One Grocery Bag, 3 Great Meals

This week I made:
Chicken Turkey Meatball & Vegetable Soup, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
Chicken Turkey & Broccoli Stromboli, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
Asian Chicken Turkey Lettuce Cups, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

These three recipes were grouped as 3 great meals that could be made with one grocery bag. It kind of seems like most three meals could probably fit in one bag, but I guess this is special because you should be able to pass through the express lane since it's just 10 unique items (although I feel like 2 cans would count as 2 items for express lane purposes. And the express line doesn't let you get your Monopoly tickets to participate in this year's edition of the frustratingly-never-even-win-$2 promotion).

The shopping list:

We had an incredibly cold, windy, snowy, rainy day on Thursday, so it was great to follow up with a warm bowl of soup.

This soup was very fast and easy. A lot of the seasoning just comes from the Italian-style canned tomatoes. The onion and carrot are sauteed a little first, but then the broccoli, orzo, and meatballs are just cooked in the broth so it simmers for a little while. I don't usually use Italian-style tomatoes, but it's nice to think that with that and some random vegetables you could make a soup almost any time. I guess that sprinkling in some Italian seasoning isn't the time-consuming step, though :-P And don't seasoned tomatoes probably have more sodium or something bad like that? Oh well.

For Valentine's Day we ate in and I made stromboli:

I don't know if this is really a stromboli though. I guess it's more like a calzone except it's log-shaped. A stromboli (according to Google) seems more like a roll. Like a cinnamon roll with salami and cheese instead of cinnamon. But this one was just closed up (and barely... I didn't do a good job rolling out the dough and so it got a lot of hole) as a tube, not a pinwheel. The filling was onion, broccoli, ground turkey, and cheese, and it was topped with more Italian-style tomatoes. So... a lot more of the same flavors as the previous dish. But I guess if it tasted good the first time, it's not bad to have it a second time? I used a pillsbury can of whole wheat pizza dough, and it tasted better than I expected it to.

On Monday we finished up the trio of meals with these lettuce cups:

The problem is that butter lettuce really doesn't want to make cups. This was the super messiest meal to eat. It tasted fine, although it wasn't anything too extremely compelling.

Apps from the freezer

Tonight was Open Doors Night, a biannual event at our dorm. The past two times we've gone easy and just put together a cheese platter and some truffles or other chocolate. This time, emboldened by his success with the meatball sliders he made for Superbowl, G wanted us to make some of the other recipes in the group. The theme was appetizers that can be made very quickly from a small number of ingredients, mostly from the frozen food section or pantry. The meatball sliders for example used frozen meatballs.

Today we made:
Chicken 'N' Mini Waffles, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2013
Lemony-Dill Salmon Cakes, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2013
Bacon-Tater Bites, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2013
Ginger-Miso Sweet Pea Spread, Food & Wine December 2010 (not pictured)

The chicken and waffles sounded really cool, except for the fact that it literally is just a chicken nugget on top of an Eggo mini waffle. There's not too much to it! But luckily there is a sauce, which made it seem like it was something. The sauce is just honey and Sriracha (6:1), but is pretty tasty.
The lemony salmon cakes were a bit more complex. It's smoked salmon on top of a blend of feta, cream cheese, and lemon zest, on top of a mini pancake. The feta/cream cheese mix was kind of odd, but good, and the Aunt Jemima Frozen Lil' Griddles Mini-Pancakes were nice and sweet :)
The bacon-tater bites were just bacon wrapped around tater tots. We didn't make the sour cream + chive dip.
Individually, these were each super easy. But, since they were all frozen things, there wasn't a whole lot of space in the oven! So it was hard to get everything together and be warm at the same time. We baked the waffles and chicken nuggets separately, although I guess you could have baked them as assembled units to save on space if you wanted. The pancakes could be microwaved, but the tater tots and bacon needed to be cooked briefly separately before being wrapped and then baked for longer. That was a sight to be seen. Basically, the bacon and probably the tater tots too were just sweating grease. We poured off a lot after the first bake, but when we checked on them later during the second bake to see if they were crispy, they were just bathed in grease! I guess that's what makes them taste so good....
Almost everything was eaten, except a couple of the salmon pancakes and two waffles which were left behind by someone who just took off the chicken nuggets (!)
Noticing that these three apps all had meat, I wanted to make a veggie option too. I made this ginger-miso sweet pea spread, which is incidentally also from a frozen food. It's thawed frozen peas blended with green onions, ginger, jalapeño, and some miso. It makes for a kind of strange flavor combination. Everyone, upon hearing the ingredients, was really excited to try it. But, I don't think that many people went back for seconds or thirds. It's a little too odd, or maybe everyone was just full from bacon. I wonder if it would be better with edamame or something instead of the green peas.

