What to cook next

[Bronzebow]

Hey, guys and gals!

I'm trying to decide what I want to cook this weekend, but nothing's coming to mind. I try to cook a quantity of one or two things so I can freeze them and have easy meals during the week. Even though I have about a dozen familiar recipes I like to eat, I'm kind of in the mood to branch out and try something different. Some things I've cooked recently:

Mushroom and broccoli casserole
Chili (sort of chunky with veggies and stew meat)
Pulled pork (slow cooker)
Roast beef and potatoes
Catfish courtboullion (my first creole dish...came out great!)
Beef stew
Red beans with sausage and rice
Steak, marinated for a day in Italian dressing (Long work week, so I treated myself dangit!)

What are some of your favorite dishes? Something you grew up with, or maybe something cheap and good you devised?

[Rapscallion]

I'm partial to Thai Green Curry - just had a dose right now, actually.

Thai green curry paste - check how much to use, should be on side of jar. Stir fry that a little, add coconut milk (reduced fat allows more spice flavour), add in diced meat (I usually use chicken in small cubes) and veg (usually onions, mushrooms, pak choi, choppsed sugarsnap peas or mange tout - whatever's in season). I usually put in the juice of a lemon to add a different taste as well.

I add dry noodles to it instead of pouring over - retains more of the curry heat that way, I find, and makes for a thicker end result. Also, one less pan to wash. Freezes really well.

Rapscallion

[MaggieTheCat]

Something similar to what Raps suggested in an orange-honey stir fry that I made up. What I usually use is the following:

Fresh sliced onion, celery, carrot, bell pepper, mushrooms, & garlic
Meat, (I use either chicken or beef, but pork or shrimp would be good too,) cut into bite-sized pieces
A couple of cans of mixed stir fry veggies, or cans of individual veggies (bamboo shoots, baby corn, water chestnuts)
Canned chunks of pineapple and/or mandarin oranges (save the juice)

Of course, everything is to taste. Feel free to change up the veggies however you like.

Start by sauteing the fresh veggies in peanut oil (or any other high-heat oil) over medium-high heat for just a couple of minutes. Add in the meat (unless you're using shrimp -- you don't want to overcook that) and let it saute until mostly done. Dump in all the canned stuff and let it heat up.

Meanwhile, make a sauce. Start with the leftover juice from the pineapple and/or mandarin oranges, if you had any. Add some regular orange juice, or use all regular orange juice, until you have around 1 cup worth of juice. Add a couple tablespoons of honey, a few shakes of soy sauce, a drop or two of sesame oil (if you have it), freshly grated ginger (if you like it), and dried hot peppers (the kind you'd put on pizza, if you like it spicy.) Stir it all up and whisk in about 2-3 teaspoons of cornstarch. There might be lumps but they'll smooth out once you heat the sauce. I can't really give definite measurements on the sauce, 'cuz I never measure it, and a lot of it is a matter of taste and how much meat/veggies I have. You want enough sauce to adequately cover everything and still a bit more to soak into your rice (well, that's how we like it.)

Pour the sauce over the meat and veggie mixture and turn the heat down to medium low. Let it simmer, stirring occasionally, until thick, about 15-20 minutes. Serve over rick with cashews or peanuts on top.

I make this dish often and you can REALLY stretch it far if you use a lot of veggies. My husband is a big eater and we normally get about 2-3 meals out of one batch of this, but if I were to make the exact same amount for myself, I could easily get about 7-10 meals out of it. Never tried freezing it, though.

Another thing that I make sometimes that makes a lot of leftovers is a quick and dirty chicken and dumplings in a slow cooker.

Start with 1 small package (about 1-1.5lbs) of chicken breasts, preferably frozen (supposedly they stay juicier if they're frozen first.) Put them directly into your slow cooker and top with 2 cans of "Cream of" soup (cream of chicken, cream of mushroom, cream of celery, you could even use cream of cheddar soup if you wanted it cheesy.) Add 1 can of water (fill up one of your soup cans with water, after you empty it) or chicken stock, or water + chicken bouillon, and spices to taste. Garlic powder and chili powder are good. If you like veggies, add them. I've made it with no veggies and I've made it with freshly sliced carrots and potatoes. If you want to use frozen veggies, it's probably best to wait till the end to add them (probably about the same time you add the dumplings.)

