Category Archives: Food

Finding and creating recipes has gotten a little trickier since we discovered that my son has multiple food allergies.

Onion Onion

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I went to the pantry the other day to grab an onion and I found this:

I did a little research and discovered that the top is actually the same green onion you buy at the grocery store and some people grow their own green onions this way, right on their window sill. If you rest the onion on top of a glass and keep the roots in water (but not the whole onion 0r it will rot), you can keep snipping the greens off the top, leaving about an inch, and get quite a bit of green onion out of one single regular onion. I’m not going to leave this onion in a wine glass – I just thought it looked cool – but I might try the glass trick and see how much green onion I can grow in my window.

Have you ever found a sprouting onion in your pantry?

Necessity is the Mother of…

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…homemade baby food!

Before we started solids, I had full intentions of making all of my own baby food. Then the day came to start him on baby food and I found myself completely overwhelmed by the idea. I looked through recipes, instructions for steaming, which foods to use, etc, and I quickly reached for the jar of Beechnut instead. A few attempts resulted in Micah refusing the fruits of my labor since I couldn’t get the purees to be as smooth as the store-bought.

Now that Micah is getting into foods like spaghetti, pancakes, eggs, and other “big people” foods, I have revisited the idea of making my own purees since it’s no longer a necessity to make them so smooth. In fact, the opposite is true: I want them to be chunky! Still, I have been hesitating since it’s so easy to just grab that Beechnut and pop it in the microwave. So easy, that is, until you look in the pantry and realize you only have one jar left and it’s the one the baby refuses to eat!

Suddenly I’m raiding the fridge for veggies, digging out my steamer basket and trying to figure out how to make carrots a little more appetizing, since the last time he tried Beechnut’s variety he hated it. I’ve got three carrots and a slice of apple steaming right now over a pot of boiling water seasoned with pumpkin pie spice (in the water, not the carrots). I’m hoping the spice will seep up a little bit into the carrots without overwhelming them and add a little flavor. The apple should sweeten them up a bit. I plan on throwing it all in the food processor until it is semi-smooth and thick. I’m hoping that he will like it. Please, baby, please like it!

Savory Hamburger Soup with Rolls and "Texas Roadhouse" Cinnamon Butter

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I adapted the recipe for this delicious soup from one I found on All Recipes. You can see the original recipe here.  Eric absolutely loved it – we will be making this again!

Savory Hamburger Soup

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 potato, peeled and thinly sliced
  • 1 carrot, peeled and thinly sliced
  • 1 1/2 cartons beef broth (or about 48 ounces)
  • 2 (14.5 ounce) cans stewed tomatoes
  • 1/4 (16 ounce) package frozen green peas
  • Ground black pepper to taste (generous sprinkle)
  • Garlic Salt to taste
  • Oregano to taste (generous sprinkle)
  • Cumin to taste (generous sprinkle)
  • 2 spoonfuls of Juan’s Fiesta Artichoke Spinach Party Dip Mix
  • Squirt of Worcestershire sauce

Directions

  1. In a large frying pan brown ground beef and chopped onion. Season with black pepper and garlic salt. Drain grease from pot. Pour into slow cooker.
  2. Add the rest of the ingredients to the slow cooker. Season with a little more pepper. (With the Oregano and Cumin, I just sprinkled the top of the mix and stirred it in. I didn’t measure it – just use according to your preference.)
  3. Cook on high for a couple hours or until all the veggies are tender.

“Texas Roadhouse” Cinnamon Butter

Blend the following until smooth:

1 stick of butter – softened
1/8 cup evaporated milk*
1/8 cup sugar*
“Squirt” of Maple syrup**
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

*The original recipe called for 1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk – I mixed half and half evaporated milk and sugar instead – still amazing!!

**The original recipe called for 1/4 teaspoon corn syrup. Maple syrup was an improvement, I think!

(I didn’t have these ingredients so I made some substitutions. I couldn’t tell the difference and Eric really loved it, so I’ll probably just make it this way again!)

Spread this on warmed rolls and it’s pretty much to die for!

I’m linking this to the Tempt My Tummy Tuesday blog carnival. Head over there for even more amazing recipes!

