By The Book

I'm on a mission to find some new cookbooks and expand my culinary horizons. Right now I get most of my recipes off Pioneer Woman or I frankenstein recipes out of Better Homes and Gardens. I also have the Top Chef cookbook, which frankly is a joke. My eyes glaze over at the directions in there. The food, however, is amazing.

I sent out a call to friends (thanks, Facebook) and I got two recommendations:


The Secrets of Jesuit Soup Making and Moosewood Cookbook.

I don't trust the Amazon reviews. Taking food suggestions is like taking movie suggestions. You really have to make sure people know their shit when they advice you on such topics. For instance, one person was complaining about a book I looked up, saying that the recipes had too many ingredients in them and the soup took too long to cook. WTF? Soup cooks all freaking day when you make it from scratch. You can't make a soup from the stock up in 30 minutes. It's just not going to happen. Another reviewer was complaining about the obscurity of ingredients that Julia Child uses. Do I even need to explain how stupid that is?

These are not issues with the quality of the books, these are issues with the quality of people's patients. And those are definitely not people that I want to take food advice from. I have my quick and easy recipes and I make meals that come out of boxes. Sure. But when I want something yummy and soulful, I look for a complicated recipe with 87 ingredients and I enjoy myself. After all, that's what cookbooks are for.

In addition to the two books above, I'm also looking for a really good Jewish-American cookbook. I want old school NYC deli food. "Old people food" if you will. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who is knowledgeable about that genre of food, so it's just me and Amazon on these ones:


2nd Avenue Deli, Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook, Junior's

Anyone else have any cookbook recommendations?

Stuffed Poblanos

I made a really quick, cheap meal last night that I feel is worth sharing. There are no pictures because I ate it too fast.

Hungry + Staring at tasty food = Impatient


Tuna Stuffed Poblanos

3 large poblano peppers (aka Anaheim peppers)
8oz block of softened cream cheese
2 cans of tuna
1 white onion
shredded cheese
garlic
pepper
paprika

Cut the peppers in half length wise and clean out the insides.

In a bowl, mix together the cream cheese, tuna, 1/2 a diced white onion and garlic to taste. Poblanos are a pretty mild variety of pepper, so if you want to add a little heat to the recipe chop up some jalapenos and mix them in too.

Spoon the mixture into the peppers. Crack fresh pepper and sprinkle paprika over the tops. Then, top everything off with a layer of shredded cheese.

Heat in the oven at 350 for 15-20 minutes.

Easiest Freaking Homemade Ice Cream in the World

I cannot believe this. Sugar free, fat free, everything free, one ingredient homemade ice cream. I will be stopping at the store today to buy the ripest bananas I can find...

How To Make Creamy Ice Cream With Just One Ingredient

Ratpatootie

Can you guess what I made from looking at this picture (and ignoring the post title)?



I made ratatouille!

It was sooooo good. I was thinking about the movie Ratatouille and I wondered what exactly was in ratatouille. I googled it, then looked in the fridge and it just so happened that I had everything needed to make it. (Everything minus red wine, but I figured I was close enough.)

To start, sauté onions and green peppers in olive oil. I only sautéed mine long enough to make them a little transparent because I'm ridiculously impatient, but they would probably taste fantastic if I'd browned them.



I then threw in Italian parsley and garlic and about 3/4 of a jar of sauce. Heat that up a little bit and then throw about a cup of the yumminess in the bottom of a baking dish.



That looks good enough to eat on its own...

Slice an eggplant, green zucchini and yellow zucchini. I had the world's biggest zucchinis, so only used about a third of them. I chopped and froze the rest and I kid you not, the remainder filled five baggies. I could feed a 3rd world country for a month with the zucchini in my freezer.



Toss the sliced veggies in the pot with the sauce and heat it for about ten minutes. Now, I actually put the eggplant in first for about five minutes because it takes a little longer to soften up than the zucchini. So, the eggplant got ten minutes and the zucchini got five.



