Pretty low effort dinner tonight. Pasta salad, and the salad dressing was just combining a baggie of oregano oil, a stick of honey, and a squirt of lemon. I knew we’d need a quick meal option this week so I opted for having a ”picknic meal” added to our 4-dinner plan.
Work is a bit nuts so having ingredients and recepies delivered is a game changer in getting us fed.
I cooked some more pasta for my lunches and it worked ok despite not being able to double the dressing.
Woot! Freezing grapefruit rind works. I have been trying to find a way to store these easily, and the fridge…not too great, 
. I’ve had these ones in the freezer for about a week and a half so far.
Whatcha doin with those?
I freeze a lot of things - ginger stays fresh & is easier to grate. Bread gluten starts to break down when toasted so sliced loaves get frozen. Most cheeses. Fresh herbs mashed in oil. Hummus/bean dips. Concentrated broth. Cooked bases like onion-celery-garlic or mushroom-peppers.
The freezer is such a great tool for preserving & prep.
Mostly smoothies, but I’ve used them in gnocchi and noodles, too. (But still, my taste and smell is terribly erratic, things that shouldn’t taste good, do, heh).
OH MY WORD! [Smacks self on forhead] why on Earth have I not thought about doing this? Yeesh! heh, I have refrained from a lot of recipes because I don’t want to waste them…Oh for Pete’s sake. [Smacks self on forehead again…now I got a headache, 
]
[Mental note to self]. For some reason I don’t think of anything other than candying them to get them to last, but that’s just way too much sugar for my liking.
Interesting! I don’t eat grapefruit anymore since I think it interacts with one or more of my medicines. I’m sure I checked at some point… But it interacts with a lot of things so fair guess is I should keep avoiding it, heh…
My delicious ”problem” is this:
It has begun… lots of beans in our diet from now on!
Those freeze well too! Slightly blanched to enhance colour & texture.
We do that with kale, it’s so easy to grab the baggy & crumble a handful of it at the end of cooking so many things.
I too dislike waste but that includes wasting my cooking time with batches that one serve one meal. I tend to cook for hoards so freezing is a must. Cooked beans are just fine frozen & bean dips labour intensive, especially if using dried legumes. Pressure cooked, mashed, portioned & frozen. I can make hummus once every 2 months & have enough to eat it every day.
Some of the beans are in the freezer and some are eaten. I’m very happy with the heritage variety of green beans, super tasty! They might be a bit mushy once thawed since I cooked them to be able to eat some too. Oh, well.
The snowpeas are nice, also a heritage variety. I mostly snack on them raw to be honest. The runner beans are… meh. They have pretty flowers and pretty seeds/beans. I’ll stick to the green beans for cooking the entire pod. The runner beans are slightly better as mature beans I think.
If soft when thawed they would be perfect for soup/stew tossed in at the end of cooking just to warm them up. I honestly love veggies in any form, lightly steamed or many of them are just as good cooked to utter mush.
Oki made a large batch of hummus, and thanks to @Magpie for jostling this addled brain, I’ll put two into the freezer. And the two bowls are small enough I’ll be able to put them into a pyrex bowl and heat them up quickly without having to wait or melt the plastic bowls.
The flatbread is my pretzel dough recipe fried in butter on the skillet. they’re what I’ll use with the hummus.
And here is tonights ready to eat. Cinnamon, anise, and nutmeg in a little sunflower oil, and my erratic taste thinks it’s just fine, heh.
Oh yeah, that works quite well.
For this batch, I fried some corn and jalopenos in a little sunflower oil for the topping. (My best one yet. Though, I should have thawed and dried the jalos and corn first…KABOOM, ).
And my widdle spoon is still quite handy, heh.
That looks excellent!
