maverick's truth

Ah ha! Finally caught up. Without further ado, this weeks new recipes:

Chicken Quesadillas: your basic quesadilla, but low fat, and using chickpeas instead of a guacamole. Bake these babies in the oven for 10 minutes and you have a quick and easy meal. I think we'll also pair this with a Caesar side -- another new recipe.

Caesar: I'm always a little dubious of home-made Caesar dressings, but I'm not opposed to just giving this a try. Custom-built croutons are also on the plan for this side salad.

Chicken Catchatori: tomato-saucy chickeny goodness. Bake it together with some seasonings

Possibilities:
Perogies: home-made perogies with a tomatoe sauce over the top. J is thrilled that I will finally try perogies "her way", and I'm just hungry for perogies. This one is our first choice possibility since we need to find pasta shells to stuff the perogie mix into.

Pineapple chicken: a sweet-n-sour chicken dish with rice and loads of veggies. I will, again, probably pass on the pineapple. We may end up having this even if we do have the perogies, since we have the ingredients anyways.

Hm... looks like a chicken week to me. Oh well, last week was a pork week, so it's time for some new meat!

On a sidenote, if you want any of these recipes, let J or I know and I can email you one to try.

"This has been your weekly recipe report. We now return you to your regularly scheduled activities. Thank you, and have a good day."

I'm researching for my term paper, and came across this quote. I don't know why it struck me, but I thought it was just an absolutely great quote... For those who think that studying early Christianity is all about reading texts and having your head in a book, consider this -- an example of the direction the academy is going:

Paul was a city person. The city breathes through his language. Jesus' parables of sowers and weeds, sharecroppers, and mud-roofed cottages call forth smells of manure and earth, and the Aramaic of the Palestinian villages often echoes in the Greek. When Paul constructs a metaphor of olive trees or gardens, on the other hand, the Greek is fluent and evokes schoolroom more than farm; he seems more at home with the clichés of Greek rhetoric, drawn from gymnasium, stadium, or workshop.

-- Wayne A. Meeks, "The First Urban Publishers: The Social World of the Apostle Paul," p. 9. Yale University Press (1983)

Hm... so I thought that blogging weekly about what we've eaten and are eating would ensure some more regularity. Oops. That said, at least I only stopped blogging about it, and didn't stop eating altogether.

But back on track. We slowed down a bit on the new recipes since my last update, if only because it took us a while before we were able to get to the grocery store and stock up on everything. Here's a quick overview of what we've had since the last update.

Orange Chicken -- J: 4.5/5 B: 4/5
Description: Just like it sounds, chicken with an orange marinade. Nothing particularly unusual as far as ingredients go -- in fact, this is the first recipe we've done for which all the ingredients were already in the kitchen. Granted, our kitchen wasn't exactly equipped for cooking before these experiments (things like spices, worchestershire sauce, lemon and lime juice, and things like fresh onions and different varieties of peppers which aren't *unusual*, we just didn't generally stock them).
Comments: We served it over couscous, but in retrospect, rice would have been better. The ratings are for just the chicken, though. My qualm with this dish is how extremely sweet the sauce was; it was almost like an orange marmelade. However, one can always cut back on the sugar the next go-around.

Pork Chops -- J: 5/5 B: 5/5
Description: Marinate these pork chops overnight, then throw them on the grill for a sweet but tangy flavour. Served with Spanish Rice (see review below).
Comments: Fabulous marinate. And I mean, totally fab. This one does require planning ahead, since it requires at least 8 hours to sit in the marinade. But the end result is a great tasting meat.

Spanish Rice -- J: 4/5 B: 3/5
Description: Fairly normal spanish rice, which means it's got a kick. Oh... and in case you were wondering (not that you were, but...) -- we did find quick cooking brown rice. A definite relief, considering this is another brown-rice recipe.
Comments: Like I said, it's got a kick, and I guess it just wasn't my style. Not that there was anything wrong with the recipe, it just wasn't my "thing." If we added corn, the flavour might be just "weakened" enough.

Pork-u-Pine Kabobs -- J: 4.5/5 B: 3.5/5
Description: Grilled kabobs where the pork is marinated (the marinade has peach -- or apricot -- jam in it... who woulda thought?) before being skewered together with zucchini, red peppers and pineapple (for those who eat that kind of thing).
Comments: Obviously, I passed on the pineapple, and actually passed on most of the zucchini too -- just wasn't a good flavour for me, though J seemed to like it alright. We also had green peppers instead of red, which actually worked out fine. The peppers took the flavour of the marinade on really nicely (you baste them as they're grilling), and gave them a flavour that even this non-pepper fan could handle. For just the meat and the peppers, though, it wasn't worth it to me. I'd rather just use the marinade and forget the kabob-ing.

