$4.92 / Serving - Seafood Stew

This warm, creamy, and hearty stew is yet
another great recipe to try in the winter when
you just want something to heat you up without
worrying about the cholesterol from other meat
based stews. This seafood stew limits carbs by
omitting potatoes and also replaces dairy cream
with coconut cream, which adds sweet overtones
to the  dish. For depth of flavor, I also replaced
traditional fish stock with dashi - which is pretty
much Japanese fish stock, but also flavoured
with kombu, a kelp seaweed variant.

Part 1 - Dashi

Cost Breakdown

Ingredients

These really are all the ingredients you need to
make dashi. You're actually supposed to use
katsuo bonito fish flakes instead of niboshi
anchovies (pictured) but I could't find any at the
grocery store. Because katsuo bonito flakes are
smoked, they gives a different flavor to the dashi
than the anchovies but I'm making do with what
I've got at my disposal. 

Start by soaking the kombu seaweed in water for
20 minutes in a pot with the fire off. Then crank
up the heat to high and wait for it to come to a
rolling boil. The seaweed needs to be removed
from the pot just before rolling boil is achieved. 

You should end up with something like this: 

Notice how the liquid has taken on a yellowish
greenish hue extracted from the kombu seaweed.
This alone is called kombu dashi and is used in a 

wide variety of Japanese dishes. But we are not 

stopping here. We are going a step further and

throwing in the anchovies (or katsuo bonito flakes

instead, if unlike me, you were able to find some). 

Boil the anchovies on medium high for one minute.

Then strain out the anchovies and you have dashi. 

The fish introduced a darker colour to the broth.
Now that we have our dashi, which replaces the
traditional fish stock in this recipe, we are ready
to begin cooking the seafood stew!  

Part 2 - Prepping the Stew

Cost Breakdown

Begin by chopping up the onion, leek, and carrot.
Feel free to use other vegetables like celery, any
coloured pepper of your choice, fennel, etc. I just
only had these sitting in my refrigerator. 

Once vegetables are prepped, oil up a stew pot and
heat. When the oil is hot, add in the vegetables. 

Sweat out the moisture from the vegetables. Add
some salt to help draw it out, and to season. Stir

until it looks something like this: 

Notice how the vegetables are looking slightly less
plump than before. Time to re-hydrate them with our
home-made dashi soup stock! 

Bring the solution to a boil to create the perfect
environment for cooking our seafood in. 

In this recipe I used jumbo prawns, salmon, sole
and frozen bay scallops. But you can use any
seafood you like, such as clams, mussels, squid,
octopus, etc. Just be sure to include a kind of fish.
When the dashi soup and vegetable mixture hits
boiling point, add the seafood in all at once.
Lower the heat to low when it comes to a boil
again and keep an eye on the seafood. It does
not take long for it to cook - under five minutes. 

Since this recipe was modeled after the cream based
seafood chowder from Prince Edward Island, I needed
to add some kind of cream element. So I decided to go
with coconut cream for extra sweetness instead of the
traditional cow cream. To my pleasant surprise, the
coconut cream ended up being much richer than I had
anticipated and I ended up using only a fraction of the
can to thicken up the entire stew. This was the brand
of coconut cream I went with: 

And the stew ended up looking like this. 

Yes, my stove top needs a good wipe-down. 

Part 3 - Serve

Notice that this entire recipe, I did not add any
salt to the stew, except for sweating the veg.
Now is a good time to taste the broth and see
what kind of seasoning it needs, if any. I chose
to add a special kind of herbed salt just before
serving. 

The Salt Dispensary is a local Vancouver
company specializing in gourmet salts. I

only came across them at a stall they had
set up at a market my office hosted. Definitely
plan on ordering more from them soon. 

And here's what the final dish looked like! 

$3.68 / Serving - Japanese Suimono Soup

When you want to get cheap and healthy, you
can't do better than Japanese food. Traditionally
following ancient Buddhist teachings forbidding
the consumption of red meat and poultry, most
Japanese dishes tend to be high in vitamins and
minerals while staying low in cholesterol, focusing
on seasonal fruits and vegetables, and seafood. 

Today's recipe is a clear vegetable soup with a
smoked tuna and seaweed soup base, called
suimono. Vegetables aren't limited to what I've
included in this recipe. Feel free to use any
vegetables matching your preference! 

Cost Breakdown

$3.68 per serving

Step 1 - Making the Seasoning, or the "Tare"

Here are the 3 basic ingredients we'll need for making the seasoning that is the prime source of saltiness that we'll be flavoring the soup with.

1) Soy Sauce - Stick with the Japanese kind. 

2) Cooking Sake - salted rice wine

3) Mirin - this a sweet alcoholic wine

4) Water or your favorite broth - not pictured, but use your imagination!

In order of listing, with a 4:1:1:8 ratio, combine the ingredients into a pot and reduce by at least 50%. The more you reduce the liquid, the stronger tasting the resulting solution will be. Take care not to burn the reduction! In my example, I used Campbell's chicken stock. 

