12-11: Italian Macaroni and Cheese

12-11: Italian Macaroni and Cheese

Before you make up your mind on 12-11: Italian Macaroni & Cheese, I must let you know that it is not what you are expecting. If you are envisioning just another creamy cheesy béchamel-based sauce, this is NOT that.

This has ham in it and NO cheese in the sauce. All the cheese is on top. The noodles are suspended in a cream and egg base similar to a quiche filling. Jump behind the cut and see what this wacky mac & cheese is all about.


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7-55: Sunday Pork Stew

7-55: Sunday Pork Stew

7-55: Sunday Pork Stew was part of a recent 3-recipes-at-1-time attempt, which also included 4-2: Green Beans with Hazelnut Butter and 4-4: Scalloped Parsley Potatoes.

I had originally intended to make a different pork recipe, but when faced with an unexpected ingredient shortage (someone used my mushrooms), I rolled with it and dug out another pork recipe for which I had ingredients on hand. This would have been better with pasta or rice, as suggested on the card, but dinner is dinner when you’re hungry.


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6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts

6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts

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.


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3-13: Velvety Carrot Soup

3-13: Velvety Carrot Soup

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 velvetySimply Delicious has you covered.


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6-8: Curried Chicken

6-8: Curried Chicken

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.


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3-1: Sweet Potato Vichyssoise

3-1: Sweet Potato Vichyssoise

Soup is technically easy to make, but can still quickly go wrong. Our CSA box came with 2 lbs. of white sweet potatoes this week, and it was time for something else besides sweet potato fries. The trusty interwebs told me that white sweet potatoes were pretty similar to regular ones, so I thought I’d give 3-1: Sweet Potato Vichyssoise a whirl.

Vichyssoise is originally a French-American creation. This version is definitely more of an autumn/Thanksgiving-type of flavor, but it was still easy to make and pretty good. Obviously the recipe card depicts the use of an orange sweet potato, but white sweet potatoes work pretty well also.

Soup’s on!


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