Date Night

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Fun: The Worst Case Scenario Game of Surviving Life

If you’ve ever wondered how to correctly fall down the stairs, keep a person from swallowing their tongue, or what to order when your date has halitosis (guacamole, of all things!), this game is perfect for you. What’s funny is when you find yourself acting out a scenario in an attempt to guess the right answer. We ended up in a tie except Eric had more body parts left than I did.  And I’m now fairly certain that I would never survive in a worst case scenario.

Food: Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Here’s the weird part, Eric originally said he didn’t want to help bake, but then he ended up doing most of the work. He’s a closet Emeril. We used the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book (you know, the red and white checkered binder) and added cinnamon – they turned out amazing! We can’t stop eating them…. and that’s why we don’t bake very often. This was the first time Eric used the stand mixer I bought  for myself with my birthday cash. Growing up, he baked a lot of cookies, but always stirred the batter by hand.  He was impressed with how much easier it was to throw the ingredients in a bowl and watch the mixer do all the work. That mixer was a Walmart door buster – definitely worth my $17.

Show: The Office (x3)

We dragged the memory foam, pillows and blankets off our bed down to the living room and camped out on the floor for an Office marathon. Cookie crumbs may have ended up in the sheets… It’s funny because I remember doing this with my sister when we were little. For some reason watching TV is so much more fun when you’ve built this impressive pile of blankets and pillows on the floor, like a fort without walls. Here I am at 26 and I still love it. I look forward to having a pile of kids on the floor with us for movie nights someday. Speaking of The Office, is it just me or does Dwight Schrute get funnier every season? I think he’s becoming my favorite character on the show.

Dwight K Schrute from The Office (tvfanatic.com)

I think that was pretty much my ideal night! How do you like to spend time with your family?

Easy Peasy Pizza Sauce

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This sauce is the ONE. Eric and I have been trying to come up with the perfect sauce for our homemade pizza for ages. I’d like to say that I came up with this recipe because I’m just that great of a cook; but like many fine inventions, this was more of a stroke of luck than anything else.

I was just going to use marinara straight from the jar like we always do, but while I was looking in my pantry I noticed that I had a jar of Hunts tomato paste and also a jar of diced tomatoes. The wheels in my head started turning. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but I knew that if it tasted horrible, I still had the marinara.

Shown above are all the ingredients I used. First I mixed the two cans together in a mixing bowl. (Note that both are already seasoned with Basil, Garlic & Oregano.) I added just a little squirt of EVOO to make it the right consistency. Then I added a generous pinch of sugar, a pinch of garlic salt, and a pinch of dried tomato & garlic pesto mix (available from Tastefully Simple).
No cooking, no nothing. Just mix it together and smear it onto your pizza crust. It was so delicious and the texture and consistency were perfect

Great Recipes to Try

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Here are some recipes I’ve discovered lately that I really love:

Taco Seasoning (Just like Taco Bell’s!)
We actually had this for dinner tonight. It really did taste a lot like Taco Bell’s seasoning. My mom gave me a box of mini taco shells that she wasn’t going to eat and I had half a bag of shredded lettuce left over from sub sandwiches, as well as half a tomato, so I decided to make Tacos. The shells were a little small for eating the usual way, so we made taco salad instead, crunching up the shells for the topping. It was really good!

Whole Foods Hot Chocolate Mix
I found the link to this recipe on a friend’s blog – and for some reason I cannot find the link to it right now…. I loooove hot chocolate. Especially when it’s homemade!

Classic Baked Acorn Squash
This recipe makes amazing squash. I love acorn squash to begin with, but this makes it taste like dessert.

Pumpkin Pie Dip
I made this for a fall party I went to a few weeks ago. Despite the fact I made a huge batch, the majority of it was gone by the time we left. I still have a few spoonfuls left and I love dipping mini pretzels in it. You can never go wrong with Taste of Home!

Baking Things

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I’ve never been much of a baker or a cook, but lately I’ve come to the realization that there is a whole lot more food in my pantry than what meets the eye… I just have to make it!

From fried rice to giant ginger cookies (shown in the photo above), there of tons of things I can make from scratch and save a lot of money in the process. It just requires a little extra creativity and a little searching (through my cookbooks) to find what I can make from the various basic ingredients I already have.

The Peach Fiasco

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Part of me is excited to start giving my son solid foods (he’ll be six months old on Tuesday) and the other part of me hesitates because it means a lot more food prep, a lot more laundry, and a lot more time in general. Up until now, feeding him has been so easy and convenient. No warming up bottles, no pureeing vegetables, no bibs, not post-lunch bath, no nothing!