Slice up your tomatoes (as many as you'd like) and grab the baking dish. Layer the slices of veggies and tomatoes in the dish and pour the remainder of the sauce over the top. I think I then cooked it for about 40 minutes at 350. You could leave it in there for an hour if you have the kind of self-control that I am obviously lacking.



Yumm. Yumm. Yumm. Grab a big scoop of it and sprinkle some parmesan on top. I intended to eat it over rice but realized I didn't have any as I was boiling the water for it. I went for garlic bread instead, which I feel ended up being an excellent choice.



I think this would also taste amazing as a real stew or over chicken, pasta, a piece of cardboard, anything remotely digestible by the human body. As a little bonus it's also a seriously easy and delicious vegetarian meal. You could even make it vegan if you left off the parmesan, but really? Why would you want to do that?

Buffalo Chicken Pizza

Last night for dinner I wanted something a little different so I made a buffalo chicken pizza.Honestly, aside from the crust, there isn't anything "pizza" about it. It's just a bunch of stuff that sort of resembles a pizza...

I usually go the Boboli route when making homemade pizza but I wanted a really thin, crispy crust for this one. I grabbed a couple of the pizza mix packets instead. Good thing I grabbed two because I completely screwed up the first one. The one and only direction on the package was, "Add 1/2 cup of hot water."

I failed. Completely.

I added 1 1/2 cups. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't getting doughy. It was just a bowl of liquid that smelled like bread.

The second one went as planned, but that stuff is a bitch to spread out onto a pizza pan. You are a saint if you have the patience to roll one of those things out at home. It stuck to everything except the pan because I used cooking spray on it. I evidentially should have sprayed my hands and arms up to my elbows because I was covered in the stuff by the time I was done.

Luckily enough stayed on the pan to constitute a pizza crust.



I topped it with Frank's buffalo sauce, sauteed onions, parsley, garlic, celery, chicken, basil and bleu cheese crumbles. Everything you need to go with buffalo sauce - except carrots. I thought that might be weird, and coming from someone who loves pickles on pizza, it probably is. Unless it was a Thai pizza, then it would be necessary.

Mmmm. Thai pizza!

I also made some bleu cheese dressing to smear over the top of it when it was done.



I'm not a fan of bottled dressings so I'm happy to have finally figured out how to make it from scratch. For this I mixed about a cup of sour cream, maybe two tablespoons of mayo, and a couple splashes of milk. (I think you can use skim, low-fat, regular and it doesn't really matter.) I whisked that together until creamy and then added dill, onion powder, garlic, a heap of fresh chopped parsley, ground pepper and bleu cheese crumbles. It was pretty amazing.

Yumm.

Girl's Night Skinny Dip

I went to a "girl's night" slumber party at my gay boyfriend & his husband's house on Saturday. Matt asked me what we do on these girl's nights. I told him, "Stereotypical stuff. Drink margaritas, eat a ton of garbage that we shouldn't eat, talk smack (kidding), watch chick flicks, etc."

And we did. They made margarita's with sherbet (YUMM!) and some crazy good stuffed jalapenos. We sat outside and talked for four hours. Then, we watched First Wives Club, possibly the best grown-up chick movie ever. I love it so much that I forgive Diane Keaton for her inability to be anyone besides Annie Hall in it.

My contribution to girl's night was a bean dip that I made up, sort of a four layer bean dip. The boys are dieting in preparation for a trip to Miami so I tried to bring something half-way slimming to the fatty-fat-fat buffet table. Ignore the fact that is was eaten on chips...

Four Layer Skinny Dip
*no picture exists because it was devoured like crack*

1 can of fat free refried beans (I think I used Ortega)
1 to 1 1/2 cups of low fat or fat free sour cream
1 packet of taco seasoning
1 cup pico de gallo (1 large tomato, 1/4 white onion, fresh cilantro, lime, jalapeno, salt)
1 avocado

Spread the can of refried beans into the bottom of a dish. (I used an 8x8 dish.) Mix the sour cream and 1/2 of the pack of taco seasoning together, spread over the beans. Next spread the pico de gallo over the sour cream - be sure to leave out about 2 tbsp. Mash up the avocado with the leftover pico de gallo to make guacamole. Drop the glob of guacamole in the middle of the dish and you're done! (Instead of regular chips, you could serve it with baked tortilla chip or pita bread.)

