Weekend breakfasts are best

Saturday morning Scott and I stumbled upstairs around 7, which is really 'sleeping in' for us, and I set about getting something together for breakfast. I love making egg dishes in the skillet, because it's a chance to use up a lot of the little containers of leftover odds and ends that tend to collect in my refrigerator. In the skillet above it was onions, a few strips of bacon, some ham and half a can of mushrooms. I started with the onions and gradually added the other ingredients in their cooking order so they were nice and sauteed and flavorful before I added the egg mixture.

The egg mixture consisted of about four eggs - one of them was leftover in a container, a failed attempt at separating an egg for another recipe. Add to that a splash of milk and some salt and pepper.

Pour the egg mixture over the vegetables, with the skillet over medium heat, and let it set up for about 30 seconds before beginning to stir and scramble.

Keep scrambling until the eggs are set up, but be careful not to overcook, or the eggs will 'weep,' and you'll end up with water in your scrambled egg dish.

The staples that must always be in my refrigerator are fresh vegetables and lots of dairy in several forms, and one thing we never run out of is cheese. I used to buy pre-grated cheese, but then saw the light of how much better freshly-grated cheese is. It's so much softer and lighter and fluffier, and it really is worth the extra work of grating it. Usually I grate a little extra so we have some on hand in a container for salads, soups or whatever else. On Saturday morning it was a topping for the eggs.

It was Scott's idea to put the egg mixture on leftover tortillas from the Mexican restaurant the night before. I had fixed this plate for him and given it to him before I remembered to take a picture, and thus the first tortilla was half-way to his mouth when I made him pause for a photo. :-) He says I take too many pictures. I tell him it's digital - there's no such thing as too many pictures!!

Chicken and Biscuit Pot Pie

Yes, I broke down and cooked a chicken-based dish for dinner last night.

It's like this: my refrigerator had frozen a nearly-new bunch of celery, and I couldn't bear to throw the whole thing away, so the easiest way to use it up was in a baked dish or soup. That, and I'd had the canned chicken in my cupboard for some time and wanted to get it out of there. I decided to try canned chicken instead of keeping frozen chicken breasts because with all of our beef, pork and wild game  I don't have much extra freezer space, especially for poultry, and canned chicken just seemed a like an easier way to go, rather than thawing, cubing and cooking frozen chicken breasts.

Turns out, the canned chicken worked just fine, and it was quick and mess-free. For as rarely as I use chicken, in the future I'll probably use cans again for my next chicken dish in 10 months so I don't have to keep a bulk bag in my freezer.

So this is the canned chicken after I'd given it time to brown in the skillet. It looked good, and tasted good, too, no weird textures or funky tastes.

Any recipe that begins with a big pile of fresh vegetables is bound to be good. I salvaged what I could of the non-frozen celery. My '100 best foods to eat for pregnancy' book says that celery is a very good thing to eat while pregnant, as it contributes to skin health and your skin's ability to remain elastic through the whole ordeal.

The book also recommends chocolate milk. :-)

After cooking the onion, celery and carrots in olive oil for a few minutes I added fresh minced garlic and green beans from the freezer.

The vegetables also later had milk and broth added to them, as well as some flour. This was a 'healthy' version of chicken pot pie by Ellie Kreiger from Food Network, and to make it even healthier I think you could easily get away without adding the flour. It ended up pretty thick with the flour, so even reducing it would make the dish lighter.

After everything was mixed and heated in the skillet I added it to my red cast iron casserole dish which has been coming in quite handy lately.

As the vegetables were heating and simmering I had put together the whole wheat biscuit batter for the topping. It turned out pretty thin, and didn't hold its shape very well, so next time I would add some more flour so it looks more biscuit-y and less gloppy.

But, gloppy biscuits and all, it turned out great and was a nice, quick and easy dinner to have on a weeknight - it probably only took me an hour, tops, from start to finish, and that included cleaning and dicing the vegetables.

