Budget cooking: chicken n’ buckwheat

Hello, all,

For my next trick, I will take ordinary chicken legs and transform them into something delicious. I learned this recipe when I was living in Belarus. The lady of the house where I was staying, a utilitarian cook, would rotate five dishes for our weekly menu: chicken n’ buckwheat was one of them.  There’s nothing difficult here at all, in fact, it’s an incredibly lazy way to make a full meal in one pan.  Four ingredients (meal serves 2)!  Add some kind of veggies to round it out.  If you really want to be Belarusian about it, I’ll post a recipe for a Slavic salad below.

Ingredients

2 full chicken legs (that’s drumsticks and thighs, ladies and gentlemen!)

2 cups of buckwheat groats (it’s buckwheat before it’s been turned into flour or soba noodles)

Olive oil (I will NEVER, EVER write EVOO on this blog)

Salt and pepper

Recipe

Heat your olive oil in large pan over medium-high heat.  Liberally season your chicken with salt and pepper.  Once the pan is hot, drop the chicken in skin side down and sear.  Resist the urge to flip it, just let the skin brown for five minutes.  Shake the pan to keep it from sticking. Once the skin is light brown, turn the chicken over and cook for another five to seven minutes.

Add the buckwheat groats to your pan and enough water to cover them, plus another quarter inch.  The idea here is that you don’t want to drown them, but you don’t want to add more water later.  Turn your heat down to medium and let the groats/chicken cook for 12-15 minutes.  Resist the urge to eat directly from the pan (I just did).

The beauty of this recipe is that the fat that rendered off the chicken during the cooking process flavors and salts the buckwheat.  It’s also really convenient as a dish that can be cooked passively – just do the initial cooking and let it finish on its own.

Some things to take away from this recipe:

1.  Try new grains. Buckwheat is not something that’s heavily rotated in the American diet. Yet it’s low in saturated fat, low in sodium, and really high in fiber.  Try it, then try other grains like amaranth, barley, and quinoa.  They’re not so scary, I promise.

2.  If you’re strapped for time, or just lazy, cook everything in one pan.  Do an initial sear on your meat/poultry so that it retains juices, then finish cooking it at a lower temperature.  Add a grain to the pan and water and you’re set.

3.  You don’t need a hundred ingredients to make a good meal. Just use quality, healthful ingredients.  I will harp on this all day.

The quintessential Slavic salad also involves relatively few ingredients and highly depends on what’s available from your dacha (country house).  Here’s one variation that’s particularly good with chicken n’ buckwheat:

Ingredients

1 big, juicy tomato

1 small pickling cucumber

A few sprigs of dill and parsley

1/2 cup of sour cream

Salt and pepper

Recipe

Dice the cucumber, throw into a serving bowl.  Cut the tomato in your hand over the bowl, so that no juices escape on the cutting board.  Mince dill and parsley, toss in.  Bind together with sour cream.  Salt and pepper to taste.

So on a night when you really don’t feel like cooking, but don’t want to pay to go out, throw this meal together.  It’s easy, it’s nutritious, and it’s cheap.  Any interest in learning more about Slavic cuisine?  I have an entire arsenal of recipes if people are interested.

More to come if you want it,

Jen

Cleaning out my fridge, drunken turkey thighs ensue

Whenever I go on a trip, I spend the week or so beforehand eating everything I possibly can out of my fridge, freezer, and cupboards.  I can’t stand the thought of something going bad while I’m away, and I’m too damn cheap to spend the money I’m going to spend on vacation on a meal out in Central Square.  This dogged determination – this frugality – is what inspired tonight’s meal.  It also inspired me to eat white rice with soy sauce for lunch – not one of my prouder moments.

I claim to be a foodie, but that’s only half the story.  I’m also a somewhat lazy cook, who prefers not to put hours into her dinner (unless those hours can be spent ignoring an oven where something delicious and fragrant is baking).  I love using ingredients I just happen to have sitting around the house, and I love making up my own recipes.  I very rarely consult a cookbook for more than 30 seconds – I just look at it for long enough to see any ingredients I might have missed and to get a quick idea on cooking times.  Everything else I just … wing.  I once had a conversation with a girl who asked incredulously, “well, what if you fail?”, to whom I answered, “that just never occurred to me”.  And that’s the truth.  It never occurs to me that I’ll produce something totally inedible.  If you’re working with great ingredients and have a minimal amount of kitchen know-how, you’ll always produce something good.  Don’t be afraid to experiment and have faith in your food and your ability - that’s a large part of my philosophy.

