Roasted Broccoli
I’ve always liked broccoli, well compared to most other vegetables. Roasting it with some garlic really makes a great side dish though, with a little effort it comes out miles ahead of steaming/boiling, so that even people who don’t like broccoli will eat it.
Potatoes Halves with Guacamole
I usually consider baked potatoes a winter food, especially when you start adding toppings, but what happens when it’s starting to get warm out and you want a touch of summer on your baked potatoes? Just fill them with some guacamole of course.
All Day Tomato Sauce
If you want to make amazing tomato sauce with deep complex flavors and will be home all day and can stir it every couple hours, this is the recipe for you. It’s another recipe from Kenji and seriouseats and it really out shines most other tomato sauces I’ve had, and really blows the jarred sauces out of the water.
Scalloped Potatoes
Seriouseats calls these Hasselback Potato Gratin and they are a great potato dish, although they do take some time to make - not ideal for a weeknight meal.
Artisan Bread
This is a quick (relatively because it still takes about 5-6 hours) white bread recipe from seriouseats. I only do half the recipe and ignore some rising/folding steps, but it comes out really good anyway.
Broccoli Parmesean Soup and Vegetable Stock
We’ve had some cold days recently, and soups are great when it’s cold. They are better warm, and for leftovers that can be a hassle without a microwave, but paired with some fresh bread, they still hit the spot. I also made my own vegetable stock, which will keep in the freezer all winter for when I need it.
Basic White Bread
Homemade bread is very simple and very delicious. I used to make it much more often, but found I ended up eating all of it within a day or two. When it’s fresh and still warm from the oven – hard to resist eating like 3 sandwiches right then. And of course your next few meals will also be sandwiches, or toast, or both, until you run out of bread. I have found if you freeze it pretty much right away, it can last a little longer.
Pressure Cooked Mashed Potato and Cauliflower
I’ve been meaning to do a pressure cooker recipe ever since I got one a couple months ago, so far it’s been great at hard boiled eggs, steamed potatoes, rice and more. I decided to try mashed potatoes with cauliflower, all in the instapot at once. Mashed cauliflower is very similar to mashed potatoes in consistency and with enough butter you can’t really tell the difference – I remember dinner at my Grandmas house when I was young and really loved the mashed potatoes, I had seconds (maybe even thirds). As I was going to get even more someone told me it was mashed cauliflower. I was aghast. I didn’t like vegetables and I couldn’t eat any more of the food I was just moments ago thoroughly enjoying. Now I’m a little better at eating veggies so here’s my mashed potatoes mixed with cauliflower.
Homemade Burger Buns
Hamburgers are great but what can really knock them out of the park is a home made burger bun. Or you can use them for sandwiches, or a snack all by themselves. They aren’t even that hard to make, and a whole lot easier with a stand mixer.
Mac and Cheese Showdown I
It’s no secret that I love pasta or that I also love cheese. One of the best combinations of these two is macaroni and cheese. There’s a few different types including oven baked, stovetop, homemade, store bought and this post is the beginning of my journey to find out which one I like best – because I do like them all.
Sicilian Pizza
Pizza is always a good meal, and homemade pizza isn’t too hard to make (dough and all) and much tastier than any frozen pizza or chain. I was never a huge fan of Sicilian pizza because the tomato sauce was too chunky – but when you make your own sauce you can make it as smooth as you want.
Lighter Fettuccine Alfredo II
Alright another pasta dish. Actually another fettuccine alfredo dish. But I like it better than the other one. There are some differences in the recipe itself, but possibly most notably I changed the cheese used to actually be parmigaiano reggiano rather than pecorino romano. The real test would be to make the old recipe with parmigiano and compare it to this recipe with parmigiano, and for good measure also make them both with pecorino. But even I have to admit that might be too much pasta.
Lighter Fettuccine Alfredo I
I know, I know, another pasta dish, well get used to it, I like pasta. It’s quick (usually), it’s easy (most of the time), it’s delicious (almost always) and there are so many different dishes to choose from. Also note the “I” in the title, since there are about a million and a half recipes for fettuccine alfredo I am already planning ahead because I will make multiple versions. Anyway, this is a lighter fettuccine alfredo recipe (
Spinach and Ricotta Pasta
This is a recipe from https://www.budgetbytes.com/2015/05/easy-spinach-ricotta-pasta/) that I double to make it work with 1lb of pasta (#end)). It really is one of the few ways I will enjoy spinach – covered in ricotta or some other type of cheese. Plus it’s pretty quick, doesn’t have a whole lot of ingredients and gives you something to do while waiting for the water to boil.
Ricotta
So this isn’t true ricotta because that’s made with stuff that is left over from making cheese, and I used whole milk and heavy cream. But the end result is pretty similar, and a bit better than ricotta you find at the grocery store, and it’s pretty easy to make. I’d make it all the time, except as I mentioned, it’s made using whole milk and heavy cream which means I’d have to work out twice as much to make up for it. Anyway, as for other ingredients just a little vinegar (or other acid – I might try lemon juice next time) and salt.
