(Family Features) – Stretching food dollars on eating healthy food, tasty on the table can be tricky. dietitian, nutritionist and author Elizabeth Somer has created these recipes and tips for the budget to help you add a health to your taste great food without a big price for your budget.

Compare unit. Often, buying in bulk or larger sizes are cheaper, but not always.
Plan meals in advance and keep a copy on the refrigerator and when you go to the store so we are not trying to understand what is for dinner while shopping.
Make an afternoon on a weekday evening, “uncooked”, where the whole family can participate to make coats, turnstiles or its cold.
Take inventory of what you have on hand. Keep track of basic foods you keep buying food is not necessary.
Check the circulars. Seeing what is available to help you see what to store and help plan your meals.
These revenues worth centered, designed to serve five to about $ 10 or less, are easy to make and use simple ingredients for family meals quickly and successfully.

Visit missionmenus.com find recipes and tips.

Quesadillas Chicken and Black Beans
Ingredients
2 cups shredded cooked chicken breast (grilled chicken works well)
1 15 ounces black beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup salsa Mission
2 tablespoons fresh cilantro
1 / 2 to 1 teaspoon chipotle pepper
2 teaspoons honey
Mission 8 medium tortillas for soft tacos
1 cup Monterey Jack
2 cups lettuce
1 tomato, diced
2 teaspoons chopped fresh cilantro
Reduced-fat sour cream
Mission sauce
Preparation
Combine chicken, black beans, salsa, cilantro, chile chipotle and honey in a large skillet. Heat over medium heat until hot. Remove from heat.
Heat a large skillet over medium heat and spray with cooking spray vegetables. Place a tortilla in the skillet. After one minute, flip the tortilla.
Carefully spread about 1 / 2 cup chicken mixture on top of the tortilla edges. Sprinkle cup of cheese 1 / 4. Place another tortilla on top, press down with spatula. Cover with the lid quesadilla. After 1 minute of cover quesadilla Brown. Once the cheese has melted remove quesadillas, a cutting board and cut into 8 wedges. Repeat for remaining quesadillas.
Place quesadillas on a platter to serve, sprinkle with lettuce, diced tomatoes and chopped cilantro. Serve with sour cream and salsa.

Interested in a gift idea where kids can travel the world without ever having to pack a suitcase?

The Passport to the World Club from Ginger Kids Fun! is the perfect way to give your child an exciting, hands-on world adventure this holiday season! By choosing one of two affordable monthly membership options, kids will have a blast cooking up new international cuisine, interacting with children from other cultures, learning new languages and more.

The monthly membership provides a fascinating view of the world by engaging the five senses. Children will experience a wide variety of activities in a magical, interactive online journey of each monthly destination. They will listen to a fun-filled musical tour of each cultural destination with a CD from Putumayo Kids. A hands-on cooking experience teaches kids to practice their creativity and imagination, and the result will fill their senses with delightful aromas and delicious flavors.

Passport to the World Club Membership Details

Premium Membership – $29.95 per month

Premium membership provides a complete multicultural experience through a “culinary adventure in a box” delivered monthly to your doorstep, and VIP access to the Passport to the World website. The “culinary adventure in a box” includes a non-perishable food product, special kitchen tool, additional recipes and more! Other exciting program details include welcome postcards with problem solving questions delivered one-week prior to the release of the new month, food shopping lists for parents, and birthday greetings for all members!

Online-Only Membership – $.9.95 per month

Kids can still experience the adventure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with the online-only membership program! The easy –to-navigate online portal provides an entertaining and educational platform to learn about different cultures. The child also receives their own ‘passport’ by postal mail.

If you’re not convinced that the Passport to the World club is the perfect gift to excite young minds, here are some additional benefits:

* It helps overcome picky-eater syndrome – kids will be enthusiastic to try what they’ve made.
* It brings families together through the joy of cooking – you can even turn it into a monthly family tradition!
* A monthly project promotes ongoing learning – and excites kids about their world!
* It boosts self esteem by teaching new skills such as foreign language, cooking techniques, geography, travel and more!
* It encourages children to embrace and appreciate cultural diversity.

The Passport to the World Club membership will be available for purchase at www.gingerkidsfun.com starting September 2009. Memberships can be purchased on a month to month basis or as a twelve month VIP package. Sample destinations include Jamaica, Greece, Italy and Israel! Those that join the twelve month program will receive a FREE welcome package complete with Ginger Kids apron, Kitchen Basics: Rules, Tools & Etiquette cookbook binder, Cookbook binder with country tabs to store 12-months of recipes and a Ginger Kids Passport.

Proving myself wrong in record time (see comments on my first post, where I claimed I wouldn’t be discussing squid recipes), today’s squid is served with chiles, lime, and herbs.

Why?

The coincidence was just too good to pass up. Another commenter suggested that squid popularity these days isn’t just a flash in the pan–and then a recipe blog in the Village Voice by that very name posts a squid dish!