Then, I negated my efforts by making dark chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter filling.



It was so very worth it though. I planned on doing a three mile run on Sunday so I made sure to eat one for every mile.

Summer Cooking

One of the unfortunate things about Spring and Summer is that some days it's just too hot in the house to do majoring cooking in the kitchen. As soon as we pick up a new tank of propane, we'll be busting out dinner on the grill. But in the meantime I'm trying to come up with delicious meals that require little effort. Because of the heat, yes. But also because I'm lazy sometimes.

For instance, tonight I made a delicious salad plate of tuna salad, mixed lettuce with vinaigrette, chopped tomatoes, cheese, olives and a few baked chips. Light, yummy, doesn't require me to stand in front of the stove.



I've found out that the trick to really good tuna salad is to make your own relish. Don't use the garbage in the jar. Mix together chopped pickles, onion, dill and garlic and you've got yourself better relish than Heinz will ever make.

A couple of days ago when it was cold and rainy I made Runza pie. (Trust me, it's good.) I couldn't make it in a regular pie pan because mine disappeared, so I had to shove it into an oval shaped pan. I had a few scraps of the pie crust leftover and I didn't want to throw it away... So I made a quick and easy leftover dessert. Mmmm. Leftover dessert. Doesn't that sound awesome?

I pressed the leftover dough into little circles and baked them in ramekins. I only had enough for two, but pretend there was an entire pie crust there and I made a dozen.



Then I whipped together equal parts softened cream cheese and Cool Whip. Again, I happened to have about 3 ounces of cream cheese sitting in the fridge, but lets say I had a whole package and mixed it with about half a tub of Cool Whip. Then I beat in powdered sugar until it tasted sweet enough - but not to sweet. For a whole batch I would try a 1/4 of a cup and go up from there. I scooped that on top of the crust...



...Then covered it with fresh strawberries.



Mmmm. Delicious.



After I took that picture I drenched them in extra Cool Whip. I didn't take a picture of it because it's embarrassing. I recommend you do the same though. It was so delicious.

P.S. Who else thought of Family Guy when I mentioned Cool Whip?

Here's a sort of recipe if anyone wants to make these:

Package of premade pie shells
8oz block of cream cheese (you can use the light or fat free kind)
1 tub of Cool Whip(you can use the light or fat free kind)
Powdered Sugar
Fresh strawberries

1. Make small circles out of the pie crust (maybe with a cookie cutter?) and put them in the bottom of muffin papers. Bake crust according to directions on the box, but keep an eye on the time since these are a lot smaller.

2. Whip together the cream cheese and a cup to a cup and 1/2 (depending on your taste) of the Cool Whip. Beat in the powdered sugar according to taste. Try starting with a 1/4 cup. Drop spoonfuls into the muffin cups.

3. Cover the cream cheese mix with fresh strawberries.

4. Add a spoonful of Cool Whip to the top if your heart desires. And I'm guessing it will.

Easy Recipe: Homemade Chicken Pot Pie

I made this last night. It was really, really easy. And delicious. I didn't take a picture of it because you probably wouldn't want to make it if I had. Beige colored food does not photograph well.

Homemade Chicken Pot Pie

Package of 2 refrigerated pie shells
12 oz. bag of frozen mixed vegetables
1 pound of chicken
1/2 an onion
Small can of mushrooms
Can of cream of mushroom soup (or whatever kind you want)
Can of turkey gravy
Garlic
Salt and pepper
Cheese (if you so desire)

Cut the chicken into strips and season it however you'd like. I sprinkled mine with Lawry's and chicken seasoning. Creative, I know... Boil it in water for 5-10 minutes (until it's white inside) and shred. Throw it in a pot with the veggies, mushrooms, onion, gravy and soup. Cook over medium heat (you're really just warming it up before it goes in the oven). Add garlic, salt and pepper to taste. It actually needs a decent amount of salt. I never add salt to anything I cook but I thought this recipe definitely needed a sprinkle. I think I also threw in some bay leaf and worshishtershirerer worcestershire for some extra help.

