Makeshift Food

It's somewhat amazing what sorts of things you can come up with when your food supply is severely limited by budget constraints. (Yes. Severely. At least for the rest of this week.) As it turns out, butter, milk, flour, and eggs can make an astonishingly wide array of food, as can cinnamon and pizza dough.

My first success was cinnamon pizza. That sounds nasty, I know, but it wasn't. Probably because there were no normal pizza toppings involved. I remembered late last night that I had a roll of pre-made pizza crust in the fridge that I needed to use very soon. However, I didn't have any pizza sauce or tomatoes, so it seemed like it was doomed to a miserably, rotten death until I remembered that everyone loves apple crisp. Problem number one: Lent. Problem number two: no apples. Now, dessert isn't dessert if not all the pieces are there, and you can't have pizza for dessert. Therefore, problem number one was solved. On to problem number two. I think we can all agree that the best part of apple crisp is the topping, so that's what I made. No recipe involved, just experimentation. It worked, too. It came out of the oven looking like this...


...the apartment reaction was something like this:


...and 10 minutes and six people later, it looked like this:


I will be making that again next time I have pizza crust.

After school today I ate some eggs, but then I decided I wasn't full yet. After perusing the Williams and Sonoma website for things I could make with the above-listed ingredients, I came across a recipe for rosemary popovers. Now, I didn't really want to make them with the parsley and rosemary that was called for, because I wanted to put butter and jam on them. Parsley and jam, in my opinion, don't make the best combination. So I just left them out.

If you've never made popovers before, they might seem kinda weird. The batter is lumpy and quasi-viscous, and you put them in a cold oven to start. But if you make them right, they are the most delicious little biscuitlike things you can imagine. They're not sweet at all, even though they look a little like muffins.


(Yes, they are supposed to be that crispy-looking. They're crispy on the top and squishy in the middle.)

One of mine came out looking a little lopsided, but it tasted the same.


Then you put on your butter and jam - I am particularly partial to jam of the raspberry-minus-the-seeds variety - and you have an excellent after-school snack.


Lauren and Diana ate some too...and I ate four...

I'm slowly exhausting my supply of not-so-renewable-by-me resources, so I'm going to have to become even more creative for the rest of the week. But given my success so far, the outcome should be pretty good.