Broccoli Salad

Due to some miscalculation of what we'd have left (I'm still not quite sure how) Dave made a monthly payment towards his student loan a few days ago in the amount of 13 times as much as he was required to pay, thereby leaving us (after sending out my GI-NORMOUS check to the wedding videographer today) with about $100 between both our checking accounts. Until next Friday.

In an effort not to rack up the credit cards, I have adopted some very frugal habits to last me at least until... well... next Friday.

Now, while the challenge isn't to avoid starvation (we have plenty of stuff in the pantry and freezer) it is indeed a strenuous exercise to attempt decent meals from combinations of their contents. Every time I think I have all the ingredients for something, I am off by one or two and give up and defrost something from the increasingly further nether regions of the freezer.

Yesterday I threw caution to the wind.

(An unsolved side note: A few days ago I spotted a head of broccoli appear on the shelf in the fridge where one hadn't been the day before and thought, I want Broccoli Salad! I did nothing about it though because I figured Dave must have bought it for some specific purpose, as he never buys groceries, and most assuredly not the fresh vegetable variety. But pressed to concoct something for our meal last night, I asked him if I could use it and he looked at me blankly. He did not know about it. He swears he did not buy it. This is very odd. I haven't lived here long and don't presume the place haunted- because really, ghosts that provide cruciferous veggies? Possible but unlikely. Well, what's a girl to do? I used that haunted broccoli.)

I found the simplest broccoli salad recipe I could online and I IMPROVISED! The dressing called, in large part, for red wine vinegar. Well, we didn't have that, but Dave's mom had lost a bottle of Garlic-Flavored Wine Vinegar to the depths of her cabinets in the seventies, which I unearthed during my extensive excavations and poured right up. As antique vinegar is wont to do (I imagine) it had formed many black floaties. (Sampling revealed this as merely an aesthetic flaw.) The recipe called for bacon- well, we had prosciutto! It called for red onions- well, we had chopped scallions! It called for one to only use the broccoli heads and throw away the stalks- hey now, whoa there, starvers can't be choosers. Into the bowl went every micro-bit of broc, along with the ingredients we actually did have: mayonnaise, sugar, and cheddar cheese.

Well, who'd have thunk? It was DELISH! Dave had seconds and I finished off the bowl for lunch today. Broccoli salad: success!!!