Zucchini

There are delicious foods in the world that do not photograph well in spite of what your Facebook and Instagram friends may think.

This would be one of them.

::cue Law & Order intro::

It's based off a dish my dad used to cook all the time when I was a kid, except his version is vegetarian, everything is made from scratch with fresh ingredients, and he loads it with something like two sticks of butter, which the dish (and more specifically, my version) doesn't need.

Ground beef
Chopped onion
Garlic
Zucchini, sliced not too thin
Sliced mushrooms
1 can diced tomatoes
1 jar spaghetti sauce
Herbs of your choosing
Huge bag of mozzarella cheese

Brown the beef, drain, set aside.

Same pan, in a bit of olive oil or butter, sautee onion (~1/4) until translucent. Add one or two crushed cloves of garlic and cook for a minute or two. Add well-drained can of tomatoes (I used one that had oregano and basil) and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring and crushing the tomato bits as much as you can with the spoon. Add spaghetti sauce (how big the jar depends on how much beef you have and how thick you want the sauce to be), simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Here's where you would add herbs/spices - I used oregano, parsley, a bit of fresh grated ginger... if I lived with culinary thrill-seekers I might have added a small can of chipotles (or chipotle powder.) I would also suggest adding about a teaspoon of sugar or so.

Remove from stove, stir in ground beef. In a greased pan, layer slices of zucchini and mushrooms with a layer of the beef sauce, and a layer of shredded mozzarella; keep layering until you reach the top of your pan (finishing with cheese.) Bake at 425F for 25-30 minutes or until cheese turns golden. Let rest for 5+ minutes so the juices settle before you dig in.

You can't cut into this like you would lasagna. This is a messy dish, and there will be trails of cheese following your ladle and getting all over the outside of your bowl (don't even think of putting this on a flat plate.)

I made this a few hours in advance, so I had to put it in the fridge and it was cold when it went in the oven; so I baked it at 350F for 10 minutes covered in foil before cranking it to 425 and baking uncovered for another 25.

Tuna patties

Where I come from this would be a more complicated process involving boiling potatoes, cutting them, making a mash out of them with a decent flavor, and all that before you can even START making the dish itself.
I make the pantry version because it's quicker.

1 pouch instant mashed potatoes (there's a variety of flavors, pick any one you like)
Canned tuna (I use 4 small ones because that's usually what's in my pantry. You could get a big can, I guess)
1 egg
Bread crumbs
Crushed garlic
Parsley (FRESH parsley changes the flavor of these things tremendously, but I don't have any. =( )
White pepper
Olive oil

Preheat oven, 400F.

Make the mashed potatoes following the directions on the package. Mix in the garlic (as much as you want), bread crumbs, parsley, and white pepper. Set aside to cool a bit while you drain the tuna.

Add the tuna BEFORE adding the egg, because those potatoes retain heat well and you don't want scrambled egg in your mix.

Make patties in whatever shape or size you desire, brush some olive oil on both sides, and set on a cookie sheet. Top rack, 400F for about 15 minutes (they'll start looking a bit dry), then flip them, turn oven down to 375F, and give them another 15-20 minutes.

This would make about 12 decent patties, but I skimped a bit and they ended up being 13, so I didn't have room for that last one on the cookie sheet. I made it in the toaster oven and it came out crispier and more golden than the others (which I kinda liked better, personally).

You can eat these in sandwiches if you'd like. I prefer them over lime juice-sprinkled iceberg lettuce. They taste like summer to me and my 9-year-old loves them.

(I also put some grated ginger in them to appease my ginger fixation. The child did not notice and I didn't feel the need to fill her in)

Son of the Return of the Freezer Revenge: The Stir Fry

So then I made that Stir Fry.

I have a bottle of Chile de Arbol oil that was a byproduct of making an insanely spicy salsa (by my standards. Meaning, not very spicy at all). The oil itself can't be considered a culinary weapon, but it does add a zing to dishes that is more flavor than heat. I'll try to post a recipe of that salsa the next time I find myself making it. It's really good, actually.

This is the oil that I used to sear the stir fry beef. Set aside, add a bit more oil, saute the carrot/celery/onion blend.

Added a bag of stir fry veggies that I happened to have in The Freezer, cooked over medium-high heat for about 6 minutes, added the beef back to the pan. Gave it a couple of sprinkles of soy sauce and a good swirl of stir-fry sauce (thereby winning this entry a place in the "faking it" tag, but that sauce is pretty good!), cooked it for a minute or so longer, served over rice.