Of course, I see it as an opportunity to discuss seafood labeling and sustainability. I’ve noticed the recipe ingredient list never gets any more specific than “squid”. But there are lots of squid in the world. Which species should you buy if you’re making this or any other recipe? How would you even know what’s available? It’s not like scientific names are ever printed on the packaging.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program lists four different kinds of squid–wait, scratch that, one of the “kinds” is plain “squid”. I guess they did that because sometimes you just can’t find out what species you’re buying. Here’s what they have to say about it:

Increasingly, squid are becoming the target in areas where other species have declined due to overfishing. Without effective management and enforcement measures in place we are concerned that squid fisheries are at risk of collapse.

I couldn’t have put it better. The problem is that we know so very little about squid that it’s hard to even design effective management, much less enforce it. For many squid species, we have no biomass estimates, little knowledge of spawning seasonality or location, and a limited understanding of population dynamics. This is exactly the situation we had at the beginning of exploiting the many, many fish stocks that have since collapsed!

Now we know more about the biology of these fish, but we’re faced with using that knowledge to recover a disaster, instead of preventing a disaster in the first place.

Off the soapbox and on to practical matters: at least one commercially fished squid, Loligo pealei, the long-finned squid, has a reasonably thorough stock assessment and scientists believe the fishery is in good shape. So, if you’re ready to make that flash in the pan, look for longfins!

Hunger does things to your mind. We’ve been air bound for almost 7 hours and the last meal of chicken briyani served by the Air Asia stewardess, is a memory fast fading as my brain is now sending urgent messages to my stomach which has been somewhat spoilt by the unusual eating habits of the past three weeks.

I had not only devoured the surprisingly delicious briyani but also the lasagne that my husband pre ordered. And now I am hungry again.

While waiting for Pak Nasser’s nasi lemak as promised in the menu tucked in the seat pocket in front on me, my mind does its cruel trick dredging up memories of culinary delights that we had been spoilt with during the last trip. Going back to my own home cooked food does not seem a very attractive prospect.

Now let’s see what the stomach had been subjected to lately.
(I am continuing this piece after a sorry excuse of a meal, which I ransacked in the kitchen. Sharing the milk with Snowbell, I had my very early morning tea with milk and cereals. Now I long for those dangai and pulut sambal from that stall at the junction of Bukit Pinang)

Just soon after landing at LCCT, we were taken to a corner lot restaurant somewhere near Bangi that boasts all kinds of soup – and one that is making me drool all over the keyboard now is soup keting. I should have taken pictures of the soup, but common courtesy demanded that I exchange niceties with my siblings and siblings in law who had taken the trouble to fetch us at the airport. I chose not to ask what keting is but proceeded to eat it with the enthusiasm of one deprived of food for a whole month. Be warned, soup keting in all its delight has hidden explosives in the form of finely cut chilli padi. That not withstanding, I finished a whole bowl before proceeding to wipe clean the platter of mixed satay before me. Simply yummy. The hubby, jetlag setting in at quite a speed, chose mee hailam but regretted it almost immediately. He was not very impressed.

There was certainly something in the air during this trip, and it was unmistakably durian. It seemed to be durian galore everywhere – five or six for 10 ringgit and I went crazy. We made a visit to the pasar tani where I bought lemang and on the way back bought several durians. Suffice to say that was not the first durian binge in three weeksLooming large in my mind right now are butter crabs at the seafood heaven near Vistana Hotel. I think the place is called Hokaido. Jijah and Isa, knowing my penchant with things crustacean, took us there for supper. There were also lala and crab sambal. The proverbial “Mak Mentua lalu di belakang pun tak sedar” was quite apt here.

You can trust Jijah to find the best food in town. She has the nose for it. One fine afternoon, she and husband Isa took us to Aunty Aini’s, a kampong food haven tucked away in Kampung Chelet, Nilai. The kampung style setting puts you in the mood for good old kampung food. There were ulams and masak lemak and soup tulang – the most delicious I had ever tasted. I have never been one for ulams and masak lemak and left it to hubby to finish them. And I must add that proprieters of De Chenge as reported by Puteri Kama in her entry here, could learn a thing or two about customer relations. Both Aunty Aini and husband were so friendly and even had time to sit down and chit chat with us.

With Jijah, I took a sentimental journey back to Alor Setar, starting out at about 5 am to catch the 07.15 Air Asia flight. We both grew up in Alor Setar but after the first few months of Primary One together at the SAS, we were separated, only to meet up again after Pak was transferred back from Yan to Alor Setar. We continued our friendship that took us to most of the fine eateries Alor Setar could offer, and to some of the most wonderful gerais our trusty old bike could take us.

The main aim of the journey was to visit Kak who had just been discharged from hospital after a knee op, but of course dear siblings of mine exiled in Bangi would not hear of a visit back to Alor Setar without a pilgrimage to their dearly beloved adopted uncles, namely Abu of the famed mee Abu and Zakaria of Laksa Teluk Kecai..