Last Few Weeks

I've finally started to settle in and accept my unemployed status.  It's tough being unemployed and yes I do realize that sounds ridiculous.  You go through so many different emotions.  At first I was sad to leave the working world.  The first week felt like a stay-cation.  I did as much and as little as I wanted to do and that brought me happiness.  Along comes the second week and reality set in pretty quickly.  There was anger (how come everyone else gets to work!), depression (I'm a sad, boring person now and I hate housework), and anxiety (am I ever going to work again?) all thrown into the mix..  And the BOREDOM!  Never in my life have I ever felt this kind of cabin fever before.  Now I get excited to run even the most mundane errands.  Currently I am in my third week of unemployment and I've dropped the anxiety and anger this week (had an interview Monday).  The depression has turned mainly just into boredom.   It's finally the time to get back to blogging.


Obviously I'm still trying to stick with making cheap yet delicious dishes.  Usually while I'm looking through my recipes I'll look at the ingredient list.  If I have a lot of ingredients on the list and the ones I have to purchase are inexpensive that recipe will make the cut.  Since I've been a bit of a slacker when it comes to blogging, I'm going to recap a few recipes I made.


Rachael Ray's Salsa Stoup and Double-Decker Baked Quesadillas:  I love soup and what could be better than turning salsa into a soup! The quesadillas are cheese and scallion; the scallions really gave these more flavor then you normally get with a cheese quesadilla. I will be adding scallions, leek, or shallots to my cheese quesadillas from now on.


Total Cost:  (I already had the oil, onion, garlic and omitted the cilantro and sour cream) $13.49

Mushroom and Sausage Ragu with Polenta:  Yum this was a great meal!  I added some sauteed kale to it because it needed more veggies and the kale was the perfect choice.  Total cost:   (I had the oil, onion, garlic, salt, and butter and substituted baby bella's for creminis)  $11.65

Both of these recipes had enough left over for lunches the next day.  

That's my update for now.  Next up:  Garlic and Bean Enchiladas and Sweet Potato Soup

Heading South

When it comes to food, I'm a Southern girl at heart.  There is just something about Southern food that warms you up inside and makes you feel happy.  Sadly I don't come across many recipes for Southern food that are healthy enough for me to eat them every week.  There are recipes where someone thought it was a good idea make a dish like fried chicken and then they go an bake it.  Did you REALLY enjoy that baked "fried" chicken?  Did it make you drool and crave more?  I doubt it!  As they say, everything in moderation!  Don't try to make a dish that is amazing and totally bad for you into something healthy, it won't work.  You won't be satisfied.  Just suck it up and cook the unhealthy way every once in awhile.  It's worth it!

So I was browsing one of my favorite food sites Serious Eats and came across a recipe for Sauteed Andouille,and Green with Grits.  Just looking at the picture my stomach started to growl.  I couldn't wait to go out and get the ingredients for this dish and cook it up!  This recipe required three pots/pans on my stove at once (that always freaks me out!) and only some minor prep work.

In the big pot I boiled the collard greens for about 8-10 minutes.  Yum, I love greens!

While they were cooking I started the grits.  Bring some salted milk and water to a simmer then turn the heat down so you get a low simmer and whisk in the grits.  These will cook for 20 minutes or so.  Meanwhile you should drain your greens and move on to cooking the rest of the vegetables and sausage.  Brown your sliced sausage for a few minutes on each side.  Remove the sausage from the pan and sautee the shallots (I love these things and I love that fact that I have been using them a lot lately!) and red bell pepper in the sausage fat.  My sausage didn't have a lot of fat, so I had to throw in some olive oil.

Once the peppers are cooked, add the greens and sausage to the shallot and pepper mix.  Mix them together and cook until warm. 

When the grits are cooked stir in some butter and cheddar cheese. That's it! Finished!  So while there were a lot of pots, there wasn't really a lot of work involved (there was a lot of clean up though). 

Final Product:

 
My thoughts:  Yum, yum, yum.  Comfort, comfort, comfort.  This was good!  I added some sriracha (hot sauce) to mine since I love everything as spicy as possible. The one ingredient that doesn't need to be included is the red bell pepper.  I didn't feel like it really brought anything to the dish, but it did up the vegetable quotient which is always good.  Cheesy grits are so delicious.  They just melt in your mouth.  This dish can work with shrimp or as a vegetarian dish too without losing it's comfort factor.  You can make it even more comforting by adding some cornbread to the mix.  I just made a box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix and added some cheese and chopped jalapenos to it.  If you are going to go the unhealthy route take it all the way to the top!

I was also curious how budget friendly this dish was:

Sausage/$4.79
Grits/$1.89
Collard Greens/$1.99
Shallots/$0.70
Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix/$0.55
Red Bell Pepper/$2.99
Block of Cheddar Cheese/$2.29

Total/$15.20

Nowhere near as economical as I have been lately! Although when you really think about it this was a dinner for two, plus enough left over for two lunches.  $15 really is cheap when thought about it in those terms!

Next up:  Mark Bittman's Lentils and Potatoes; Salsa Soup with Cheese Quesadilla's 

Beer, Sausages,and Potatoes...Some of My Favorite Things

Hello everyone I'm back!  My classes are done, so I can cook again.  It felt really good to get back into the kitchen.  I might almost say that I even missed it.  Almost.  The expensive grocery bill kind of spoiled my enjoyment of returning.  $181!  Granted it wasn't all food products, but I would say the majority of the bill was food related.   We finally got out to the meat market (Triano's) that is in our town and it was a really good experience.  We got a bunch of chicken, ground beef, and Italian sausages for around $13!  I was impressed and will definitely be going back there.   


