Robynettely

I used to write little food adventures here, but for some reason that fell by the wayside. Last night I left the YMCA thinking I should pick up some cottage cheese to mix with the Chimichurri that was leftover in my fridge, but I didn't want to go to the giant Loblaw's across the street. It seems really stupid to me to drive across the street to the Loblaw's parking lot, but the store is extremely pedestrian-hostile. Also, the store is just too large. All I wanted was cottage cheese, and maybe some parsley to go in the Cowboy Pie I was going to make for dinner. So I decided to go a little out of my way to the Foodland store -- much smaller and almost on my drive. But while I was on my way there (passed my normal turn, waiting at the light to turn onto Foodland's street) I realized I could replace the parsley with the chimichurri, and then it wouldn't be leftover in my fridge anymore, and I wouldn't need the parsley anymore. I drove past Foodland and just...

Ingredients: 1 lb        ground beef 1 pkg     dried onion soup mix 4            pita pockets               feta               tzatziki               tomato               cucumber               lettuce Mix the ground beef and onion soup mix. Divide in four and make into burger-shape. Dig a hole in each one and press a chunk of feta in the middle, closing the meat over it. Fry them up. Open the pita pockets and stick a couple of slices of tomato, maybe 4 slices of cucumber and a piece of lettuce in each one. When the burgers are cooked, put one...

The boy likes meat, and I'm meat ambivalent, which makes it kind of funny that he suggested bruschetta for this meal, and I suggested goulash. And I only wanted it because Steven Brust mentioned Szekely Gulyas on twitter maybe a week before. And I googled. The recipes: Stephen King's Transylvanian Goulash Rachael Ray's Bruschetta We did the first few steps of the goulash, which involved onions, bacon, and pork, and then wandered off for 45 minutes before coming back and doing the rest of the goulash and the entirety of the bruschetta. This was not the bruschetta he envisioned, I think. His dad must do bruschetta with cheese. We'll do that in a few weeks when we do Shakshuka again. I chose this goulash recipe because it looked like it took less than 90 minutes, and because it didn't have an instruction at the end to wait 24 hours and then reheat and add the sour cream and serve. We would have DIED of hunger if we'd done that. The boy was interested in...

The boy asked me a few weeks ago to teach him now to cook some things, but he doesn’t really have a plan, so I taught him to make a burger (the Rachael Ray way) and  Mediterranean chicken skillet (chicken, rice, veg). The first time I made that, he said "I get a WHOLE chicken breast?" He wasn’t very impressed with it when we were making it, though, because I couldn’t find the recipe (somewhere in a pile of torn out pages from magazines, in an ad for Kraft ingredients) so I did it from memory. There’s nothing wrong with my memory, but he said “It doesn’t seem very precise.” This is kind of similar to something my dad said to one of his wives, or maybe my sister: “Just follow the damn recipe for once, could you?”  Anyway, so I had this brilliant idea that you can’t really cook if you don’t know how to acquire ingredients.Thursday evening last week after circus, we stopped at the 24-hour grocery and bought the stuff to make a meal. I’d printed off the recipe so he could c...