In the hopes of sparing my Facebook friends from a barrage of food pictures (and craft projects, and other fun things that will just clutter people's newsfeeds), I've created this blog to use for sharing and chronicling my and John's attempts at tasty culinary dishes.
So far this past week, I made - to varying degrees of success - homemade Guinness and ghost salt pretzels, southwestern chicken burritos with cilantro cream sauce, spinach lasagna roll-ups, and honey wheat bread.
The pretzel recipe came to use from our favorite spice shop, Savory, in downtown Hinsdale. One of the neat things about that shop is the selection of recipe cards scattered around. On a whim one day, I picked up the pretzel recipe card and we bought 2 oz of ghost salt to complete the recipe. And then the card sat, all but forgotten, in the kitchen drawer until last Saturday. After two failed attempts at starting the yeast, I realized the recipe was calling for the wrong temperature water -- oops! After adjusting the water temp to warm (it called for cold), the yeast started to bloom, and my pretzels were soon on their way! They baked up crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside with a sharp kick of ghost salt sprinkled on top. Yum. I will definitely be making these again, and they will most likely make an appearance at Heath's Oktoberfest this fall.
Sunday's dinner recipe was the southwestern chicken burritos with cilantro cream sauce, courtesy of Pinterest. These burritos were super-easy to cook and assemble, and they baked to a golden brown. The cilantro cream sauce was equally easy to prepare, and I added a whole avocado to the original recipe. These tasted just like the southwestern eggrolls appetizers from Chili's. We reheated the leftovers in the oven for dinner on Wednesday, and they were even better reheated because the tortilla shells became even crispier. After assembling 10 eggrolls, there was still some filling left, so we had those with a dollop of cilantro sauce on Friday for lunch. Delicious!
Thursday night I assembled spinach lasagna roll-ups, another recipe from Pinterest. The original called for frozen spinach, but I used fresh. The result was a slightly bitter spinach taste and a bit of crunch sprinkled throughout the roll-ups, but it didn't detract from the tastiness of the dish. We reheated these for lunch on Saturday, and they were fantastic even reheated. I topped them off with a jar of marinara mixed with John's homemade spaghetti sauce, which is loaded with yummy chunky vegetables. When I set out to make this dish, we were going to make homemade lasagna noodles, but time got away from us and we had to use store-bought. Next time...
Friday evening, I whipped up a batch of honey wheat bread, another Pinterest recipe. The bread was relatively simple to make. It rose for about an hour the first time, then I punched it down and shaped it into loaves and let them rise about another hour. The baking time was only supposed to be 30 minutes, but they were in the oven for close to an hour, and I still feel as though the loaves were too doughy in the middle. Toasted up they are ok, but I'll have to make some kind of adjustments to this recipe next time. Would sifting the flour help in any way to keep the dough from being so dense?
After making these few simple and delicious recipes this week, we are feeling inspired (at least for now) to make dishes to freeze and then pop in the oven. The pretzels, burritos and roll-ups would be fantastic make-ahead dishes to stock the freezer. John and I spent a few hours yesterday researching our best options for freezer-to-oven food storage solutions, but so far, we haven't found anything perfect. I think we would like to stay away from aluminum (the disposable pans aren't easy enough to wash to make them reusable), we're not crazy about the idea of reheating food in the oven in plastic (despite claims that some manufacturers have items that make this possible), and glass can't go straight from the freezer to the oven. We saw one option, Ovenware, which is made by Glad, is reusable, and can go from freezer to oven...but it's plastic. We were hoping for glass solutions, but our research showed that Pyrex, which we were hoping would be our best bet, needs to be brought up to room temperature before going into an oven. Sigh. We were striving for minimal clean-up after meals, hence the search for safe, reusable, freezer-to-oven options. If you know of any good items, please leave them in the comments area. The vacuum sealer is, of course, an option, but an expensive one since the bags - even the generic Menards ones - are far from being economical.
