Dave: Hey, I’m Dave Leiberman with some great tips on how to entertain this holiday season without seeming like a Scrooge.
What I’m telling people is to stock up on pantry staples. Things like canned fruits and vegetables, stocks and dry goods. These are the kinds of things you can use over a wide variety of dishes and really bulk up your holiday meal without spending extra cash.
So I’m going to take you through a full meal from appetizer to dessert. So for my appetizer, I’ve got here spinach dip. Really simple, just four ingredients. Cream cheese, canned spinach, scallions and a little bit of tobacco sauce. Whip it up, throw it out there with some crudite or crackers and you can serve about 10 people easy on just about $4.00 for all of that.
Now moving on to the hot stuff, I have a corn and pumpkin chowder here and I’m relying on canned corn. A couple of cans of corn to deliver a lot of flavor and I’m throwing in some fresh cilantro, stirring that up with some chipotle and I’ve got some fresh pumpkin and I stew it until it’s tender and you can serve 10 people easy on this too and it’s a really nice sort of inexpensive way to start your meal.
Now, I’ve got this book coming out at the end of the month. It’s called the 10 Things You Need to Eat and one of the 10 things you need to eat is tomatoes, especially cooked tomatoes because they’re high in licopene which is an important antioxidant. So I’m basing my main course, this chicken cachetori on Del Monte stewed tomatoes and the reason why I chose these tomatoes is because on top of being healthy for you, they also have a lot of other ingredients or flavors already packed in to the tomatoes so those ingredients I don’t need to add to the dish itself. It helps keep my grocery list shorts and that saves me money.
Finally, for dessert, I’m even finding a way to include pantry staples into my dessert. Beets are one of the 10 things that you’ll find that book but it’s also a great pantry staple and I mix it into my chocolate cupcakes and I can top it with chocolate frosting. I even made a beef frosting and it’s another way to cut costs without seeming like a scrooge. For all these recipes, you can go to delmonte.com/solutions and look for my book The 10 Things You Need to Eat coming out at the end of December. Thanks so much.
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