A hot dog on a bun instead of a steak?

One day, through no fault of your own, you find yourself on a low or fixed income. All of a sudden, you find yourself with less coming in and more going out! Suddenly, you've become a person on a budget with food topping the list of must have categories.

That has been my circumstance, for some time. And, when it comes to grocery shopping, I've become smarter than I used to be! I've given up high priced items such as steak for much less expensive hot dogs and such. In a recent post on Forsythbiz, I displayed the results of my often eaten foods in the form of a report. At a cost of a little over a twenty dollar bill, I got a lot of good stuff. Perhaps that's why that store is called Save A Lot (duh).

Hot Dog with great condiments!

As bad as the average wiener is nutritionally, there is still a lot to be said for the All American Dog! This day, I just kicked it up just a notch with some great condiments!

I had a couple of Bananarama peppers that grew on a stem that had been cut down the year before in the fall and then left over the winter on my condo balcony. But, lo and behold, there was a couple of green shoots growing out of that old stem by the following February! I brought the pot back in and placed it on a south facing windowsill. Amazingly, I got two small peppers to grow by that April. I decided to harvest one and cut it up as a spicy addition to my hot dog!

When choosing a wiener, I almost always go with something by Oscar Meyer. I also like the Ballpark brand of buns. For my choice of condiments, I chose the above mentioned pepper that I diced; a couple of Mezzetta Hot Pepper rings that were also diced and then a dash or two of  traditional mustard and ketchup. And OK, at the last minute, I added a bit of sweet pickle relish just for the heck of it.

Now, for a bit of pseudo DanO culinary science. While I wanted the pickle relish to remain just as it was, I did not want to squander the subtle heats of the pepper rings or the Bananarama by leaving them as chunks! To that end, I chopped down both these guys to a really fine structure (DanO's method of blended taste distillation). That way, I got the 'essence' of minor heat with each bite.

The end result was a slightly warm dawg that was way too satisfying. 

DanO's All American Dawg!

After going, a couple of times to the local Sonic Drive-in and enjoying their hot dogs and fries, I decided to try and emulate that offering with one exception; I shit-canned the fries in favor of something a bit more nutritious and a lot more cheap!

The Sonic All American dog and medium fries was a bit of a nutritional nightmare as far as I was concerned:

A 700 calorie lunch might be cool for an athlete or someone in great shape, but perhaps not so much for an aging gnome such as myself. With tax, this meal deal came in at $4.31! I figure I could craft a much more nutritional dawg and coleslaw side at a much better price. This is what I came up with:

About half the calories and maybe one fourth the cost made this a sure fire winner for me at lunchtime!

Critique: The All American hot dog!

Why does this look like a very fucked up vagina?

The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council estimates Americans consume 20 billion hot dogs a year - more than twice the retail sales figures. That works out to about 70 hot dogs per person each year. Hot dogs are served in 95 percent of homes in the United States.

That is one heck of a boatload of dawgs! (For myself, I think that the total would be a much more conservative rate of consumption... maybe 68 hot dogs a year). Whatever the actual count, I thought to examine this very popular pastime in a bit more detail!

Right off the bat, let it be known that (like eggs), there are many variations you can eat out there; you have all sorts of meat wieners combined with many kinds of buns which are slathered with more crap than I could ever recount here. For this review, I decided to concentrate on your average run of the mill dog and bun! Here's a list of what I used for this post...

A disclaimer: This particular combination of ingredients was not the best a health conscious person could buy, nor was it the worst. (It was the kind of stuff I was able to easily purchase at my local Country Mart located in Forsyth Missouri).

I decided not to add anything about taste as that would be a waste of time. If you do not like to enjoy a good hot dog, you are very likely beyond the administrations of medical science....

What's actually in a common wiener?

All hot dogs (those that are sold commercially in the US) are cured and cooked sausages that consist of mainly pork, beef, chicken and turkey or a combination of meat and poultry. Meats used in hot dogs come from the muscle of the animal and looks much like what you buy in the grocer's case. Other ingredients include water, curing agents and spices, such as garlic, salt, sugar, ground mustard, nutmeg, coriander and white pepper. And that don't sound too bad... [Rumors that some dogs contain ground up eyeballs, beaks and other sordid and sick animal body parts. Not true, those are only sold to some West Coast consumers!]

Calories per gram!

After doing much research, I determined that there are about 2.3 calories per gram in this particular dawg. So, at 57 grams for the Frankfurter and 46 grams for the wiener, that came to only about 230 calories! Really, not all that bad even after adding some additional toppings.

The toppings!

For myself, I like a fairly standard group of stuff to throw on board; mustard, ketchup, minced onions, hot pepper and relish! I also like to lightly brown the inside of the bun for that finished look! 

In the end, you have thrown together a great tasting treat for low cost and a minimal impact on your waistline... enjoy!

Using simple ingredients for cheap, healthy meals!

Times are hard, you find yourself either unemployed, under-employed or on a fixed income. Doesn't matter much which, they all suck! (That's about half this country these days)! Eating well and eating cheaply can sometimes be real hard to do. Here's some ideas that require just a few simple ingredients to make some healthy meals without stripping you penniless!

Ingredients:

Oscar Meyer hotdog, sliced

1/2 cup pork n beans

1/2 medium russet potato, baked

toast, slice

1 c. 2% milk

butter or fake butter

salt (fake optional) and pepper

Total calories ~517

I got a good deal on the hotdogs and potatoes; a package of 12 Oscar Meyer franks for only a buck and a 10 lb bag of russet potatoes for just $3! so, figuring about twenty six 174 gram potatoes per bag, my cost per potato was about 12 cents! Likewise, each wiener worked out to be about 8 cents each and with other items figured in, I would guess one serving would cost in the neighborhood of 67-75 cents! That's affordable even by my standards!

By mixing in just a few more ingredients; sauerkraut, cottage cheese and salad fixings from the garden (you do have a garden, right)? You can come up with an entire group of tasty creations that won't break the budget!