Step 2 - Prep the Vegetables (while the tare is reducing) 

This step is pretty ad-hoc. Use as much or as little of whatever vegetables you like (ie: the cheapest, chopped into whatever sized chunks you want to. Ideally, the pieces should be bite sized. In my recipe, I used enoki mushroom, Asian radish, carrot, firm tofu and kamaboko fish cake.

Step 3 - Simmer All The Things!!

Take your prepped vegetables and place them in a pot of hot dashi. Dashi is a Japanese soup stock made from blanched Kombu seaweed, and dried tuna flakes. You can buy instant dashi powder, and add it to hot water for instant dashi. As for making dashi from scratch, I will be uploading the recipe here shortly! 

Once your vegetables are in the hot dashi, crank the heat up until you achieve a rolling boil. Once the rolling boil is achieved, immediately lower the heat to a low simmer and leave for 10-15 minutes, or until the carrot and radish reach desired tenderness. 

While the soup is simmering, gradually add the tare reduction, ONE SPOONFUL AT A TIME, until desired saltiness is reached. The reason I stress that the seasoning should be added gradually is because this reduction is very strong. I made the mistake of adding too much seasoning (by the ladle) and ended up with strong tasting soup and a grumpy face. 

Step 4 - Assemble and Serve

Ladle the soup into a serving bowl and garnish with some chopped green onion. Enjoy! 

$8.55 / Serving - Spaghetti with Meat Sauce

This spaghetti and meat sauce recipe utilizes a
home made bone broth using beef bones. Bone
broth is known for aiding in digestions, as well as
boosting the body's immune system due to the
gelatin extracted from the simmer process. These
health properties can't be found in store bought,
pre-made, ready-to-use broth. We begin this
recipe by making this home made broth.

Cost Breakdown
$1.91 per serving

If the cost of making broth seems stupid cheap,
that's because it is. Ingredients cost almost
nothing and you can use meat and vegetable
scraps to help add flavor to the dish.

Prep

1. Soak beef bones in water for 10 minutes to draw out blood. 
2. Chop the onion, celery, and carrot into even size chunks and set aside.
3. Rinse beef bones and soak again for 10 minutes. 
4. Rinse beef bones and scrub out any extra congealed blood, vessels, etc. 
5. Fill a soup pot with 2 liters of water.

Cook

1. Place beef bones into pot of water and bring up to a boil.
2. When a rolling boil is achieved, lower the heat to light simmer.
3. Leave on a light simmer for 6-8 hours. The longer the better. 
4. Top up the pot regularly to maintain water levels.
5. In the final hour of simmering, add the onion, carrot and celery. 
6. Strain the broth well. A strainer works well. Cheese-cloth even better.

You'll end up with something like this. In this
picture, I used chicken bones, not beef bones
but the execution was exactly the same. Now
that we have the broth for the meat sauce, we
are finally ready to begin preparing the dish.

Cost Breakdown
$8.55 per serving

Prep

1. Dice carrots, onion and celery
2. Chop parsley finely
3. Mix ground meat and season with salt, pepper, and your favorite spices

Cook

1. Heat some oil in a pot on medium heat, and throw in the diced vegetables. 
2. When vegetables are soft, add in the mixed ground meat. Stir until brown. 
3. Add tomato paste and mix until tomato paste is caramelized.
4. Add broth and crank heat up to high until it boiling. Then lower heat to simmer. 
5. Let simmer on low for 4 to 6 hours. 
6. In the final 30 minutes, add in coconut milk for thickness. 

Assemble

1. Boil a pot of water and throw in the dried spaghetti. 
2. Drain spaghetti after reaching desired tenderness and plate. 
3. Sprinkle chopped parsley on top. 
4. Sprinkle your favorite cheese (optional)

I decided to make my own noodles. I plan on
posting the recipe for my homemade noodles
in the very near future! Please stand by for it! 

$11.78 / Serving - No Dressing Chicken Salad

 

This recipe removes excess calories from salad

dressing and carbohydrates. Juices from the
roasted tomato acts as a vinaigrette-like dressing.
Perfect for anyone on a low-carb diet or looking
to cut out excess calories from their meals.

Cost Breakdown
$11.78 / Serving

Pricing is taken directly from on a local organic 
market based in Vancouver, Canada. If cost is
a priority, remember that prices can be 25 to 50
percent cheaper if you use non-organic produce.  

Recipe

Prep

1. Get a pot of water boiling.
2. Slice cherry tomatoes in half and place on a baking tray. Sprinkle salt and pepper.
3. Grate feta cheese (low moisture content feta cheese, please). 
4. Cube avocados.
5. Slice or cube chicken breasts and rub on salt and pepper, or your favorite dry rub.

Cook

1. Place cherry tomatoes into preheated 350F oven for 15 minutes.
2. Place eggs in pot of boiling water and leave for 7 minutes.
3. Pan sear chicken breast pieces on medium high for 6 minutes, and set aside.
4. Remove eggs from boiling water and place in ice water to rest.
5. Remove cherry tomatoes from the oven and let cool. 
6. Peel eggs and chop.

Assemble

1. Portion is fist full of salad greens into a bowl.
2. Distribute chicken on top.
3. Distribute tomato on top.
4. Distribute cubed avocados, egg, and feta cheese.