8-31: Roast Beef

8-31: Roast Beef

This recipe is the best kind of recipe from Simply Delicious, an easy one. I’m not the most confident at preparing roast beef in this manner, however, the method shown in 8-31: Roast Beef is easy and can be applied to other cuts of meat such as lamb. ?

Simple is the best way to describe baking a roast beef in the oven.

Editor’s note: I’ve made this one before–it was part of my fancy dinner party I had in my first apartment after college. You know, before I had to surrender it to the roaches. ? I’ve continued to use it as a basic roast beef recipe, although now I like to do a beef broth/mixed-herb/red wine marinade before roasting. 


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6-20: Rosemary Chicken

6-20: Rosemary Chicken

6-20: Rosemary Chicken is another “Easy” level recipe, my favorite kind of recipe from Simply Delicious. This isn’t my usual method to prepare chicken, but it is fun to try something new every once in a while.  ?

The editors of Simply Delicious are sometimes off on their estimate of cooking time. 45 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to bake a chicken at the temperature they recommend on this card. I found this out the hard way. ?


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10-10: Roast Leg of Lamb

10-10: Roast Leg of Lamb

Due to some infestation-related activity long ago, the Lamb and Veal category suffered some minor liquid damage. Some of the cards are virtually unusable, but this card, 10-10: Roast Leg of Lamb is just slightly mangled.

Despite the condition of the card, this preparation of leg of lamb is one of the best I’ve ever had. ?


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10-12: Basil-Baked Lamb

10-12: Basil-Baked Lamb

I’ve done over 100 recipes at this point (closing in on 150 in the next few weeks), and this is the FIRST recipe from Group 10: Lamb & Veal. This is probably due to the fact that neither of those have ever featured heavily in my diet or culinary rotation. However, in the interest of science everything must be covered. So here we go–the first lamb recipe: 10-12: Basil-Baked Lamb.

Um, yeah. In the very first entry (where I explained what this whole project is about), I had mentioned that these books got a bit trashed when I had a bad roach infestation in my first apartment after college. This section was one of the casualties from overzealous roach spray distribution and poor post-massacre clean-up. A lot of the pages got stuck together, and due to their lack of regular use, stayed that way for far too long. Luckily for this one, the recipe part of the card is still somewhat legible.


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4-34: Italian Roasted Vegetables

4-34: Italian Roasted Vegetables

This one’s short and sweet. I’ve made 4-34: Italian Roasted Vegetables a few times before, once as part of a big dinner party I cooked for when I was about 13 (6-22: Crispy Chicken Drumsticks and 9-20: Meat Roly-Poly were part of that as well) and Thanksgiving 2000 based on my mother’s notations on the back of the card. I know I’ve used the concept multiple times in other instances, even if I wasn’t following this exact recipe.

This is more a method than a particular recipe–you can use pretty much whatever vegetables you want with this one. Now’s a perfect time for this recipe–farmer’s markets are open and there’s lots of good stuff out there to roast. ?


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7-5: Spareribs

7-5: Spareribs

There’s a couple of rib recipes in Simply Delicious, but this one’s probably the most basic. It’s still a bit too cold out to BBQ, but 7-5: Spareribs gives you a pretty decent oven method of cooking ribs. As is usually the case, the inspiration for these came from needing room in my freezer after picking ribs up on sale somewhere a month or two ago.

Simply Delicious seems to echo my sentiments. However, their choice of the creepy pig doll for the recipe picture was less than optimal. Anyway, this is pretty easy to do, not that hard to clean up, and works pretty well. Sounds like a winner to me.


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1-33: Artichoke & Roasted Pepper Dip

1-33: Artichoke & Roasted Pepper Dip

Around the time I started this project (almost 2 years ago at this point), I was distracting myself from real-world stresses by throwing myself into something that always made me happy–cooking. I would make dishes from these and other books and send them to work with my husband or bring them with me to share. 1-33: Artichoke & Roasted Pepper Dip was one of those dishes–in fact, one of the two that inspired me to make the project a reality.

I made it originally for my husband’s work (they loved it) and I made it this time for a get-together I attended (also loved it). It’s SUPER easy and a real crowd pleaser. I mentioned that this was one of two recipes that inspired this project–the other was 1-13: Crusty Toast with Mushrooms.


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18-18a: Cooking Glossary IIa

18-18a: Cooking Glossary IIa

I mentioned in 18-17: Cooking Glossary I (the first installment of this mini-series) that I’ll be mixing in Cooking School entries from the last three chapters of Simply Delicious along with the regular recipe/photo entries that I usually do.

Here in 18-18: Cooking Glossary IIa, we find the second page of the glossary that I introduced to you previously. There’s one more page after this one, which you can find at 18-18b: Cooking Glossary IIb. I split the second entry to limit the amount of links/pics/content in one post.


Follow the jump for links to recipes I’ve covered that will help you practice each and every one of these terms & techniques! If I haven’t covered the term yet in one of these recipes, I’ll be sure to update it when I do!


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4-1: Eggplant, Onion and Tomato Bake

4-1: Eggplant, Onion and Tomato Bake

While I was cooking 4-12: Cheesy Sliced Baked Potatoes, I also was working on this recipe–however be careful with this one: it takes a WHILE to make. ?

This recipe takes 2+ hours–most of which is just it baking in the oven. Just an FYI. 🙂


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4-8: Roasted Peppers with Dressing

4-8: Roasted Peppers with Dressing

Making 4-8: Roasted Peppers with Dressing arose more out of a need to use up peppers more so than a desire to eat the recipe itself. However, that being said–it wasn’t terrible.

4-8 Roasted Peppers with Dressing

The recipe card uses multi-colored peppers, and I used monochromatic ones. While the taste doesn’t vary much, the more colors you use, the more visually appealing it may be.


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