Press the first pie shell in the bottom of a pie pan. Add the filling. Cover it with cheese if you choose to. Press the second pie shell down over the top and trim off excess if there is any. Pop it in the oven at 425° for 20-25 minutes or until the top turns a nice golden color. You can also brush the top with a little melted butter before sticking it in the oven to give it a nicer color.

Easy. Delicious. What else can you ask for?

On a side note... Can you believe how expensive meat is? It's outrageous! Why is chicken so expensive? They're rotten little birds that are born by the dozen. Farmers should be giving them away for free! I often make several vegetarian meals a week because grocery shopping is insane otherwise. We tried to buy a hunk of roast beef for Easter dinner and a 5 pounder was nearly $20.

For beef?

In Nebraska?

Is that a joke?

Creative Ways To Save

Matt and I have been making an effort lately to spend less money. Focusing on food alone is helping out a lot. We only go out to eat maybe twice a week now. Usually once a week for lunch at Jimmy Johns (at $14 it's an expense that is well worth it) and once out to dinner on the weekends. Spending less on eating out of course means that our grocery bills are going to be higher. Now the challenge comes to reduce our grocery bills.

We've started buying some items in bulk with our Sam's Club card and we make sure we eat our leftovers, but I still think the grocery bills are high. I've subscribed to coupon emails and I clip out of the newspaper. Did you know that Target has coupons online? They do! It took me a while to find them but they're right there! Target is probably one of the most expensive places you could possibly buy groceries, but sometimes they'll run a really good coupon for like, 50 cents off Silk Soy Milk which Matt drinks like it's going out of style.

Still seems too high though. What's another way to cut costs? How about making pantry staples from scratch? I just read a great article about how to save over $100 a year on spaghetti sauce. We buy a lot of spaghetti sauce in our house. We've always wondered how to make it ourselves but never really tried to figure it out. It's a pretty genius plan. Make one giant pot of it and then freeze it? Duh. Easy.

Now I just need to learn how to brew my own Leiney and we'll be set.

What other grocery staples are easy to make at home?

Recipe! Irish Leftovers

Yesterday was my first St. Patrick's Day as an Irish man's wife. I performed my wifely duty and cooked corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and beer bread. I have never, ever, in my life eaten corned beef and cabbage before. The words just sound gross. Turns out though that it's really, really good. I'm a corned beef and cabbage convert.

We ate the leftover corned beef in the form of reubens for lunch (Frank's Sour Kraut - also a big yum) and were left with a giant container of cabbage and potatoes. Soooo, I made my version of a Runza. For those of you who don't live in Nebraska, Runza is a fast food restaurant with a deliciously weird sandwich called, what else, a Runza. It's ground beef and cabbage baked into a bread pocket. There are versions with cheese, mushrooms, whatever.

I browned a pound of ground turkey with onions, garlic and hamburger seasoning. Then I chopped up about 1/4 of a head of the boiled cabbage from last night and threw that in. I also mixed in a scoop of the sour kraut leftover from lunch and a small can of mushrooms.



I scooped the mixture into a premade pie crust.



Drenched it with shredded sharp cheddar.



And covered it with the second pie crust.



And ate it. Yummmmm...

Monday Recipe: Fake Baking!

As far as I know, I created this recipe. It tasted a little familiar though. So, unless someone comes forth to claim it, I'm saying I made it up. Complete bonus for it being easy peasy.

No-bake Peanut Butter Cheesecake



Beat 2 tbsp (room temp) unsalted butter until fluffy. Then add 1 cup peanut butter. Then beat in about 2 tbsp powdered sugar. Once that's mixed and creamy, beat in an 8 oz. package of cream cheese.

If you're like me, you could just eat that straight out of the bowl. But, it gets better.

Fold in half a tub of Cool Whip. Pour cheesecake mix into a pre-made graham cracker crust. Voila! Cheesecake.

