Featured

Start where I am today…

Today was not a day of many Spoons. Those of you with limited spoons know what I’m talking about. So here was my quick food prep for today. It sounds like a lot, but it honestly did not require much energy, with the exception of the dinner sauteing, which almost did me in.

  • I sauteed green cabbage with some pre-chopped onions for tonight’s dinner and I put the extra into the freezer for another day. Green cabbage has a Nutrivore score of 2034 if you’re a Ballantyne fan (!!) and an Andi score of 434, if you’re a Fuhrman fan.
  • I had the foresight to soak a 4-year-old package of small red beans last night so that I could cook them in the Instant Pot today. It took 30 minutes on high pressure with natural release to get them to a delicious, creamy state. You’d never know they were four years past the best-by date. I got them off Freecycle about a year ago from a lady who must have hoarded beans around the time COVID first hit. Once she realized that there wasn’t about to be a bean shortage, she offered them to me. I think I got about ten packages of expired dried COVID-beans from her, and I’m still working my way through them.
  • I prepped some beets. Wrapped them in a wet paper towel and put them in the microwave in a glass bowl. I cooked them on high for four minutes and then let them cool. The skins rub right off. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet, but I’ll leave them in the fridge for a few days to see if I can come up with something. Beets have a Nutrivore score of around 2000, so they’ll be good for something!
  • Made dinner of cabbage, pre-prepped potatoes, pre-prepped cut onions, and yeah, I put a veggie dog sliced in there for myself and a hot dog for my kid. Sauteed it in the pan. It wasn’t the healthiest meal, but it did have some nutrient dense foods. Kiddo and I both liked it. It would appear one of the kittens liked it, because she was in the cast-iron skillet, licking it with gusto and scraping out pieces of potato. She’s currently eating the tinsel out of the Christmas tree, so I guess she doesn’t really have much of a discerning palate
  • Made the crockpot dinner for tomorrow, and it took less than five minutes to assemble, thanks to the stuff I had ready to go. I used a jar of marinara sauce mixed with some chili powder, some of the small red beans I’d made this morning in the Instant Pot, some pre-chopped bell peppers I had in the freezer, and some frozen corn. I put some pre-cooked all beef meatballs to chop up and add to the chili for Kiddo, tomorrow, and I got myself two Gardein “meat”balls.

In related news, if you chop lots of onions on a good day, you can freeze them raw for use in sauteing later when you no longer feel like chopping onions. Onions are good for you and add flavor to any vegetable dishes. I just freeze them loose-packed in glass mason jars because if I freeze them in plastic, the whole freezer smells like onions, and everything tastes like onions, too.

I know that there are stores with already-chopped-for-you frozen onions, but my local Walmart never seems to have them. Sigh…

New Book and a 5-Minute Dinner

I’ve had this America’s Test Kitchen book, The Side Dish Bible, on my Amazon wish list since I checked it out of the library a few months back. I liked it because, aside from having 1001 (not just 1000!) recipes, the index makes it so easy to find what you can make based on ingredients. My mommy got it for me for Christmas, which was fantastic.

On page 173, there is a recipe called “Hearty Baked Brown Rice with Andouille, Corn, and Red Pepper.“ The recipe does take over an hour as written (I mean… brown rice!), but due to the fact that I had every single ingredient pre-cooked, I was able to make it in roughly 5 minutes.

I used the following ingredients:

  • Frozen pepper and onion mix that I sauteed, which is probably what took the longest.
  • Pre-cooked Impossible Sausage and onions I had in the freezer from several months ago. We don’t eat a lot of “fake” meat products other than for adding flavor, so it was about 3 oz. for the whole pot.
  • Dehydrated corn that I had rehydrated a few nights ago in Thermos with boiling water
  • The brown rice I had made and frozen a few weeks back.

I didn’t have Andouille sausage, and I’m aware it would have added a completely different taste to this than breakfast sausage, but I’m ok with that.

I just sauteed the frozen veggies in oil, added the sausage and onions, and then added the corn and rice, along with a little water for moisture. I also added a soft, beef-style bouillon cube in there for flavor because the recipe called for cooking the rice in broth and my rice was plain.

It wasn’t beautiful, and my food photography leaves a lot to be desired, but Kiddo declared it “Make Again,” so I consider that a win.

A while back, I needed to make space in the freezer, so I dehydrated all the half-eaten bags of corn I found in the garage mini-freezer. 

I have an Excalibur 9-tray dehydrator in my garage, and I’m a big fan.

As you can see, I’m also a big fan of Bonne Maman jams. Haha! I have about 40 jars from that company that I use on my dehydrated goods shelf. They look pretty. I’m not sure if I eat the jam because I like the taste or because I like the jars. Kiddo eats more jam than I do, anyway.

I label them with oil paint pens, which wipe off easily with a spritz of straight rubbing alcohol / isopropyl and a paper towel.

I’ve been experimenting with different ways to rehydrate dehydrated vegetables and fruit. In Kiddo’s opinion, the most surefire way to ruin a dish is to have an unexpected crunchy bit somewhere in there. I’ve come up with two ways that work for me, and I will continue to see if I can find better ways:

  • Thermos method: I put the dehydrated produce in an insulated vacuum container / Thermos before I go to bed, and then cover it with boiling water. I seal it and go to bed. This worked well with the corn, which usually takes a while to rehydrate, even in soup in the pressure cooker.
  • Instant Pot pressure cooker: I had a weird desire for oily eggplants a few days ago and made some caponata with some dehydrated eggplants and dehydrated cherry tomatoes. I put both dehydrated vegetables in the pressure cooker and let the cook for 30 minutes. I think this was overkill. It would probably have been fine after 15. Nevertheless, I mixed it all with olive oil and garlic, and ate the caponata with tortilla chips. There is clearly nothing better than oily eggplant and tomato with corn chips as a late night snack.

