Lauren: Squashpuppies: A Yellow Squash Recipe June 23, 2014

I have to admit that I don’t love yellow squash. It’s okay, but it doesn’t come close to how I feel about asparagus or beets.

But I love this yellow squashpuppies recipe, probably because it isn’t super healthy and you can’t really taste the yellow squash. Ha ha. Oh well. It’s super delicious!

Ingredients:

4 cups of oil (I used olive oil)

3-4 yellow squash, sliced (You’ll end up using 2 c. the squash puree)

2 eggs beaten

1 1/4 c. all purpose flour or 1 3/4 c. cup freshly-milled flour

1/3 c. cornmeal

2 tbsp. sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 1/3 tbsp. oil

2 tsp minced onion

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/2 c. cheese

 

Directions: 

1. Heat oil to 375 degrees in a small pot. (It takes a little longer to cook all of the squashpuppies in a small pot, but you can use less oil.)

2. Place squash in saucepan. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer ten minutes, or until tender. Drain and puree. Let cool.

3. In a small bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, salt, oil, onion, garlic powder, and cheese. In a medium bowl, mix 2 c. of squash puree with the eggs. Add the dry mixture into the wet.

4. Drop by rounded spoonfuls into the hot oil. (It’s okay if the batter is a little on the runny side.) Cook until they are brown and crisp on one side. It should only take a couple minutes, then flip. Once they are brown and crisp on both sides, remove, and drain on paper towels.

 

Lauren: Delicious Freezable Breakfast Burritos June 13, 2014

I’m in love with these breakfast burritos. There’s something about the combo of cream cheese, eggs, potatoes, and bacon. Yum. And they make the perfect breakfast on those crazy mornings when you have to get everyone out the door in 30 minutes or when you wake up to realize you have no milk. . .

Ingredients: 

1 lb bacon

6-8 potatoes, diced into small pieces

10 eggs

1/2 c. milk

salt and pepper

10-12 tortillas (I use whole wheat)

8 oz cream cheese

 

Directions:

1. Cook the bacon in a skillet. Then let it drain on paper towels.

2. Add the diced potatoes to the skillet. You can cook them in the bacon grease for extra flavor. Cook about 5 minutes on the first side or until they turn brown and crispy. Season them with salt and pepper (and garlic powder if you want) while they are cooking. Wait until they brown on the first side and then flip them. Cook for another five minutes or until brown. 

3. While the potatoes are cooking, crack the eggs into a bowl, add milk, and whisk until thoroughly combined. You can cook them in a different skillet or wait for the potatoes to be done and cook them in there. (Save on dishes!) Scramble those babies (not literally babies since the eggs are unfertilized, but we won’t getting into that chicken reproduction discussion right now. . . )

4. Time to assemble some burritos. First, smother cream cheese onto the burrito. Then add about 1/4 c. eggs, 1/4 c. potatoes, some crumbled bacon and roll it up.

5. Eat!

6. Throw the leftovers in a ziploc bag and reheat when you need something yummy in a jiffy.  Hmm. Jiffy-what a funny word.

 

 

 

 

Sarah: Quick Tomato Soup May 28, 2014

1. Saute yummy vegetables and spices together in olive oil.

A few years ago, my sister and I were at the store and grabbed a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, thinking we’d have a quick dinner together.  When we heated the soup later, we were sadly disillusioned.  I hadn’t expected to be able to taste the high fructose corn syrup that Campbell’s had (inexplicably) added.

We tried seasoning it, but in the end we had to give up: the soup of our childhood did not taste anything like we remembered.

Giving up Campbell’s tomato soup was easy since it wasn’t even edible to me.  However, giving up tomato soup in general was impossible–it’s the best thing ever with grilled cheese.  So here’s a quick recipe that doesn’t involve long cooking times, roasting tomatoes or red peppers, or doing any other sort of elaborate cooking. I’m sure you can find more delicious recipes out there, but this is a good, basic, and fast way to have soup without having to buy the high-fructose-corn-syrup version.

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3-5 tomatoes, chopped
1 32 oz. can tomatoes (I like the diced ones)
a splash of broth (chicken or veggie)
Italian seasoning to taste
salt & pepper to taste

2. Add the liquid ingredients to make the soup base.

Directions:

1. Sauté onion in olive oil until translucent (about 2-3 minutes).  Add in garlic, then tomatoes and Italian seasoning, and sauté another minute or so (sautéing your spices makes even dried spices far more flavorful, and it means you don’t have to later simmer the soup quite as long).
2. Just before the veggies start to stick, dump in can of tomatoes.
3. Add broth and salt/pepper.
4. If you, like Campbell’s, feel the need to sweeten your soup, you can add about a teaspoon of sugar, but please don’t overdo it!  I don’t find I really miss the sugar, and it’s just extra calories that I don’t need.
5. Allow to simmer for 20-30 minutes, until the flavors mix together.
6. Blend with a handheld blender (also called a stick blender or immersion blender–if there was one kitchen appliance I could take to a desert island, it would be my handheld blender).
7. Serve with grilled cheese.