At any rate, tonight I’m working with turkey thighs.  I love them because they’re cheap and because they’re delicious marinated with red wine and herbs.  I love them because you can marinate them and essentially forget about them, throwing them into the oven at the last minute and just waiting until the aroma fills your apartment.  Add root veggies and some starch and you have a complete meal.  Here’s where I worked with (meal serves 2):

Ingredients

2 turkey thighs, about 1.5 pounds

6 bay leaves

About 10 sprigs of thyme and savory

6 sprigs of marjoram

3 garlic cloves, broken into pieces (or loosely chopped if you want uniformity – meh)

1/3 white onion, also loosely chopped

1 whole summer squash (I just had this in my fridge – potatoes, carrots, parsnips, or anything of the sort would actually work better)

1/2 of a 32 oz. can of whole tomatoes, including juice

1.5 cups of red wine (any table red will do, I just popped open a Rioja that I’ll drink later)

Salt, pepper

Aluminum foil

Recipe

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  In a 13 x 9 baking pan, place your turkey thighs skin down.  Liberally salt and pepper the thighs, then press a bay leaf into the center.  Arrange the thyme, savory, and marjoram so that they blanket the thighs, then sprinkle the garlic and onion pieces over them.  Next, add your summer squash or root vegetables.  Pour the tomatoes over the mixture.  Lastly, douse the entire thing in red wine and cover the pan with aluminum foil.

Bake for 45 minutes, then remove the aluminum foil.  Bake for another 15 minutes, piercing the vegetables with a fork to make sure they’re tender.  Your turkey thighs should register 165 degrees on the meat thermometer – that way, you’ll know they’re done.

So with this recipe, you already have your protein and your vegetables.  You’ll probably want a starch – I suggest mashed potatoes, but desperation in my kitchen determines that I use the gnocci we already have sitting in the cupboard.  A propos – you’re going to have a lot of liquid left over in the baking pan, plus you might have some veggies and turkey meat/bones left.  Add three to four cups of water to that goodness and you have soup for the next day.  Salt if needed.

Some things to take away from this recipe:

1. Cook with wine. EVERYTHING tastes better if it’s been cooked in wine – just make sure you cook off all of the alcohol.  This rule applies to most standard alcohol, which dramatically improves a lot of dishes.  Penne with vodka sauce, anyone?

2.  Cheap cuts of meat (case in point, turkey thighs) don’t have to taste cheap. Generally speaking, the cheaper your cut of meat, the slower you should cook it – hence the hour.

3.  Use what you have. If you have rosemary, but not thyme, substitute.  You can stray a little from the rigidity of a recipe by substituting one strong herb for another, just make sure that the herbs match in strength.  This recipe wouldn’t be good with, say, dill.  Also, use the vegetables that you have.  Most people I know keep carrots, potatoes, and celery in their fridge as staples – these veggies work well with a recipe like this.

4.  Have faith in your ability and in the outcome. If you have quality ingredients and use sound cooking techniques, your food is bound to come out well.

I’m off to boil my gnocci, but if you try this recipe, please let me know what you think.  And if you have any budget recipes you’d like to trade, I’m all ears.  I think I’m going to put more recipes (for food, for beer, for beauty concoctions) up on this blog.  I hope that they help demystify some of these processes for people who might be intimidated by them.

Eat well,

Jen

Muffins.. granola, whatever – I just hate seeing food go to waste

Hello again, my dears.

After brewing my Belgian wit, I found myself with about a pound of spent grains – malt, barley, and wheat, and a desire to do something with them.  After all, they’re so nutritious!  So much fiber!  No barnyard animals to feed them to…

So I got creative.  I thought to make cookies.  But I had so much grain that I had to do something bigger.  Then, it hit me: MUFFINS. 

I threw in a stick of butter.  Three eggs.  About a cup, cup and a half of sugar.  Two cups of flour of so.  About a half a cup of peanut butter and some chocolate shavings.  Baked at 350 degrees for, like, a half hour.

