There are never enough food lists.
Produce
mushrooms
2 1/2 tomatoes
roasted garlic
spinach
collard greens
eggplant
potatoes
roasted medium-mild peppers
jalepeno peppers
1 banana
apricots
cherries
strawberries
orange juice
lemons
Meat-ish
4 2 eggs
cooked chicken scraps
canadian bacon (frozen)
chorizo (portioned, skinned, and frozen)
bacon
chicken stock
Dairy
random Mexican fresh cheese
sharp cheddar
parmesan
cream cheese
sour cream
bread
tortillas
Last meal I made – Saucy Mexican Potato and Chorizo Saute
So I’ve been reading a mexican cookbook – and I didn’t make a real recipe, but I extrapolated and cobbled together stuff from my ingredients and her methodology.
Okay, so I put in my new (to me) mini food processor: 3 cloves of roasted garlic, the stems from most of a pint of mushrooms, 1 roasted mild pepper (large and pale yellow-green), a tomato – peeled and seeded, a sprig or two of fennel, half a dozen small sage leaves, and a few tablespoons of stock. And I made a sauce.
In a pan, I cooked a couple (3) diced potatoes and a diced onion in a bit of oil… not much oil, but slightly more than my usual minimum amount for sauteing because – potatoes – they make sweet, sweet loving to the oil. And then I remembered I had chorizo, so I put a third of one of the lengths into the pan… and it oozed a bit of grease as it cooked, so I probably would have been fine with less oil, if I had done the sausage first.
So. then. I believe I added the mushroom caps (larger ones were quartered) to the pan with the potatoes and onions. And then, after a bit more sizzling together, I put the sauce into the pan.
At this point I had the epiphany that some nice queso fresca (or whatever, neither the book nor the label is in front of me) would be just the thing melty all over this dish. So I turned the heat way down, and I popped across the street for some cheese and diced up about a third of that.
End result was tasty, not spicy, and kind of way too greasy. Furthermore, it didn’t even occur to me to put a portion aside to freeze for lunches, and that would have been a wise decision. But otherwise, it was pretty satisfying. It would have been good with some greens, but the recipes in the cookbook weren’t doing that kind of mingling.
Future Recipes
I dunno… I’m thinking I need some healthier food for a bit. I’m looking at the strawberries and wondering whether to marinate them with balsamic vinegar or just chomp them right from the box. Meghan also loves strawberries in salad, but she’s crazipants sometimes.
Spinach… Spinach salad… with strawberries? Done – Mmmm tasty
And the eggplant – it’s big and firm and beautiful and plucky with that sound when you tap it like the most perfect round eggplant. I could not resist buying it, but this kind of eggplant intimidates me. I am much more comfortable with the long, thin chinese eggplant that are easy to control – you can just roast them until the skin chars and you have a cooked, easy to peel eggplant with the bitterness cooked out. But this round eggplant? It’s a wild, buxom thing. Maybe I’ll look in the italian cookbook… maybe I’ll buy tofu and make my favorite spicy tofu-eggplant stir fry. With spinach on the side. OOooooo….
Meanwhile, while I’m getting my schedule aligned so that I can stop by the chinese grocer 1 block away while it’s open and I can then go back home to refrigerate the stuff, I can cook up the greens and the chicken and make quesadillas. Possibly with canadian bacon in them. And cherries? I can probably find time to just eat the cherries properly – out under the hot sun with obnoxious spitting noises as I extract the pits.
And that just leaves random potatoes, which probably means mashed potatoes to use up the rest of the sour cream after I finish with the quesadillas.
