Salad. It is a topic near and dear to my heart. There are so many kinds to love: pasta, three-bean, vegetable medley, or even with seafood, chicken, or steak added. My favorite kinds include the whole meal all in one place, like with turkey, avocado, egg, and bacon all thrown together on a Cobb, or a Southwestern salad made with zesty chicken and spiced up corn and black beans. But mostly what I love is dressing. Oh yes, the dressing. Ree has taught me how to make amazing versions of so many salads, and they included recipes for my all-time fave, Bleu Cheese dressing, and a truly magnificent Southwest Ranch made with salsa which are now permanently in my repertoire. However, there are a couple salads that have never made my Top 10 list. Still, as I approach the end of the book, I have to suck it up and expand past my much-loved cream-based dressings and dive into…sigh…vinaigrettes. 
As you can see, I was so unenthused about making Greek food that I forgot to even take pictures of the progress in creating Recipe #124: Mediterranean Orzo Salad. This is sad, because Greece is on my bucket list of places to travel (Santorini, anyone??), yet I am singularly unimpressed with Mediterranean flavors. I blame Kalamata olives. They are literally one of only two foods I have ever in my life spit back out after taking a bite. And I AM including all forms of peppers in my reference! So alas, to preserve my commitment to taste a portion of this salad, I subbed in black olives, but I still used minced red onion, feta cheese, and tomatoes along with garbanzo beans (or chickpeas, if you can’t find the other name in your store) to mix in with the orzo pasta. That’s right; pasta. I have heard many people say they thought orzo was a rice product, so they have a hard time finding it at the grocery. Just look next to the spaghetti! The pasta base makes this a very filling recipe, so you could serve this alongside chicken or fish and call it a day. But onto the most important part, the dressing. (Insert heavy sigh here). It was just olive oil and red wine vinegar, along with garlic and some spices. I know, I know…. there are entire cultures where this is the basis for most of their dressings and sauces! I just really think some milk or mayo or sour cream would have livened this up for me, and I might have been all over this recipe. Unfortunately for me, this is one time where Ree went for “light and refreshing”, when I always prefer “heavy and fattening” when it comes to my salad! I personally gave it a 5 out of 10, but I think bringing it to a potluck with people who have a more reasonable relationship with dressing would be a success!
Which brings me to the next salad! Recipe #125: Panzanella, was in fact well-received when I took it to a potluck meal. Again, my bucket list of vacation destinations includes Tuscany, Italy, where this chopped salad originated. I confess to liking this one better, which utterly contradicts several of my food rules. 1) It contains raw red onion slices, which is so overpowering to me that I rarely eat anything with that ingredient, and 2) It features wet bread. Wet. Bread. This would be the other food I literally ejected from my mouth when I sampled it: undercooked bread pudding. Y.U.C.K. (I have since been exposed to tolerable, properly prepared bread pudding, but it will never be a go-to dessert for me!)
What really saves Panzanella from being unpalatable is the fact that you use stale bread to begin with, and then further toast it in chunks in the oven with olive oil, essentially creating croutons. I chose a garlic loaf from the day-old rack at the store, so I didn’t have to worry about it being bland. Not “garlic bread”, like what you would buy in the frozen foods aisle, but an Italian loaf baked with cloves of roasted garlic already inside it! Delish. So the key here is to dry out your bread, then to toss it LIGHTLY with the vinaigrette, not soak it until it’s mooshy. The salad also included seeded cucumber (this is important; not only do the seeds contain a ton of water, contributing to the squish-factor, but they also are the part that gives people gas or indigestion. Just scrape out the offending seeds with a spoon) and tomatoes. The best part of the whole dish however, is the large quantity of fresh, fragrant basil. In this recipe you are using it as a main salad ingredient, not an herby accent. Get this: there is NO other lettuce, spinach, or green of any kind in here! Roll up the basil leaves in a pile, then chiffonade it (a.k.a. slice thin ribbons out of the roll) and sprinkle it over the bread. Finally, add fresh Parmesan shavings to the top and toss it together. Don’t grab that can of Kraft crumbles which makes a visible presence on your plate of spaghetti, yet has no discernable flavor! Spring for the good stuff that comes in little sheets of cheesy goodness, or go one better and use a potato peeler to shave off pieces of fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano! Really, it costs about $3. You’ll thank me later.