Not including prep time from earlier today (making the rice, sucker-punching vegetables, etcetera), this meal was put together in about 20 minutes. The 7 year-old ate a huge bowl of it, so I'm going to call it a success.



PS-You know what would have been awesome here and I didn't even think about? GINGER.

Tuna Ring, in which my ability to speak English deserts me

It's Friday.

I don't observe Lent, but it does give me an excuse to make some people around here eat fish.

There's a delicious abomination called a Taco Ring, you may have heard of it or even eaten it before. It involves croissant dough, ground meat, taco seasoning and a metric ton of CHEESE. It's pretty awesome, really, but I always feel like such a phony Mexican when I make it, because, seriously, taco seasoning??

Anyway, as I said, it's Friday. No meat for J today. We IMPROVISE around these parts.

Tuna Ring
Croissant rolls dough
Canned tuna (I used a 12oz can)
1 metric ton of shredded cheese
1 egg
Bread crumbs (what, about 2 tbs.? Give or take?)
Finely chopped parsley
Sprinkle of ground ginger
Sprinkle of garlic powder (which I hate, but this was a lazy, fakin'-it sort of meal)
Annnnnnnnnd...
Mashed potatoes. Again, I'm going half-ass on this, so I used instant. This was about making a Really Quick meal, not a gourmet one, bear with me.

Preheat oven, 375 degrees.

Drain tuna, mix with everything else.

Lay out the croissant triangles on an ungreased cookie sheet so they make this circle thing. It's a tricky thing, and I'm sure a masters degree in applied geometry would help make this easier, but do the best you can. Spoon the tuna mush onto it and fold the dough over it so that you end up with an actual ring. I could have taken pictures, but didn't. What. I'm just going to use pictures other people have successfully taken of a taco ring.


My croissant circle of doom never looks that cool.

Bake according to the directions on the dough can, usually 12 or so minutes at 375 degrees or until a nice, golden brown.

Mind you, this is what/how much I made. Yeah, after piling up all that tuna and the mashed potatoes and ALL THAT CHEESE, it was almost too much for just one can of croissants. And maybe my little circle of death would've looked much neater if I'd used two, but it worked out.

If I'd wanted to spend more time on this thing, I may have used roasted (or super finely chopped fresh) garlic, fresh grated ginger, maybe some steamed spinach. I'm kinda feeling some chopped green olives, here, or jalapeno.

Maybe next time.

Chicken and rice

I have a thing for roasted chicken, and it borders on "unhealthy obsession."
Roasted chicken is pretty much perfect. A whole chicken costs barely more than a sub, and you can get something like 3-4 meals out of it (more like 2 meals for me, because, seriously, I LOVE roasted chicken).
We went to Kroger tonight and they had this huge 16-piece chicken thing for 8 bucks. Add to this the recent acquisition of a toaster oven, and dinner was on its way.
Chicken was baked for about 23 minutes at 325F (so the package instructed), and while that was happening I made some white rice with frozen corn thrown in. Since both of these things sort of cook themselves, I busied myself with making an onion cream sauce.

There are things I keep in my freezer to make lazy meals even easier than they already are. For example, I love parsley with a passion, but I never use an entire bunch before it starts going bad. So I dry it up as much as possible using paper towels, then finely chop it, blot out more moisture, and then store it in an airtight container in the freezer. When I need some, I bang the container on the counter a few times, shake it up, and it goes straight into whatever I'm cooking. Better than dried parsley.
(I also do this with cilantro)

Another thing I keep in the freezer is cubes of chicken or beef broth. The chicken ones are usually a result of a roasted chicken binge, when I take all the meat off the bones for the 2 picky eaters in the household, throw the bones in a pot with whatever peels/stems/leaves I have leftover when cleaning up vegetables for storage, and simmer over low heat for about an hour. The beef ones happen as a side effect of shredded meat for flautas or salpicon (which I'll probably post about eventually, but tonight is not the night).
I have 2 ice trays specifically for the purpose of freezing broth.

So, this onion cream sauce.
(I may or may not also have a thing for cream of-'s)
Roux drill - melt about a tablespoon of butter over low heat, add equal amount of flour and whisk until it dissolves, allow to cook for a bit until thick.
Then I started playing with it--added some milk... a few beef broth ice cubes, about half an envelope of onion soup/dip mix, some parsley from the freezer, some thyme (chicken + thyme = OTP). I just messed with it until it was the consistency and amount that I wanted.


I wish the end result had looked as pretty as it was tasty. For a half-assed meal thrown together out of things in my pantry/freezer and an impulse buy at Kroger, it was much better than it had any right to be.