Cook on high for about 6 hours, stirring occasionally if you can (I'm sure if you wanted to do this while you were at work, you could cook it on low for 8 hours and bump the heat up to high when you got home.) Add water if needed so it doesn't dry out. You need a decent amount of liquid (the dumplings will absorb some of the liquid when you add them), but not soupy. If it seems too thin, you can sprinkle a little flour over it and stir it in to thicken it up.

About 30-60 minutes before you're ready to eat, take out a can of biscuits (like the Pillsbury biscuits you can get in the refrigerated section of your grocery store) or make some simple drop biscuits (bisquick works fine.) Drop the raw dough on top of the chicken mix in small portions (you may want to tear the biscuits in half if you're using the canned kind) and put the cover back on and let them steam for about 30-60 minutes. You can insert a fork or a toothpick into the biscuits to see if they're done. They won't be like biscuits if you bake them, they turn into soft dumplings when cooked this way. This makes a ton (again, we easily get about 3 meals out of this) and saves very well.

Enjoy!

[BookstoreEscapee]

They had cheese lasagna on the menu at work today which always makes me think "I should make some"...

Once I happened to have some meatballs in the freezer (that my mommy had made and gave me the leftovers), so I cut them up in to small pieces and made a meatball lasagna. It was really good.

[Bronzebow]

All of this sounds great. I've never tried for Indian food, but methinks it's time to try. Thanks for the ideas!

[Antisocial_Worker]

My only specialty is seafood lasagna. I made it on a whim, combining three recipes I found online and it came out wonderfully. The only problem is that it also came out extremely dense, and two pieces were enough to pin me to my bed for the rest of the night. I'd think about exercising... then get to thinking about gravity and how it's so damn heavy instead. Exercising... gravity... inertia...

[MaggieTheCat]

Oh, a couple of things:

With the orange-honey stir fry, the last time I made it, I added a couple of spoonfuls of orange marmalade to the sauce, and that really kicked up the orange flavor. It was great!

Also, I see you make slow-cooker BBQ pork, which is a staple in our house, too. I'll tell you what I do with the leftover meat if we get tired of just BBQ sandwiches. Make or buy enchilada sauce (I can give you my recipe if you want it, it's really easy) and mix some of it in with the BBQ meat, then fill tortilla shells with the meat and some cheese and top with more sauce and bake for enchiladas. I know, weird, right? But it's really good. My husband doesn't like authentic Mexican food but he likes my variation on it. Apparently it's a mid-west thing (I'm originally from Wisconsin) to take leftovers and add stuff to them to make new meals. A friend of mine down here in Texas has family in Minnesota and says I cook a lot like them (but better. )

Edit: Okay, I just read the OP again and I guess it's pulled pork, not BBQ pork. Either way I bet you could still add a little enchilada sauce to it to make enchilada meat!

[AdminAssistant]

Edit: Okay, I just read the OP again and I guess it's pulled pork, not BBQ pork. Either way I bet you could still add a little enchilada sauce to it to make enchilada meat!

Isn't that the same thing?

And yes, that would be tasty stuffing for enchiladas (or tamales or tacos or....well, now I'm hungry!)

[Bronzebow]

Hah, that's the funny thing with the pulled pork. It makes so much and you get tired of it after so long, so you start trying to think of what else you can do with it. I've added it to other soups with some success, and I made a salad that was so-so. On second thought, though, all I did was slow cook pork roast in some bbq sauce and a few assorted spices, so maybe I'm calling it pulled pork when it isn't. I like the idea of baking them on tortilla shells with new stuff. I'll have to give that a shot next time I make it.

