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.
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.
First of all, ANY mention of 3-8: Gazpacho must immediately be followed with a reference to this episode of the Simpsons.
“It’s tomato soup served ICE cold!”
Yes, Lisa. Yes it is. 🍅
It was the end of summer and we had a ton of tomatoes. It’s a winning combination. 🏆
My options for cooking have been limited lately, so I’ve been gravitating towards simpler recipes in order to keep it manageable, yet active. You really can’t get much simpler than 2-6: Greek Salad.
This is a great recipe for summer–most of the ingredients are in season and it’s super light. We made it for dinner instead of lunch as suggested, but I’m sure the folks at Simply Delicious won’t mind.
“Oriental” is a word you don’t hear often anymore (for good reason)–this would probably be referred to as an Asian dish in a modern cookbook. 7-11: Oriental Stir-Fried Pork is a pretty standard Asian stir-fry starter recipe which could also work with chicken, beef, or shrimp.
The teaser line on the front reads “tantalizing flavor”. Not so much, at least in my opinion. This is a basic bare-bones stir-fry–if you want something that’s going to have some kick to it, you’re gonna have to do it yourself.
An old favorite that I’d like to share with you today: 4-21: Herb-Roasted Potatoes. 🍃
These are essentially homemade oven fries, and they’re super easy to do. So easy, in fact, that I used to use these as one of my recipes for when I taught elementary & middle school kids to cook in an after-school program a few years ago. If a kindergartener can do it, you can too.
Okay. This one sounds weird. It looks weird too. But you know what? It actually worked out okay. I had some green beans from the CSA box that desperately needed to be used, so here’s what we did with them.
Pork chops + tomatoes + green beans + sliced cheese sounds odd. Book 1, Group 2 (Main Courses), Subgroup 7 (Pork) gives us 7-2: Pork Chops with Tomatoes. I had pasta and salad ready on the stand-by in case this went south, but luckily I didn’t need them.
Finally–something that’s not chicken. The first pork recipe we’ll cover here is 7-26: Maple-Glazed Pork Chops.🍁
My mom was NOT a pork eater and I grew up quasi-Jewish, so there wasn’t a lot of pork being cooked in my childhood, spare the occasional ham steak or rack of ribs here and there at my dad’s request.
The key here is to make sure you use REAL maple syrup, not table syrup. Big difference.
6-24: Mushroom-Almond Chicken tasted okay, but looked…odd. I’m not sure why mine came out mauve, but there you go. The picture below is definitely not mauve. This recipe was cooked in tandem with 6-8: Curried Chicken, due to an abundance of chicken.
As I mentioned before, mine came out in a slightly mauve color, which doesn’t seem to be the case on the recipe card photo. I don’t know where I went wrong, but at least it was edible.
It’s been a while, my friends–life gets in the way, sometimes. But, we must still eat, which means we must still cook (when you get tired of ordering out). Get ready for a trio of chicken recipes, starting with 6-8: Curried Chicken.
I actually made this in tandem with 6-24: Mushroom-Almond Chicken, as I had a LOT of chicken that night. Both recipes are from Book 1, Group 2: Main Courses. Subgroup 6 is Poultry & Game, so there’s some turkey and duck recipes scattered in with a multitude of chicken recipes.
Let’s dive into some Main Course recipes–you don’t win friends with salad.
Soup is technically easy to make, but can still quickly go wrong. Our CSA box came with 2 lbs. of white sweet potatoes this week, and it was time for something else besides sweet potato fries. The trusty interwebs told me that white sweet potatoes were pretty similar to regular ones, so I thought I’d give 3-1: Sweet Potato Vichyssoise a whirl.
Vichyssoise is originally a French-American creation. This version is definitely more of an autumn/Thanksgiving-type of flavor, but it was still easy to make and pretty good. Obviously the recipe card depicts the use of an orange sweet potato, but white sweet potatoes work pretty well also.
Soup’s on!
