5-2: Old-Fashioned Oven Pancake

5-2: Old-Fashioned Oven Pancake

Hello there, and happy June! I was on vacation (a real one!) for most of May, but I’m back now with 5-2: Old-Fashioned Oven Pancake. There’s not a lot that goes into this dish (just 4 ingredients), and it’s probably better/more commonly known as a German pancake and/or a “Dutch baby”.

So far, this is the only mention of lingonberries that I’ve seen in this whole book–I always think of them as something you only see in jam form at IKEA, but according to Wikipedia they are grown in multiple regions including North America (not just Europe/Scandinavia). They’re tough to find fresh here, but frozen seems to be widely available.


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6-16: The Chef’s Special Chicken

6-16: The Chef’s Special Chicken

I’ll be honest–I have no idea why this is “special chicken”. But for me, 6-16: The Chef’s Special Chicken will be special because I made it with “chick’n” instead of the real thing. I guess that’s not all that special for me at this point, but maybe for you?

If you search for “chef’s special chicken”, you’ll get a million different types of recipes, so I’m not sure what makes this one especially traditional. Although this one I found is pretty much this same exact recipe, so I guess it’s not as unknown as I thought. That or someone ripped off Simply Delicious and called it their own.

In a restaurant when you see “chef’s special”, it usually translates to “this is about to go bad so let’s try to sell it tonight however we can”. #themoreyouknow


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7-4: German Pork Stew

7-4: German Pork Stew

Guten Tag! Today, I have 7-4: German Pork Stew for you, which is probably a very appropriate winter-weather dish for right now. This isn’t an original recipe–you can find a lot of varieties of this same dish with just some simple searching. They all seem to include the same three base ingredients: onions, pork, and sauerkraut.

Stews are varied for Simply Delicious–sometimes you get something rather traditionally “stew-like” (like 8-27: Classic Beef Stew), and then sometimes you get recipes like this one that seem closer to…something else. Not anything bad, just not “stew” (as I think of it).


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5-4: Eggs Benedict

5-4: Eggs Benedict

I believe in a couple of things–nobody’s perfect, and all things eventually balance out. My experience with this recipe, 5-4: Eggs Benedict, especially relative to how the rest of the meal went, encapsulates both of those ideas.

In the days leading up to making this Mother’s Day brunch (MD2017), I knew I needed to practice two things before the big day: poaching eggs and hollandaise sauce–I’ve had trouble with both in the past. Guess what I didn’t do?

I procrastinated on practicing both my egg poaching and my hollandaise, and those were my exact failure points on this recipe. After the jump, you can read about what went really well (my homemade English muffins) and what didn’t (my broken hollandaise sauce, for one).


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1-8: Delicious Cocktail Snacks

1-8: Delicious Cocktail Snacks

I recently attended a birthday party, and was tasked with making some of the dishes for the party (as is usually the case). Seeing as some of the guests were “old-school” about their dining preferences, I decided to use up some of the more “old-school” recipes. 1-8: Delicious Cocktail Snacks looks exactly like something a waiter would be carrying around at a fancy cocktail party in an old movie.

So retro. These were pretty easy to make, and actually held really well in the fridge before the party. I reheated them at the party and it worked great–just a thought if you need something for a party that you can make earlier, transport and/or reheat later.


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