A few weeks ago I started him on rice cereal. We only got through three days before I realized it was the rice cereal that was shooting through his system. We burned through a lot of diapers during those three days, and I immediately stopped giving him rice.

After some online research, I found some other moms who had better luck with Oatmeal, so the other day I mixed up some oatmeal for him and he gobbled it up! Yesterday he didn’t eat any because (1) I wanted to make sure there was no diarrhea and (2) I didn’t feel like pumping the necessary milk to make it. (I’m just being honest!) In the end, he digested the oatmeal just fine and I plan on regularly feeding it to him once I stock up on enough milk to mix it with.

Today I had no intention of giving him anything because of reason #2 and really, it’s not like he needs it. (Breastmilk is sufficient for the first 12 months of life.) But he had other plans at dinner. There I was, eating breaded Tilapia, mixed veggies and a bowl of just-thawed mixed fruit, when I noticed that Micah was getting increasingly fussing and was lunging at my plate. When I picked up a peach and plopped it in my mouth, he had a fit. I’ve let him suck on fruit before, so I picked up another peach slice and let him suck on it a little bit. It was really cold and so I figured it probably made his gums feel good (he’s been teething). This time, however, he did more than suck. He started chewing and nearly pulled it off my fork, so I took it away. Big mistake!!

Micah screamed pitifully while I hurriedly mashed the peach with my fork and as soon as peach mush touched his lips, he gobbled it up like a starved child. His face exclaimed, “why have you been holding out on me?” He whimpered and cried between bites, I couldn’t mash and feed fast enough for his ravenous appetite. While I was mashing, he was trying to grab the big pieces off my plate. Well then he finished off that slice of peach…. the only fruit I had left in my bowl were half frozen grapes. Probably not a good idea…. then I remembered I had peach baby food in the pantry from one of my baby showers.

In less time than it takes you to sing the Peaches song by The Presidents of the United States of America, he had practically inhaled half of the carton. This kid is a genius, too, because he grabs the spoon from my hand, sucks the food off of it, and throws it back down in his lap empty, waiting for me to refill it. I never taught him how to eat off a spoon, so the only way he figured this out was either through intuition or by watching us eat for the past six months. By the time he had finished, peach was on his bib. Peach was on his pants. Peach was behind his ear. Peach was everywhere! I’m pretty sure I wiped it from his nose, as well. But don’t be mistaken, 98% of the peaches were in his belly. He was kicking peach and taking no prisoners. I’m fairly certain that if he knew how to lick around his mouth, he would have. He then cried until his hands were wiped clean (is this an indication of future behavior?).

The sad part of this story is I cannot find my camera anywhere (even now). My mom-brain must have set it somewhere in the house that makes completely no sense, and as a result, I do not have a photo of this peach fiasco. Fortunately, I’m pretty sure there will be plenty more photo opportunities where eating is concerned.

“I got the hint, Micah, you’re ready for solids!”

Amazing Eggs

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The average cost of a dozen eggs this year is about $2.89. I can make four huge omelets (three eggs each) with a carton of eggs, meaning each one costs me about 80 cents if you account for a little shredded cheese and seasonings. That’s cheap!

In addition to the fact that they inexpensive, eggs are also nutrient dense. There are about 6.5 grams of protein in each egg. They also contain most vitamins, except for vitamin C.

Visit the Egg Nutrition Center for more egg facts.

Because eggs are so cheap and healthy, they have become a staple in our budget-conscious household. I have been looking for ways to incorporate eggs into our meals as an alternative to meat, which can really increase your grocery bill all by itself. The American Egg Board has some great recipe ideas on their website.

Occasionally to save money, I attempt to empty out my freezer, fridge and pantry rather than head to the store. This week I noticed I had bought another carton of eggs even though I already had some, so we’ve been eating a lot of eggs lately.

For lunch we enjoyed cheesy omelets. Mine was loaded up with ketchup because I love the combination of egg, ketchup and cheese. Odd? Maybe. But I love it! Breakfast for lunch is fun and yummy. Try it!

For dinner, I made egg salad. Because neither of us are fans of the yolk, I made the salad without the yolks and served it on light rye. I think it turned out great, though its color was not the usual yellow. The only thing I don’t like about egg salad is the smell of hard boiled egg.

What are some of your favorite egg recipes?