Bossman likes to come up with new recipes as a hobby. Last week, he was telling me about how he made seafood stuffed bell peppers. There was a sale on some good shrimp, so he picked up a bunch and got some green peppers, baked up the insides with tomato sauce, holy trinity, a few cheeses and the shrimp.

I've done the same thing but with eggplant. I picked up a stuffed eggplant recipe from the Moosewood cookbook, and it came out pretty good. I cut a few in half, scooped out the middle and blended it with cottage and cheddar cheese, paprika and sunflower seeds. Bake for a while and voila. Now those came out tasty!

Edit: Sure, I'll take a recipe for enchilada sauce. I've not quite ventured in that direction yet.

[It shouldn't]

The green cabbage was loving the cool moist weather we had here.
Darn cabbage heads in my garden are approx. 15 lbs ea. Takes me and the hubby a week to eat one head.
The other day I made 'unrolled cabbage rolls' (way easier than the rolled variety and taste the same)

Mix:
1lb of ground beef
1cup of cooked rice
1 package on french onion soup
1 teaspoon worchester sauce
2 eggs
salt, pepper
and breadcrumbs to make it medium firm.

heat some olive oil in a deep frying pan. Roll (or I use a squeeze handle ice cream scoop) 1" to2" meatballs. Drop in hot pan and fry, turning a few times.

Add:
Lg can of tomato juice
4-5 beef bullion cubes
1 to 2 tablesoons sugar

Simmer the meatballs in the juice for about 10 minutes.
In the meantime chop (in my case, it was huge, so I used 1/4) a 1/2 head of green cabbage into large-ish (about 2" spuare) pieces and add on top of juice and meatballs. Cover pan with lid and simmer till cabbage is a bit wilted, then mix cabbage into sauce and cook 5 to 10 more minutes on high to evaporate the juice down some.

I serve it with mashed potatoes.

Tastes just like cabbage rolls but you don't have to boil the cabbage ahead of time and do the rolling.

[Der Cute]

I like making spaghetti sauce - and let it simmer allllllll day and smell the house up good. Then I freeze what's left over in containers, and one container's enough for another meal's food.

I also make fried rice, as a home leftover thing.
Take what meat you've got in fridge (the cooked stuff)
Take any leftover rice that's cooked
Soy sauce
Brown sugar
cut up lots of green onions

Put the rice and about 4 T of soysauce in the warm up pan. Lots of rice - this is to color it and make it brown colored.
Put the meat in there, have the pan on low/mid low.
Put any leftover hard veggies you've got - carrots, celery, NOT taters. Put that in there, warm them up.
When the mix is getting warm, you can throw in the cut up green onions, and if you have, scrambled eggs. If not, no biggy.
Put pinch or 3 of brown sugar in there to taste.

This is the way to clean out a fridge in my home.

[MaggieTheCat]

Isn't that the same thing?

I think it just depends on the recipe. My mom makes a pulled pork recipe that doesn't have BBQ sauce in it. I can't remember what she uses, but I think it's something similar, she just doesn't call it BBQ sauce.

Anyway, enchilada sauce!

1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 Tablespoons flour
chili powder (to taste)
1 8oz can tomato sauce
ground cumin (to taste)
garlic powder (to taste)
onion powder (to taste)
salt (to taste)
1 or 2 (1oz) squares baker's chocolate
sugar (to taste)

Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add flour and chili powder and reduce heat to medium. Let the mixture cook, stirring constantly so the flour doesn't burn, for about 3-5 minutes. Slowly pour in the tomato sauce, still stirring constantly, until smooth. Add the spices and salt and let the mixture simmer until thickened, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally so the sauce doesn't burn on the bottom of the pan. Remove from heat and add in the chocolate, stirring until melted. Taste the sauce. If it's too acidic, add a little sugar to help balance the flavor.

I know, chocolate is a weird thing for enchilada sauce, but it's good. You can't really taste the chocolate itself, it just sort of mellows out the flavor and smooths out the texture.