Stroganoff with Yogurt Tarragon Sauce

This dinner was AWESOME if I do say so myself. Here's what you need.

Ingredients:
1 pound ground meat (beef, chicken or turkey as you like)
1/3 C chopped shallots OR onion
1/2 pound sliced mushrooms (white button, cremini or baby bellas)
1/8 tsp of dried tarragon
salt and pepper to taste
1/8 tsp of nutmeg
1 cup of room temperature plain yogurt
1 box of pasta of your choice (we did some whole wheat penne)

Season your meat with salt and pepper and then brown it in the pan set on medium high. Break the meat up into large chunks. As it cooks pour off any fat or accumulated water so the meat can really sear and get brown. Avoid moving it around with your spoon too much, in fact use a spatula to "flip" the meat and take it out of the pan before it is cooked entirely through. Turn the heat down to medium low and cook the chopped onions in the same pan you cooked the meat in and sprinkle them with a pinch of salt. Add in the mushrooms when the onions are soft and cook them through. Season the vegetables with the tarragon and nutmeg, then stir in the meat. Take the pan off the heat and stir in one cup of yogurt.

I served this by putting the pasta in a bowl, topping the pasta with a handful of fresh chopped spinach and then topping with the stroganoff sauce. Delicious and healthy and filling.

Meatless Monday: Slow Cooker Vegetable and Lentil Soup

This is a pretty basic little soup, but very tasty.

Ingredients:
3 yellow potatoes, cubed
1 bunch of fresh spinach, rinsed and chopped
2 large carrots, chopped
2 stalks of celery
3 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 cup dry lentils
water, or vegetable broth in an amount to cover vegetables

Souper Soup Spice Mix:
1 teaspoon dried Italian herbs
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/8 teaspoon ground curry powder
1/8 teaspoon paprika
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger

sea salt and ground black pepper to taste

Put the vegetables and spice mix in the slow cooker except the fresh spinach; I like to stir that in just before you serve the soup. I also add the salt and pepper right before I serve the soup so that the salt does not inhibit the cooking of the lentils. You could also serve this with a little bit of basil pesto on top or a tiny sliver of parmesan cheese. Cook on high for 6 hours or on low for 8.

Slow Cooker Spare Ribs

This was a SUPER EASY dinner to make. We had a long busy day so I decided first thing this morning to make a slow cooker meal. In the bowl of your slow cooker place 2/3 cup of brown sugar, pour in 1/2 C of soy sauce and 1/2 C of worcestershire sauce and 1/2 C of water plus 2 TB of prepared BBQ sauce (or ketchup). Mix this thoroughly and add in 5 whole sweet mini peppers. Place about 2 pounds of frozen pork ribs into sauce, submerging as best you can. Cook on high for the first hour and then on low for the next 7 hours (can be cooked on low for 8 hours as well) About halfway through cooking time I flipped the ribs over so the other side could baste in the sauce as well.

The ribs will come out fall off the bone tender. We served this with leftover mac and cheese, leftover baked beans and steamed Normandy style mixed vegetables.

Nostalgia Foods

If you grew up Catholic in the 80's, chances are there some foods you only eat on Friday nights in Lent. Cheese pizza is one. (My Mom actually argued the pizza guy down to a better rate on those cheese pizzas we were such good customers.) Tuna in cream sauce with peas over egg noodles and of course fish sticks. I seriously love these foods, but unless it is a Friday night in spring I really don't think about them.

We are having fish sticks tonight, coleslaw, vegetarian baked beans and spinach salad.

Have a good dinner y'all.

Happy International Women's Day!

Just made some oatmeal raisin cookies for the teachers at my daughters' school who are except for one, all female. God bless elementary school teachers, they work REALLY, REALLY hard for not much money or respect to educate our children. This seemed like a good day to thank them for all they do.

A note on keeping the kitchen clean and orderly

Today I used up some odds and ends in my fridge, you know the sorts of things that take up room in the fridge but you don't want to throw out?

For instance last night there was a small package of Sweet Chili sauce I received in the mail as a sample. I added it into my stir fry. Today I made Russian dressing, so I took the dozen or so sad little dill pickle chips floating around in the bottom of the pickle jar and chopped them up for the dressing instead of using pickle relish. I had some leftover chicken pieces I needed to use up after I made my Apricot chicken. I placed the pieces in a gallon size Ziploc bag and sprinkled the pieces generously with BBQ rub. I had an allllmost empty bottle of ketchup. I opened it up, placed a little water in it and swooshed it around. I squirted that all over the chicken in the bag, then I added a squirt of mustard and a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce. I also took a tablespoon of pickle juice from my now empty jar and added that to the chicken, sealed the top and shook the heck out of it all. Now my chicken is defrosting in the bottom of the refrigerator and marinating in an almost effortless and almost free BBQ sauce. I will broil the pieces on Saturday for either lunch or dinner.

I save everything. Leftover pieces of vegetables, like onion tops, carrot ends, the woody stems of asparagus, bell pepper tops, mushroom stems, or anything really get placed into ziploc bags in the freezer to be used for veggie broths, the cooking water for potatoes get saved in the freezer to make potato bread or to add to a potato soup base. Bones from roasted chickens or from bone-in roasts get saved for stock. Shrimp and lobster shells make a great fish stock too! Bacon drippings get saved in a jar in the fridge to sauté vegetables. Even a few tablespoons of leftover spaghetti sauce gets saved to go on a homemade pizza or to use as a dipping sauce. Label everything though or you might find yourself defrosting something just to figure out of it is a fish stock or chicken stock, you know?

Dinner is (very, nearly) Ready!

My husband is working late, so I won't have him to ride herd on the children while I cook; so I decided to make a slow cooker meal tonight. My Mema used to make this great apricot chicken in a crock pot recipe that I loved. I seem to have lost my recipe card for it, and of course today is the day Mema is leaving for Ireland, (bon voyage!) so I tried to find it on the internet.

Lots of APRICOT CHICKEN recipes out there! Some sounded better than others, but I read several and combined them to the best of my memory of how Mema's chicken is made.

Sorta-kinda Mema Chicken

Ingredients:

6-8 chicken thighs, drumsticks or both, skinless and bone-in
1 C of Russian Dressing
1/2 C of Apricot Preserves
1-2 TB of red wine or apple cider vinegar
1 package French onion soup mix
1 tsp. dried Italian herbs
Pinch of pepper

Place frozen chicken in the bottom of the slow cooker (use thawed chicken and it will cook faster). Combine the rest of the ingredients in a small mixing bowl and pour over chicken. Cook 6-8 hours on low. I use the Automatic setting which cooks on high for 2 hours and then switches to low. Serve chicken over cooked rice or pasta and with vegetable of your choice.

The only snag I hit was that I did not have any Russian dressing. I did learn one thing in Brownie Scouts though, besides how to look AMAZING in a beanie cap, and that was how to make my own dressing. Over the years I have tweaked it a little, to have a more grown up taste. Here are the recipes.

Brownie Scout Russian Dressing:

Ingredients
1 C of mayo
1/4 C of ketchup
3 TB pickle relish
Squirt of mustard

Mix together and serve.

My Grown Up Version

1 C of mayo <---_ sometimes I use homemade!
1/4 cocktail sauce <--- Horseradish adds a kick.
1 squirt of Dijon mustard <--- Glamorous, no?
2-3 TB of pickle relish
1 TB minced onion

Mix together and use immediately or can be stored for 2-3 days in the fridge.