For my first foray back into the kitchen I decided to try out a Martha Stewart recipe.  I'm not sure that I've ever actually tried one of her recipes before, so I figured I might as well try it out.  The recipe is Beer-Braised Sausages and Warm Potato Salad.  As I mentioned in the title of this post:  Beer, Sausages, Potatoes these are a few of my favorite things! (And so is the Sound of Music!)


This was an easy recipe to follow, the only issue I ran into was browning all sides of the sausage.  I got the first three sides browned, but the part that curves was really hard to brown.  I ended up breaking one of the sausages a little bit trying to do it, so I finally just gave up. 

Next you add the thinly sliced onion and cook that until it's softened. 

Then you add the beer (12 oz of pale ale), red potatoes (I quartered mine), water, salt, and pepper.  You bring that to a boil and then cover the pan and lower the heat to medium and cook until potatoes are done.

Once the potatoes are done (15 minutes for me) remove the sausages (keep them warm) and take the potatoes out of pan and toss them in a mixture of extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, and parsley. 

The last step is returning the cooking liquid back to a boil and reducing it down to about 1 cup of liquid. 

Once that's reduced put the sausages back in to heat them up and you are finished.  After you put the sausage and potatoes on a plate, drizzle half the sauce on top and serve the other half of the sauce on the side.


Final Product:

My thoughts:  This meal was okay, but not great.  There wasn't anything wrong with the recipe, but we used a beer that was just way too bitter.  I think you can get away with a normal ale.  I'd like to use Yuengling if I make this again.  I also highly suggest adding sourdough bread to this meal.  There was a ton of sauce and using the sourdough to soak up all of the liquid would be super.  Also because the sauce was so bitter you couldn't taste the dressing on the potatoes, which was sad because the tanginess of the vinegar would have gone nicely with the beer. 


It was easy.  It didn't take as long to cook as I thought it would.  It wasn't labor intensive.  So try it out if Beer, Sausages,and Potatoes are some of your favorite things too!


Next up:  My first Mark Bittman recipe, More Vegetable Less Egg Frittata and the Sloppy Joe is back!  This time I think I might have finally found the recipe that my mom used to use when I was little.  Can't wait to try it!

Sausage and Zucchini Rice

Day 3-The mood in the kitchen was not a good one. I was frustrated almost from the start. As I was taking out the ingredients, I was getting mad at them. Some examples of my anger: pine nuts (why do I have to toast you? why can’t I buy you already toasted?), zucchini (how the heck do I cut zucchini? why did I pick a recipe with a vegetable in it?), parmesan (I wish I didn’t feel that buying the already grated was a such waste of money!), and onion (AGAIN!!!! WHY?!!!). Am I the only person that feels like this?

I guess 3 days of having to cook is 1 too many for me. The pine nuts ended up a little too toasty. I chopped the onion and decided to call Anthony (my husband, he is allowing me to us his name) in and have him show me how to cut the zucchini. I was a bit spastic (by spastic I mean mad and lacking patience) and ended up having to cut the second one on my own (I couldn’t quite grasp how to make zucchini square, but does it really matter what it looks like? Isn’t taste the important factor?). After butchering the second zucchini and grating the dang parmesan, I was ready to cook.

The recipe originally calls for white rice and hot Italian sausage, but I like to make things a little healthier and more nutritious. So, I substituted the white rice for brown and the Italian sausage for poultry sausage. Once I got the rice started, I moved on to the sausage. The sausage out of the casing felt and looked icky. Trying to crumble it into the pan was useless; all I ended up doing was squashing it a bit. As it was cooking I tried to break the sausage up like ground beef, but it wasn’t as easy. I finally accomplished it. Next it was time to take the sausage out and throw the zucchini in. Now I’ve eaten zucchini plenty of times, but never cooked it. So I know basically what it should feel like when it’s done. This was only supposed to take 4 minutes (are they crazy?!), it ended up taking around 10 minutes. Maybe it was my terrible cutting of the zucchini, but I still don’t think it would only take 4 minutes to get it tender.

Then the recipe gets even screwier. The sausage needs to go back into the pan (with the zucchini) with 1 cup of chicken broth and ½ cup of water. After pouring in the chicken broth, there was no way I was adding the water. It would have been a watery mess. I thought 1 cup of broth might have been overkill. Once that is heated through you add the rice (the rice also took longer to cook then what the recipe said). Maybe that’s why you need the chicken broth, but definitely DO NOT use the water. It would end up too wet.

Final Product:

Overall thoughts about the recipe: The brown rice and poultry sausage were great changes to the recipe. Who cares how the zucchini is cut as long as it’s all roughly the same size. DO NOT use the water. Buying Parmesan cheese already grated is still a waste of money. And give yourself more time then what the recipe says, in case your rice and zucchini do not cook as fast as the recipe says.

I would definitely cook this again. I loved how it tasted. Yum! It felt pretty healthy too, minus the butter. Although I think the butter is part of the reason it tasted really good.

Totals: 25-30 minutes prep time, 30-40 minutes cooking time, 2 pots.

I’m giving myself a break tonight and not cooking. We will be having frozen pizza. Rochester pizza and people from New Jersey do not mix. It’s been decided in our household that we would much rather eat frozen pizza, than have any pizza in the area delivered to us. The crust is way too thick and the sauce is too sweet. There will be more on the pizza topic later.

Where to find the Sausage and Zucchini Rice Recipe-

http://www.rachaelraymag.com/Recipes/rachael-ray-magazine-recipe-index/dinner-recipes/Sausage-and-Zucchini-Rice