3. Simmer, blend with handheld blender, and serve with grilled cheese!

Sarah: Final Week of Eat-In May!

I use Barbara Kingsolver’s recipe for Eggs in a Nest from her book/website Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life.  Incidentally, it’s a great read if you like gardening, cooking, or really good non-fiction writing.

Sarah: Week 4 Planning May 20, 2014

Sarah: Egg Drop Soup May 18, 2014

Friday night dinner: rice wraps filled with chicken and veggies, rice, and egg drop soup.

 

One difficult thing for me about eating in all month is that, while I’m pretty good at cooking pastas, vegetable soups, and frittatas, I don’t know much about ethnic cooking, and I really miss going out for Thai or Chinese or Nepalese.

 

However, there is an exception: egg drop soup is so easy to make that even I can’t mess it up.  Keith went ahead and grilled some chicken with a little hoisin sauce, and, since I was waiting for him to finish the chicken and we had leftover veggies, I decided we should just go all out and have rice wraps with chicken and veggies to go with our soup.  It was a feast outside my usual repertoire, which was a welcome change for us all!

 

 

 

 

Easy Egg Drop Soup

Ingredients:

4 cups chicken broth (you could use veggie if you’re going vegetarian, but it won’t taste like restaurant egg drop soup)
4 eggs
1/4-1/2 tsp. sesame oil (to taste)
salt & pepper (to taste)
green onions (optional–I didn’t have any, so the soup went without)

Directions:

1. Bring chicken broth to a boil; add in sesame oil. Add salt and pepper to taste.

 

2. Crack eggs and gently break up the yolks with a fork (no vigorous beating, folks).

3. Turn down heat on the broth and slowly pour eggs into it, stirring in circles with a fork until the eggs are distributed in streamers through the soup. Top with green onions if desired.

In case you’re wondering about the rice wraps, these can be found at most major grocery stores (King Sooper’s or Kroger carries them) or at Asian markets.  They’re just sheets of dehydrated rice starch, but if you dip them in hot water and fill them with veggies or meat, they’re the perfect vehicle for a healthy and delicious meal!  We like to have hoisin sauce and plum sauce on hand (also easily found at major grocery stores) to add a little flavor.

Look for these–you can make spring rolls, or you can fill with meat, veggies, or tofu!

Some of our favorite fillings: cilantro, peppers, avocado, spinach, steamed veggies, or chicken.

Boil water in the kettle, pour into a bowl, and then dunk the rice sheets in–you don’t need to leave them in. Just a quick dip and then put it on your plate.

Pile on the fillings and fold two sides over, then roll the rest.

Ta da! Don’t forget to dip it in sauce!

Lauren: How to Freeze Cookie Dough for Later May 16, 2014

I’ve always felt a little leery of freezing things. I’m not sure why. I may have been traumatized as a child by eating bread that had been frozen; it just wasn’t the same, but frugal adults argued against my wise taste buds. But little by little, I’m overcoming my aversion to the freezer. (I even freeze my homemade bread now, but I always toast it, so I can’t taste the freezer taste. . .I know it’s there.)

Now I love having frozen cookie dough on hand. I make a double batch and hide the extra dough from my husband. He would eat it all. Seriously.

I cook one batch and freeze the other. Then I can pop a couple cookie dough balls in the oven whenever company stops by, when E. fills up a sticker chart, or on rainy days when I have two boys cooped up in the house. (The cookies are for me, not them. They don’t need any more energy.)

Not the prettiest cookies ever, but yummy

First, whip up a batch of your favorite cookies, scoop the cookie dough into an ice cube tray (one cookie per slot). Alternatively, you can place them on a cookie sheet and stick the whole thing in the freezer. My freezer is teeny tiny, so we use the ice cube tray method.

 

Let them harden in there for 24 hours and then scoop them out into a ziploc bag or other freezer storage container. As a side-note, I don’t recommend leaving them in the ice cube trays for weeks. They might get freezer burn and never get over it. Just saying.

Then any time the kids whine too much, you have an impromptu date night on the couch, or you just need an afternoon pick-me-up, throw a few, five or six, or, heck, a whole dozen if it’s been one of those days into the oven. You don’t have to defrost them or anything. Follow the recipe directions for time and oven temperature, but add a couple minutes onto the original cook time.

 

Last time I made these, I also rolled some into tiny balls to add into homemade ice cream sometime. I can’t wait to try it.

 

 

 

 

Lauren: Homemade Kettle Corn May 13, 2014

 

 

 

There’s one thing I can’t resist at the fair: kettle corn. You can have your caramel apple and your fried oreos, just give me the largest bag of kettle corn there is.

The reason I’m bringing up kettle corn is because I got ambushed by some the other day. I wasn’t at a fair, so it was quite unexpected. My four-year-old was running a race and there it was, calling to me with its sweet, sweet smell. I walked over “just to see” and then I remembered. It’s Eat-In May! Shootfire! as my friend Margaret would say. It would be eating out. So I didn’t buy any. Aren’t you proud? But I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I just kept thinking that I had to have some. . . so I gave in and made my own. I’m happy to report that it’s delicious and totally satisfied my craving!