How were they, you ask?  Pretty good, I think.  After baking for a half hour, they were still wet in the middle and a little crumbly.  But they tasted good and are pretty healthy.  AND they mitigated me having to ditch an entire pound of perfectly good grain.

When/if you make these muffins, be advised that they won’t come cleanly out of the muffin tins.  You’ll get the top out, plus a little of the middle (be careful and they’ll remain easy on the eyes), but the bottoms will stick to the tin.  I scraped out the remainder to make granola.  Bake for another half hour or so at 350 degrees and leave out to dry.  I’ll tweak this recipe with the next batch of homebrew that we make and will post a much improved recipe.

I’m beginning to get a feel for how our grandparents used to live – wasting as little as possible of the things we consume.  It feels good not to waste.  Thus far I’ve found uses for beer at all stages of the game – the grains go into muffins/granola and the sediment goes into beauty masks and hair treatments.  Now if I could only figure out how to infuse things with the scent of hops.. I’d be all set.

Belgian Wit

As promised, I will relay to you my first foray into brewing – this time, from the beginning.  I hope nobody is disappointed, since I managed to do this correctly without drenching myself or the nearby walls in beer.

For my first solo brew, I chose a Belgian wit kit (I’m not so advanced yet as to make up my own recipes).  When brewing with friends, we usually do hoppy-as-hell pale ales, so for a nice change of pace, I wanted to do a spiced wheat beer (the coriander and bitter orange peel sounded so exotic). 

Brewing is pretty straightforward, though what a miracle in the end!  Start by heating about two and a half gallons of water in a stainless steel pot on the stove (this is, of course, after thoroughly sterilizing all of your equipment).  Once the water is at 155 degrees, dump your grains (wheat, pale malt, and oats for a Belgian wit) into a grain bag and steep them in the water.  When steeping, make sure to tie the bag off and to evenly distribute the grains so the water can soak in evenly.  The grains should soak for 20-45 minutes – enough time to get the flavor out.  Watch that the temperature doesn’t fall below 150 degrees and, if it does, turn up the temperature to bring it back to 155.  Don’t exceed 155.

After soaking, fish the grain bag out of the water, cut it open, and set the spent grains aside in a bowl (I’ll post a recipe for muffins and granola using them next).   Now, bring the wort (that’s the liquid you just made) to a gentle, rolling boil.  Add your liquid malt extract and stir continuously so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of your pot.  Next, slowly sprinkle your bittering hops into the wort – don’t let the pot boil over or you’ll have a miserable time chipping it off the stove.    Your recipe should tell you how long to boil the hops – mine said to do it for 40 minutes, maintaining that gentle boil. 

Then, after 40 minutes, I added the dry malt extract and my coriander and bitter orange peel.  That all boiled for 5 minutes, then I added flavoring hops and boiled for another 10 minutes after that. 

After the brewing is complete, in order to transfer your beer into the fermentation container, you need to cool it to 70 degrees.  Kill the power on the stove, fill your sink up with icy water, and lower your pot into it.  When the wort is around 75-80 degrees, siphon it into a clean bucket and slowly sprinkle in your yeast.  Siphon the beer from the bucket into a fermentation container (the carboy).  Agitate (read: put your hand over the mouth of the container and shake) the beer to  add oxygen.  Add enough water to bring it level with the neck of the carboy.  Cap the fermenter, fill up your airlock and twist it into the lid.  Voila!  You should see the airlock bubbling within a day.   It’s kinda fun to watch.

Brewing was easier than I’d expected it to be, plus I had chosen an intermediate recipe.  I’m going to keep gaining proficiency in the art of brewing with the goal of showing other people how to do it – especially women.  I hear a lot of women say that they don’t like beer, but I think the beers they don’t like might be of the macrobrew, flavorless variety.  It’s my belief that everyone has a beer that appeals to them – some just haven’t found it yet. 

Stay tuned for my spent grains muffins/granola recipe!

Brew on,

Jen

Surprise, surprise, the FDA thinks America’s kids are for sale

Dear friends,

Please be assured that I am not in the habit of preaching.  I hate it as much as the next guy, but the recently introduced Smart Choices program by the FDA has deemed Froot Loops and Lucky Charms healthy choices for children.  I can’t sit back and let them fuck up the next generation nutritionally like they fucked up ours.