I then topped mine with the chocolate ganache from this recipe.



You might want to spread your cheesecake out a little more evenly than I did...

Word of advice for this recipe! It's almost easier to make two pies with this. Just double the peanut butter, butter and powdered sugar ingredients. (And obviously buy a second crust.) Otherwise, you'll end up with half a tub of Cool Whip and about a cup of ganache left over. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have two pies than a fridge full of halves.

Enjoy!

Mexican Chicken Chili

I had a taste for soup tonight. I figured I'd just use what we had at the house and pop open a can of tomato soup, throw in some chicken and call it good. But then I had to make a trip to the grocery store after work and my soup sort of morphed into something else.

I ended up with a Mexican style chicken chili... I guess? It was delicious and the colors looked fantastic in the pot. Food definitely tastes better when it looks pretty.



I cooked maybe a pound of chicken in a medium pot. I sprinkled it with a handful of diced onion, garlic, marjoram and oregano. I poured over enough chicken broth to cover the chicken. Bring to a boil and then turn down the heat and cover. Cook for somewhere between 5-10 minutes. The chicken should be falling apart. You can pretty much shred it with your hands or a fork and throw it into the soup pot. (You might want to let it cool first)

While that was happening I threw together:

1/2 can chicken broth (or whatever you have left)
1 can chopped chilies (with juice from the can)
1 can Rotella's tomatoes (with juice from the can)
1 can tomato sauce
1 small can of corn
1 can black beans (with juice from the can)
1/2 chopped red onion
1 chopped Anaheim pepper
Crap tons of garlic
cilantro
pepper

You can either stop here and have yourself a nice, healthy dinner or you can do what I did and throw a glob of sour cream on top.



Yumm!

Yet Another Real Simple Recipe

Lat night I made the mac and cheese out of Real Simple magazine. You can tell I've really been cooking from it because it's covered in food splatters. I didn't take pictures of it because it's mac and cheese... you probably know what it looks like, plus in photographs it would just look like a pile of slimy yellow slop.

I modified it a little from the recipe in the magazine because I'm lazy creative.

14oz boz of whole wheat macaroni
8 oz block of sharp cheddar, grated
1 lb bag of chopped cauliflower
1 1/2 cups of low fat sour cream
splash of milk... 1/4 cup maybe
salt, pepper, garlic and parsley to taste

Cook the pasta and cauliflower, stir everything else in until melty.

At that point, I just started eating it right out of the pot. But according to the recipe I was supposed to have put it all in a casserole dish and sprinkled some bread crumbs and olive oil over the top, baking it until it was a little brown and crispy on top.

This recipe was "healthy" sort of. Maybe, if you don't count the cheese? There's a vegetable in there! I should get credit for that.

Creamed Spinach Broccoli

Last night for dinner I made another turkey meatloaf (twice as big this time for twice the leftovers) and creamed spinach. Sort of.

I set out to make this recipe from Real Simple magazine.



So, I thawed out my spinach.



And then I noticed that it wasn't spinach. Plans changed and I made creamed broccoli instead.

I melted 8oz of reduced fat cream cheese and about 1/4 cup milk (I don't measure anything.) I threw in what I thought was too much garlic, and then added more (I also like a lot of garlic) and then added a couple shakes of minced onion and pepper. Once it got melty I tossed in the broccoli and cooked it until it was thick and creamy.



It ended up being delicious. I didn't have high hopes for it, but wow. I made something freaking delicious on accident.

Happy Cupcake Day

Happy day after Valentine's!



I celebrated my Sunday by shopping the clearance V-Day rack at Target (I bought a pair of cupcake pj pants for $3.49!) and buying some of the new Orla Kiely collection. (Including that table cloth.)

Sunday is family day around these parts. It was our turn to host, so we had some of Matt's family/people-who-are-essentially-family over for brunch today. I've figured out that the best time to bake something is when company is coming over. Then, I can send all the leftovers home with other people and avoid eating them myself at 11:00 at night when I'm bored and watching the DVR, thus slowing down the amount of time its going to take for my ass to inevitably get fat from baked goods.

