4-7: Mixed Vegetable Bake

4-7: Mixed Vegetable Bake

4-7: Mixed Vegetable Bake is yet another boring vegetable dish. 🍆 🌶 🍠 There wasn’t an emoji for the vegetables used in this dish, but it was such a bland dish that even the text needs a little excitement with some added emojis! 😉

This onion is about the most flavorful part of this combination behind the cheese. The vegetables add a lot of color, but not a lot of flavor.


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7-7: Mushroom-Stuffed Pork Rolls

7-7: Mushroom-Stuffed Pork Rolls

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Simply Delicious uses mushrooms pretty heavily throughout their recipes–about 20% of the recipes I’ve covered so far have involved them. I wasn’t a big mushroom eater when I was a kid, but I’ve (slowly) begun warming up to them. 7-7: Mushroom-Stuffed Pork Rolls aren’t especially fancy, but they’re not a bad option for lunch, dinner, or even making in a large batch for a party.

This is the first recipe (of 160+ at this point) that uses sage, described as being “savory & slightly peppery.” I like using sage with mushrooms (along with parsley, rosemary, & thyme–the “essential herbs,” according to Simon & Garfunkel), as the earthy flavors of both complement each other well.🌿


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3-3: French Onion Soup

3-3: French Onion Soup

It’s the middle of summer right now, so soup’s probably not your first thought. However, I continue to be surprised that how no matter how hot outside it is, people still enjoy soup. So here’s a classic: 3-3: French Onion Soup.

Simply Delicious cites Les Halles (the Parisian farmers’ market, not the NY restaurant where Anthony Bourdain worked) as the originator of French onion soup. I wasn’t able to directly verify that with 5 minutes of lazy Googling, but I did find a food timeline that gives a bit of the dish’s history–I suppose their claim is totally still possible.


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17-24: Crispy Oatmeal Cookies

17-24: Crispy Oatmeal Cookies

I made 17-24: Crispy Oatmeal Cookies for a family get together and they went over very well. I didn’t serve mine in such an elaborate manner as shown on the card below, but they got a good reception because I dipped them in dark chocolate that I melted on a double boiler. 🍫

We didn’t have an ice cream on hand, but these cookies make a great dessert all on their own. 🍪


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6-25: Salmon-Filled Chicken Breasts

6-25: Salmon-Filled Chicken Breasts

I’ve been saving some lox in the freezer from a past brunch for this recipe, 6-25: Salmon-Filled Chicken Breasts. There’s not a lot of salmon recipes in Simply Delicious (despite salmon’s popularity in the 1980s & 90s), and this may be one of the only smoked salmon ones that I have in my collection for this book.

Definitely not the first time Simply Delicious has given a recipe for stuffed chicken breasts–see 6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts for another take on the same idea. However, if you like smoked salmon like I do, you may have some extra laying around–here’s a use for it. 🐟


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11-14: Tempura

11-14: Tempura

This recipe, 11-14: Tempura tastes great, but the amount of prep is so arduous that I would rather pay a chef at a restaurant to make it for me.

Mixed tempura is my favorite starter dish whenever Jamie and I go out to a sushi restaurant. 🍣


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13-2: Onion Tart

13-2: Onion Tart

It’s hard to think of things to write about something you cooked awhile ago–a moment of honesty while I get my gears turning here. 13-2: Onion Tart is a great vegetarian (with a modification or two) option that satisfies everyone for any meal of the day. It’s not super exciting (which explains my inability to think of anything particularly interesting to say about it), but it’s definitely a pretty good fallback option if you’re in need of an easy, crowd-pleasing, inoffensive, yet impressive recipe.

Simply Delicious notes that this recipe is French and that this version comes from the Alsace region of the country. I found a few other takes on that version scattered around the Internet, but give or take some bacon and Gruyère cheese, they’re all relatively similar to this one. 🍷


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17-27: Nut Cookies

17-27: Nut Cookies

17-27: Nut Cookies are tremendous. My mother certainly never baked cookies like this. She is into the traditional chocolate chip variety only. 🍪

This was my first time baking with rye flour, which we had left over from when Jamie made 17-37: Holiday Cookies. 🌰


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17-26: Breakfast Crescents

17-26: Breakfast Crescents

Baking is still new to me, so I took this recipe, 17-26: Breakfast Crescents as another chance to experiment with yeast again. These crescents taste very much like a loaf of bread, just in crescent roll form.

This is just a simple bread recipe where you roll the dough into crescents.


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11-25: Best Ever Sole Au Gratin

11-25: Best Ever Sole Au Gratin

This recipe is already setting high expectations with the title 11-25: Best Ever Sole Au Gratin, and I’m not here to completely dash those hopes. This is a pretty decent fish recipe, as those go (I’m usually wary of home-cooked fish recipes), but it’s nothing spectacular, despite Simply Delicious’ assertions. 🐟

This one gets fancy with the piping bag and tips for the potatoes. I still haven’t replaced my piping/pastry bag set-up since it all failed during the making of 17-52: Apricot Macaroons for the holidays last year (2015). Since I’ve yet to replace it, I’ll have to get creative again.


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