Pasta, Orange buns, and Stoup

This week I made:

Chicken Ragu with Fennel, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

Sweet Orange Buns, Saveur January/February 2012

Sausage, Zucchini & Potato Stoup, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

Thursday I made this pasta with ground turkey, fennel, and half-and-half. It was ok, but nothing too special. Unfortunately I didn't give the flat fettuccini enough of a stir after first putting it in the pot, so some of the noodles clumped together, becoming super thick masses that were quite al dente, in a bad way :-(

But while that was being eaten, these babies were in the oven:

I made the dough, filling, and rolled these out the night before, and they sat in the fridge until tonight. I baked them for the final meeting of book club. They were pretty ridiculously sweet and buttery, definitely needing some straight tea to mellow it out. The filling is two sticks of butter plus 3 cups of powdered sugar along with some zest, extracts, and more sugar (brown this time). It's about a centimeter tall once it all gets smeared on top of the dough! Of course, during baking that basically all just melts, such that you end up with these rolls sitting in a bath of melted sugar-butter about halfway up the sides. They have you use a bit more of the filling mixed with a bit of orange juice to drizzle, but it just seemed so excessive and not even different (how does adding 1 Tbs juice to 1/4 cup frosting even make it more like icing? Seems like icing needs less liquid, not more, or else it just melted in instantly).

We enjoyed the leftovers for breakfasts and such :)

On Friday we warmed up after a cold day with this stoup:

I thought I had a lot of extra Italian sausage in the freezer, but didn't. Instead of just skimping, I used up some other sausage that was in our freezer-- a fully-cooked chicken sausage with apple and sweet maple syrup. Um, this did not fit in well. The rest was hearty and savory, but then you'd have these cloying bites of this sausage with a weird texture to boot. It would have been better without it, and on my second bowl I started fishing it out. The rest of it was great and used up the rest of the fennel from the earlier pasta. As a kid, we used to eat a similar soup basically every week as per my sister's demands. I named it "rainbow soup" because it had so many colorful ingredients, but I think I was the only one who called it that. I guess the only similarities are ground meat (but sausage instead of ground beef), potatoes, onion, garlic, and tomatoes. I'm not sure what makes this a "stoup"-- it's pretty much the definition of a soup.

Superbowl Spread

Today I made:
Meatball Sub Sliders, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2013
Veggie Taco Bowls (made as a layered dip, not put into bowls), Family Circle September 2013
Tricolor Trio-- Kale, White Bean, what Chile Crostini, Every Day with Rachael Ray December 2013
Sweet Chile Hot Wings Drumsticks , Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2013
Guacamole

So I've never really watched football. I don't think G really does either, but anyway on Saturday he was bemoaning the fact that all of our friends were going to be watching the Super Bowl and we hadn't been invited to anyone's parties. (...maybe because we are homebodies who don't often go to parties even when we are invited...) I suggested that we throw our own party, because it would be fun to do the cooking thing, and we sent an email out to the dorm to see who else was "homeless" for the event. It turned out to be a party's worth! 

I've never been to a Super Bowl party, but the Internet told me that you've got to have some sort of wings, some sliders, chips and dips, and some veggie sticks (gotta pretend to be healthy, right?). We selected several recipes that seemed like they'd be pretty quick.

Although each dish was less than 15 minutes of hands on time, I started a few hours before the party to do whatever seemed like it could be done in advance. And at this leisurely pace, it took up basically the whole time until people arrived.

The sweet chile hot drumsticks were definitely the star food, and they got eaten up quickly. They're just slow cooked with soy sauce, honey, and sriracha (4:4:1 ratio, plus broth or water to cover) for a few hours, then broiled to get nicer looking. After slow cooking they looked pretty gross, but after baking they looked much nicer. We ended up baking them for longer than recommended, because the slow cooker took a while to get up to speed and we wanted to make sure it was cooked through.

The close second hit were the meatball subs. That was G's pick to make. They all got eaten too, and we made a second batch partway through the evening which also got devoured even though everyone was pretty full by that point. They're simply assemblies of purchased items, so they're very easy. It's jarred marinara, frozen meatballs, and slider buns. The buns are broiled with cheese (we used provolone), the meatballs are heated up in the marinara, and other than that it's just a bit of torn up basil.