Clearly the organization is for sale, clearly the nation’s kids are too, and unless enough people speak out about this, they’ll continue to label things like Snickers (it’s got peanuts!) and Sunny Delight (a whole day’s worth of vitamin C!) healthy foods because these companies pay them to do so.  For $100k, a company can join and “recommend” healthy choices for kids.  Kellog’s and ConAgra sure as hell jumped on the bandwagon, peddling their cheaply produced, GMO-infested, massively unhealthy wares via this medium.

To read their version of the program, go here.  And while you’re at it, look up all the sugar cereals you used to eat as a kid.  I bet they have the label.

Please sign this petition.  And please consider joining Food Democracy Now.  If you join, I will cease to harass you.  That is all.

Love,
Jen

Beer rinse! (AKA Grandma was right)

So remember that half full bottle of beer?  I decided to put it to good use.

Ladies, do you remember your mom or grandma talking about how, if you rinse your hair with beer, your hair will turn out shiny and voluminous?  Do you also remember how gross that sounded?  The first time I heard my mom mention it, I thought, ew, I’m going to dump some nasty beer on my head and I’m going to end up smelling like a bar for a week.  It’ll permeate.

My dears, it will NOT permeate!  It actually works!  The proteins in the malt and hops in beer actually coat and repair your hair.  Here’s how to do it.

Take a bottle of warm, FLAT beer.  I’ve been reading up on beer rinses, and most people recommend that you choose a beer that has a weak odor.  Screw that, I says.  I’m a hops fanastic.  I love the smell.  I do not mind being deliciously hops-scented.  But pick whatever beer you like.  If you don’t want to smell like it at all, pick a wimpy beer like Miller Light.  If you’re like me, though, grab some Hopalicious.

Shampoo your hair as usual.  Rinse.  Take yer bottle of beer and dump it, slowly, over your head.  If you are using the last bottle of your homebrew, be prepared for the last layer of wort sediment to hit your head with a resounding * PLOP * like it did to me in the shower this morning. Let the beer absorb for two minutes.

Because of the sediment, I actually had to shampoo my hair twice.  Then I rinsed out the bits and added some conditioner, rinsing really, really thoroughly.  As I was blowdrying, I noticed less frizz, more shine, and more bounce.  And that lovely little hops aroma.

I’ll be doing a bit of research on beer (+ byproducts) and their use as beauty products.  I have a sneaky suspicion that wort makes a GREAT face mask.  Anybody know of any other homeopathic beauty treatments?

My first foray into homebrewing, albeit backwards

Now, onto what you really want to read about: beer.

I have been passively observing a homebrewer friend of mine. I’ve been to the Modern Homebrew Emporium a few times, helped sniff out the best, most HOPPIEST of hops (I’m a Cascade fan) and have ground whole malt kernels into a coarse flour. I have passively watched the procedure of boiling water, the suspension of a giant teabag of said crushed malt (the mixture is called the wort – pronounced “wert”), the adding of liquid malts, and lastly, the addition of bittering and finishing hops. HOPS, it took me so long to recognize it was you that I loved all along..

But I’m not going to talk about how to brew – not yet. Because I haven’t done enough to be able to tell you, definitively, how to do it. But I can tell you about what a spaz I was last night when I tried to siphon the beer from the carboy (the fermentation vessel) into a bucket, and then from the bucket into individual bottles. I can also tell you about the ridiculous amount of pride I felt when I finally capped those 29 bottles.

The instructions left for me were straightforward enough – dissolve priming sugar (for carbonation) in one to two cups of boiling water, throw into the bucket. Hoist the carboy onto the counter and assemble the siphon – a racking cane (a long piece of plastic with an inverted tip at one end), a hollow plastic tube, and some flexible plastic tubing. Again, pretty straightforward. Stick the racking cane into the hollow plastic tube and attach the flexible plastic tubing to the inverted end. Pump. Simple, right? Evidently not. The entire process demanded an amount of dexterity that I didn’t seem to possess last night. Somehow I had to suspend the racking cane above the hollow plastic tube in order for the beer to flow into the tubing. Then I brought the racking cane down, pushing the beer up through the siphon. Beer trickled through the tubing onto my floor, because, in holding the apparatus so high, I had pulled the bottom part of the tubing out of the bucket. WTG. I tried a few more times, each time managing to trickle a little more beer into the bucket. I got about three pints into the bucket and about one pint onto the floor before getting extremely frustrated.