Potato Salad -- J: 1.5/5 B: 1/5
Description: A potato salad which uses a vinagrette dressing rather than a creamy one. Red potatoes and an oil + red-wine vinegar + seasonings make up the dressing. This one was a side to the kabobs (above).
Comments: The first recipe we've made that I just couldn't finish. Whether there was too much red wine vinegar, or whether I just don't like the flavour, I don't know. But I don't want to have it again. Oh well, you live, you learn.


Update on the new recipes forthcoming. [edit: wow, did I just say that? I didn't even notice at the time, but that's the exact same way I finished off the *last* report]

Again, all ratings are out of 5. This post is only the reviews from last week; we haven't decided what we're trying this coming week yet.

Pizza Pasta -- J: 4.5 B: 4.5
Comments: the title of this one is a bit deceiving, since it's more like a baked spaghetti with pizza toppings (including veggies). It's still really good, though a bit less pasta would work well.

Shepherd's Pie -- J: 4.0 B: 4.0
Comments: The spinach definitely needed to be chopped up more finely than what we had, but overall, this had really nice flavour. It was a bit of a pain to bake in the toaster oven, and draining the fat off of the meat was a bit tricky, but the leaner the meat, the better the result. I also found the amount of meat to be a bit on the high side, but then again, I'm not really a meat eater.

Blueberry Pancakes -- J: 5.0 B: 5.0
Comments: Woot! Awesome pancakes, with a really nice banana creme sauce to boot. Secret ingredient in this one was cottage cheese in the batter, which helped keep it light. But really, blueberry buttermilk pancakes? Who can complain!
Guest Reviewer: Kevin: 4.0/5.0 -- 'only reason for it being a 4 is that it was really, really filling'. J and I agreed that it was filling, but thought that the banana creme sauce helped with that.

Orange-Lime Rice Salad: J: 4.5/5.0 B: 2.5/5.0
Comments: This one constitutes the first recipe that I really didn't like. The flavours just weren't working for me. The rice is a pain in the you-know-what, since it's long grain brown rice, and we couldn't find any quick cooking stuff. Dumb stuff. J liked the flavours, but didn't like the rice cooking time. The salmon that we had with it was really nice, though.

I'll post part b of this week's report once we've figured out what we're gonna have!

Alright, the first week of cooking and eating with the new recipes seems to have been an overall s-u-c-c-e-s-s. All ratings are out of 5.

Mandarin Salad -- J: 3.5 B: 3.5
Comments: the salad itself seemed was quite good, but the parsley's bitterness made for a not-so-great aftertaste. Less parsely and without waterchestnuts should bring this one up to a 4 or 4.5 at least.

Fettucine Alfredo -- J: 4.5 B: 5.0
Comments: J found this a touch dry, but I quite liked it. But you have to eat it when it's hot -- the sauce and peas loose their lustre as it cools down. The portion sizes were also a a nice surprise; we were able to eat a lot, without eating "bad."

Mixed-Up Meatballs -- J: 4.5 B: 4.5
Comments: what a surprise! I hate horseradish... and horseradish combined with raspberry jam sounded just bizarre. So bizarre, that we really only tried this because of how crazy it sounded. And yet, we both agreed it's worth having again -- we made lots of meatballs and froze them so we have 3 more meals worth before we have to splurge for the ground chicken again. The price of the ground chicken was really only problem we had with this recipe; we couldn't find ground turkey, and the ground chicken was tricky to find. All in all, though, a great surprise.

Not mentioned last week (but we tried them anyway) were some smoothies. We tried the Bikini Breezer (strawberry - banana - OJ) and a Peach one as well. Both are worth having again, though we're going to try adding some fresh strawberries to the first. This week, we'll be trying a third variety, which is a pistachio banana one.

The other new things this week are:

Orange-Lime Rice Salad: we're having this one as a side to some BBQ'd salmon. J's never had fish other than the canned junk, so this should be interesting for both of us. Cantalope, peppers and green onions fill out the salad. This is our "not sure about" recipe for the week.

Shepherd's Pie: the old classic with red potatoes, ground beef, and the twist is the addition of spinach.

Pizza Pasta: it's pizza on top of pasta. Strange but true!

And as a bonus, there's a recipe for buttermilk pancakes (with blueberries for those who eat them) and a banana-creme topping (with low-fat plain yogurt, cinnamon, banana, etc.) Kev's coming over to help us devour them... thus the "blueberries for those who eat them."