I had a rare and complete FAIL this week. The CSA gave me more eggplant, so on Monday I tried making a nearly identical curry to the one I made last week. I just swapped the chickpeas for chopped chicken breast and added a handful of leftover kale. I sautéed the aromatics, then the spices to bloom them, in the bottom of the Instant Pot, then I carefully deglazed, and set it to pressure cook for 7 minutes, with a 10 minute natural release, and then to ‘Keep Warm’ for a few hours. I then proceeded to do more chores around my kitchen and laundry room, leaving it to do its thing, much like I would the crockpot. Unfortunately this did not go as well as it would with a crockpot…
Apparently the Instant Pot didn’t seal for some reason, so it was unable to come to pressure. But it kept trying to get to pressure, by continuing to cook on high. This meant that the liquid boiled, and boiled, and boiled. Until the point that there wasn’t enough liquid in the pot, and it started to scorch. Then the Instant Pot thankfully turned off its own heat, and put up an error message, which I noticed about an hour or so later. The chicken breast became wayyyy overcooked, and hard as a rock, so there was really no saving the curry. I ended up cooking some frozen chicken tenders and zucchini fries in the Air Fryer, and turning them into Chicken Parm sandwiches with some leftover Kaiser rolls. I was able to reuse the rice that I had going in the rice cooker, to make fried rice the next night.
I like many of the dishes I’ve made in my Instant Pot, but this is the second time it hasn’t sealed, and has led to a dinner disaster. It really pissed me off to dump $15 worth of ingredients.
Yikes! Well, I have had my fail as well…though, luckily I could still salvage it.
I saw a vid on making macaroni noodles by hand…Well, that did not go as I saw…
The initial rolling with the dowel went quite well…
buuuuut only the initial rolling. They all stuck to the dowel like glue. Neither oil nor flour would keep them from sticking to the dowel…yeeesh!
So I just went into using my mulberry noodle smoosher and made occ…i forgot what they’re called…Eh, shell noodles…basically, heh. (Well, some. Leg started hurting too much, so had to put the left over ball in the fridge and I had to lay down).
Oof! Just too sore, so I just made them rather basic, and a little thicker than I wanted. Well, since this GERD or whatever is finally letting me eat a little more normal now, I can use them with a cheese sauce. (Well, depends if my legs let me, )
Made an oat bread, and all I can taste is the sugar. Yeesh! Well, that and a hint of the butter with the last bite. Man, I want to taste it, heh.
And my main goal for making the loaf of bread.
And I was afraid the cracking was a bad omen, and it was. The bottom isn’t cooked all the way. Welp, I guess a few minutes extra at 350…i hope it will come out fine without being baked upside down, and without a water bath…
Yep! 21 minutes finished it. (Funny, can’t taste the sugar, but it is sure upsetting my stomach, ).
Edel spent a bready baking morning with Rob & I in her kitchen showing us a few of her tasty floury staples. Our first morning back, Rob mixed up some soda farl. It’s got a nice rise on it, looks fluffy already!
I’m working on making some big recipes, as freezer meals. Our neighbors are expecting a second daughter in early October, so a bunch will go to them.
Last weekend I made a huge pork loin into carnitas and pulled pork, for a house full of guests. We ate a lot, but I managed to freeze 3 dinners worth for future tacos, and 4 containers of roasted tomatillo salsa verde to go with them.
I also used up all the CSA basil with a batch of vegan walnut pesto, frozen into 3 single-dinner sizes.
Then this weekend I did an enormous batch of Bolognese sauce, with a mix of ground beef and Italian sausage. It filled 2 crockpots yesterday, and made the house smell heavenly. I kinda wish I had more small containers to freeze it in. These are pretty big. About 4 cups of sauce each. I might divide some up into smaller freezer bags, but these were what I had on hand last night when I needed to get things into the fridge.
Looks yummy and what a great time saver having things on hand!
Have you thought about getting one of those sealing things for food? I got a very inexpensive one on Amazon and was surprised at how often I have used it.
I made a larger batch of this recipe last night. (The blog is dedicated to the art of cooking for one, and I was feeding a few more people.) I used 2 cans of white beans, chicken bullion for the water, and mozzarella instead of feta, because that’s what I had on hand. And I added a small diced onion, a medium zucchini, and 1-2 tsp of za’atar seasoning into the cooking shakshuka. When I dished it up, I drizzled on a teaspoon of a Moroccan seasoning-in-oil blend. (Think Chili Crisp, but Morrocan flavors. It was awesome. Definitely going to make it again soon. My batch fed three adults and a toddler for dinner last night, and an extra serving for me for lunch today.
This looks great. Thanks for posting it.