The odd-one-out was the kale and white bean crostini. Too healthy? Not flavorful enough amongst all the other intensely spiced items? At the end of the evening we had several of these left, along with some dips. We repurposed the veggie taco bowl filling (beans, corn, spices) as quesadilla filling the next day for dinner.

Month 12 day 13: Mac and cheese and bangers mashup

Today I made:
Cheesy Mac n Bangers Normal Sausage Bake, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2012

Rachael Ray likes to experiment in weird ways with food, I guess. She had a bunch of recipes that were mashups between two well-known-but-normally-separate dishes. This was a mix of mac and cheese and ...bangers... which I guess isn't that normal for Americans. And also wasn't available at Shaw's. So... normal sausage.

This was kind of ... meh. There isn't really cheese in the mac and cheese (what.) except cream cheese, which doesn't really count in my book. This is topped with some bread, and I chose a bread that actually tastes pretty bad. Unfortunately, the flavor of that bread was pretty dominant, and it was wedged in in a way that made it hard to remove later. The sausage and spinach was fine, because how could that go wrong? But then the eggy mix that gets poured on top spilled out everywhere, because the bread evidently made somewhat of a water-tight seal. To speed things along, instead of waiting for it to seep through, I just lifted up the corners of the bread and let it drain down into the mac, since I figured that's where it was meant to end up. But I don't know if that's really what was supposed to happen.

The problem with this kind of a mashup dish is that it is then the work of two dishes. But instead of just making a main and a side or something, it's all together in a form that is hit or miss. And this one missed. :-/ It was hard to convince G to help me finish the leftovers of this.

That's it for January! G is back and the semester is about to start up again.
My favorite:
A tie between the tourtiere and the chicken parm

 I've discarded the last of my cooking magazines! From here on out, we'll be dipping into the archives or keeping up with my current subscription of Every Day with Rachael Ray. Over the course of the year, Rachael Ray proved to serve up a variety of creative, quick, and hearty meals that almost always tasted great (with a few exceptions, such as the above). She knows how to please!

Month 12 day 12: Quesadillas and cupcakes

Today I made:
Escarole, Sausage, and Fontina Mozzarella Quesadillas, Cooking Light January 2011
Take 5 Carrot Cupcakes, Food & Wine January 2011

(Cupcakes not pictured)

Tonight was book club again, so I wanted a fast dinner. I made these hearty quesadillas. They seem kind of fancy with their escarole and sausage, and it was pretty tasty. I'm not sure if the escarole added a whole lot of extra flavor, but I guess it's healthy? I could imagine using fennel or something would be yummy too. Instead of being cooked in the skillet, these are baked. I'd never considered making quesadillas that way before, but it would be a good way to make several at once instead of serially cooking them in the skillet and having the first one get cold and soggy by the time the last is made.

The cupcake recipe was from that same general store that made the chicken parmesan from this month. If all their recipes are like these two, then it's worth a stop if you're ever in Seattle! I'm normally not really into carrot cake, but these were delicious. They were surprisingly fast and easy too, once the carrot was all grated. That was by far the most time-consuming step. The cupcakes came out really moist (from using oil instead of butter?), lightly spiced, and didn't have any of the nuts or raisins which I normally don't like in carrot cake-- they were nice and smooth. Not too many people ate them at book club, but my lab enjoyed them the next day, and I felt like they were breakfast appropriate. Right? Anything with cream cheese frosting is a breakfast food, or something like that. And it's healthy, because vegetables. Yep...

Month 12 day 11: Flourless peanut butter chocolate cookies

Today I made:
Peanut butter and chocolate cookies, Every Day with Rachael Ray October 2011

(Sorry, no picture!)

For book club tonight I looked through the archives (my large, accordion file folder in which I've been storing all the extra delicious-looking recipes at the end of each month). One of the members is gluten-free, so I was excited to find this flourless cookie recipe. It's super simple:

• 1 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chunks
• Beat first four ingredients. Stir in chocolate. Bake at 350 F for 10 min.

This is one of those recipes you could just always remember, like crepes are for my dad.

Even though there is no flour, these end up being a pretty normal cookie dough texture. After baking, they're a bit crumbly, but otherwise just seem like completely normal cookies. It's kind of magic! They get nicely puffy because of the baking soda (I guess) and have a good texture. We don't eat peanut butter that often, so it's actually not a staple for me that's always around. But if it is something you have on hand, then this is a great recipe to have in your back pocket for when you want a treat with minimal fuss or time.