Happy New Year! I hope last night was as eventful or non-eventful as you dreamt it would be.

Weekly Bread Prep

I make a loaf of bread every week (or more if we eat a lot of bread), but I use my trusty 20-year-old bread machine to make it a quick and painless experience. I’m sure some people might find kneading dough therapeutic, but I am not one of those people. I’ve got my recipe memorized, so the whole endeavor takes less than three minutes. 

The only pain in the patoot is slicing it, although letting it sit on the counter overnight usually makes it easier to cut. I freeze the sliced bread so it lasts the week. 

By next week Sunday, the leftover frozen bread is used for our grilled cheese sandwich lunch.

My bread recipe includes the following ingredients, dumped into the bread machine and set to the two-pound load 3 1/2-hour basic cycle:

  • 4 cups of flour
  • 1 1/2 cups of warm water (my Pyrex measuring cup has the 1 1/2 c. mark marked in black paint pen so I can fill it without squinting, and I know that putting the measure in the microwave for 40 seconds gets it the exact temperature I need)
  • 2 tsp. yeast
  • 1 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 2-3 tb. of olive (or some other) oil

Sunday – Shrimp Tacos, Salsa, and Potato Prep

I’ve been trying to find out for years how to make salsa that tastes like the stuff in restaurants. I think I (kind of) figured it out. Here’s how I did it:

  • Some baby tomatoes I had in the house
  • A can of diced tomatoes
  • Fresh cilantro
  • Vinegar-pickled jalapeno pepper rings I made in summer following this extremely easy recipe from The Bossy Kitchen. This was the easiest way I could find to store peppers, so…
  • Pre-chopped onions that I froze a few weeks back
  • Sugar, cumin, salt, and minced garlic

I just put in things and pulsed them in the food processor until they tasted good.

I am planning on making shrimp tacos either tonight or whenever I’m feeling full of energy (hah), so I put most of the salsa in a pint deli container. The extra, I put in an 8 oz. container and froze for another day.

Unrelated, at the end of the gardening season, I harvested as many of my leftover greens as I could from the garden and dehydrated them. I add them to the fresh greens in my nightly smoothie. The jar in the background holds these dehydrated garden greens. 

I didn’t realize, though, that it would be the middle of December in Chicago and I’d still have kale growing outside.

One of my meals for this week will contain mashed potatoes as a side, so I cooked four potatoes in the Instant Pot this morning. I stuck each potato with a knife several times, put them on a trivet, and places them in the Instant Pot with 1/2 cup of water. I pressure-cooked them on high for 35 minutes and let the pressure release naturally.

I also began thawing the shrimp for tacos so I could cook it in salt and garlic later and have it ready to go for taco-time.

Soup-Dinner Saturday – Stuffed Cabbage Pasta Soup

Saturday lunch, my son and I go to McDonald’s on the way home from his sports class (maybe to counteract all the great exercise he did?). So, every Saturday dinner, I make vegetable soup for dinner. I try to use up any vegetables and things I made during the week.

This week, I used my leftover cabbage and small red beans to make vegetarian stuffed cabbage soup.

  • Put 6 cups of water in a pot.
  • Added half a jar of marinara sauce.
  • Added a cup of small red beans and two cups of sauteed cabbage and onions, both prepped last weekend.
  • Stirred in two tablespoons of Better Than Bouillon Roasted Garlic base and a teaspoon of refined coconut oil for savory flavor.
  • Put in some broken spaghetti noodles.
  • Salted to taste.
  • Simmered on stove for about 40 minutes
  • Served with shredded Parmesan cheese.

It was really, really good, and now I have enough for three days of lunch at school.

More deli containers. I write on them with paint pen, and I wipe it off with a spritz of rubbing alcohol and a paper towel I keep reusing for that purpose.

Mid-Week Ingredient Prep – Quick Chili

I had a better week than I’ve had in a while, so I made these energy balls, which I found here on Fannetastic Foods. I didn’t have walnuts, so I used raw cashews, and I added some cocoa powder because we like chocolate. My son liked them, too. What made these different than the recipes I usually see is that they are made with raisins instead of dates. I rarely have dates around, so raisins worked for me! In fact, I had some home-dehydrated raisins left from this summer, when I had some grapes that weren’t being eaten. I was able to use everything up, including a half-eaten box of raisins that wasn’t going anywhere. Kiddo asked for these in his lunch, and I had them at work each day this week. I actually bought more raisins so I could make more of these.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I made the chili from the small red beans I cooked last weekend. My “cheater chili” is popular around here (ok, just in my house), and (again as I previously mentioned), I made it in under a five minutes. It went as follows:

  • Empty a jar of marinara sauce into the crockpot. 
  • Add 1 tsp. chili powder.
  • Put in some frozen corn.
  • Put in some pre-prepped raw bell peppers I got over the summer and froze in Foodsaver-vacuumed bags.
  • Throw in a few frozen angus beef meatballs for my son’s chili and a some Gardein veggie balls for me.
  • Put in the crock pot for 5 hours on low (I use mini crock pots because we have a small family).
  • Add shredded cheese before serving. 

I think we ate this with bread or something, but I don’t remember that far back…

I had some leftovers and I ate mine for lunch. The meat chili went into the freezer for some other day when Kiddo is in the mood for chili again.

Deli containers are the bomb for various reasons:

  • They stack in small spaces.
  • The lids almost always are interchangeable.
  • They’re mostly leak-proof.
  • They’re dishwasher safe.

I know plastic isn’t always the best, but when you live in a miniature house, mason jars quickly overtake the house.

I still use glass for my dehydrated, shelf-stable foods, but much of my food is now stored in deli containers.