Today I baked what is known as a tasty cake. Real "Tasty Kakes" are these gross little packaged cupcakes that Matt used to eat as a kid when he lived in Delaware. I've tried one and they're bad. Really bad. The idea is good - a piece of cake covered in peanut butter and chocolate - but the execution fails terribly. Over the last few years I've created my own tasty cakes. They started out as a boxed cake mix slathered with peanut butter and dropped into chocolate bark.

I've upped the ante since then.



Here's the most recent incarnation:

The cake is from Bakerella's yellow cake recipe. I piped in a peanut butter cream filling made of:

1 cup peanut butter
3 tbsp unsalted butter
2/3 cup powdered sugar

(Mix together peanut butter and room temperature butter. Sift in powdered sugar and mix until creamy.)

And topped it with a chocolate icing made with 1 cup of heavy cream and 8 oz. of chopped up Ghirardelli's semi-sweet chocolate.

(Bring cream to a simmer. Remove from heat and drop in chocolate. Let sit for 5 minutes then stir with a whisk until blended. You can let it sit for a few minutes if you want it to thicken up.)

I only bought the Ghirardelli's because the store was sold out of the cheap stuff. It ended up being delicious though.



I'm still not great at making my baked goods look pretty. I put too much batter into each cupcake liner, so they sort of exploded all over the place when they baked. All the tops broke off when I took them out of the pan. Plus, I'm doing something wrong when I make Bakerella's yellow cake. Mine always ends up sunken in instead of puffed out.

And then the chocolate was a complete mess.

Guess I shouldn't have stopped taking those pastry classes.

Kitchen Victory

Guess what I just did?

I made peanut sauce! And it was good!

I decided to try something new with my... leftovers. I put it on some pork tenderloin that was in the fridge. It wasn't the most sophisticated meal but that's not the point. I mixed:

1 glob of chunky peanut butter (2 tablespoons?)
1 tablespoon of Dale's Sauce (essentially soy sauce with some spices thrown in)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
a bunch of garlic
1/4 cup of water

Put everything together in a sauce pan and let it cook until the peanut butter melts completely and the sauce smooths out.

I couldn't believe it was actually good. The last time I attempted something blindly like that was when I tried to make enchilada sauce. It was a complete disaster. I want to make the peanut sauce again and put it on a noodle and cabbage bowl, sort of like pseudo Vietnamese food. Mmmm. Chicken and rice too.

I've sort of picked up this habit lately of only eating meat once a day, if that. Today I had a bean taco bowl for lunch so I was excused to eat pork tenderloin for dinner. I don't plan on becoming a vegetarian, or telling people I'm a vegetarian, because I don't have the discipline to take it that far. Unless there's a type of vegetarian that eats chicken fingers and bacon. I've just really started to think about the food I put in my body (mainly meat) and where it came from and what it went through to get to my plate and I'm not really comfortable with it.

I've thought about it too much lately. I've read too much about meat processing. I've listened to too many new-agey people talk about how bad meat is for your bodily energy. Frankly, meat sort of grosses me out now. I'm mostly talking about beef, pork, miscellaneous land mammal. (Bacon is of course excluded. Sometimes it's better not to think, just chew.) Chicken I'm still okay with for some reason. They're devilish little birds and they deserve to be eaten. Fish and seafood I'm still cool with too. I've caught and gutted fish before (I was five. Thanks, Gramps.) so I can without a doubt say that it does not bother me to kill and eat a fish. But cows? Pigs? I don't know. It just seems different. It's just gross.

I still eat meat when presented to me and I still buy leather products, so it's not like I have some moral or ethical reason not to eat meat anymore. And like I said, I do still love chicken and seafood. But I haven't eaten a cheeseburger in a couple of weeks and the last one I ate gave me some mental indigestion. Will I eat a burger again in the future? Probably. Okay, yes. It's not like I'm going to turn down a burger if I'm over at Jen's and she offers me what I'm told is the best burger ever. But I don't think beef is going to be a staple in my diet anymore.