Ingredients:

1/4 c. oil (I used coconut)

1/2 c. popcorn kernels (try to find non-GMO)

1/3 c. sugar

salt to taste

Directions: 

1. Add 1/4 c.  oil to a medium-sized sauce pot.

2. Add 3 kernels. Once they pop, you’ll know the oil is hot enough to add the rest. 

3. Add 1/2 cup of popcorn kernels. And then add 1/3 cup sugar.

 

4. Cover the pot with a lid. Don’t put it all the way down. Leave room for some steam to escape so the popcorn doesn’t become tough. And shake what your mama gave you. I mean, shake the pot so the popcorn on the bottom doesn’t burn. Continue until the popping slows down.

5. Transfer the popcorn onto a piece of parchment paper. Let it rest for a couple minutes so sugar will harden a bit and give the popcorn that delicious crunch.

 

6. Enjoy! Try not to eat it all in one sitting. I dare you.

 

 

Sarah: Week 3 Planning + Quick Veggie Chili May 12, 2014

Here’s the plan for the week, everyone!  The goal is quick and healthy with as much variety as possible (because we do eat leftovers for lunches, and there’s only so many times a month you can revisit the same meal!).

As a bonus: here’s my quick chili recipe, vegetarian, and ready in less than an hour.  Also–this is a super-mild chili recipe because I wanted to be sure Little Bear would eat it (she did…with her fingers).  I would normally have added a jalapeño into the sauté or added another 1/2-1 Tbsp. chili powder.  Also…I kind of think sweet potato would be amazingly delicious in here, but I had neither sweet potatoes nor the time to peel them.

Note: sometimes frozen/canned veggies are more tasty and healthier than eating off-season veggies, so it’s nice to have some recipes for not-so-fresh vegetables before the garden starts producing!

Quick Vegetarian Chili

It snowed today, yes, in May, so chili was good comfort food!

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic
1 red pepper, chopped
1 Tbsp. chili powder (give or take)
1 large (32 oz) can diced tomatoes
1 can black beans, drained/rinsed
1/2 package frozen corn
pinch of paprika
1/2-1 tsp. salt
a few squirts of ketchup, to taste

Directions:

1. Heat olive oil and sauté onion.  When translucent, add garlic and chili powder (sautéing spices gives them extra flavor).

2. Add in red pepper and sauté for another few minutes. At this point, I added about a cup of veggie broth because it was leftover in my fridge and would have gone bad this week and I just hate to waste things, don’t you?  But I don’t think the veggie broth was fully necessary, so you can omit as you see fit.

3. Pour in can of tomatoes (with all the juices), add the beans, and dump in the corn.

4. Put in the spices and a little ketchup, taste-testing as you go and adding more or less as needed.  Bring it to a boil and then turn down to simmer.

5.  The longer you simmer, the better the flavor, but I found that it took me less than 15 minutes to put it all together and that a 30-minute simmer was enough to make it decently good.  Also, serve with cheese on top, because everything’s better with cheese, right?

Sarah: Quick Beef Roast

A large bowl of shredded beef for only 5 minutes of work? Yes, please!

This recipe is a gem: fast, easy, delicious, and very few ingredients.  We made it last Wednesday, and it fed three adults and one pint-sized human for dinner, and then it fed me for lunch the next day, and then it filled burritos on Friday night for two adults and a young’un.  I can’t recommend a recipe any more highly than that!

The original recipe called for 1 c. of ketchup, but that seemed both expensive (that’s somewhere around half a bottle!) and too sweet, so I altered it a bit and added some spices.  You could probably double the spices, the brown sugar, and the tomato paste and skip the ketchup entirely if you were so inclined.

You could also probably skip the onions, but I thought it made a nice additional topping to the sloppy joes.

Seriously, this took me 5 minutes to make, and it gave us two dinners.  That’s a pretty good return on investment!

Bonus meal starter for a different night!

 

 

Ingredients:

beef roast (I just used a basic chuck roast)
1/2-1 onion, cut into rings
1/2 c. apple cider vinegar
1/4 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. ketchup
1 small can (6 oz) tomato paste
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. onion powder
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
2 c. broth (any kind will do, though I used some of the Leftover Veggie Broth I had frozen)

Directions:

1. Place beef in crock pot.
2. Place onion rings around and over the beef
3. In a small bowl, whisk together vinegar, sugar, ketchup, tomato paste, salt, onion powder, and garlic powder.
4. Pour the mixture over top of the beef and onions.
5. Pour broth over top of all of it.
6. Cook on low 6-8 hours.

We ate it on hamburger buns with a little BBQ sauce like a sloppy joe.  We also later ate it in burritos (just add a smudge of taco seasoning when you reheat).  You could make it over mashed potatoes or to go with veggies.  I like versatility; it helps you use up leftovers!

Also…if you’re being super thrifty, don’t throw away the soupy sludge at the bottom of the crockpot.  The tomato-y beef broth would make the perfect starter for veggie beef soup or, perhaps, for a minestrone!  I froze the stuff left in my crockpot, and it probably equalled about 2 cups.

Leave that restaurant table empty! You’ve got a date with some fruits and veggies.