Mostly I needed to clean out the fridge and use up the berries before they went off. Really, there was barely a recipe to stick to at all. This was the simplest of simple: berries, cream, and some cookie crumble for crunch. Here is an instance where you don’t want to whip out the canned cream (I couldn’t resist that pun!), but I suppose in a pinch you could sub in thawed Cool Whip. Personally, I feel there is no excuse for not taking three minutes to whip heavy cream with sugar and vanilla (or hazelnut, almond, coconut, whatever) extract, to get delicious, authentic whipped cream. No need to be crazy and do it by hand – which by the way takes at least seven minutes and you always get a cramp – when the electric beater or in my case the stand mixer can do it for you! The berries can be mushed with a little sugar by hand using a potato masher, which frankly I found satisfying, and then folded gently into the cream so as not to deflate all the air you (or your machine of choice) just put in there. Finally, take a rolling pin or a meat tenderizer to a Ziplock baggie full of any cookie (I used Nilla wafers) and smash to your heart’s content; sprinkle the resultant chunks, crumbs or dust on as a topping. Really, this is a great dish to make when you have some aggression to take out! The result is a relatively healthy dessert that pleases your sweet tooth without making your kids ping off the walls.
Let me just take this opportunity to point out that imposter cakes are not known for their spectacular taste. It’s all about the look, baby! With that being said, I had complete freedom to use boxed cake and canned frosting. The Boy wanted coconut chocolate, so I made the simple additions of half a cup of sweetened, shredded coconut and about a teaspoon of coconut extract to the batter. I even went out and specially bought locally-made coconut syrup to brush on the layers for additional moisture and flavor. I learned from watching Spring Baking Championship that even if you have a cake as dry as the Sahara, you can brush on a liquid such as simple syrup and save it. I then promptly forgot to add the aforementioned moisture until I had already frosted the whole dang thing… Ah well, there’s always pancake Sunday!
Now it was time to whip out the tape measure, cardboard and scissors and get to work on the construction of the “fake out” décor. (BTW, if you don’t have one of those spinny things on which you set your naked cake and then twirl it around spreading frosting instead of moving your SELF all around the plate, you need to make the $15 investment. It’s a lifesaver.) Also, I discovered I am missing all my adorable little cardboard cake bases (because how else do you then get the cake OFF the spinny thing??) and I was forced to hand-craft one from a flat-rate postal box and kitchen shears. Necessity really is the mother of invention! Anyway, the first step to sushi roll decorating was to sketch out a 3″ circle (yes, I measured) in the center of the cake, then fill it with “salmon” and “cucumber”. The fish substitute was sliced chili-lime dried mango, which I had to wash off to remove the sugar crystals. They just didn’t add to the look. A diced up Granny Smith apple tossed in lemon juice made the cucumber. All this was arranged in my circle to give me a border to work with when creating the “rice”. But before that, I had to cut a strip of parchment paper to wrap around the cake like a sleeve. This is where the glue-frosting came in handy! Once the sleeve was stuck on and the cake chilled for a bit, I had a mold in which to drop crisped rice cereal (let’s be honest, I’m not getting paid for advertising here, but it was straight up Rice Krispies!) mixed with white, a.k.a. vanilla, candy melts. I used their directed proportions, but I could have added more cereal and it would have looked more realistic. The great thing about the candy melts is that they stayed soft and moldable for quite a while during the decorating, but once fully solidified, they became basically a rice brick. Not so easy to cut slices of cake through all that!
