JULI LEONARD - jleonard@newsobserver.com
The green chile beef stew served at Angelina's Kitchen in Pittsboro is a customer favorite. Soup is a great way to use up produce at home.
If you want to squeeze every bit of value out of your grocery budget, the first stop is in your biggest pot.
Make soup. Real soup, from scratch. It's the oldest kitchen trick there is for making your other food earn its keep.
"Soup is the No. 1 thing that people are like, 'I don't really know how to do that,' " says Lell Trogdon, owner of Lell's Cafe in Rock Hill, S.C., who has taught classes on how to be a smart cook. "And when they learn it, they're amazed. Soup is the revelation for stretching the budget."
At Angelina's Kitchen in Pittsboro, outside Chapel Hill, Angelina Koulizakis-Battiste boasts proudly: "No vegetables go to waste here. They find a way into a soup or a side dish, always."
Both Trogdon and Koulizakis-Battiste have tiny restaurants - Lell's seats 49, Angelina's, 23. But both have big missions, using locally raised meats and vegetables almost exclusively.
The popular notion is that what they're doing is impossible: Small restaurants that rely on lunch traffic have to keep overhead low and prices reasonable. But both Lell's and Angelina's are using the kind of ingredients that are often dismissed as too expensive in today's economy.
How are they doing it? By reaching back into the old ways of cooking to make every scrap count.
Trogdon calls herself the product of farm-raised parents, with a father who was in the military: "There's a certain amount of frugal built in."
And Koulizakis-Battiste is the first-generation daughter of Greek parents. When she was a child, she was sent to Greece to spend summers with her aunts in small villages where people raised everything they ate.
Today, she gets her money's worth by being willing to buy what her local farmers have, even if winter has beaten it up. If she gets collards that are limp from a hard freeze, she'll cut them in slices and stir them into lentil soup.
"The benefit of growing up eating a lot of vegetables and watching my aunts - whatever (farmers) have left over, I have a way to cook it. That's how we can afford to buy locally."
Tricks for flavor
At Lell's Cafe, Trogdon swears she's afraid to change her soup schedule of creamy tomato on Tuesday, Italian sausage on Wednesday, chicken on Thursday and black bean chili on Friday.
"People get upset if there's any change in the soup plan. If I don't have the soup on the day it's scheduled, it's like pitchfork-riots in here."
She gets a lot of flavor out of a limited number of ingredients, using a few tricks of necessity. At an earlier restaurant, she only had an oven, no range. So she learned if she roasted meat and stirred it in at the end, instead of simmering it in stock, the meat would stay tender and have more flavor.
"The way I make soup, you build your flavor base in the beginning."
She starts by slowly cooking a lot of onions in the pot. Then she adds a generous jolt each of balsamic vinegar and reduced-sodium soy sauce, followed by herbs, celery, carrots, broth and tomatoes.
On Sundays when the restaurant is closed, she'll roast a big batch of chicken legs from Baucom's Best of Union County for her quesadillas. Then she saves the skin and bones to simmer with the trimmings from a roast chicken on Wednesday to make stock for Thursday's chicken soup.
Use it all up
Her philosophy is the same as Koulizakis-Battiste's: Waste nothing.
Leftover chickpeas from hummus might go in the soup pot. Stale cookies from the bakery case go in the cheesecake crust. Unsold cooked grits and oatmeal go home as chicken feed for customers who keep chickens.
Her dishwasher, Scott Adams, takes out the garbage at the end of the day. "Two small bags. Other places he works, he has to make two trips."
It's hard to believe, but Trogdon is able to use a single roast chicken to get enough soup for 30 to 35 small bowls served with half-sandwiches.
At Angelina's, Koulizakis-Battiste says part of cooking frugally with good-quality ingredients also is in educating her customers to change their expectations a little. If you get a dish with meat, it may not have a lot of meat. It might be served with rice, or it will turn up in soup in the company of a lot of beans and vegetables. If there is enough flavor, you don't need a lot.
"Nutritionally, it's better for you. We don't get complaints from our customers."
