Tuesday, February 21, 2012

A list of food-ish things

I have this mish-mash of food-related stuff I've been meaning to post but, for some reason, keep not getting around to. So I'm just going to brain dump it here and now.

1. The Hearty Brown Lentil Soup in Love Soup. I've made few things from this book so far, and I've liked them all, but this is number one for ease, yum, and being filling. Plus, it makes a lot. I'd recommend the book if you, uh, love soup. Especially if you're a vegetarian (which I am): all the recipes are vegetarian, but there's still lots of basic, hearty stuff.

 hearty brown lentil soup

2. Black bean patties with corn relish and avocado cream sauce. I made these for the Super Bowl. Really good. Relatively easy. Only change I'd make is less lime in the avocado cream sauce. It was insanely limey.

3. Easy, yummy guacamole. I don't know why/how, but I have had bad luck with making guacamole. This was easy and yummy (as I said two sentences ago, but maybe you forgot?). I forgot the onions - after everyone left following the Super Bowl, I was putting away some chips and saw an onion on the counter and was all, where'd that come from? - but it was still really good, amazingly enough, even though it's so simple.

4. Speaking of things I've had bad luck with: chocolate birthday cake. It's Adam's birthday, which means chocolate-cake-baking time. I went with the Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Cake recipe for the third year in a row, what with it being the only non-fail chocolate cake recipe I've ever made. It's in the oven now, so wish me luck!

5. Lasagna in the slow cooker. This recipe was really easy, gave me a good use for some of the pesto I made and froze this summer and fall, and turned out pretty darn tasty. I recommend it. I made it yesterday afternoon and was able to forget about it (except for the part where it made the house smell like deliciousness) until we were ready to sit down to eat dinner. Awesome.

6. From months and months ago (how is this not already in a post?): I made my own pumpkin puree. Yeah, I was pretty proud of myself. We bought a jack-o-lantern pumpkin for Adelaide this fall, but we just left it intact on the front porch rather than carving it. So after Halloween, I decide to make use of it. I love doing stuff like that because it makes me feel all resourceful and what have you. Plus I love eating pumpkin seeds. Anyway, I'd never cooked a pumpkin or made a puree out of its guts, so I used this helpful tutorial. It took a lot longer than instructed to cook my pumpkin (it was huge, and took about an hour with the stovetop steaming method). But it worked! Hooray! And I cooked the seeds as instructed here.

making pumpkin puree

making pumpkin puree

pumpkin seeds

2 comments:

annette said...

Thank you for all the yummy recipe links, the black bean patties look great and I am definitely trying the crockpot lasagna.

I have been dreading dinner making lately and broke out the vintage crockpot this morning. I was flipping through the 1973 recipe booklet which came with it and noticed they had all these cake recipes in there, pretty funny. We aren't cake eaters anymore (unfortunately! this is for health reasons) but if a crockpot cake just happens to get made for scientific purposes it will be reported about.

Happy belated birthday to Adam!

Sarah said...

Aren't old recipe books the best? Not always much I'd want to actually eat, but the entertainment value is priceless! (And crockpot cake sounds rather intriguing.)