What's not on this blog

1. Chicken breasts. The most boring, tasteless meat known to man. And completely overpriced.

2. A lot of beef, either ground or in steak form. After a particularly virulent case of food poisoning from a restaurant hamburger, I no longer trust ground beef in any pre-packaged form--whether it's from a restaurant (even a good one) or the meat counter at the supermarket.

The ONLY way I'll eat ground beef these days is to buy a whole, organic, grass-fed piece of meat at a reputable butcher and watch them grind it in front of me.

And frankly, for that amount of money, I might as well have the steak.

I use sausage meat, ground pork and ground turkey in recipes to substitute for the beef, and when I want a burger, I use the above or make veggie burgers.

3. Seafood. You'd think you could get good, fresh seafood in Southern California. But noooooooo. Apparently it is impossible to find fresh-never-frozen shellfish of ANY kind, and finding fresh-never-frozen fish (of any sort) is a crapshoot. Previously frozen shrimp is just as tasteless as chicken breasts, so I don't bother.

It breaks my heart, because I love seafood, I really do. I'll try to post more seafood recipes, even though I may not be making those recipes in my own kitchen right now.

4. "Ingredients." I put the word in quotations because I see a lot of these recipes, based around pre-made convenience crap. There will be no recipes posted here utilizing any of the following:

• condensed cream-of-anything soup
• canned fruits or vegetables (especially green beans)
• "pie filling," whatever the hell that is
• frozen, pre-made pie crusts or pizza crusts
• brand names (Bisquick, Oreos, Jell-O, Rice Krispies, etc.)
• lunch meat
• Spam
• "cheese product" (think Velveeta and that cheese-flavored dandruff that passes as Kraft parmesan cheese, in the green can)
• biscuits in a can
• pre-made cookie dough (seriously, it tastes like chemicals)
• cake or brownie mixes
• icing in a can
• soda
• potato chips
• tater tots
• and so on. Basically, anything that comes from the middle of the supermarket.

Not because I'm against convenience--it's because all that shit tastes bad.

Plus it's expensive.

What IS on this blog:

1. Eating well, really well, on a hard-core budget.

2. Lots of creative ways to use fresh vegetables.

3. More pizza and soup combinations than you ever thought possible.

4. Really flavorful, cheap cuts of meat. Oxtail, pork shoulder, short ribs--the stuff you cook down on low heat for hours at a time, and then tastes amazing. So much more flavor than steak, and cheaper, too.

5. Bacon chocolate.

Need I say more?