Here's the link to Food Network.

it's all a part of going on vacation

yep, that's right, cleaning out the fridge, in preparation of being gone for a week to oregon. last night was one of those dinners where i pulled all the various ingredients out of the fridge, put them together and made them work. that's also how i tend to decorate my house, and somehow it all works out ok in the end. :-)

these are a few of the ingredients i started out with - zucchini and yellow squash brought from iowa by my mom last weekend, steaks leftover from a dinner with the parents and the remaining block of a package of sharp cheddar cheese.

some of the zucchini rounds were rather large, and i should have quartered them to cook more evenly with the smaller yellow squash rounds. frying zucchini is very simple but so amazingly delicious - melt a good chunk of butter in the skillet, add the zucchini, flip around once, sprinkle with a good dash of salt, then just keep frying on medium heat until the slices are nice and golden brown. that's it - no need to get all fussy!

this is about the stage at which i add the salt. roasting in the oven or on the grill with olive oil and salt also works great, but takes longer, and the stovetop is the simplest version.

there was more steak than this to begin with, but several cubes were eaten before they made it to the skillet phase of dinner. :-) since they were pretty cold from being in the fridge, i heated them first.

then added some leftover chopped red onion. red onion is one of my staples - i always have a few on hand, and preferably pre-chopped and waiting in the fridge for just such applications.

i gained a dozen ranch eggs from ranch wife jo keith earlier this week. since they're pretty small, i used three. and - you guessed it - leftover cream that i'd like to use up before i leave.

add the egg and leftover chopped green onion to the skillet with the steak and red onion. cook over medium to medium-low heat until the eggs are set up, stirring the whole thing to scramble it.

by this time the squash was lookin pretty good, and warranted a fork to grab a few to eat immediately.

and it didn't take but a few minutes for the steak scramble to finish up, and i added the grated cheddar to the pot to melt a little.

and there you have it - easy wednesday dinner while cleaning out the fridge. so, tonight go open up your fridge and use up some of those ingredients that may be beginning think they're a permanent resident. :-)

using up ingredients

last night i cooked again, after cleaning out the fridge and rearranging the shelves to make more efficient use of the space. my new resolve is to use all my purchased fresh ingredients before they go bad, so that meant i needed to cook two recipes last night, one of which was my standby favorite, snow pea stir fry. it used the fresh snow peas and mushrooms. this is all the ingredients you need to make a delicious side dish.

here it is all finished, toasted almonds get the snow peas and mushrooms added to them, then the cornstarch/soy sauce/chicken bouillon sauce, then just let it simmer a few minutes until it thickens a little.

since the snow peas were an old favorite, the other recipe i made was a new experiment. here's the cooked brown rice and a pound of rough chopped tomatoes, ready for the dressing.

the dressing was simple -  rice vinegar, olive oil and some pepper.

then you add chopped fresh basil - i had purchased some, and was determined it would not go to waste. my basil plants in my herb garden are done for the summer.

when this was all finished and i tasted some i wasn't so sure about it, but scott loved it. if you like vinaigrettes, this one's for you. it took me a little while to warm up to it, but i liked it, and i think it'll be better after the flavors have had time to marry in the fridge.

in this one i also added in green onion, since i had some of that in my vegetable drawer to use.

here's the link to the food network recipe: brown rice with tomatoes and basil.

summer suppers

last week we had several afternoon storms go through. one of them was pretty big and black and windy, but the nice part was when the clouds moved off and the sun came out it was 20 or so degrees cooler.

so that was the evening i was brave enough to turn on my oven, and the three things i made that evening all took their turn.

the first of them was the 'beer bread in a bottle' that coworker curt gave me at my housewarming. as we had plenty of bud light leftover from that same party - turns out coors light was the preferred by just about everyone - i used a can of that.