Basically the only thing in this was sugar, sugar and more sugar: 10 ounces of mini marshmallows and a little water microwaved to melting, then a POUND of powdered sugar is mixed in, followed by a cup and a half of dark cocoa. Oh yeah, then throw in some butter. Just in case diabetes doesn’t get you, we needed a nod to artery blockage! I’ve gotta say, when I plopped this mess onto the parchment to roll it out, “seaweed” was not the first comparison I made. Moving on… A rolling pin and some elbow grease eventually resulted in a long, flat strip of fondant which I trimmed with a pizza cutter to give precise edges, and once wrapped around the cake, it really did look pretty amazing! And you know what? It didn’t taste awful, either! I’m not saying I wanted to eat a pound of it, but it definitely made up for limited frosting. Final touches were the “wasabi” (vanilla icing tinted with green food coloring) and “ginger” (Starburst candies squished with the rolling pin). In the end, I was proud to serve this cake to my son, and I enjoyed watching people guess what all the parts were made from. From here on out, I don’t think this kid is getting anything but imposter cakes from this mama!
Irritatingly, this mixture actually smelled pretty good cooking over the fire, as the sharp acidity that I dislike so much in peppers was reduced in the roasting. Incidentally, I used red onions in this recipe even though it called for white, both because I was out of white onions, and because I was trying to work in as much sweetness as I could. Once the vegetables were cooked through and softened, into the food processor they went, to be pulverized to a thick paste. Then back into the cooking pan, where I added a cup of chicken broth and some heavy cream, which resulted in this orange-ish color. PS, No Grocery Month took its toll here too, and I actually used half-and-half since my heavy cream went off last week! Still worked though. Ok, this was turning out pretty well so far. Ree suggested rigatoni as the pasta, but I had some orecchiette I thought would be perfect. (As my Italian lessons have taught me, “orecchiette” means “little ear”, just in case you’re interested!) I’m endlessly fascinated by the seemingly infinite amount of pasta shapes available, and the heated debate of which pasta is appropriate for which sauces and toppings. I just thought it looked cute, so I bought it!
Not as in, “I went out and bought frozen celery on purpose”, more like I put the celery in the garage fridge and it has been so insanely cold, the poor stalks froze solid. There is a reason that frozen celery is a not “a thing”. It’s pretty gross when it thaws out. Limp and floppy. No good for ants-on-a-log, but to braise with other vegetables? Perfect! Finally, a main component of this recipe was the dreaded bell pepper. Red ones. Green ones. Supposed to be added in big, fat slices. NOT HAPPENING. So in came my mini-sweet peppers to the rescue. I used about 3-4 of these sliced into slivers, because I didn’t want any huge chunks; they practically dissolve when they are small enough!
Plus, look how nicely it makes a braising liquid for the chicken! Despite all the steps, the recipe came together very quickly, since everything cooked in one pot, and the whole shebang just finished in the oven for 45 minutes. Last but not least, buttered egg noodles with fresh parsley and Parmesan made the perfect “nest”. The kids loved it, I enjoyed it, and I was proved wrong about a recipe I initially rejected. Just goes to show, you can’t judge a recipe by its cover photo!
Oven BBQ Chicken was the main course, and it had the added bonus of requiring me to make my own barbecue sauce from scratch. “Bonus” because I’m trying to use up pantry stuff of course. I’d tell you to just buy a bottle of sauce like the recipe suggests! The Roasted Carrots were coated in a homemade vinaigrette I already had in the fridge plus a few extra ingredients, and were a nice departure from the old “frozen bagged carrots cooked in butter” routine. Polenta… Oh, polenta, where have you been all my life?? Italy you say? One more reason to go there and spend a month or two. (I had to look it up; I could have sworn polenta was from Mexico or Spain!) 
at the same time. Once I started the actual cooking process, it moved really quickly; almost like a REAL 16-minute meal! Thank goodness I prepped for making the chow earlier in the week, so all I had to do was dump pre-chopped things into the wok as I cooked that one. Make-ahead meals for the win! Two more REE-cipes (ha, I just made that up!) done and done. But for the sake of my blood pressure, I’m moving to a salad next!
I’ve had a couple bags of frozen hash browns for months, but I’ve never managed to make a hash 
I did however take a picture of my Epic Fail at making homemade breakfast sausage patties. I made breakfast sausage… piles. Evidently my pork sausage was a bit on the lean side, because they crumbled to bits when I tried to flip them. On the other hand, I was able to use some fresh sage out of my Aerogarden and made a pretty decently spiced side dish. Next time I’ll just make sure to use much fattier pork!
Have Book, Will Cook 