Day 29: List

April 29, 2020Leave a comment

Crust
Tomato sauce
Cheese
Pepperoni
Green onions
Parsley

It’s a short list, but it’s mighty tasty when you put all those things together. The above list, of course, is a list of ingredients for my favorite pizza. Bubbles had asked me to fix it for supper last night, but the local grocery store was fresh out of the necessary ingredients, so I made a trip to town this morning to pick up what I needed—and milk, because we always need milk—and we had it for dinner this noon instead.

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It’s a really simple recipe. To start with, you prepare the crust according to the package directions. Once you have the crust prepped, prick the heck out of it with a fork and bake it for five minutes at 350°.

Next, add your sauce and toppings. I used pepperoni, green onions, fresh parsley, and colby jack cheese, though usually I use a cheddar/mozzarella blend. I like to add a few more of the toppings on top of the cheese as a garnish. Finally, bake the pizza for 20 minutes at 350° (or bake at 450° for 10 minutes, which is how I did it today).

What kind of pizza is your favorite?

Day 5: Dish

April 5, 2020April 9, 20202 Comments

I find myself returning to comfort food lately. So far, I’ve fixed French onion soup, chicken and rice, and tuna casserole, and chili and cornbread. Seymour fixed goulash a while back, as well as his favorite dish of chicken, noodles, and potatoes. Friday’s menu will involve tuna apple salad, because it’s Friday and also because the boys have been asking for it a lot lately (and it has been a while since I’ve made it).

If you’re like me the first time I heard of this dish, you’re probably making a skeptical face. That or you’re actively saying, “Eww, gross!” And believe me, I get it. It sounds like it should taste horrible.

But it doesn’t.

If you’re looking to try something new, then keep reading!

Adventures in the kitchen, part 2

March 22, 2020March 21, 20201 Comment

In addition to French onion soup, I spent a little time in the kitchen last weekend trying to make a strawberry rhubarb pie, which is a family favorite. But I depleted my stash of frozen rhubarb a couple summers ago and I’m not sure I’ll be able to harvest any this year, since we transplanted our rhubarb over the summer and I’m just hoping it’ll come back.

But then one day as I was wandering the aisles of my local grocery store, I happened upon a can of strawberry rhubarb pie filling. I’d never seen such a thing before! Naturally, I had to buy a can to find out what it was like.

I dug a box of pie crust out of my deep freeze and set it on the counter to thaw while I got dinner going. Once the dinner dishes were done, I set out to make my pie, with a little help from Bubbles.

Apparently, though, I should have…

Adventures in the kitchen

March 21, 2020March 21, 20202 Comments

So what do you do when you can’t go out and do the normal things you would do on a Friday night? Well I don’t know about all of you, but I tried out a new recipe, and boy, are my feet sore!

(Tile floors + thin slippers with no support + a long night = very sore feet.)

I absolutely adore Panera’s French onion soup, and there was recently a recipe for said soup included in one of the New York Times newsletters I receive. I bought most of the ingredients earlier in the week, but I didn’t get a chance to try it out until last night.

The recipe…is behind the cut!

Edible improv?

July 13, 2017July 25, 2017Leave a comment

We’ve been in a food rut lately, so the other night we decided to improvise an old favorite. Cheeseburger pie is one of my – and my family’s – favorite recipes, yet we hadn’t had it in a very long time, probably because it takes somewhat longer than Hamburger Helper, another family favorite.

The way I fix it is already an improvisation of the original recipe, which comes from the cookbook created by my seventh grade class some twenty years ago (Thanks, Mrs. Dunham!) as part of a semester-long enrichment class. The original recipe calls for a flour crust but, try as I might, I was never able to get the crust to come out well. Instead of being tasty and delicious, it was always solid as a rock and just about as flavorful, so I switched to using a Peter Pan pizza crust mix (which is probably literally the same as just making a flour crust, except for the part where it turns out to be edible when I fix it). I also add way more cheese than the recipe calls for, because there’s nothing better than a great big cheesy cheeseburger, am I right?

Of course I’m right. 😀

The original recipe:

Photo 365 #282

May 16, 20152 Comments

I spent yesterday afternoon picking, washing, and chopping rhubarb. I picked so much rhubarb, in fact, that I didn’t even come close to chopping it all, but I did manage a fine pot of strawberry rhubarb sauce for supper, so there’s that.