Apple Cinnamon Pancakes
So it has been quite a while since my last post. I moved to a new apartment and didn’t really try any new recipes for a while, and now that I’m settled I started trying some new things again. This time around is pancakes with apple and cinnamon, it was the first time I made pancakes from scratch (which is surprisingly easy – I don’t think I’ll be buying a premade pancake mix any time soon). Just some flour, baking powder an egg, milk and some butter for the basic pancake and an apple and cinnamon for the added flavor part.
Macaroni and Cheese
So October was a pretty busy month for me, quite a few races and gone pretty much every weekend so I was strapped for time and didn’t really have the time for experimenting in the kitchen. I’m back home after some successful races and I found a Mac and Cheese recipe with cottage cheese as one of the ingredients – I’m a big fan of cottage cheese so I had to try it out. I was in a bit of a rush to get to the store and mistook sour cream for cream cheese and didn’t realize until the mac and cheese was in the oven… Anyway, here are the ingredients I used:
London Broil
To celebrate my recent promotion my roommate and I decided to have steak. Whole Foods was having a deal on London Broil and I remember this being in the top 3 things I enjoyed off the grill as a kid (the others being burgers and salmon), so I went ahead and got a 1.5lb piece. The key to a good London Broil is marinading it, and I only had about 3 hours so I did a quick search on the internet and found a soy sauce and garlic marinade that looked good and said for anywhere between 30mins to 24hrs. So I went ahead and mixed that up:
Pulled Buffalo Chicken Pizza
A local pizza place does a great buffalo chicken pizza so I decided to try my hand at it. I decided to go with pulled chicken because this was a saturday and I had plenty of time for slow cooking. The plan was to make two pizzas and have one with a tomato sauce and the other with more of a ranch sauce. So after swimming in the morning I started the 4 chicken breasts in the slow cooker with buffalo sauce, some garlic, butter and a package of dry ranch dressing:
Stuffed Burgers
So my roommate and I have done stuffed burgers quite a bit, but this is the first time I got around to photographing them. We always use some kind of cheese, this time it was mozzarella, but we’ve had success with cheddar and monterey jack and a few others. The thing with the stuffed burgers is they are pretty large, about 1/2lb of beef each, so be prepared. To start we mix the meat (this time we used a 3/4lb beef and 3/4lb buffalo mixture) with some minced garlic, salt, pepper, onion, breadcrumb and an egg, oh and a bit of worcestershire sauce. The measurements came from a recipe at one time, but I have long since forgotten and go by feel now. Usually with 1.5lb of meat a half onion is good, just 1 egg, a tablespoon or so of worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of minced garlic, and add breadcrumbs little by little until everything sticks together nicely.
Mexican Pizza
So the idea here is to use soft tortillas as a base for a “pizza” that is more like an open faced taco. I used corn tortillas which fell apart pretty easily and tasted kind of weird, I think I should have stuck with flour tortillas. Anyway, the first layer I used was some chopped onion and ground beef mixed with taco seasoning.
Guacamole
Guacamole is one of those things I never tried for the longest time because it was made of all vegetables and how could that be good? Well I was wrong, guacamole is delicious. It’s also quite simple to make, you just have to make sure you get the portions right. The first time I made it (for 3 people), I used 6 avocados because I wanted some extra… well I got some extra. Like 3 whole meals worth of extra. Still delicious, but you have to eat it pretty quickly. As I said, not much to it, here is everything I used:
Cedar Plank Salmon
So after making burgers on the grill almost every week for quite a while my roommate and I decided to try cedar plank salmon after I saw it while browsing some recipes online. The idea is the cedar will impart some smoky cedary flavor to the salmon while cooking. So I head out to Home Depot to pick up some cedar planks, originally searching the lumber section, and eyeing some power tools to cut up the wood. Realizing I could easily spend over $400 on wood and power tools I probably don’t need (but might someday), I sadly head over to the grilling section and find some pre-made cedar planks for grilling. At only $8 for 2 planks it was a close thing – had they been over $10 I might have opted for the 8ft planks of cedar and a sawzall. Anyway, after the trip to home depot I headed over to whole foods to get some salmon, where they were actually selling some on cedar planks. After picking up the salmon sans planks at whole foods, I soaked the home depot planks for a couple hours (along with some corn, which is beneath them)
Pulled Pork
Pulled pork is great. I’ve wanted to make it for a while, but it is a little daunting when a recipe calls for over 8 hours of cooking, even using the slow cooker. But I planned ahead and started at 8am to let my 4lb pork shoulder cook until it was nice and tender, that was the plan at least. So here is the pork before:
Pan Pizza
s much as I love thin crust NY style pizza, I saw a “fool proof” pan pizza recipe over at serious eats and wanted to try it out. Turns out, I’m a better fool than the recipe planned for. I prepared the dough a day before, and let it sit out overnight to rise, and when I checked in the morning I still had the same size, moist, ball of something that resembled dough. Something smelled off about it, so I decided to trash it and try again with a more tried and true recipe for bread dough that I’ve used before. I’m not going to share the bread recipe because it didn’t come out tasting very good for a pizza crust, but the basic ingredients included flour, yeast, salt, sugar. After mixing them all and kneading (thank you stand mixer) I let the dough rise.
