Category: Recipes

Mother made sloppy joes with a few variations, depending on exactly what she had handy, but her standard sloppy joe meat was an easy-peasy quasi-recipe, modified here in amounts, a lil in process, and with a couple of my fav additions. Still easy-peasy.

Take a pound of hamburger meat. Crumble it in a medium hot pan and brown it. Chop an onion–coarsely–while it’s browning. Drain it (more or less; I drain it “indifferently” nowadays). Set it aside and mince a couple of cloves of garlic (or just do the garlic while the meat’s browning, along with the onion). Sautée those juuuuust to clarity and add the meat back. A few tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (I dunno how many; just until it’s enough for your taste), about 3 tablespoons of prepared mustard and enough ketchup to sop up the mustard *heh*.

I like to sautée about half a bell pepper (green), coarsely chopped, along with the onion and garlic.

Let it simmer to come together, and. . . sloppy joe time! Serve on toast or fav bun.

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Another comforting food. . .

Mother’s “French” salad dressing:

Base: mayonaise (although she used Miracle whip, since that’s what my Dad preferred); add a wee a tad prepared mustard; a wee bit more ketchup. Stir to combine. Finished.

Ingredients:

Mostly picked over carcass of a roast chicken
A couple of quarts of water
An onion, roughly chopped into large chunks
Five or six stalks of celery
A tablespoon or so of peppercorns
Bay leaf
Salt (to taste, after a few hours’ cooking)

Process:

Cooked on high in crockpot for an hour or so, then low for a few hours, then “warm” overnight.

Strain.

Too delicious for words. Store in fridge. After it’s well-chilled, you can scrape off the schmutz (the well-seasoned chicken fat), if you wish, for use in other recipes (DO NOT THROW THIS MAGICAL MATERIAL OUT!!!) or leave it for incorporation when using the stock/broth. I like it for just plain sippin’.

This is especially quick for me, since I almost always have all the ingredients at hand, including the toasted* (flat) corn tortillas and my fav brand of canned refried beans (seasoned with jalapeño, onion, garlic and cumin to make a better-than-Frito Lay bean dip).

• Flat, toasted (baked) corn totilla
• Refried beans (seasoned to taste)
• Shredded cheese (your fav); use pre-packaged or Make America Grate Again! *heh*
• Nuke for whatever time your MW oven takes to melt the cheese.
• Top with diced onion, shredded lettuce, salsa–whatever floats your boat.

Make just one or as many as you want to eat.
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*I take corn tortillas, place them on a baking sheet in my convection toaster overn at 350F for ~20 minutes. They’re a wee tad more fragile than if fried in oil, but still really tasty and it’s a virtually hands-off job.

So, wanted to make some cabbage soup last week. Didin’t like the look of the cabbages at the local market, so grabbed a bag of “coleslaw mix” (just shredded cabbage and carrots) that did look OK. Didn’t use chicken stock cos I had some ham base to work with. Also didn’t use bacon, as would ordinarily be my wont, cos had tons (well, seemed that way) of “pork butt” already cooked and on hand.

Had only four small potatoes, but had onion, garlic and etc.

You see where this is going? Yeh, made some pretty decent cabbage soup anyway, largely from substitutions and leftovers.

And the leftover cabbage soup ain’t half bad, either.

OK, NOT authentic, but Good Enough in a pinch.

Ingredients:

1. Emergency can of enchilada sauce (the real stuff takes a while to make; traditional method takes eight or so hours of soaking the peppers to start)
2. CORN tortillas
3. Shredded cheese
4. Diced or minced onion

Directions:

1. Dice or chop the onions, then place them in a covered, microwave-safe bowl and nuke ’em for about a minute. It’s a sort of faux saute technique. I usually add a wee tad of olive oil.
2. Place a bit of enchilada sauce on a plate; place a tortilla (flat) on top; a few onions; cheese, another tortilla, etc. Last one in the stack gets sauce and cheese, only.
3. Nuke the plate. Three tortillas will cook in a wee tad over a minute in a 1000W microwave oven. Four? Add another 20-30 seconds.

Yes, the texture is substantially different to regular, traditional rolled and baked enchiladas, but the favor and nutrition is the same.

Serve with rice (LEFTOVERS! *heh* Remember: QUICK meal, mmmK? 😉 ), refried beans (from leftovers or a can) and some shredded lettuce.

A note about canned enchilada sauce: most is based on tomatoes and water and merely favored to approximate real red sauce. IOW, most canned enchilada sauce is crap. Avoid it religiously. Around here, the only canned enchilada sauce that’s worth buying is this:

Note that it contains NO tomato product and the only ingredient present in a greater amount than dried red chiles is water, which is normal for real enchilada sauce consisting of simply dried red chiles (rehydrated, softened and blended) and water. The other ingredients listed don’t detract greatly from the flavor. *heh*

SUPER fast faux enchiladas: take some of those frozen flautas that are available nowadays (I think I’ve seen ’em called “taquitos” or some such stupid thing). Cover ’em in an appropriate enchilada sauce you have on hand (red for beef, green for chicken), add shredded cheese and then nuke. I’ve done this when I was in a rush (my Wonder Woman likes to have those frozen things to take with her for lunches, so they’re around). Turns out. . . edible, but not as good, IMO as the “flatpacks” above.

5.5 pounds of pork butt in the slow cooker with onion, garlic, a wee bit of salt and freshly ground pepper. After five hours, a bit “soupy” but smelling great. Give it overnight on a nice, low setting so it can be pulled tomorrow and then put back to soak on low heat in BBQ sauce.

