Meal Plan - November 25 - December 1, 2018

I'm proud to have tried some new things this week. Braised Beef with Fennel. Wasn't all that good, so I'm not scrambling to find a recipe. Actually preparing Breakfast Sandwiches for meals has been surprising! Simply toast, tomatoes, mayo, and bacon.  Yummy.

I'll have to source out that muffin recipe, it's pretty good - but for the time being - I'm just working on seeing if I can get this posted.

Enjoy!

Home Made Cereal!?!

Maybe I shouldn’t be *so* surprised that it’s possible to make cereal. I guess people have been having breakfast since the dawn of time. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that I’d love a Jamie Oliver recipe either. (I love watching his shows, but rarely want to sample what he prepares.) I find converting the quantities from weighed to volume frustrating – so I tried something new with this one. I just eyeballed. :) 

The following is what I came up with. (And this is the original from Jamie Oliver himself.)

Granola Dust

5 cups porridge oats

1 cup nuts (I just use up the ends of bags I have in the cupboard)

¼ cup (or more) of seeds (millet, pumpkin, sesame, chia, whatever you have)

1 tbsp ground coffee

3 tbsp cocoa

1 cup dried fruit

Toast the oats, nuts and seeds in a 350º oven for 10-15 minutes. Let cool completely.

Add coffee, cocoa and fruit to the mixture. Process in a food processor until it’s “dusty”. (Maybe more like sand than dust.)

Enjoy.

7-Up Salad

“When I told her I would bring a fruit salad of sorts, I didn’t tell her that it would look like head-cheese.”

No proper mold - so I used a bowl.
On its way out of the bowl onto the plate,
it hit my tummy, and bounced onto the plate.
No harm was done!

I’m not sure how I happened across this website - *Mid*Century*Menu* and it’s recipe for Ginger Ale Salad – but you can imagine my surprise when I saw this rather pale jellied number. It was less than a week from when I was to go to a friend’s for breakfast. The timing couldn’t have been better. The breakfast couldn’t have been better. And the salad was a nice bit of weird fun to bring along.

I substituted a few items, but for the most part, it’s the same recipe – less the ginger. (I just didn’t have any on hand.)

7-Up Salad

2 envelopes of unflavoured gelatin

8 tbsp cold water

½ cup boiling fruit juice (the juice from the canned pineapple can be used)

Enjoying a slice of leftover salad. 

½ cup sugar

1/8 tsp salt

2 cups 7-up

Juice of one small lemon

1 ½ cups globe grapes, sliced in quarters (I’d get a seedless variety if I were doing this again. I *thought* globe grapes were seedless.)

1 orange, peeled and roughly chopped

1 pink grapefruit, peeled and roughly chopped

Soak gelatin in cold water until it blooms. (I had no idea what “blooms” meant – and was surprised to see that it looked more like half-melted butter when I went back to look, 10 minutes later.)

Add sugar to the boiling fruit juice and stir until mostly dissolved, then add the bloomed gelatin to this mixture – stir again until the gelatin is dissolved.

Add salt, 7-Up, and lemon juice. Stir lightly to avoid losing the carbonation in the 7-Up. Chill until partially set. (About 20-40 minutes.)

Add fruit to partially set gelatin. Pour into a 5-cup gelatin mold. Refrigerate until firm.

Enjoy!

Refrigerator Pickles

This has been a weird year so far. Overall, everything is working out. I’m still a little sad I didn’t garden. Lucky me (us!), pickling cucumbers showed up at work yesterday! We are so lucky to have a gardening colleague with a case of the sharesies.

I wondered how I could make a small enough batch of pickles, and then remembered - my mom has been trying to sell me the recipe for refrigerator pickles for a whole lotta years. It was time to buy what she has been selling.

It’ll take a little longer to pickle – like.... probably weeks in the fridge... but this was a really fun way to use a half-dozen cucumbers!

Here goes:

Refrigerator Pickles

1 ½ c cold water

1 ½ cups sugar 

1 ½ cups cider vinegar

1 ½ tbsp dried onion flakes

¾ tsp salt

¾ tsp celery seed

½ tsp garlic salt

½ tsp onion salt

½ tsp celery salt

6 pickling cucumbers cut in ¼” slices

Mix all ingredients, except cucumbers, in a ½ gallon jar. Cover and shake til mixed. Pack in cucumbers. Put in fridge. Wait. Mom says that after a couple of weeks, she tastes one every few days til she decides they’re ready. She also says that you can easily substitute Splenda for the sugar.

