tacos

tacos and iced tea. simple. tasty.

potahtoes

Baked potatoes.

1. steamed broccoli
2. hot dog medallions (makes it sound fancier, right?)
3. cheese sauce (horrible, embarrassing to admit, American cheese sauce)

In the end: delicious.

really good soup and yummy bread

JULY
In July
I'll take a peep
into the cool
and fishy deep
where chicken soup
is selling cheap.
Selling once
selling twice
selling chicken soup
with rice.

Tonight's dinner was courtesy of Maurice Sendak's glorious book Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months. My five-year old loves that book and he often asks, "What are we having for dinner? Chicken Soup with Rice?" Tonight I had the extreme joy to answer, "Why yes we are!" He was so excited.

My oldest, after tasting, said, "It's not that good."
I replied, "You don't like it?"
He says, "No, I think it's very good, I just don't think it's good enough that the wind would want to blow down the door to get some." (In March the wind "...laps it up and roars for more.")

It was really good though. I bought chicken thighs (with skin and bones, which is so out of style these days) and made my own broth first. I used the recipe in ATK's Family Cookbook and it only took about an hour and a half. Then I turned the page, made the chicken noodle soup sans noodles and threw in 1 1/2 cups of cooked rice.

Man, they are so right when they say homemade broth is better. There really is no comparison. None.

Oh yeah, we had bread and butter, too.

Enjoy this song.

PERSONAL PIZZA NIGHT!

Personally I don't do this too often because it takes FOREVER to cook five pizzas. Especially so when yours is last and you've been working on it for the last two hours. (Baby doesn't eat her own yet and Daddy's gone or else it would be seven! I soooo need a double oven).

Sweet Red Head Doll and her pineapple-only pie.

Big Sister likes things spicy. She emptied the last of the pepperoncini jar and then sprinkled red pepper flakes on top. (That's ranch in the middle.)

Little Brother made a portrait of his friend from pineapple (mouth) and olives (hair, eyes and nose) which is not particularly visible on account of the angle and the fact that I cut it into slices before the picture, of which my son was most emphatically unhappy. Luckily he recovered enough to smile for the camera.

Big Brother and his pineapple, olive masterpiece. His was the last pie of the kids' to be cooked. That smile is purely his exuberance that he can now fill his tummy.

They talked me into getting my face in the picture. I can assure that my pizza was much more photogenic at this moment. I outdid myself on my pie tonight, though: artichoke hearts, red peppers, olives and between the sauce and cheese I added a layer of minced basil. Basil's aroma is magic. Ethereal basil, how I love you.

I know she's not food nor holding any, but everyone else got their pic in tonight...

compilation pt 3 (and hopefully the last, i think i'm caught up now)

This is my husband's favorite spaghetti sauce. (Thank you, Berta.) It makes a lot. I mean you use one of those HUGE #10 cans that hold like a gallon or so. It's good and we had breadsticks and salad.

This meal was just a jar of spaghetti and a pound of cooked elbows baked with mozzarella sprinkled on top. (Ironically I took some of the leftover sauce from the night before and filled an old spaghetti sauce jar so I would have the right amount for this dish.) And salad. Don't forget the salad.

Stromboli! Flavor tonight: Cheeseburger. After making a batch of my pizza dough I rolled it out as square-ish as possible and sprinkled browned ground beef and cheddar cheese about. I rolled it up jelly-roll style and after a half hour stint in the oven...voila! Everyone is usually pretty happy with this one. Steamed broccoli gave us our green. (And brown. Apparently sherry vinegar causes broccoli to turn brown. One of those "learn something new..." items.)

The dessert bowl isn't so pretty because I forgot about taking a picture entirely and had already begun the consumption process. I paired a Grandma Virginia's Applesauce Cake with the BlueBell Triple Caramel Ice Cream my hubby brought home. It was mmmmmm. (The cake recipe came from this cool book I checked out from the library: The Food Journal of Lewis and Clark. The author read the diaries of the intrepid explorers and did a ton of research on the cooking of the period. I've tried a few things from it already and they've been very good.)

Lastly, we've got super-uper frugal night. I took some tostada shells and slapped on some refried beans and rice. My parents left a huge Sam's Club package of American Cheese when they visited last and I cooked up some cheese sauce with the vile stuff. I will admit that the stuff sorta hitch hikes onto the tasty train when stirred into a basic white sauce. Topped off with taco sauce and sour cream? That was some tasty dinner. (Dinner is such a stretch here. I mean this is more along the line of Super Bowl snacks, doncha think?)

compilation pt 2

Life and blogging haven't been friends as of late. Now on to the food:

Here we have peanut soup over rice and a green salad. The peanut soup is just carrots, onions and cabbage cooked with broth until tender then blended into smithereens. Add some peanut butter to pureed soup and season to taste. Super easy, cheap and the kids always are excited for "Peanut Butter Soup!"

Pizza night. Let's see...choices appear to be cheese, sausage, and  pineapple.

