Here is another Staff Favourite recipe from April’s issue of Food & Wine magazine for a Chilean vegetarian dish, Bean, Corn and Squash Stew. I’ve never been to Chile–even though it is on our list of future vacation spots whenever I become employed again–so I don’t know what Chilean food is supposed to taste like, but this stew had a nice Tex-Mex taste to it from the cumin.

We will probably feature a lot of vegetarian recipes on Recession Recip.es because usually a meat or fish protein is the most expensive part of a dish, and going vegetarian is definitely one way to cut down on costs. Also Carlo and I have been trying to cut down on our meat intake as a way to be a bit more healthy. This stew is tasty and hearty enough to even satisfy a meat lover.

This recipe made 4 servings at $2.14 per serving.

Normally when I need butternut squash in a recipe, I buy a package of precut squash. However in an effort to save money, I decided to buy a whole butternut squash and peel and cut it up myself. The peeling and cutting up was much easier to do than I had expected, but I don’t think that I really ended up saving that much money by not buying the packaged squash. The only plus was the texture because I felt the cut whole squash became much more silky in texture while the stew cooked.

Frying up the vegetables that form the base of the stew–kind of reminds me of fajitas.

Since corn is yet in season and fresh corn was quite pricey, I ended up using frozen corn instead to save some money. I just took the corn out of the freezer and let it thaw for a few minutes before putting it in the pan. Throughout the cooking process, the frozen corn kept its texture and didn’t get mushy so I think it was a good substitute. I would however like to make this stew again during corn season because I think the sweetness of fresh corn would add a little extra something to the dish.

I think you could either take or leave the hot paprika oil on the dish. While it added a nice finishing touch, I’m not quite sold on whether the dish really needed it or not, so feel free to leave it out if you can’t be bothered to make the oil or want to cut back on calories from the extra oil. I think you could get that nice smoked taste instead by perhaps adding a bit more hot paprika during the cooking process when you add the other spices.

Whenever we get our new issue of Food & Wine in the mail, I immediately flip to the recipe glossary and see which recipes have been marked as a Staff Favourite. Through experience, I know that I’m always guaranteed something delicious if I make a one of these recipes.

This starred Chicken and Leek Pie recipe by Curtis Stone was no exception. In fact it is one of the best things that I have made in the kitchen lately. The pie filling was rich and creamy with a nice edge from the leeks and fresh tarragon, and who doesn’t love some puff pastry as a pie crust! It goes perfectly with a nice arugula salad with aged balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

Speaking of the puff pastry, this ingredient was the most expensive component of the meal at $4.99. If you can make your own puff pastry, I recommend you do so to cut costs. But after reading about Kathleen Flinn’s attempts to make puff pastry at Cordon Bleu in the great book The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, I don’t feel like I’m quite up to that challenge yet! I just bought a pack of frozen Sara Lee puff pastry and after letting both sheets thaw, I rolled them together to make one sheet large enough to cover my 9×13 inch casserole dish. This method worked well and the two sheets didn’t split apart when the pie was cooked.

While the puff pastry might be a tad expensive, this recipe uses chicken quarters that are one of the cheapest cuts of chicken, and in my opinion, one of the tastiest cuts as well. This recipe takes a long time to make since you have to roast the chicken legs and let them cool before you put them in the sauce. One option to prevent the 9:00pm dinner that we had the night I cooked this pie is to roast your chicken legs in advance, remove the skin, and just have the shredded meat ready to go for when you want to make the pie.

Food & Wine states that the Chicken and Leek recipe feeds 4, but we easily got 6 servings out of the recipe, especially when paired with a green salad. We calculated that at 6 servings this recipe costs only $2.06 per serving, which is a bargain for just how good this pie is!

The recipe doesn’t say to clean your leeks before cutting them up, but be sure to do so! Leeks are notoriously sandy in their inner layers and you don’t want that grit ruining your pie. The best way to clean leeks is to cut them in half lengthwise and then run them under water to get rid of the sand.

The cheap but tasty chicken quarters. Another option is to find a cheap whole chicken to roast so that you can have a mixture of dark and white meat in the pie.

The creamy sauce waiting for the puff pastry cover.

The pastry crust puffed up beautifully and tasted incredible. I liked the way the way the recipe called for you to roll the puff pastry over the edge of the casserole dish, so you would get these big crispy bits of pastry with which you could scoop up the filling.

The finished Chicken and Leek pie–perfection! We reheated leftovers the next night and even though the pastry crust wasn’t as fluffy as when we took it out of the oven, it still tasted great.

While we were in Santa Fe over the weekend with Carlo’s family, his brother Les gave us a couple of Meyer lemons grown in his garden in Tucson. We brought them back to Vegas and didn’t really know what to do with them until I was flipping through Jamie Oliver’s cookbook Happy Days with the Naked Chef to find a recipe for dinner. I stumbled upon this recipe for Lemon Curdy Pudding for which I already had all the ingredients that I needed in the pantry and fridge.

The Meyer lemon is kind of a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange, so its juice and rind are a bit sweeter than a regular lemon. This recipe was delicious, easy to make, and basically cost pennies per serving since I already had everything in stock and the lemon was a gift.

I served it with some heavy whipping cream on top, just to make it that extra bit English. It was just like a dessert from my childhood!

This recipe makes 4 large servings at a cost of 18 cents per serving.

Les’s homegrown Meyer lemon

The first time I’ve ever been able to properly whisk egg whites to stiff white peaks! It must be living in the desert and having no humidity in the air.

I cooked the pudding for around 45 minutes like the recipe stated, but I wish I had started checking on it around 37 minutes so the bottom part of the dessert could have been a bit more gooey.

Yum, topped with heavy whipping cream to finish it off.