I haven’t written a post in about a month. I did some traveling, celebrated my birthday, and have been a little swamped at work. One thing I have been doing a lot of those is batch cooking on Sundays. In the spirit of my pantry project, I continue to seek out ways to save money. I try not to buy lunch at work anymore, or I will treat myself maybe once a week. Instead, I bring lunch, easily saving me $40 a week. Plus mall food kinda blows if you have it daily.

I’ve done some fun dishes, like butternut squash risotto that I also rework into arancini, and potato soup remains a favorite. In the meantime, with the weather getting colder I’m missing some of the Greek dishes I’ve enjoyed from my mom over the years, like trahana and Patates Yiahni. The latter is a braised potato stew that can be vegan or with meat. Having a few errands to run today, I decided to experiment with making it in a crockpot. 

What is great about much Greek cooking is the simplicity of the ingredients. For the stew I combined some olive oil, two chopped red onions (you can use any onion, red I just had on hand), a couple of sliced garlic cloves, chicken thighs straight from the freezer, four potatoes, a box of Pomi strained tomatoes, two cups of chicken broth, salt, pepper, oregano, and some bay leaves. Everything went straight in the crock pot, set on high for about four hours. That’s it, and I have lunch for most of the week.

   
   
To serve, add a generous sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese and you can also eat with some crusty bread, but I like it as is.