I went on a cooking spree and made 4 recipes last night. 17-28: Pound Cake was the last of what I cooked, when we were scouring the house looking for a dessert. ?
Hey! This one has MY handwriting on it! I said it was good a few years ago, let’s see if it’s still good.
Spoiler alert: it was. 🙂
I jumped several sections ahead a few weeks ago when I needed to make a pasta side dish for something (I don’t even remember what at this point). I don’t have this group scanned yet and I procrastinated on scanning the card–oh well. ?
We find 12-6: Seasoned Pasta Toss in Book 2, Group 2 (Main Courses), Subgroup 12 (Pasta & Rice). I still have a ton of parsley in my freezer and gluten-free rice pasta in my pantry, and it’s time to clean house.
Too bad it turned out to be less than impressive. It’s my fault, but still.
Okay. This one sounds weird. It looks weird too. But you know what? It actually worked out okay. I had some green beans from the CSA box that desperately needed to be used, so here’s what we did with them.
Pork chops + tomatoes + green beans + sliced cheese sounds odd. Book 1, Group 2 (Main Courses), Subgroup 7 (Pork) gives us 7-2: Pork Chops with Tomatoes. I had pasta and salad ready on the stand-by in case this went south, but luckily I didn’t need them.
Fennel has been a challenge ever since we started receiving CSA boxes a year or two ago. I really never cooked with it before and even now, finding recipes to use with it (that I’ll eat) is difficult.
If you’ve never had fennel, it tastes like black licorice. You eat the bulb part, and usually cut off the stalks & feathery parts. I usually save those parts and put them in when I make chicken stock.
We ended up with two very large fennel bulbs, and so I decided to make 4-13: Fennel au Gratin, because you can’t go wrong when you cover things in cheese.
We paired this with some English cheddar tortilla/gluten-free something-or-other chips as well as put it on top of some veggie patties–both were pretty good. It worked well as a dip–it might be too cheesy as a side dish, unless you added more fennel.
This arose out of a desire to use up some leftover chicken more so than a desire to eat another meat-based crêpe recipe so soon after 5-24: Meat-Filled Crêpes, but it turned out to be pretty good in its own right.
5-22: Crêpes with Chicken really should be “Crêpes with Chicken and Mushrooms”, as mushrooms are just as much a part of this as the chicken.
I had originally considered making it at breakfast, but I’m glad I didn’t–it’s definitely a savory dish. Crêpes are popular in this book–all this practice is making me quite the crêpe-master.
Finally–something that’s not chicken. The first pork recipe we’ll cover here is 7-26: Maple-Glazed Pork Chops.?
My mom was NOT a pork eater and I grew up quasi-Jewish, so there wasn’t a lot of pork being cooked in my childhood, spare the occasional ham steak or rack of ribs here and there at my dad’s request.
The key here is to make sure you use REAL maple syrup, not table syrup. Big difference.
A week or two ago after we returned home from a grocery shopping trip, I found myself with a package of chicken that needed to be cooked ASAP due to having its plastic wrap punctured on the way home. Since I had some red peppers that needed to be used up as well, I chose to make 6-26: Chicken Maryland.
Recipe #26 of Subgroup 6 (Poultry & Game) in Book 1, Group 2 (Main Courses) is Chicken Maryland, which is basically a nicely-spiced fried chicken with a red bell pepper cream sauce. The chicken was delightful–the sauce turned out a bit odd, but that was probably my fault.
6-24: Mushroom-Almond Chicken tasted okay, but looked…odd. I’m not sure why mine came out mauve, but there you go. The picture below is definitely not mauve. This recipe was cooked in tandem with 6-8: Curried Chicken, due to an abundance of chicken.
As I mentioned before, mine came out in a slightly mauve color, which doesn’t seem to be the case on the recipe card photo. I don’t know where I went wrong, but at least it was edible.
It’s been a while, my friends–life gets in the way, sometimes. But, we must still eat, which means we must still cook (when you get tired of ordering out). Get ready for a trio of chicken recipes, starting with 6-8: Curried Chicken.
I actually made this in tandem with 6-24: Mushroom-Almond Chicken, as I had a LOT of chicken that night. Both recipes are from Book 1, Group 2: Main Courses. Subgroup 6 is Poultry & Game, so there’s some turkey and duck recipes scattered in with a multitude of chicken recipes.
Let’s dive into some Main Course recipes–you don’t win friends with salad.
