Showing posts with label creative cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative cooking. Show all posts

Friday, May 20, 2016

Old Mother Hubbard Says It's Time to Go Grocery Shopping

A sweet potato and a few onions...
By Angie Quantrell @AngieQuantrell

You do know the nursery rhyme about Old Mother Hubbard, right?

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor doggy a bone.

When she got there,
The cupboard was bare,
So the poor little doggy had none.

Presenting, on life's stage, Old Mother Hubbard.
Played by Angie.

Seriously.

Old Mother Hubbard needs to go shopping for groceries. Now.

I resist grocery shopping. I don't know why. I will scrounge, create, and do everything I can to make it last just one more day. All to avoid grocery shopping.

Maybe it's the lines, the crowds, the cost, the forgetting something on the opposite end of the store and making repeat trips, the foraging through produce to find the freshest, the struggle to open produce bags, touching raw meat packages...

Probably it's the having to take it all home and put it away.

But I so love having food to use when I prepare meals!

We are down to wilted celery, one sweet potato, a few onions, and garlic. Oh, I think there may be a dried up bit of ginger hanging around as well and some frozen peas and corn. Almost out of milk, yogurt, and bread.

Two pieces of frozen salmon and one package of frozen ground turkey make up the protein portion of our diet (per what is in the fridge/pantry/cupboard). I suppose I could count the canned chicken and tuna.

Well, that sounds like I have plenty for another day of Grocery Store Avoidance.

Yippee!


Frozen Food Tip:
Guess what?! The package directions actually work for frozen brussel sprouts! I've never even glanced at the directions, but did so last night on a whim. You can MICROWAVE the entire package - and they come out perfectly moist and not soggy and gross!

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Roasted Red Pepper Ragout?


Saw this easy and excellent recipe in the current issue of Martha (May, 2014).

But there must be something wrong with me. I CANNOT just follow a recipe. Seriously. I am always adding, guessing, tweaking. So what she had planned for easy dinner, I totally changed. Ok, a few items were the same.

Suggested items that I actually used (but my own measurements of everything - estimations really):

~ white beans, roasted red peppers, chicken broth, olive oil, crushed red peppers, garlic, polenta

What I made was actually not even close to the original recipe. Forget the ragout. It was a thick soup spooned on top of polenta. Served with a side of roasted asparagus.

What I added:
~ cannellini beans (rinsed); the entire jar of rinsed, diced red peppers; 2 diced carrots; a diced onion; 6 cups of chicken broth for the soup (no ragout for me) and 2 more for the polenta; chopped cabbage; 4 stalks of kale, stem removed and chopped; 1 can of diced tomatoes (not rinsed) and hominy (rinsed); fresh parsley; fire roasted green chillies; about 2 cups of turkey; a splash of Mrs. Dash; fresh ground black pepper; some cayenne; a bit of cumin and oregano

This was a very delicious NOT RAGOUT recipe. :)

Just wished I had low sodium broth as the recipe suggested. And celery.

And for once, that I could follow a recipe as written.