Or maybe I'm wrong. It's probably just some weird phase and I'll grow out of it.

I'm still torn on sausage though. I really like sausage. And of course the bacon. Maybe I just have a problem eating meat that is still identifiable as an animal's body part. Chicken fingers don't look like meat. Sausage doesn't look like meat.

Who knows.

Easy Cheesy

I borrowed a cheesy potato soup recipe from the Duersken family for dinner last night. It was goooood. I recommend it to anyone who likes potatoes and cheese and soup.

I changed their recipe around a little to suit my tastes. I for one cannot stand American cheese unless its hidden on a burger, so I swapped it out for an 8oz block of cheddar. I get that American cheese is kid friendly so that's the way go to when you're feeding the youngens, but I'm only serving it to adults in my house. I also used a pouch of bacon bits instead of cooking bacon because it's much, much easier. And the pouch kind doesn't make my house smell like bacon for a week. I just went ahead and threw that right in. Also, I skipped the salt which was a good call because it was pretty salty without it. (Probably because of the bacon and cheddar.)

Easy. Cheesy. Yummy.

I also got most of a scarf done last night that I'm making for a friend. She really liked the groomsmen's scarves and asked me to make one for her. I'll post it tonight!

Haphazard Recipe #2

This one was kind of a collaboration between Matt and me. It was very, very good. I would recommend this to anyone who loves Italian food or what is more than likely pseudo Italian food since I don't think real Italian people would ever eat this.

Italian Sausage Bake

Jar of spaghetti sauce
Garlic
Bell pepper
Onion
Red wine
Italian sausages (we use the spicey variety)
Parmesan cheese
Shredded mozzarella
Mostacholi (or whatever you have)
French's fried onions

Start by cooking the sausages in red wine and garlic in a large saute pan. Throw the chopped onion and green bell pepper into the pan with the sausages so they pick up some of that flavor. When the sausages are done, take them out and toss the red wine and veggies into a large pot with the jarred pasta sauce. Slice up the sausages. While this is going on, cook your pasta. When those three things are ready, mix the noodles and half of the sauce together in a baking dish. Sprinkle with parmesan. Slice the sausages and layer them on top of the noodles. Cover the sausage with shredded cheese and then the French's onions. (We also layered tomato slices from the garden on top for a little extra freshness.) Bake until the cheese is melty and toasted. Then, serve yourself a piece and top it off with a scoop of the extra sauce you saved.

It's soooooo good.

Haphazard Recipe #1

I'm pretty good at creating meals out of nothing. Well, close to nothing. I think they usually turn out pretty tasty. Then again, maybe I just think it tastes good in relation to the ingredients I started with, and how bad it could have actually turned out. I also cover most things with either cheese, fried onions, sour cream, or any combination of the three. So, there's that. How bad can something really taste when it's slathered with cheese and sour cream?

Without further ado, I bring you my recipe from last night. Honestly though, unless half of your taste buds have been ripped off in an incident involving a frosty pole, you may want to heavily modify it into something completely different:

Mexi Pasta

Mix together:
1 can of black beans
1 can of corn
chopped onion
garlic
jalapenos (if you're into that)
Chili Powder & Pepper to taste

Drain the corn, but keep the bean water to cook everything in. It gives it more flavor. While you're simmering your beany concoction, cook some pasta. I chose shells because that was the only thing to choose from. You can choose whatever tickles your pasta bone. (That sounded dirty but I'm keeping it.)

When everything is cooked, pile some pasta on a plate and cover it with the beans and corn. Then, slather everything with shredded cheese and sour cream. It's gooey and cheesy and pretty good in a pinch.

That's all pretty regular stuff that we have in the house on a daily basis. I could have made the dish better if I'd gone to the grocery store and picked up a couple other things. It would have really been good with some enchilada sauce and some tomatoes. But that would have involved actually going to the grocery store. You know what else? We have several pounds of frozen hamburger in the freezer. That totally would have kicked the tasty up a notch if I'd thrown some in there.

So there's my dinner from last night. It was moderately healthy. Until the fatty dairy products came along at least.