THEN, it occured to me. I should stand on the counter! Balancing precariously on the counter, I tried the pumping motion again. And again. And again. And then I just started furiously pumping, cursing myself for evidently not knowing how to siphon and the homebrew that needed to be siphoned in the first place. Then, something magical happened. The beer started flowing, steadily, on its own. I could’ve cried. Quickly readjusting the tubing that had (once again) fallen out of the bucket, spilling beer all over the floor, I watched as the homebrew flowed – on its own – from the carboy to the bucket. Why siphon, you ask? Why not just pour? Oh, friends, this occurred to me, and oh, how badly I wanted to half ass it. But if I poured, all of the sediment from the bottom of the carboy (all that hops and malt that makes for murky beer) would have made it into my bottles. Plus the siphoning makes it simpler to bottle, because, theoretically, you can block the tubing with your thumb, controlling the amount you dispense into each bottle. Ha. Easy.

So I managed to transfer the homebrew into the bucket with the priming sugar, then I hoisted the bucket onto the counter for the same siphoning process – this time, into individual bottles. With the same trial-and-error strategy of pumping like hell til something came out, I managed to get beer into the tubing. I put my thumb over it. The top part of the tubing attached to the inverted tip explodes off, drenching me, the dishwasher, and the wall behind me in beer. I swear profusely, the most vile Russian words that I ever heard a bum utter while in Belarus. I regain control of the tubing, salvaging the beer.

It comes out too fast, overfilling the bottles and splashing onto the floor. I remember the homebrewer’s advice – if it’s coming out too fast, hold the bottle higher so that the flow of beer stops. I heed the advice. I fill 30 bottles, 29 full and 1 half full. I cap. I uncap the half-full one, because, evidently, when there’s too much open space in a bottle, the bottle will explode because of overcarbonation (same goes for bottles that are too full – they won’t carbonate enough). I heave a sigh of relief. I mop the floor, clean out the bucket, tubing, and carboy, and go over to a neighbor’s house, exhausted, but somewhat amused at how this process all went down. Glad my friend the homebrewer wasn’t there – he’d have laughed his ass off.

Anyone else homebrewing out there? Was your first time bottling anything like this? What are you brewing?

Apologies for being away, update

Hello friends,

I owe you a big apology for falling off the map these last several weeks.  As you may have noticed, I’ve deleted a number of my posts.  I deleted the posts that I considered forced, not my best, and not interesting.  And then I noticed a pattern.

I love food.  I love writing about it, I love cooking it, I love eating it.  Same thing goes for beer and other libations from the drinking end of things.  This was very clearly reflected in my writings here on Jennifer Ede’s blog, so the logical thing for me to do was to wipe out everything that diluted that love.  Then my thinking broadened a bit, to contemplation of what I’m doing, where I am in my life, and how I’m spending my time.  Yes, my dears, I am having yet another quarter life crisis.

Maybe calling my reflections-as-of-late a mid-life crisis is a bit of an overstatement, but nevertheless, I have taken some time to think over what I REALLY want to do with my life.

Haymarket, North End, Artu

Apologies for juxtoposing my sequence of events from this weekend – I was out in the sun more than I have been in the past month, given the weird weather patterns/global warming happening in Mass.  As a result, I think my brain has been baked and is giving me memories in some strange backwards order.

I finally made it out to Haymarket yesterday!  And, while it was intriguing enough, with the little downstairs Halal butcher shops with skinned goats’ heads on display in their outer windows, I was still reminded of what I miss about the city I left four months ago – Madison, Wisconsin.  Madison’s farmer’s market spans the entire outer circle of the Capital building and only allows its vendors to sell food that’s been produced with a 50-or-so mile radius of the city.  I didn’t see that at Haymarket.  I saw delicious-looking vegetables (munched on sugar snap peas while I walked) and fruits – tropical and otherwise (also snacked on figs, cherries, and black grapes before I could get them into my bag).  As I walked, spitting pits into the piles of rubbish behind the stalls, I thought about how much I miss Wisconsin cheese and locally grown vegetables (no Peruvian asparagus or Mexican tomatoes in sight).

