🐰 The Easter Bunny has come early this year and he’s brought 5-13: Italian Easter Pie! I prefer the Cadbury Bunny to the Easter Bunny, but I’ll eat this pie any day.
This dish is certainly elegant and delicious, I’ve never made a Torta Pasqualina before. Now I can check it off the list. ✅
The photo of the pie for this recipe, 16-4: Blueberry Pie is epic. The peasant blueberry picker doll in the background is a great departure from most of the photos in Simply Delicious. 👍 We bought a case of blueberries during a trip to the market because they looked super fresh. I was going to make blueberry muffins, but after flipping through the recipes, this seemed like the best choice.
The whipped cream in the receptacle looks great. Check out how they used the pie in the background as well as in the center of the photo. The blueberries scattered on the table and the baby’s breath everywhere makes this photo extra fancy. 🎩
Here’s something a bit different…and I’m not talking about the recipe. In fact, 12-27: Chicken Broccoli Lasagna itself is pretty boring. But here’s what’s interesting: I made this recipe at work, for work. This one will be a bit of a glance into what I do all day–my other kitchen, if you will.
I usually use ground turkey for ground meat recipes (there’s a few kids with special dietary preferences) and I’ve made lasagna before for work, so this one seemed like a perfect recipe to try to scale up for the amount I need for a daily meal. “Healthy” is what parents are looking for these days when it comes to school lunches–another way this recipe is a good fit. 🍴
EDIT: Full disclosure–this was written in 2016, and I now have a career in a completely non-culinary related field. However, this still serves as a fun reminder of a previous “life”. Enjoy!
12-14: Brown Rice Casserole doesn’t sound very appetizing, but it is very cheap to make and very filling. I made this dish before I took a trip as a meal prep and it really helped me keep my eating in check. ✅
As advertised on the card, this dish is hearty enough to be a meal in itself. I did eat it with a side of pepperoni slices, but the majority of the meal was this casserole. 🌾
The whole time I was making 6-2: Fiery Chicken Casserole, I had this image in my head because I thought my sauce came out wrong. My sauce was light colored and the chicken in the photo shows a crispy, golden skin. If you look hard at the bowl in the upper left corner, you can see the white sauce that the authors described.
My version of the casserole came out a lot differently than the image shown on the card and didn’t taste very “fiery”. This dish would need a lot more heat to be considered “fiery”. 🔥
There was apparently a week in April 1992 (can’t say that without thinking of this) when my mom was on a tear through this book. 7-14: Easy-to-Make Pork Casserole is from two days earlier, and there’s a few more coming up from that same time period. 6-17: Chicken Breast with Cheesy Filling seems like something my mom would have been all about–she loves chicken breasts and blue cheese.
Stuffed chicken breasts aren’t new territory for Simply Delicious—6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts and 6-25: Salmon-Filled Chicken Breasts are two variations on the concept that I’ve already covered.
17-35: Healthy Bread with Vegetables was yet another attempt to make bread that went somewhat awry. This recipe was quite an experiment with quite unusual results. 🍞
This bread was definitely moist and colorful. I’ve had carrot cake, but I’ve never had shredded carrot in my bread. I substituted the beet with zucchini because the only Beets I enjoy are the band from Doug.
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.
Stroganoff was a VERY common dish in my house when I was growing up. Since this was the 90s (low-fat everything), it was usually made with plain ground turkey, powdered mix from a packet, and some light sour cream (which is essentially tasteless mush–real sour cream was a revelation when I got older). It got to the point where I couldn’t even stand the smell of stroganoff because my mom made this dish so often.
Time has passed, and stroganoff & I have had a reconciliation. I make it about once every other month now for work, but from scratch and not with packet mix (but still using ground turkey since it’s leaner). Simply Delicious has two stroganoff recipes: 13-6: Mushroom Stroganoff (a vegetarian version) and this one, 8-12: Beef Stroganoff. I made both at the same time, as part of a stroganoff-off.
Beef stroganoff is a pretty well known dish, and it’s not surprising that it’d be included in a book like this with so many other “classic” dishes. Let’s see how far Simply Delicious strays from the norm–who knows…they might surprise us.
This recipe, 15-31: Pavlova Meringue Tart had a couple of firsts. It was my first attempt at making a meringue, but it was also my first failure at making a meringue. However, my first successful meringue came out of this experience too, so in the end, it was all good! 👍
Due to lactose intolerance, I substituted the whipped cream for a coconut whipped topping. Half of my berries were bad so this tart had a lot more kiwi than raspberries. 🍧