Beans are soaking separately. They’ll cook up nicely to go with the pork for tomorrow evening’s meal. Cornbread? Sure, why not that, too? Now, for greens. . .

Now, that’s the way I found this recipe, and it looks OK as is, but I can’t ever leave well enough alone. So. . .

How about some dill or mustard (prepared) or mustard powder mixed with the mayo and sour cream? And why not chop and add some bread and butter pickles, too? Frankly, a little chopped celery would be nice, I think.

Just consider this recipe as I did when I saw it: a base recipe to vary to taste for your own use. Heck, I’d marinate the cubed potatoes overnight in a vinaigrette. Several research papers suggest that would increase resistant starch levels in the potatoes and be beneficial in moderating post-prandial blood sugar levels. Besides, if a tasty apple cider vinegar or even tastier balsamic vinegar were used (of course balsamic vinegar would affect the color of the potatoes), it’d be even tastier.

Haven’t tried the recipe (or my suggested variants) yet, but I am sure to do so soon. I’ll report back with “supplicants'” responses. *heh*

Here’s another one, similar but perhaps tastier from the get-go:

5 lbs potatoes, cooked and cubed (about 9-10 medium potatoes)
1 1/2 cups mayonnaise
1 1/2 cups sour cream
5 tablespoons melted butter
1 -1 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon seasoning salt (or to taste, or use white salt)
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 -5 green onions, chopped
1 small onion, finely
1 1/2 cups cheddar cheese, finely cubed (or coarsley shredded)
1 1/2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded (or to taste)
2 cups finely chopped cooked ham (or use cooked chopped chicken or turkey) (optional)

1 TO SERVE HOT AS A CASSEROLE; grease a 13 x 9-inch baking dish (or use a casserole dish that will hold the mixture).
2 Set oven to 350 degrees F.
3 In a large bowl, mix mayonnaise, sour cream and melted butter, garlic powder, seasoned salt and black pepper until well combined.
4 Mix in green onion and yellow onion.
5 Add in the cooked cubed potatoes, cubed cheese and ham (if using) mix with a large spatula until well combined.
6 Transfer/spread the mixture to prepared casserole dish.
7 At this point you may cover and refrigerate for up to 24 hours until ready to bake.
8 Bake 25-30 minutes or until hot and bubbly.
9 Remove from oven and sprinkle the grated cheddar on top; return to oven and bake 5-8 minutes more or until the cheese has melted.
10 TO SERVE AS A COLD POTATO SALAD; make as stated in steps 3-5 reducing the melted butter to 2 tablespoons.
11 Place in a bowl, cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or more before serving.

This is another in my collection of “not quite right” non-recipes. Make of it what you will.

Had no hoisin sauce, and nor did I have all the ingredients to whip up a batch, so I decided to wing it and approximate something in the neighborhood of a hoisin sauce. . . sort of.

What I did:

Combined:

• 4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce (because I had only a smidgin’ of soy sauce on hand)–This is the single most significant departure.
• 1 tablespoon peanut butter (‘cos I had no soy paste or black bean paste on hand and didn’t want to hassle with cooking some black beans, making paste, etc.)
• 1 tablespoon maple syrup (cos I’m out of honey and my molasses is reserved for other things)
• 2 teaspoons white vinegar
• One garlic clove, minced
• 1/8 teaspoon onion powder (I don’t usually use onion powder, but it works for this)
• 2 teaspoons olive oil (right: out of sesame oil)
• About 2 tablespoons of Melinda’s Jalapeño Ketchup (better than just a few drops of hot sauce, IMO)
• About “8 grinds” of black pepper
• 5 prunes. Just because.

. . .in food processor until smooth. Pretty good. Not “real” hoisin sauce, but it’s usable as a substitute, IMO, so. . . I used it in a crockpot five-spice pork recipe. (Yeh, there were more ingredients in the recipe I needed this for, like a 2.5lb pork roast, a couple of teaspoons of five-spice, some apple cider, the soy sauce I had on hand, a large onion, quartered and pieced out, and some carrots and potatoes dumped on top of the whole thing. Woulda included some celery stalks, but I forgot I had ’em. *shrugs* At least I left the kitchen sink out.)

TH
he only thing I’d do differently would be to change the order of loading in the veggies. Carrots on bottom, onions and then potatoes. That way, the potatoes wouldn’t soak up quite as much of the liquids/seasonings. Other than that, 12 hours on low produced a really, really delicious pork (shredded for “sammiches”–it just fell apart) and the potatoes, onions and carrots were very tasty.

Well, not exactly, but I did take this “not-quite-a-recipe” from Mostly Cajun, All American and Opinionated and kinda run with it.

To his “not-quite-a-recipe” I added some sucralose to taste after adding some green beans to my corn-red beans-“on-yum”-and-garbanzo mix. Actually, I took the water from my canned corn and canned green beans and added the sucralose and about a cup of balsamic vinegar, added in about a teaspoon of freshly-ground pepper and. . . ended up filling two wide-mouth quart jars to chill in the fridge.

So, building off his recipe

a can of garbanzos, drained
a can of red (kidney) beans, drained
a small can of corn (use the liquid)
can of green beans (use the liquid)
about a cup and a half of defrosted frozen green peas
some (not sure how much) chopped “on-yum” (Yum!)
coupla tablespoons of sucralose
about a teaspoon of freshly-ground black pepper
about a cup of balsamic vinegar (candy!)

I didn’t salt anything, since all the canned goods were pre-salted anyway and the balsamic vinegar is just tooooooo delicious to detract from with more salt..

This will be a staple. I just wish I’d had some wax beans handy for more color variation. . . And I might just add a few red pepper flakes, like The Cajun did.