Haymarket was, however, a really cool study in culture – I saw Moroccans, Italians, Bostonians and Mexicans standing shoulder to shoulder, hawking their produce.  I also saw freshly-baked pita bread, beautiful seafood, and a place where I could order a whole goat, in addition to all sorts of other animal… parts.  I heard at least five working languages at the market, got jostled by people of every creed and color, and saw all sorts of bizarre fruits and vegetables that I wouldn’t normally see at the supermarket.

After the Haymarket, my companion and I walked a short distance to the North End – Boston’s Little Italy.   It was seriously… little Italy.  I heard Italian everywhere.  I saw Italians in track suits… everywhere.  I went into a church STRAIGHT out of my childhood (no, I’m not Italian, but St. Rita’s in Milwaukee left a major impact on me with the single Italian mass I attended there as a teenager).  We wandered in and out of little shops selling everything from Pecorino to Prosciutto, to gallon buckets of olive oil, to cannoli.  The glutton in me shouted, “URRA”!  Despite the fact that we were surrounded by food, we spent an insane amount of time looking for a place to eat mid-afternoon.  We finally ended up at a place called Artu.

Artu, what can I say about you?  You weren’t my first choice.  You weren’t even my second choice.  And, had I known that you would just be… sub par, you wouldn’t even have been my third choice.  I’m headed to Giacomo’s next time.  And I’m bringing cash.

I should precede this review of Artu by saying that I have almost an infinite amount of patience when it comes to servers.  I understand every single component of my dining experience, because I’ve been in a position to orchestrate someone else’s in the past.  Serving isn’t a very difficult art, especially when the place where you’re working isn’t particularly busy.  You just scan the table every time you come out of the servers’ station.  You look to see if your patrons have water, if they need another (paid!) drink, how their meal is, if they need anything…  It’s not hard.  In fact, it’s ridiculously easy to keep someone happy enough to throw you 20%.

Our server at Artu was old.  I think he had to have been serving since before 1940 – he was that old.  And he was a pretty nice guy.  But man, his service was not good.  I understand that when you order iced tea, you’re kinda copping out on drinks that bring in actual money for your server.  But if you, as a server, refill the glass a few times, your patron is much more likely to remember the experience fondly and magnanimously feed you a few extra percentages in your tip.  It’s not so hard.  Plus, when you walk by the table ten times, you should maybe glance at it every once and awhile to see if things need to be refilled.

But that’s fine.  Artu’s food was standard Italian, red-sauced… meh.  We ordered Melanzane Parmigiana and Scampi Arrabiata.  Both were satisfactory.  One needed salt, one had too much.  But they were filling and on the cheaper side of things on the North End.  With a quick stop for gelato (espresso and tiramisu), we were back on the T to the PRC.

Legal Sea Foods

Legal Sea Foods, they were right about you. I was willing to give you a chance, on account of your location in Harvard Square and your hours (why does everything close at 22:00 in Boston on Saturday night? It baffles me to no end..). I was willing to ignore the people who said you were overpriced for the quality of your seafood. But guess what? For upwards of $150 for three people to eat not-that-much of not-the-highest-of-quality seafood – you’re overpriced. My server was super cool and was really helpful, so service is definitely not the problem. My main problems were your prices and your kitchen. Don’t get me wrong – I’m perfectly willing (and happy!) to pay $30-35 for an entree WHEN THE KITCHEN CAN DELIVER. Instead, I paid a little less at Legal for a grilled trio of fish, plus some shrimp and scallops. The shrimp and scallops were not bad, but I asked for my tuna RARE. You cooked it well done. I was a couple of Vouvrays in, so I wasn’t going to make a scene, but c’mon. If you’re confident in your seafood, please – undercook my fish.

Treasures of the Reef was okay (lobster, oysters, clams, shrimp, assorted sauces). Definitely nothing to write home about. In fact, the entire experience wasn’t anything to write home about. The least they could’ve done was give me a rock to smash open my crustaceans a la Barking Crab. Geez.

My dining companions and I left, full, albeit much broker than we’d intended at the beginning of the evening. The random torrential rains sweeping across Boston last night put a cap on that lovely evening. Next time I’ll consult a bit more closely with @eatBoston and Richard Auffrey (@RichardPF), a fellow foodie here in Mass., whom I’ve just discovered following me on twitter. Richard, I’ll hit up No Name on the Waterfront/B&G Oysters/et al soon and write ‘em up.  Keep the recommendations coming, please… til I run out of money