imple Vegetarian | Thrift Week 2018, Day Three: Skillet Kugel

For Day Three of our Thrift Week menu, Brian prepared a recipe of his own invention: Skillet Kugel, which appeared as myRecipe of the Month in September 2014. He created this dish a few years back, adapting the potato kugel recipe from The Clueless Vegetarian to make it both lighter and quicker to prepare. Since then, it's become one of our go-to-recipes because, first of all, we both like it, and second, it's easy to make with ingredients we always have on hand: potatoes, onions (or leeks if we happen to have any), eggs, oil, flour, and salt. So if we're ever stumped for a dinner recipe, we can always trot out this old standby.

We normally serve this dish followed through frozen peas and applesauce, which Brian has turn out to be adept at making inside the stress cooker. The recipe for that is so easy it rarely merits the call, but if you need to try it, here's how:

1. Peel and core 2 large apples and cut them into small pieces. (We do this with an old-fashioned apple peeling machine like this.)
2. Load the pieces in the pressure cooker with a tablespoon or two of water.
3. Cook for 6 minutes at full pressure.

So, for this entire meal, the additives and their expenses were:

• 3 potatoes (about 1 pound): about 25 cents. Our most recent purchases of potatoes were 5 pounds for $1.50 and 10 pounds for $2, so it works out to 25 cents a pound on average.
• 1/3 onion: about 3 cents, from the bag we bought at the H-Mart.
• 2 Tbsp. cooking oil: about 6 cents. We generally pay either $1.80 per quart for canola oil at Aldi, or $2 per quart at Shop-Rite.
• 2 Tbsp. flour: about 2 cents. (We last paid $1.81 for a 5-pound bag at Aldi.)
• 2 large eggs: 50 cents. This is the priciest ingredient, since we only buy organic, Certified Humane eggs. We last bought these for $3 a dozen at H-Mart. If you made it with conventional eggs, you could cut the cost by around 34 cents.
• 1 tsp. salt: less than a penny.
• 2 apples (12 ounces): about 25 cents. We got a ridiculously good deal on apples at Aldi recently: 99 cents for 3 lbs. Normally we pay more like a dollar a pound, which would triple the price of this ingredient.
• 3 ounces frozen peas: about 37 cents. We buy the organic frozen peas from Trader Joe's for $1.99 a pound, so once again, you could cut this price nearly in half by buying conventional, store-brand peas.

That involves $1.48 total for type of 4 meals: one dinner for the 2 folks, and leftovers for two lunches. That's virtually 37 cents for every meal. However, we generally have no peas left over, so we turn out to be having to complement the lunch a bit bit - possibly with some other piece of fruit. So, factoring that in, it would average out to as an lousy lot as 50 cents a meal, which remains quite darn perfect. And quite darn tasty, too.