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Oh, thanks so much. I love simple treatments. So you don't cover it at all?

Oh, and a five...smiley?...rating.

I am in love with the Zuni Cafe cookbook recipe I found on Chez Pim's website.

Dorrie Greenspan recommends brushing a little egg white on the crust immediately after parbaking it. I'm not that much of a perfectionist so I've never tried it.

Fifty is our weekly budget, and we live in northern Virginia. Basically, we eat very little meat, and not too much food.

Also, I keep track of how much I've spent on food and if I go up to fifty I just don't go to the grocery store anymore that week. It forces you to be really creative with the ingredients you have at home. What I do is I go on allrecipes.com and use their advanced search to find some dinner ideas, then search the web for that same meal from a better chef or more reputable site. It takes some time, so I usually just plan meals like I should. I think delicious cooking is less about fancy ingredients and more about technique.

Oh, and along with looking out for groceries that are inexpensive, avoid things that are expensive. Unless other fruit is in season or frozen and cheap, we only eat apples and bananas (those are great, too, because organic doesn't matter if you peel your apples.

But really, we don't buy a lot of organic stuff. I'll be impressed if you can do fifty a week, eat sorta fancy, and eat the amount of produce you should, much less buy meat at all. I guess you could peel whatever produce you can?

Good luck!

Um, he totally ate the crust in the clip Steward showed. Right?

Cookies - I roll out balls and flash freeze them, then put them in freezer bags. Usually I just wind up eating the frozen dough, but this method does work well for when I want just a few warm cookies in ten minutes.

Also, I know many are against this and it's not exactly a response to the question, but we're a family of three and one of us is only 2 years old and has a correspondingly small stomach, so we buy meat when it's cheap and freeze it. I honestly can't tell the difference between that and meat that's never been frozen. I buy a big bag of thighs or leg quarters and then put them into individual freezer bags. Same thing with ground beef (yeah, yeah, yeah, when I get a kitchenaid with a meat grinder attachment I won't buy it anymore).

It went great! I used the cast iron skillet for the yogurt cake and then just served it with the lemon curd and raspberries. There was a lot leftover, which I don't mind one bit.

Thanks so much for your suggestions. The cake actually looked really pretty baked in the skillet, sliced (I couldn't get it out of the pan) and then rearranged in a circle on a plate.

I actually didn't eat much of the food because my Crohn's is acting up again. The burgers did look delicious, though. And of course, I couldn't keep away from the lemon curd. I wish I could send you all a jar! I swear, eating that stuff is like eating joy.

Thanks so much for the ideas! I do like the idea of baking a cake in a cast iron, but I don't have a cake stand. Would you just bring the cast iron along? I might feel sort of ridiculous doing that because of the weight, but maybe it's not as silly as I think.

And with a trifle, is it acceptable to just serve that in an opaque serving bowl?

If it's not too late to enter, my response is Colbert.

Food blogs. I'm late, but it starts now. :)

I would feel totally superfluous with that thing around. I would stop cooking and start looking for the meaning of life.