As many of you know, I’m participating in the United Way Hunger Action challenge this week.  What does this mean? Well, since I have a family of three, in Washington State we would qualify for $18 per day in food stamps.  The goal of the challenge is to try and live on that amount for five full days, so my weekly budget is $90.  Throw in the fact that Wednesday is my husband’s birthday and I’m trying to make it special for him, which usually equates to an off-the-hook feast, and I’ve got quite the challenge.  I also plan to stick to my usual habit of buying mostly organic ingredients if at all possible; let’s see if it can be done.  You may think I’m lucky in that I can count three people yet Bentley is merely a toddler.  Not so, because he knocks back three gallons of milk a week, and at $5.00 a gallon (for organic) that drops my budget down to $75 right off the bat, not to mention the fact that he eats bananas like a monkey on crack- thank god they’re cheap! 

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Santa was good to me this year. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my birthday is three days before Christmas and I expressly forbid gifts for that occasion, so Santa was able to splurge a bit on Christmas. I know, I know, Santa wouldn’t have gotten me a birthday gift anyway under normal circumstances, but you see, we’re good friends outside December 25^th and all its implications, so he tends to be there for me other times of year as well. 

In any case, Santa brought me a Sous Vide Supreme this year and for that I’m over the moon.  Don’t know what sous vide cooking is? Chances are you’ve had sous vide prepared veggies or meat a hundred times and just didn’t realize it as it’s a relatively established cooking technique in both industrial and restaurant settings, however until now the price barrier to entry for the home chef was impractical to say the least.  Cue Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades and their relatively affordable new invention, the Sous Vide Supreme.  They invented a countertop sous vide cooker that’s attractive stainless steel, not gargantuan, and holds a precise temperature to within .5 a degree, more or less.  The premise of sous vide cooking is that if you cook something at the temperature at which it should ultimately end up, but over a long period of time in a regulated water bath, it will come out tender, consistent throughout, and full of flavor.  I can now wholeheartedly attest that this is true. 

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