Chef Matthew

Over the last couple of years (mostly since I entered third year of medical school), Matt has really taken on the cooking in our little household. And, I think he has done a really great job. Its not an easy task to make dinner in a short amount of time with a limited budget.

Mostly, the issues are:
1. It is very difficult to cook when it is just you and Isidora
2. We try and keep dinners costing very little so as to save as much money as possible, around $3 - $5 if we can.
3. Isidora's bed time is 7 pm, and when I was getting home around 5:30 pm, this didn't leave much time to cook.

So, what this led to was a very standard routine of simple and easy things - canned or Alessi soup, canned chili, Hillshire Farms sausage with microwaved potatoes and sauerkraut, frozen pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Very rarely we would have the time and energy to make pasta.

But! Lately I have had a lot more time since I have been on capstone and my rotations are rapidly coming to an end (2 more weeks!). As a result, we have been getting more adventuresome with our meals again!

For instance, this is what we had for dinner tonight:

Spaghetti with browned butter, guanciale, onions, garlic, and artichoke. This dish was largely inspired by something Matt recently had on our trip to The Old Spaghetti Factory.

(He had the garlic mizithra.)

So, Matt did some research into browning butter, since this is really the part of the dish we hadn't done before. He found that it wasn't too difficult but did take some monitoring. He also found that browning the butter actually gives it a nutty flavor that he had always noticed when he had dishes with browned butter at OSF. Yum.

So Matt browned the butter.

And cooked up the guanciale, onions and garlic. (The artichokes just needed to be heated.)

And we had a great dinner! Including Isidora, who scarfed it down! So, how much did it cost?
Pasta - $0.80 on sale
Artichokes - half a can, $2.oo on sale (so we used $1.00)
Garlic - we bought a large jar a while back
Onion - we buy a bag of small yellow onions for $3.00 a bag
Guanciale - given to us by Matt's dad, Grant
Butter - 1 cup (half a pound - yikes!) at $2.32 a pound (so, $1.16)
Parmesan - we buy wedges of domestic parmesan at Volpi's on the Hill for around $3.50 a wedge

Total- between $3.25 and $3.75 for a meal, plus this will be lunch for all three of us again tomorrow!

He worked hard for this successful meal! It will definitely be added to the repertoire!