Quesadilla Appetizers $ Food Hack by Ruth Paget

Quesadilla Appetizers $ Food Hack by Ruth Paget 

Quesadillas (pronounced kay-sa-dee-yas) are delicious, inexpensive, and healthy depending on what you put in them. 

Basically, a quesadilla is a warmed flour tortilla that is folded over to make a half moon shape with warm stuffing inside. You can eat a quesadilla whole as a meal or cut them into thirds to make appetizers. 

To make a filled quesadilla, place stuffing on half of the flour tortilla. Then, fold over the part without stuffing on top of the stuffing. Warm in a microwave for 3 minutes. Usually, you only put pre-cooked items in a quesadilla to warm up like steak or chicken. 

Three of my favorite stuffings follow: 

-cheese with a generous sprinkling of Southwest seasoning on top 

-scrambled eggs with melted cheese and salsa 

-black beans, melted cheese, and a topping of canned jalapeño peppers (I use canned black beans for the filling.) 

-peanut butter and jelly 

You can make all of these quesadillas in less than half an hour and a bag of flour tortillas is pretty inexpensive. The real secret of appetizers, though, is that you can mix and match them and turn them into a complete dinner pretty easily. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click for Ruth Paget's Books

Homage to Las Brisas Restaurant in Detroit, Michigan by Ruth Paget

Homage to Las Brisas Restaurant in Detroit (Michigan) by Ruth Paget 

I learned to appreciate Mexican food at a young age when my mom took me to Las Brisas Mexican Restaurant in Detroit’s Mexican Village Neighborhood on Vernor Highway. 

My mom always ordered what Las Brisas called a botana (today’s super nachos). I just loved the mountain of botana food – warm tortilla chips covered with ground beef, black beans, melted cheese, spicy peppers, chopped green onions, and sour cream. I thought that tasted like a crunchy garden burger. I still like crunchy food. 

I walked to school in Detroit’s Siberian winters, so I had no problem polishing off the botana and not gaining any weight. I still had room for a chimichanga, which I ordered just because I liked the name of the food item. 

A chimichanga is a deep-fried burrito. I would order a chimichanga with beans and cheese, because that was the kind of burrito I ordered at Jack in the Box. (There was a Jack in the Box near our house in Royal Oak, but that is another story.) 

I loved the crunchy chimichanga with gooey cheese inside. I topped it off with hot sauce and sour cream and thought that chimichangas should be sold at Jack in the Box, too. (Hint! Hint!) 

I also loved going to Detroit in the 1970s for restaurants even if places like Las Brisas had to have security in the parking lot. I still do not mind paying to park in a garage today for security when I go to restaurants.  

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click for Ruth Paget's Books

Interning with a Dutch Accountant by Ruth Paget

Interning with a Dutch Accountant by Ruth Paget 

When I moved to Detroit (Michigan) from the suburbs (Royal Oak), I attended a private Friends School (Quaker) my freshman year. 

The Quakers wanted Detroit’s nomenklatura kids (“We’re going to live on the parents’ auto stocks”) to do vocational training that would lead to jobs. We first took the Myers-Briggs Interest Inventory to find out what kinds of work skills we already had. 

I scored highly in quantitative and analytical skills with accountant listed as a good profession for me. I was mortified. I wanted to be an anthropologist, travel writer, and art historian. My smart Quaker teacher said, “Use math and analysis when you do all of those.” 

We next did informational interviews with people doing jobs we thought we like to do. One of the people I interviewed was an accountant at Coopers and Lybrand, who worked in the Renaissance Center downtown. (I liked the office location and wanted to live in the hotel there.) The accountant’s job was very busy, but interesting. She noted that communication skills were just as important as math skills to be an accountant. 

When it came time to do our internship, I worked for the school accountant, who was Dutch. I wanted to be compatible with a Dutch boss, so I put on my anthropologist’s hat and did some research. 

One of my friends in Royal Oak was Dutch, so I did know some things about Dutch culture: 

-The Dutch eat lots of casseroles made with sliced vegetables, shredded cheese, and cream. Casseroles are a delicious food $ hack. 

-The Dutch also eat pancakes at any time of day. These are made with eggs and milk for a hidden source of protein and calcium. 

-My friend’s mom worked part-time selling Amway cleaning products. 

-My friend’s dad was an engineer with Wayne County and was probably waiting to get a job at an auto company. 

-The family’s religion wad Dutch Reform. I went to vacation Bible School with my friend several summers and won Bibles for memorizing Bible stories. 