Sushi! I finally remembered to buy actual sushi rice. We had those fake krab sticks and avocado and sesame seeds.  So good. So very good. Oh! And rooibos tea is a bad pair with sushi. Very bad! In other circumstances it is delicious. With sushi, not so much.

Have you noticed my frugal trend as of late? This meal takes the cake. Fry up some cubed potatoes with an onion, add some chopped hotdogs and top with cheese. Add a little ketchup and you've got yourself some good ol' Depression era vittles. (I actually got this recipe off the internet from a 90-year old woman who cooked it during the Depression.) Poor times or not, this is really delicious. (Especially if you use good hotdogs or even if you leave them out altogether.)

compilation pt 1

Kolaches (Hebrew Nationals inside, baby) with Carrot Salad. A&W Cream Soda was the lovely accompanying beverage.

Not much to look at but this meal was really, really good. I took notes while watching the the Potato edition of The French Chef. It is a potato pancake (with cream cheese!) and it was supposed to be topped with cubed ham, a poached egg and drizzled with tomato sauce. I didn't have all those things. So we had the potato pancake topped with a friend egg and ketchup. Not as sophisticated, but dang, dang good.

This was our actual Fourth of July dinner. Grilled steak with really runny Julia Child (made from notes I took from The French Chef) Scalloped Potatoes. Looks wise: super unimpressive. Taste wise: a good solid average. (Which really equals unimpressive, right?)

This is our Day After Fourth of July feast. Much better in looks and taste. We've got Everything Burgers, Grilled Chicken Leg Quarters, Macaroni Salad and Coleslaw. Obviously we had a gluttony issue to make up for the lack of Celebratory-Worthy Food the previous day.

See that smoke? We were burning the last logs of three trees we fell. Fire + hotdog = that face. You might be confused, but I can assure you, that is a happy face.

This nasty looking concoction was dessert for our fire/hotdog dinner. Take a banana, peel one section back and make 1/2" slices. Take out every other slice and eat them. Fill the gaps left alternating chocolate chips and marshmallows. Put the peel back and wrap the whole thing in tin foil. Lay the package on hot coals and flip after five minutes. After a total of ten minutes, unwrap and enjoy the ooey, gooey, chocolate-y, marshmallow-y goodness. Words (and even pictures) are not enough here.

corn soup + bread

I've been using my Black Binder of Printed-Out Recipes this week. Six ears of corn on the cob, some milk, some sesame oil, ginger and a blender turned into dinner tonight. I followed this recipe, Velvet Corn Soup and it was pretty good, although it would have been better if I could have thrown in the green chiles and cilantro. Instead of "contaminating" the entire pot with hotness, I just added sambal to mine. The kids were not nearly appreciative enough. They had to be bribed with an extra slice of bread to finish their bowls.

tuna casserole + salad

Dinner came from some random homemaking site I found back on some random date in the past: Creative Homemaking. It's called Tuna Supper Casserole and to be honest, it's on the skimpy side, but I double it and add a couple cups of elbow noodles and it's decent. If you tack on a salad, the whole meal is pretty filling.

I like this recipe because it has a lemony sauce, a little different from your normal tuna casserole and it has spinach to punch up the nutritional content. Not only that but you just chunk the tuna up and scatter it about, it's not incorporated into the sauce infusing the whole dish with tuna-ness. I'd definitely spend the extra $.50 and buy white tuna, not that mushy light stuff.  Now don't get me wrong, albacore doesn't turn this into a four-star recipe, but it's such a better quality for just a few more cents, it's worth it. Overall this meal is cheap and easy and tasty in a frugal-grandma-loves-you sort of way.

sloppy joes + carrot sticks

Super easy dinner tonight. I had already browned the ground beef earlier this week and I had leftover hamburger buns in the freezer. The kids cut up the carrot sticks and I already had the ranch made so I think this took a grand total of fifteen minutes. I don't know why anyone would want to buy that canned stuff when you can have fresh, know-everything-that's-in-it sloppy joes in such short notice.

I used Sloppy Joes II from allrecipes with no changes. Straight up. Wait, wait, I did make one substitution. I minced three garlic cloves instead of using powder. Whew! Now my conscience is clear...

tacos

What more can possibly be written? Oh! They had beef tonight. That's a big deal for some members of my familia.

leftovers

1. One leftover hotdog
2. One bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats
3. One glass of iced Earl Grey

beans + bread

Dinner was Beans Bourguignon, of which I've made before, from Laurel's Kitchen. Last time I made it my husband was gone, so he got to try it and he really enjoyed it. It is very tasty, which is especially surprising considering the simplicity of the dish.

My daughter made a quick single-layer chocolate cake for dessert and dusted it with powdered sugar. Smiling, happy tummies all around.

The drink is iced Good Hope Vanilla Rooibos. It doesn't have caffeine and thus, in our family, is called Kids' Tea or alternatively Van Roob. It is super delicious and highly recommended.

Beans Bourguignon Recipe