The best part? ½ hour from start til finish – and the dishes were already washed!

Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies

Another potluck, another recipe! This week’s theme was Cinco De Mayo. A Mexican independence-like holiday.

I don’t bake a lot, but I couldn't resist trying a recipe that had similarities to ginger snaps, and was a chocolate cookie rolled in chili powder. Weird. :-)

I followed the internet recipe fairly closely, except for forgetting to use coarse salt instead of regular every day salt. Anyhoo. If you would like to see the original, please visit here: http://www.marthastewart.com/336516/mexican-hot-chocolate-cookies

Other thoughts? Don’t skimp on the parchment paper for this recipe. I did. The cookies *really* stuck to the pan. Don’t use the leftover rolling sugar in your fancy iced coffee.  Blech.

Here is the recipe:

Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter, room temperature

1 1/2 cups sugar + additional 1/4 cup for sugar topping

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon chili powder (I would be open to trying this with cayenne next time.)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees, with racks in upper and lower thirds.

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, cocoa powder, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt.

In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Scrape down side of bowl. Add eggs and beat to combine.

With mixer on low, gradually add flour mixture and beat until combined.

In a small bowl, combine remaining 1/4 cup sugar, cinnamon, and chili powder. Using heaping tablespoons, form balls of dough and roll in cinnamon-sugar mixture. Place, about 3 inches apart, on two parchment-lined baking sheets.

Bake until cookies are set in centre and begin to crack, about 10 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through. Let cookies cool on sheets on wire racks 5 minutes, then transfer cookies to racks to cool completely.

Enjoy!

Zucchini Chicken Poppers

Don’t we all want some new ideas? And that “Tasty” youtube channel has some seriously tasty looking dishes. With a lot of them deep fried. Heh.

Well, I saw one that looked very tasty and kinda healthy. I bookmarked it to try at a later date – which ended up today. Of course, I made a few changes – notably removing onions and cilantro. 

Here’s how they turned out. (Before you get too far, I made them with 1 tsp of salt, and I’m pretty sure that could at least be halved.)

Zucchini Chicken Poppers

1 lb chicken

1 clove garlic, minced

1 ½ cups grated zucchini

½ cup grated fennel

½ tsp grated ginger

½ tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

4 tsps olive oil

Grate zucchini, fennel, and ginger into a medium sized bowl. Add salt and pepper, mix. Add in ground chicken, mix.

Pan-fry by tablespoons. (I made 4x batches of 5, refreshing oil in pan with each batch. If you could do more at a time, you could use less oil.)

Makes about 20 pieces. (20 1 tbsp size plus one giant one, to be exact.)

The original served this with a guacamole type dip – but I didn’t have avocado in the house. That would have been a fresh addition. (And a nice way to cut the salt.)

Enjoy.

If you are interested, here is the link to the original recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Z-Z6hx0s0 

Cottage Cheese Pancakes

Happy Louis Riel Day! I'm celebrating with a leisurely Monday morning. I woke up without an alarm, shuffled around a bit, tidied a little, and decided to give these Cottage Cheese Pancakes a try. I’d enjoy them while watching into the sunny back-yard. I can hardly wait to enjoy my first summer in that yard.

I don’t eat a lot of pancakes – they slow me down. I don’t know why, I just know they do.

Along came a recipe that looked like a try. I liked them! I think I might make a few extra and freeze them for quick breakfasts.

Here is the recipe (from here: http://hurrythefoodup.com/cottage-cheese-pancakes/):

Cottage Cheese Pancakes

½ cup cottage cheese

½ cup rolled oats (I used quick-oats)

3 Eggs

Whisk eggs together and add cottage cheese and rolled oats.

Fry in pan with oil on medium heat.

I used a 1/3 cup measure of batter for each pancake. This made 5. I think I will switch to a ¼ cup measure in the future. 2 was just a little too much for breakfast. (And it will probably make 6 this way, too.)

Enjoy!

Update: 3/6/2016: I made these again this weekend. The 1/4 cup measure worked like gangbusters. Plus, I used the immersion blender to make a more smooth batter, and that also improved them. They are wonderful with unsweetened applesauce. Also, I've collected the nutritional info for them:

Nutritional Info With Applesauce

Nutritional Info Without Applesauce