🍆 13-12: Eggplant-Rice Casserole is a heavier preparation of eggplant than my other eggplant recipe, 13-16: Arabian Moussaka, this rice and eggplant dish is two, two, two dishes in one. I’ll show myself out for that dumb, old reference… 👋
There were lots of colors in this dish: purple 🍆, orange, green, yellow, white, and a few shades of beige.
Whosoever it was that the editors of Simply Delicious hired to name these dishes deserves some kind of award. And the award for naming-the-most-dishes-a-casserole-that-are-not-actually-a-casserole goes to….SIMPLY DELICIOUS. A casserole is defined as “a kind of stew or side dish that is cooked slowly in an oven.” 7-8: Chinese Pork Casserole is cooked relatively fast on a stove top. Doesn’t exactly sound like a casserole to me.
This recipe card is great because it basically teaches you to make a version of Chop Suey at home.
8-32: Indian Beef Casserole is an affront to Indian cooking worldwide. It is a dish that barely any Indian people would actually eat because it contains beef! 🐮
During my brief trip to India, I actually ate some beef served by the hotel which was spiced similar to this dish. This hotel served beef because it hosted a lot of travelers from USA and Europe who usually eat beef. Indian culture perceives the cow as sacred and a significant portion of the population observes a vegetarian diet. 🇮🇳
Indian never goes well for Simply Delicious. 11-16: Indian Fried Fish was a bust, and 12-22: Nasi Goreng was less than exciting. This recipe, 6-32: Savory Buffet Chicken doesn’t openly identify itself as Indian-inspired, but it’s pretty similar to another clandestinely-influenced recipe, 6-8: Curried Chicken.
“Oriental” is a term you don’t really hear any more (as I mentioned in 7-11: Oriental Pork Stir-Fry), and the language seems a bit flowery for the 1980s. However, this project is not about that stuff–it’s about the food. Let’s press on.
Costco had pork tenderloin on sale, so I’ll use that as an opportunity to work my way through some of those recipes in the book. Here’s 7-36: Pork Tenderloin with Curry Sauce, which I made for dinner a few weeks ago.
True to its claims, I made this one pretty quickly one weeknight for dinner. You could make this with a cheaper cut of pork as well (such as a chop) if you don’t want to pay for the more expensive tenderloin cut.
Here’s something a bit different from the Pasta and Rice chapter. Simply Delicious has a lot of international recipes, some more authentic than others. 12-22: Nasi Goreng is a take on a popular Indonesian fried rice dish, a sweeter and spicier variation of the ubiquitous Chinese take-out version.
This recipe doesn’t give you much in the way of creating Nasi Goreng spices if you don’t have access to or want to use a premixed blend. After the jump, I’ll include a Nasi Goreng spice blend I used and a link to the book from which I pulled it.
This was an accompaniment to 12-11: Italian Macaroni & Cheese when I went to a get-together recently. 2-17: Spicy Potato Salad is similar to a German potato salad in style–it uses vinegar & spices as the dressing instead of mayonnaise.
The main difference between this version and most traditional German potato salads is that this one lacks bacon. But if you miss the bacon that much, feel free to go crazy and add it on back in there.
Chapter 19 of Simply Delicious is Basic Ingredients, another big part of cooking and Cooking School. 19-10: Dried Herbs & Spices I is the first of a two-part series on a selection of spices that you’ll probably find in a well-stocked kitchen.
For this entry, I’ll link to a recipe (or two, or three) that I’ve covered in this project that calls for that spice to illustrate an idea of how to use it (and maybe increased motivation to give one of these recipes a try).
Alright. This is my FAVORITE recipe out of this entire book (at least, as far as I know). My mom always referred to it as “Shrimp Something”, but its official name is 11-12: Creamy Sautéed Shrimp.
You can tell by the state of the card how often we cooked this recipe. This was always a big deal for me when I was a kid and my mom would make this dish.
I also cooked this one for my husband (then-boyfriend) when we were first dating, as a “here’s who I am” kind of a thing. What I’m trying to say is that this dish has a lot of feels attached to it.
Here’s another potato recipe for you. I had a LOT of potatoes to cook. This was the complement to 11-16: Indian Fried Fish, which I posted a few days ago.
This one got stuck to the page before it in the book–hence the destroyed-looking card. You can still see the important parts though–these are mighty tasty. My notes indicate I made it in a chipotle-style a few Christmases ago–we’ll do it legit for this one. For science. 🔬