-The kids and I all went ice skating after school like little Hans Brinkers. 

That was my ethnographic survey of second-generation Dutch in Michigan. I also read about the importance of maintaining dikes to keep below-sea-level Netherlands from flooding in a Time-Life book about the country. 

I thought my Dutch boss would be a stickler about maintaining order given her cultural background for my analytical part of internship preparation. 

My boss told me I would be helping her organize “Accounts Payable” – bill or invoices the school had to pay. The “Accounts Receivable” – tuition payments and other sources of income – were private. She had a stack of bills piled up on my desk. She showed me a legal date stamp and told me to stamp areas on invoices with no printing on them to not cover up numbers. 

Once I went through those, she gave me a chronological journal to write up the bills I had stamped with the following information: 

-date received 

-creditor name 

-invoice amount 

-creditor invoice number 

Once I had the chronological file done, I was to assign payments to budget accounts. The accountant showed me the Chart of Accounts, budgets allocated for payment. She cut up strips of sticky notes and had me write the account number of which account I thought the invoice should be paid from along with the name of the account to help me memorize the Chart of Accounts. 

Then, I was to put the invoices in order by account number. Once, the invoices were in numeric order. I had to put them in alphabetical order within the account number. 

The accountant reviewed all my work before entering it into the IBM computer. 

I also used a business correspondence reference book to help draft business letters for the accountant and did inventory control (newest items in back of older ones). 

At the end of the internship, I told my teachers I had learned the value of maintaining systems, especially financial ones. 

(Note: I met my Dutch boss at a Youth for Understanding host family orientation several years later where I was volunteering as a former exchange student to Japan. She was going to host a student. I knew she and her family would have a happy, well-organized time.) 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click for Ruth Paget's Books

Venice Film Festival at Gino's in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget

Venice Film Festival at Gino’s in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget 

I decided to celebrate the Biennale of Venice Film Festival 2022 (Mostra Internationale d’Arte Cinematografica) with a family outing to Gino’s Restaurant in Salinas, California. 

I wore my Murano beads from Venice, Italy to dinner. Murano beads are made by hand and have gold in them. You can order Murano necklaces from Amazon at a reasonable price. Murano beads look festive on plain colored shirts like the yellow one I had on. 

Gino’s makes homemade pasta dishes, which is why I like it. 

My daughter Florence Paget ordered pasta a la carbonara, a Roman dish worthy of Rome’s cinecittà studios. Gino’s carbonara is made with chopped pancetta, egg, and Parmesan cheese sauce. My husband Laurent ordered linguine with shrimp. 

Producer dad got a heaping bowlful of plump, briny shrimp. He smiled as he ate that great dish. 

I ordered cannoli with minced veal and spinach covered in rich Parmesan cream sauce. Wow! Was that good! 

Venice has several Biennales including those for art and music. I think it would be fun to do something like Beaujolais Nouveau for these events in Italian restaurants around the world.  (The Biennale for art runs through November.  Plan a gallery visit and wear an onyx bead bracelet or necklace to go with your black pumps with dinner afterwards to do a local celebration of the Biennale for art.)

For example, before a pasta of your choice, you could order Aperol Spritz or Campari Spritz cocktails. Young people could drink limonatta (lemonade) or aranciatta (orangeade) from San Pellegrino. 

For a more upscale celebration, you could invest in Venetian Murano beads, scarves, or ties. I like the Murano beads from Raffinato. 

In Monterey County, Gino’s in Salinas is where I will be next year to celebrate the Venice Film Festival, thinking of Sophia Loren, who said, “I owe everything to pasta.” 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click for Ruth Paget's Books

T-Shirt Economics by Ruth Paget

T-Shirt Economics by Ruth Paget 

Detroit Tale 

Motown Detroit is also known as Detroit Rock City due to major funds generated by white rock bands selling merchandise, especially T-shirts. 

Every white Detroiter buys a T-shirt at a rock concert and has a collection of 15 – 20 of them in use at one time. Bars also sell T-shirts in this working class town. 

My big sister K. taught me at a young age the following math equation: 

10 T-shirts x $20 = $200 

T-shirts sell for $30 now, so the new equation is : 10 shirts x $30 = $300 

With these new tap credit cards, you can get 10 taps in 15 minutes for $300. 

In an hour using tap credit cards, one person can generate $1,200 in sales. 

