Recently, it seems like I've turned into a bit of a food blogger. In my last entry, I talked about how I'm starting to do more cooking. Since I'm staying at my dorm over the summer, which is when the dorm residents and I have to fend for ourselves when it comes to food, I'm starting to do a little bit of experimenting in the kitchen.
Last Friday, I went to a Vietnamese grocery store for cheap produce and a Safeway for other groceries. Since I've been suffering from a sore throat, cough, and stuffy nose, I made my own chicken noodle soup, loosely based off of this recipe for Spaghetti Soup, minus the tomato soup. I happened to have a large package of spaghetti on hand, so this I used that instead of the egg noodles usually found in chicken noodle soup. I had bought ground turkey, which is cheaper than chicken breasts and cooks pretty fast. The vegetables were celery, green beans and peas.
The soup tasted good, though if I were to make this soup again, I would have either put more chicken broth or less "stuff" in the soup to make this dish more like a soup, instead of watery pasta (this isn't the fault of the recipe, but rather from my estimated proportions). I also would have broken the noodles into even smaller sizes. On the other hand, the next day, I did find a stray can of tomato soup in the kitchen and used that with my leftovers -- great! It was practically like spaghetti with tomato sauce.
Eggs have become a standby for me in recent months and something I like to have on hand. They're an affordable source of protein and are quite versatile, whether it's for cooking or baking. This morning, I used this recipe for Cookie Cutter Toad-in-Hole. Instead of using a cookie cutter, I cut a square-like shape (it doesn't look like a perfect square!) with a knife in the middle of the bread. The traditional shape for the hole is a circle, so if you don't have a cookie cutter, you can use a glass rim to get that shape.
While the egg cooked in the bread, that was enough time for me to heat up a pan with oil and quickly saute ground turkey, green beans, and peas, all seasoned with freshly ground black pepper. I used canned green beans and peas in my earlier soup and had a bunch of leftover vegetables that I needed to use. This dish plus the fried egg in toast took only 10-15 minutes to cook, since I was doing them simultaneously. Delicious!
*Even though the recipe calls it toad-in-the-hole, there's a British dish with the same name that has sausages in a Yorkshire pudding batter. Instead, this egg and toast has been called a load of other names, such as egg in the basket, cowboy eggs, bird's nest, etc.
For lunch today, I had more time on my hand to prepare a meal. Still, this took less than 30 minutes to prepare and cook, especially since I was doing it all at the same time. I've grown up eating rice at home, but it was always prepared in a rice cooker, instead of on the stove. Rice cookers are pretty convenient because all you need to do is measure and pour the rice into it, measure and pour the water into it, turn the rice cooker on, and in less than 30 minutes, it should be done. It's so easy, and you're not likely to burn or otherwise mess up your rice if you cook it in a cooker, instead of a stove. However, I gave stove-cooked rice a shot. Instead of water, I boil about 1.25 cups of chicken broth and 1 tablespoon of butter on the stove on medium and added more than 1 cup of white rice. After adding the rice, I put a lid on the pot and lowered the temperature to a medium-low, so it could simmer for 20-25 minutes (I ended up doing mine for 25 minutes).
Meanwhile, I chopped up some celery and red bell peppers (I forgot to add garlic!) and added that to a pan with olive oil. I sauteed it on medium, and then I gradually added other ingredients: ground turkey (yes, I have a lot of it for one person), one egg, and more green beans and peas. I seasoned the dish with black pepper, garlic salt, and cayenne pepper. It tasted good, especially paired with the rice, which surprisingly (for me) turned out nice and fluffy, not dry at all.
While this definitely doesn't qualify for quick from my experience, I wanted to give you an update on my lemon Italian ice. Today was the first time since last Thursday that I took it out of the freezer to check it. You know what? The ice basically stayed as shavings from the last I scraped it, instead of going back to a solid block. The picture above is from the baking dish that is holding the ice. It's still good, though, to shave any ice that's still in rather large blocks. It was quite a refreshing dessert to my meal.
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