Costco Hot Dog $ Food Hack by Ruth Paget
Hot dogs in Costco’s food court cost $1.50 today with mustard, relish, and catsup available for dressing.
There are all beef hot dogs and beef and pork hot dogs available usually.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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
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