If you have 10 people tapping credit cards in an hour, you could generate $12,000 in sales. 

- 40 T-shirts can generate $1,200 in sales. 

- 400 T-shirts can generate $12,000 in sales 

Stadium shows can generate a lot of money, if you have skilled retail workers running credit card machines. 

T-shirts also publicize as rock bands know, so they keep prices relatively low. 

I think T-shirts should be marketed more extensively, because they also do not cost too much to buy the basic shirt. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click for Ruth Paget's Books

Omelets All Day $ Money Hack by Ruth Paget

Omelets All Day $ Money Hack by Ruth Paget 

Going to French-Canadian Cafés in Windsor (Ontario, Canada) when I was in high school in Detroit (Michigan) taught me that you could eat omelets any time of day as a meal. 

I loved omelets with melted gruyère cheese and mushroom ragout that I could eat there topped off with a sprinkling of sweet paprika from Szeged, Hungary. The omelets usually came with a side of salad in tangy vinaigrette and two slices of crusty, country bread. 

Sometimes I would even make those omelets on Friday nights after skating at Hartt Plaza on the riverfront. We had a Larousse Gastronomique cookbook at home that gave me a recipe for slow-cooked mushroom ragout made with melted butter and an addition of freshly chopped parsley at the end. 

I did a presentation to my high school French club about omelettes aux champignons et fromage (mushroom-cheese omelets). I duly noted that eggs bring protein for muscle building to this dish and that cheese brings calcium for bones. I also noted that mushrooms have fiber for unclogging arteries. My cost-conscious French classmates noted that this dish was inexpensive for a lot of health benefits. 

I still make omelets for my husband Laurent and me. I use three large, organic eggs per person from Costco as well as the cheese from Allgäu Alps in Germany and mushrooms from Oregon and Canada that I buy there. 

Now that I live in California, I eat Western omelets when I go to Denny’s or other Route 66-type diners made with sautéed green peppers, onions, mushrooms, strips of ham, and melted low-fat Monterey Jack cheese. 

And, best of all, omelets are still pretty low-cost to make. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click for Ruth Paget's Books

DuMochelle Auction House in Detroit, Michigan by Ruth Paget

DuMochelle’s Auction House in Detroit, Michigan by Ruth Paget 

While my friends attended classical music concerts at the Detroit Institute of the Arts on Saturday mornings, my mother and I would walk down Washington Boulevard from our apartment building to DuMochelle Auctioneers on the riverfront. 

We had the DuMochelle auction bid sheet and item descriptions mailed to us to look over before the auction. 

DuMochelle’s slogan was, “We have sold everything in Grosse Pointe four or five times.” 

Grosse Point was an exclusive Detroit suburb full of wealthy European aristocrats, descendants of people who had come to the United States before World War II started. They had furnishings sent after them and bought while in the US. Inheritance taxes made heirs send items to DuMochelle’s for auction. 

Detroiters and Canadians felt no compunction buying antique items at DuMochelle’s. When I would preview auction items on Friday after school, I would say to myself, “So, like where did you get this?” as I viewed floral silk screens from Versailles that went in front of unlit fireplaces. 

I would joke with my mom and say, “Do you think we could mix and match this Biedermeier desk with the Chinese Chippendale furniture we have at home? They are all nice pieces.” 

My mom would say, “I’m here for silver, crystal, jewelry, and Oriental carpets.” She really was and waited long enough to get deals on all of them. I loved learning about art. 

Detroit’s Dutch population keeps a steady flow of Renaissance still life paintings on sale at DuMochelle’s. A salesman told me, “The still lifes of food remind you to keep food and meals in the house to fend off death.” 

I remembered that as I ate the mustardy turkey and provolone sandwiches offered by DuMochelle’s to auction goers. I also added cream to the free coffee they offered with lunch. The auction crew had fun and free lunch. 

I viewed DuMochelle’s as a potential employer one day. I had a science and arts curriculum at Cass Technical High School in Detroit. I studied industrial art as a minor with classes in the following areas as part of my high school degree:  

-one year of art history for painting 

-one year of art history for sculpture 

-one semester pen and ink drawing 

-one semester figure drawing 

-four years of French language study 

I did not work at DuMochelle’s, but I did work in France, so these studies were not wasted. 

I also passed on my knowledge of art history to my daughter Florence Paget by having her study art and design and art history in high school as well and encouraging her to go through the educator pages for the Asian Art Museum website in San Francisco. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click for Ruth Paget's Books