Today, I thought I’d share my recipe. I even remembered to take pictures last night while I worked! FYI, those are the prettiest strawberries I’ve seen in ages. Yum.

Strawberry Rhubarb Sauce

6 qts. rhubarb, washed and chopped
2 lbs. strawberries, chopped
3 c. sugar

Wash and chop fruit. Combine in large pot. Add sugar and mix well. Let simmer on medium low heat till fruit reaches desired tenderness; let cool. Serve alone or over ice cream.

Note: I started with two cups of sugar, but added a third later. If you have more strawberries, that adds to the sweetness, so then you might not need as much sugar. I let my sauce simmer around two hours, and pulled it off the heat when it started to froth. You can run it through a blender if you like it smooth, but I like mine chunky, so I didn’t. Once cooled, this makes a thicker sauce, which my family likes. Adding water thins it out.

Photo 365 #131

December 16, 2014December 17, 20144 Comments

It’s hard to beat a sweet treat every now and then:

bananaslices

One of my favorite treats as a kid was sliced bananas with sugar (or sprinkles – sprinkles are always good, too), so when Seymour brought home a couple of green bunches last week, I couldn’t wait to dig in. But then, of course, we headed out to the hospital before they’d ripened, and before I knew it they were starting to spot.

So this morning, I dug in. And they tasted every bit as sweet as I could have hoped. You slice up the bananas into a bowl, sprinkle a quantity of sugar over them, then stir it all up. The sugar and the banana secretions (for lack of a better word) combine to form a syrup, and it’s a little bowl of heaven.

What are some of your favorite childhood treats?

Photo 365 #78: Recipe time!

October 24, 2014October 22, 201412 Comments

The other night I whipped out one of my mom’s old recipes for supper. I hadn’t made it in ages, and it just sounded good. Something about this time of year makes me long for childhood classics: hearty soups, savory casseroles, and the like.

The title on the top of the recipe card is “Help for Hamburger,” but growing up, we never called it that. We called it what it was – Hamburger and Rice.

I can hear it now – what’s so comforting about something so bland?

Well, dear readers, this dish is anything BUT bland. Check it out:

hamburgerrice Help for Hamburger (aka Hamburger and Rice)

1 lb. ground beef
2 Tbs. onion flakes
2 1/2 c. minute rice
3 1/3 c. water
1/4 c. soy sauce
Salt to taste

Brown hamburger together with onion flakes; drain. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Boil together 10-15 minutes.

It’s simple, warm, filling, and delicious. I doubled the recipe and ended up with lots of leftovers, but that’s okay with me. 🙂

What are some of your favorite childhood recipes?

Freeze!

August 6, 201411 Comments

*yawn*

*blink blink*

*chugs two gallons of strong coffee*

Wow! Well, that’s a little better. After yesterday, I’m exhausted. It seems like every time I have a day or two off of work, I need a day or two to recover. Vacation can be exhausting, but this summer, I haven’t been able to go on vacation, and it’s been equally exhausting.

IMG_20140805_150429 Yesterday I froze corn, something I’ve only attempted as an adult once up to now. It was bad. I found my grandma’s recipe, then promptly misread it, and the results were terrible. But we received a boatload of fresh sweet corn over the weekend and had to do something with it, so yesterday I tracked down my grandma’s recipe again, determined to have better results this time.

I’m happy to say I got what I wanted. I’m even happier to say that I’m done freezing corn (for a while, anyway).

I posted a few shots of my progress on Instagram throughout the day yesterday, but it was after 11:00 p.m. last night before we were finally finished – it would have been much later without the help of my wonderful family. When I was a kid, my mom’s family always used to freeze corn together – we shucked and cut the corn outside (this keeps the mess down, and I really wish I’d done the same thing yesterday), then cooked it inside. It was always a big day – Grandpa always had a truckload of corn to freeze. One of my favorite corn-freezing stories involved my great-grandma. I have no idea if I was present at the time this particular incident occurred (she died when I was four), but I get a kick out of the story regardless. Anyway, it was corn-freezing day…

Lemon delight

July 13, 2014July 14, 20144 Comments

So the other night, I tried a new recipe. I don’t normally care for a lot of lemon things, but the rest of my family ADORE all things lemon. I thought this lemon bread would be a hit for supper (we wanted to keep it light that night), and I couldn’t have been more right. As a matter of fact, it was an even bigger hit the next day.

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