you simply dump the cry mix out of the bottle, pour in a can of beer, mix well, put in a greased bread pan and pop in the oven. and boy, was it ever good! very light and soft and moist, great texture, and it didn't last long around the house. and no yeast to mess with! i'm a believer in this product now.

in my fridge i also had a package of ground beef languishing, in need of a recipe to use it up. something besides hamburgers. i went to an old stand-by from a beef checkoff recipe booklet, 'greek meatball subs with cucumber-yogurt sauce.' i've made the whole thing before, and they are really good with the sauce, but i lacked the cucumbers and tomatoes for the sauce, so i just made the meatballs. they have yogurt mixed in with the ground beef, and greek seasoning, and they're really quite good. not at all dry like meatballs can get.

and then i had an assortment of vegetables that also needed to be used, so i threw a summer squash, zucchini, onion, tomatoes and red peppers in a baking dish, drizzling with olive oil and generously sprinkling with salt. actually, i didn't throw them all in there at once. i let the peppers and onions roast first, then added the squash, and the tomatoes at the end, just long enough to warm them. then i dressed the whole thing with red wine vinegar and i forget what seasonings. :-)

the bread baked up wonderfully.

i was a little skeptical as to how lumpy it got.

the meatballs smelled wonderful. to make things easier on myself, i should line the baking sheet with foil. but, baking the meatballs on the rack keeps them up out of the grease, but my ground beef from the grazing association is pretty lean.

yum, vegetables! they were delish, esp with the little bit of leftover grated parmesan cheese i also had sitting in the fridge.

so i used up a lot of leftovers from my fridge that evening, and ended up with a tasty meal and leftovers for the next week's lunches to boot.

and i can't forget to give credit to the assistant chefs! foxy loves to slouch in this corner of the kitchen. she def has a 'lazy dog sit.'

and my lu. curly tail and all.

'garbage' scrambled eggs

in my old college town of ames there's a popular restaurant known as hickory park, and their specialty is burgers and barbecue. it's the kind of place where, when i was still in highschool, whenever my family was in town we'd stop there to eat, usually enjoying one of their wide variety of burgers and onion rings.

anyway, they have this one burger on their menu called the 'garbage burger' that my dad would order occasionally, with all sorts of toppings piled on it and several kinds of bread. thus, whenever i make anything that lends itself to using up ingredients, it falls in my 'garbage' recipe category. this post is about the garbage scrambled eggs that came into being several evenings ago.

it all started with a package of side pork from the big sack in my freezer that came from scott's mother. now, some of the kind folks out here prefer side pork, which is uncured, to bacon, but, being raised on the delicious, thick cured bacon from the local locker in iowa, i think it's a little bland. but anyhow, i thawed a package and fried part of it up, and that was just the beginning.

then i found leftover green onions in the fridge, so they went under the knife.

some wayward eggs have made their home on my refrigerator shelf for too long, so out they came.

after the side pork cooked down - and i drained out all the grease - i added the green onions, and also grape tomatoes that were on the back of the lower shelf.

then it occurred to me that my herbs could use some trimming, so out i went with my scissors, returning with parsley, chives and basil. it was at this point that scott came in the kitchen - he'd left me in charge of making something out of the sidepork - and asked suspiciously about my leafy green herbs.

combine it all together with some cheddar cheese, salt and garlic powder (for scott. he loves garlic) and we were ready to go. looks good to me!

again, this dish was too fancy for scott. after asking about the herbs, holding his plate, he says 'are those tomatoes?'

'sometimes i like just a plain dish without a bunch of stuff added in,' he says, in the kindest way possible. another thing - when i make my food i do the best job possible to get all the flavorings and seasonings just right so you don't have to add anything to it when it's on your plate, but scott is very fond of putting ketchup on his eggs, no matter if i dress them up or not.... so he knew he'd be in trouble if he slathered my little side pork masterpiece... but i told him he could use ketchup if he wanted, and i enjoyed mine with the flavors just as they were, and didn't look at his plate. :-)