I’ve been making a lot of potato recipes lately. There’s a 10 lb. bag in my pantry I’ve been working my way through, so expect a few more potato recipes over the next few weeks. We’ll start here with one I’ve made before–4-11: Potato Soufflé with Onions.
More of my handwriting. I’ve made this one before, and this time I remember the circumstances and my adaptations–see what good notes will do for you?
Here’s another dessert for you. Book 3, Group 3 (Desserts), Subgroup 17 (Baked Goods) gives us card #9: Brownies. I’ve made these a bazillion times, and they are a GREAT base for adding your own ingredients.
These are good, easy, and fast–the trifecta you’re never supposed to be able to achieve. I highly recommend them, and I keep this recipe on hand for whenever I want to make brownies. One big difference: these use actual chocolate, not cocoa powder. 🍫
In 3-13: Velvety Carrot Soup, I talked about how I love old cookbooks for their colorful attempts at trying to make boring recipes sound exciting. Another cookbook “trope” is putting words like easy, simple or quick in the title of a recipe that would otherwise sound…well, not those things.
Sometimes they live up to their titles, and sometimes not. A prime example of the former would be 6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts. To be honest, stuffing chicken breasts doesn’t even sound that hard to begin with, so I suppose it didn’t even need that qualifier.
Unless it sounded hard to you–if that’s the case, ignore that last sentence. 🙂 It’s really not that hard, is what I’m saying.
The fourth of the 4 dishes I made before I left for my trip a few weeks ago is from Book 1, Group 1 (Appetizers & Starters), Subgroup 4 (Potatoes & Vegetables), Card #23: Mashed Potatoes with Broccoli. I made this dish to accompany 6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts and to use up some CSA veggies.
They ended up being kind of…boring. I realize neither mashed potatoes nor broccoli are EXCITING things, but this dish needed a lot of help.
I think one of my favorite parts of old cookbooks is the adjectives they use to describe their dishes. I like to imagine a team of writers/cookbook jockeys staying late into the night, trying to dream up the perfect word to engage some adventurous cook into what would be an otherwise mundane-sounding recipe. How do you make carrot soup sound exciting?
That’s where “velvety” comes in. I present–3-13: Velvety Carrot Soup.
Oh, Simply Delicious. I admire you for trying to get me so excited about your carrot soup, that you put smiley face dollops of sour cream on your camera bowls.
When you have a LOT of carrots to get rid of and you’re looking for something velvety, Simply Delicious has you covered.
Catching up after a few weeks of IRL obligations. Let’s get back to it.
This was one of the 4 recipes cooked in the batch I mentioned in 17-28: Pound Cake. I was making a large amount of food to store up while I was gone for a week, and one of those recipes was 8-18: Tangy Beef Rolls. Sounds deliciously 80s.
Book 2, Group 2 (Main Courses), Subgroup 8 (Beef) gives us card #18: Tangy Beef Rolls. How do you resist something beef-related that describes itself as “tangy”? Mine didn’t come out as classy as the one in this picture, but it was still definitely edible. And somewhat tangy.
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.