13-14: Wok-Fried Veggies with Pasta is yet another dish where the preparation requires too much chopping. One of my specialties happens to be stir-fry. I can make stir-fry with the best of them.
I’ve made wok fried dishes similar to this on my own, but with chicken or beef. Usually, I think vegetarian food is best left to the rabbits. 🐰
Due to some infestation-related activity long ago, the Lamb and Veal category suffered some minor liquid damage. Some of the cards are virtually unusable, but this card, 10-10: Roast Leg of Lamb is just slightly mangled.
Despite the condition of the card, this preparation of leg of lamb is one of the best I’ve ever had. 🐏
If you had told me as a kid that I would eat meat and bananas together in a dish, I would have called you, “crazy”! Some cuckoo chef over at Simply Delicious is playing a weird joke on people with 9-27: West Indian Meat Casserole, but this dish is rated mostly edible. Jamie wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. 🍌
I don’t really see how this dish is festive. It also isn’t very attractive, at least, not in the way I prepared it.
Pan frying pork chops is not the easiest method for cooking pork chops. It is really easy to over cook pork chops that way, but 7-23: Pork Chops with Tarragon came out “just right”.
These pork chops are pan fried and the sauce is added to the pan, drippings and all at the end. Cooking the sauce and meat together creates a flavorful sauce.
I wasn’t quite sure how “authentic” 12-29: New Orleans Beans and Pasta would be when first looking this recipe over–Simply Delicious doesn’t exactly nail it on cultural faithfulness a lot of the time. A lot of that has to do with the time at which the books were written–many ingredients, methods, & tools that are easily accessible now were not 30 years ago.
However, this is essentially an American recipe, so I would assume it shouldn’t be that far off–if this is in fact a real New Orleans dish. 🎷
I wonder how many different linens/vases/glasses/odd statues they had to accumulate to photograph all of these different recipes. Just a thought I had while looking at this picture. Another thought: who decided on some of these things? What makes this picture decidedly New Orleans? ⚜🎉
Pretzels are my favorite snack food, which means that 17-21: Small Golden Pretzels were right up my alley. One of my favorite episodes of the Simpsons is based around pretzels. Making pretzels usually involves boiling the dough in baking soda water.
These golden pretzels are good as an afternoon snack. Saffron gives these pretzels the golden hue.
🍆 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.
I can’t count how many different chicken soups I’ve had in my life, but 3-11: Chicken Rice Soup is the latest version I’ve made from Simply Delicious. For this dish, I picked my own lemons and fresh mint from the garden so this dish had extra meaning to me. 🍋🌿
I’ve enjoyed a lot of chicken noodle soups, but chicken rice soup is a different experience.
Here’s another Simply Delicious recipe that exists outside of this book: 5-19: Eggs en Cocotte is a version of a pretty well-known French way to cook eggs. Variably known as shirred eggs (although that’s slightly different), this is a really easy (and delicious) breakfast or lunch option.
Cocotte has a rather interesting meaning outside of the culinary world–I’ll leave it to you to find out. 👄
I don’t make appetizers very often, so I made 1-14: Avocado Halves with Spicy Shrimp for us to eat as a snack while cooking other dishes. 🍤
I was lacking lettuce at the time, so my dish was served on a platter instead of a bed of crispy lettuce.