Scrambled Eggs
I recently came across Gordon Ramsey video of scarmbled eggs so I thought I would try them out his way. Start off with your eggs, and a tablespoon or 2 of butter in a pot:
Steak - Ribeye
Steak is pretty great. Of course it depends enitrely on the cut of meat and quality thereof. The cut used in this recipe was a ribeye from whole foods and cost about $26. Totally worth it for 1.5lbs of amazing steak. I suggest whole foods or some kind of butcher for your meat (I’m looking forward to kangaroo from a local butcher… but that’ll be another post). Anyway, I learned to pan sear/oven cook it from an Alton Brown video on youtube where he cooks it for about 5mins total. Basically this method involves searing it and then putting it in the oven to actually cook the inside. I have a cast iron pan that I’ve used a few times for this method and it works brilliantly. First you have to preheat the oven to 500F, and put the cast iron in there to heat up as well. My oven takes about 30-45mins to get to this temp (and even then I’m not sure it really is 500F). While this all is going on, salt and pepper your steak and add some oil to it. Don’t be shy with the salt.
Mashed Potatoes
While my stand mixer gets regular use with other things, I think I’ve used it the most to make mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are a great side dish for many people, but I make a meal around or out of just the potatoes. For this dinner I had just a large bowl of them, and it was delicious. Anyway, start with potatoes, wash them, and slice them into about 1.5 inch cubes.
Pasta and Tomato Sauce
I eat so much pasta that my cupboard looks like I’m preparing for the apocalypse. But really I go through a pound or two a week so it only makes sense to keep 20-30lbs around. The most typical pasta meal is with tomato sauce, which I’ve recently upgraded from the straight up canned sauce thanks to my cooking class. Here are the ingredients:
Chocolate Mousse
This was my first run at chocolate mousse and I looked around the web for recipes that didn’t involve creme fraiche because it can be a little tough to get a hold of here. I found one that does most of the work in a food processor, which was fine by me. This particular batch was made to serve 8-12 so there was almost a whole pound of chocolate.
Sautéed Pork Tenderloin
After seeing a commercial on the food network for pre made and frozen green beans and almond slivers, I decided I could probably make it and eat it… as long as it was covered in butter. So I chopped up some almonds (way too many) in my food processor, which didn’t really sliver them, I had varying sizes from dust to whole almonds, but it worked out ok.
Green beans and Almonds
After seeing a commercial on the food network for pre made and frozen green beans and almond slivers, I decided I could probably make it and eat it… as long as it was covered in butter. So I chopped up some almonds (way too many) in my food processor, which didn’t really sliver them, I had varying sizes from dust to whole almonds, but it worked out ok.
Pesto
So I have made pesto pizza but haven’t shown you how to make Pesto yet, well here’s my recipe. I’ve got a basil plant growing in my apartment that I haven’t managed to kill yet, even after my first harvest of the leaves (which were used for this pesto). This is my plant after harvesting, I got about 1.5-2cups of packed leaves depending on how tightly you packed them.
Baked Potatoes
Compared to scalloped potatoes, baked potatoes are sooo easy. Preheat oven to 400, wash potatoes (and cut out black parts if they have them, like mine did this time). Some olive oil and salt, then they are ready for the oven:
Pesto Pizza with Broccoli
Some new additions to my kitchen have been a pizza peel and a pizza stone, and I’ve used both to great results. Starting with some fresh dough I roll it out into a pizza like shape (my first few were irregular misshapen things, but I’ve since gotten somewhat better). Then you have to make the crust, just kind of roll up the edges.
Pancakes with Bacon
Breakfast for dinner? It’s all possible when you are an “adult” !! To start preheat oven to 400F and get some baking trays ready for bacon.
Scalloped Potatoes
So I love potatoes and while I’ve got baking and mashing them down, I wanted to give scalloped a try. I found a pretty simple recipe that just called for milk, flour salt and cheese so I tried it out. First step was chopping potatoes…
Chicken Burritos
For the second meal (no I didn’t eat these both tonight, just been thinking about the blog for a while and have the pictures sitting around) I present chicken burritos. I made up this recipe based on the tacos we used to make as kids, basically my mom cooked up meat, had cheese, corn, sour cream and other stuff available and we made our own tacos. So.. I’m not sure why I’m calling this a burrito if for all my childhood I called it a taco, I’m going to blame chipotle because that was the recent inspiration for the homemade version.
Sloppy Joes
So this is the first post and for some info, I’m a triathlete and I train a bunch so I get to eat a bunch to make up for it. This is my blog for my own purposes to keep track of my what meals I’ve made and how they came out so I can help myself plan for future meals.