Simply Delicious has the best decor in these photos. The wooden salad plate, white wine, and hand carved chicken plant box add a lot of character to this photo accompanying 2-8: Chicken Salad, it all screams 1980’s “chic”. Their final photo looks a lot more appetizing than my stark modern plating.
Such a luncheon treat! The chutney and mustard give the salad dressing a tangy flavor that compliments the chicken really well.
2-4: Chef’s Salad is another somewhat classic American restaurant dish to serve with your 1-18: Club Sandwich. Wikipedia gives it a similar history–most accounts trace it back to early 20th century New York, although a few credit it to originating in 17th century England. This iteration is pretty similar to most you’ll find in modern-day restaurants–the beauty of the chef salad is that the ingredients are at the discretion of the chef.
I NEED that creepy statue in the Simply Delicious picture. Google has nothing decent for me when I search “hippopotamus chef“, but you never know–someday one of my thrift store treasure hunt trips may pay off.
I like dishes that are easy enough to prepare on a weekday night. 6-14: Chicken Breasts with Tomato Salsa teaches you to make a simple salsa to put on top of some tasty chicken breasts. 🍗
I really enjoy dishes like this for dinner: simple and flavorful ingredients which combine to make a nutritious, Simply Delicious meal.
Simply Delicious contains the best recipes for pork tenderloin. I particularly enjoy this preparation, 7-24: Cran-Glazed Pork Tenderloin, which uses cranberry sauce–my favorite part of the Thanksgiving (or Christmas) meal. 🍒
Pork and wine taste great when combined together. Instead of marinating the pork as in 7-18: Pork Tenderloin in Wine Sauce, the cranberry sauce and wine are put in the pan to create a sauce to coat the pork tenderloin in flavor. 🍷
Simply Delicious is introducing me to so many newculinaryterms. 6-46: Chicken Breasts Veronique was a new one for me. 🍇 The definition of “Veronique” is explained below:
Chicken and grapes isn’t the most obvious combination, not in 🇺🇸 American-style cuisine anyway. This dish is definitely influenced by 🇫🇷 French cuisine. I’ve eaten chicken and grapes before in Middle-Eastern styled recipes as well.
Marinade is a “sauce, typically made of oil, vinegar, spices, and herbs, in which meat, fish, or other food is soaked before cooking in order to flavor or soften it”. Port wine is not an ingredient I normally keep in the house, but I have marinated a pork tenderloin before so 7-18: Pork Tenderloin in Wine Sauce shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.
Meat that soaks in a marinade comes out tender and delicious. Cooking with this method requires more preparation time. Leave the meat in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours for maximum tenderness. The minimum marinating time I recommend is around 1 hour. When I prepared this recipe, I tried to make it in one night, so the meat marinated in the refrigerator for only 2 hours.
I don’t often have ground pork on hand, but I happened to pick some up at a supermarket sale a few months ago and had been holding it in the freezer for a Simply Delicious recipe–I knew there were a few that called for it. 9-9: Pork Meat Loaf with Horseradish would have been a silly recipe to sub in ground beef for (my usual move), so this one will get the honor of being used with actual pork. 🐖
You guys, this picture does not look promising. Meatloaf is already difficult to get excited about, and I’m not sure if a creamy horseradish sauce is going to be enough to save it. Despite the copy reeking of desperation at the bottom of the recipe card (does this look “extravagant” to you?), I’m still willing to give it a shot. 🙈
This recipe, 6-29: Stuffed Turkey, is the WHOLE reason I originally decided to take on the challenge of cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year (TGV 2016)–when else was I going to get a chance to use the actual Thanksgiving recipe but on the holiday itself? I have cooked a Thanksgiving dinner before, but not in my own house, and not planned/shopped/organized for by myself. It was a fun challenge, and I have this card and project to thank for it.
Of course I made this recipe the day of Thanksgiving (Thursday 11/24), and it includes not only the turkey, but traditional stuffing and gravy as well. I cooked this in the afternoon, after making 17-5: Hot Seedy Rolls and 1-5: Pigs in a Blanket in the oven that morning.
This year’s Thanksgiving was at least 2 weeks ago by the time you’re reading this, but I hope that if you had one this year it was a nice one, and that if you’re reading this sometime in the future preparing for the current year’s feast, that yours is nice as well. Mine was lovely despite what’s been a tumultuous year, and this recipe was definitely a big part of making my first solo Thanksgiving successful. Thanks for taking time out of your day to read even just a bit of what I’ve written, and thanks for participating in my project, even just for this brief moment.
I’ve been working on this project for just under 3 years now, and I’ve got at least that long to go to attempt to finish it–thanks for giving me a reason to keep this project alive, an outlet for writing, a focus for creative energy, art to share with my family and friends, and a priceless set of memories and experiences tied to a set of stinky old cookbooks that have always meant a lot to me, and mean even more now. Thank you.
4-3: French Potato Gratin is a great side dish for a dinner. It was easy to make and it only takes one pan to cook this recipe.
Jamie made notes on this recipe that I completely ignored. I used the mandoline to cut the potatoes and I used 9 medium/small potatoes.
Editor’s note: I did indeed make notes on this, from when I made this for a fancy dinner for my family during Spring Break of 2009. I stand by my recommendation of using the food processor, but you do you, boo.
Pasta with sauce is the most basic style of dish that Simply Delicious teaches a novice chef to cook. 12-40: Spinach Pasta with Mushrooms is appropriately classified as “Easy“.
Mustard-scented sauce is a recent addition to my diet, but it is one of my favorite additions. Dijon mustard is used in a lot of Simply Delicious sauces and it adds a tangy quality to the sauce that cannot be beat.