Frugal cookery continues chez me. My freezer has become a well-oiled, well-used storage locker, no longer the languishing frosted hole of eventual return it once was. On-sale meat, frozen fruit, nuts, chocolate chips, and sorbet seem to have the most traffic. (Incredibly handy thing, sorbet: can use a spoonful to macerate fresh berries, to make a drink--stir into some sparkling water--to drop and let melt over a slice of unfrosted Wacky Cake, to add a little roundness to a smoothie, especially without dairy.)

That means that I have been free to engage in what I keep thinking of as the great grain use-up: plowing through the larger than needed stash of small brown bits in my cupboard. Not exactly sure how I ended up with so much, but at this point brown rice, quinoa, bulgur, barley, grits and oats have figured in most every meal recently. (I often end up thinking of that Mitch Hedberg quote: "Rice is great when you're hungry and you want 2,000 of something.") I'm pretty sick of quinoa, as nicely filling as it is. So far the biggest successes have been a brown rice and tuna salad (tuna is becoming a major protein go-to, although the fact that the organic kind is about 2000% better than the others is a problem, financially), scrambled eggs with barley and ground beef, and a bizarro potato/chicken/quinoa sludge that was really pretty good. A lot of the results are quite unattractive and look like they should be plopped in a wooden bowl, but they taste good. I have also managed to use up every vegetable I've bought recently, which impresses me, although I can't lie, I never made it through the pounds of coleslaw that I created last week. Another recent success, combining both grain and freezer: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, make with dark brown sugar instead of light, tons of oatmeal, and three different kinds of chocolate chips (I like that when you store them in the freezer, you can just take some as needed). Incredibly yummy.

I took a break from cooking last night to try to find some good delivery New York style pizza in my neighborhood. Not successful. Bitter garlic taste, flat as the prairie, but not in a good floppy/crisp way, more cardboard. Being an Easy Cheese person makes me a fairly good pizza tester. Without a flood of melted cheese you get a good look--taste--of what's really going on. Can't hide in the land of Easy Cheese.