Asian-inspired chicken and noodle soup
I’ve been sick the last week or so, but I’ve moved from the point where I’m not hungry and have no energy to cook to the point where I’m still feeling like crap, dont’ really have energy, but am out of the anything effortless to make (including canned soup).
Did I mention that I really haven’t done much grocery shopping in the last month, beyond one major meat restocking?
Read MoreStuffed Shells
Dinner tonight was pretty simple — pasta shells filled with mushrooms, spinach, ricotta, sun dried tomatoes, and baked with marinara; garlic bread; slacker garden salad. The recipe for the pasta shells (if you want to call it that): 12 (cooked) shells (enough for dinner + a lunch) filled with: 1 C of (skim) ricotta, 4 mushrooms (roughly diced), 5oz chopped spinach (we used previously frozen, so you’d have to wilt it first), 3 sundried tomatoes (minced), 1-2 cloves of garlic (minced), 1/2-1 tsp oregano/basil/parsley, generous pinch of crushed red pepper, pinch of salt, about 1/4tsp onion powder. In theory, you should use an egg to bind it, but I really didn’t think it needed it, so I left it out.
The stuffing was reallly similar to a Greek-y stuffing we use in pork or chicken and it could probably be used for that, too.
Read MoreRoasted duck & pork stir fry
Last weekend, I went to Chinatown with my parents. While there, I did some pantry shopping (mmmm chile-garlic sauce!), ate lots and lots and lots of dim sum, and stopped by my favorite little barbecue joint and picked up some roasted duck and pork (both split with my parents). Today, I threw together a quick stir fry — 1.5c (uncooked) brown rice, 1 head of bok choy, your typical aromatics (celery/carrot/onion), the meats, and a little stir fry sauce (2Tbs soy sauce, 2 tsp chile garlic sauce, 1 Tbs sherry or rice wine, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1/2 tsp hoisin, 3 cloves garlic, 1 tsp ginger paste). It was fairly good for something I literally threw together, and I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow’s lunch (leftovers!), but I think next time, I may add some chiles…
Here are some photos of my trip!
 Last round of dim sum (shrimp rolls & shrimp toast) |
 Shrimp dumplings, meatballs, pork dumplings, chicken dumplings, combo rolls |
 Waiting to order char siu |
 Look at all that beautiful roasted duck... |
Blueberry-Lemon Bread
But I had a huge problem: nowhere in my rented kitchen was a muffin tin, or even a bread pan.
Woe!
So I waited, considering my options for breads and muffins and what would do me better.
Ultimately, I decided on a blueberry-lemon bread recipe found on epicurious, and just had to wait until I happened to have everything I needed to bake it.
As luck would have it, this coincided the same weekend I was gifted with a ginormous mutant zucchini, and I had to put the bread aside for a few days to deal with the squash. But now, it’s 4am, and I couldn’t sleep — too jazzed up. I was hungry, and my sister (my roommate) is gone for the rest of the week, called into work unexpectedly. So I decided to make that blueberry-lemon bread to calm down, and while it baked away, unpacked and cleaned my apartment a bit. (As sad as it is that I’ve been here 17 days now and am not fully unpacked, but truthfully: I unpacked what I originally brought, and went to my parents’ to pick up some more things they’d been holding for me, stashed in the room that used to be mine.)
Anyway: this is brightly lemon, with juicy blueberries. It’s a great, sunshiney bread, good for a raining morning like today.
Southwest meatballs with green chile sauce
Living in New Mexico, you learn that green chile (the pepper, or the sauce) goes with everything. I love a good chile (sauce, or pepper), and when I read today’s paper and found this recipe for southwest meatballs, I said to myself: Self, this meatball recipe looks good… but it’s missing something. Oh yes! Chile! That is the solution!
Since I’m back in Iowa (where, unlike the anti-Mexican cuisine grocery stores of Ohio, even the small ones stock a pretty hefty Hispanic aisle and usually carry three or four kinds of fresh chiles and two or three kinds of canned), I actually had everything I needed in the pantry (or was a quick visit to the neighborhood store away).
Anyway, the way we ate them was by cutting up the meatballs individually, putting them on tortillas, and then smothered with chile and cheese, and rolled up like burritos. Quite delicious!
Read MorePastis shrimp with pappardelle
Tonight, we had a quick and hearty, but elegantly simple dinner – pastis shrimp, pappardelle, mushrooms, salad, and some French white wine. Had it been a planned meal, we would have had some crusty white bread to sop up the juices, but I thought the papperdelle did a fairly good job.
I love meals that only take 35 minutes to prepare!
Read MoreSausage, chicken, and mushroom manicotti with tomato salad
This recipe is from cuisine at home, one of the few cooking rags that I actually subscribe to. It’s one of my favorite manicotti recipes – and it is even better the next day.
I recently made it into lasagna, which worked out pretty well — keeping the cheeses separate from the meats for the layers.
I apologize for the brevity, but these are my notes; my ‘zine is back at my parents’.
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