices of pancetta or bacon which can get a bit expensive. To keep the smoky flavour and–more importantly–the tasty fat in the recipe, I cut up some prosciutto hock and used that instead. Basically the hock is the end piece of the prosciutto from which they can’t cut any more decent slices, so it can be found fairly cheap at Whole Foods deli counter for around $2.50 for a decent size chunk. Cutting the hock up worked great for this recipe and we used the rest later as a pizza topping. Here is the piece that I bought with some fresh cut rosemary from our garden. If you want to cut costs or fat further, you can just saute the rosemary with some plain olive oil and that works fine too.

I love trying to put as many veggies as possible in my spaghetti sauce. This time I found some carrots in my fridge and whizzed them up in the food processor and added them to the onion and garlic. In the past, I’ve put in mushrooms, zucchini, and bell peppers in the sauce too. The great thing is that not only are you upping your vegetable intake, but picky eaters and children don’t even know that these veggies are in the sauce when they eat it!

It seems to me that cooks are split on whether you should use really cheap wine when you cook, or whether you should only cook with something that you would drink. I’ve done both and I prefer cooking with cheap wine that I would drink, because what is better than cooking while enjoying a glass of wine? I found this Italian table red Rosso Pirovano on sale at Whole Foods for $7.99. It wasn’t the best wine but it served its purpose as both an ingredient and drinking partner for the night.

Instead of adding only a 14 oz can of whole tomatoes to this recipe, I added a 28 oz can. When you first put the sauce together it is quite liquidy, but once you put it in the oven, it thickens up and becomes really rich and meaty. Jamie Oliver suggests that you cook the sauce for 1.5 hours, but I would start checking the oven after 1 hour and take out the sauce when it is the consistency that you like.

The finished sauce served over some whole wheat spaghetti with some fresh shaved parmesan.

We ended up using some of the left over sauce as a pizza topping last night and the sauce perhaps tasted even better smothered with some mozzarella cheese and baked.

When we were doing the shopping at Fresh & Easy last week, I saw they had mangoes as part of their weekly 98-cent produce pack specials. We’d had a hankering for some fish, and seeing the mangoes reminded me of this Spicy Fish Tacos recipe I got from Men’s Health magazine a long while back, which has a really tasty mango-avocado salsa.

These tacos are great, can be made in about 20 minutes, and there’s some scope for savings in the recipe as well. It calls for 12 ounces of mahi-mahi for two servings, but in our experience, about a half pound of fish for two people is plenty. Also, I like to use something other than mahi-mahi because it’s not always a great choice from a sustainability perspective, but more so because you can use some other — much cheaper whitefish — with little effect on the overall taste of the tacos. I generally just see what’s on sale and go from there. This week, we found some dover sole on sale and paid $2.25 for almost 3/4 of a pound.

The recipe calls for blackening spice, so anything in this realm will work. You could even just do salt, pepper, and some cayenne or ancho chile powder. We used NoMU Smoky Peri-Peri Rub, and it worked well with the light fish. The original recipe says to grill the fish, but I usually just do it in a pan on the stove. Grilling fish filets can be a real pain — perhaps that’s why it calls for 12 ounces of mahi-mahi, to account for the bit that will stick to the grill or fall through the grate!

This mango and avocado salsa is incredible, especially when mangoes are in season like they are right now. You could make extra and put it on top of any kind of fish, or even some pork or chicken.

I also decided to make use of the kohlrabi Alex had bought at the farmers’ market. Instead of just shredding the cabbage to put on the tacos, I made a slaw by shredding the cabbage, then cutting the kohlrabi into matchsticks, then adding some chopped red chiles (I used Fresno peppers, a good mix of heat and flavor), chopped cilantro, and then finishing with salt, pepper, red wine vinegar and olive oil. This got a lot better with time, so if you can make it in advance, you’ll be better off.

We also had some black beans with the tacos, simmered in a saucepan with some garlic, onion, red and green pepper, lots of cumin and some chipotle flakes. I usually just do a roundup of the vegetables hanging around the kitchen when I make the beans, tossing in whatever’s leftover or looks good. If you want to get really fancy, toss in a can of Ro-tel diced tomatoes and green chilies. From my view, the only requirements are garlic, cumin and some sort of heat (I like the smoky flavor from the chipotle flakes), anything else is up to you.

The tacos with the mango-avocado salsa are great, so if you can find those ingredients on the cheap sometime, this can be a great cheap recipe. The Spicy Fish Taco recipe makes 2 servings (of three tacos each) and by buying the dover sole, it cost us $3.11 per serving. Add in the beans and/or the slaw, and it’s really filling as well. The slaw made 4 servings at 96 cents per serving, and the black beans cost only 47 cents per serving. All told, this cost us $4.54 per serving for a complete meal, and we had plenty of beans leftover (they’re great on toast with a fried egg on top for breakfast), along with lots of corn tortillas. Which, of course, means huevos rancheros are in our near future…

After going to the Farmer’s Market last week and purchasing some beautiful Russian Kale, I needed to find a recipe in which this vegetable could star. Carlo suggested that I try this Kale, Sausage and Mushroom Stew recipe from the New York Times blog of Mark Bittman, who has written numerous cookbooks and of course, gallivanted around Spain eating and drinking with Gwyneth Paltrow and Mario Batali.

This stew was incredibly fast and easy to make. Basically you just brown the sausages and saute the kale, and then pour in some chicken stock. The end result tasted much more complex than what you would imagine with such simple preparation and cooking. If you like greens, you will definitely enjoy this recipe, and perhaps even some non-greens lover could be twisted into eating this recipe with the promise of sausage chunks.

The Kale, Sausage and Mushroom Stew made 4 servings, and the leftovers were easily reheated for lunch the next day. Each serving cost $1.88.

I found a few packets of fresh sausages on sale at the grocery store for $3 each and chose the Hot Italian variety. I definitely recommend browning the sausages in the pan until they are quite well done (perhaps too well done at first glance, but trust me) before putting them in the chicken stock with the kale because the browning adds a nice smoky flavor to the stew.

Carlo has a collection of different paprikas in the pantry since he loves Spanish food, so I used what Mark Bittman recommended: Piment??n de la vera, or smoked Spanish paprika. Along with the browned sausage, this smoky paprika really made the dish.

Just be sure not to get the smoked paprika in your eyes like I did–not so fun.