You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t had lasagna before. It’s not very difficult to make, but often very time-consuming. The first entry in the Pasta & Rice section is the old standby: 12-1: Lasagna.
This version is different than what I’m used to making: it uses a cheese sauce (similar to a béchamel) in place of a ricotta/egg mixture. It was good, but I think I’d choose the ricotta/egg mixture in terms of what I think of when I think of “lasagna”.
I mentioned in 4-17: Crispy Potato Pancakes that our travels had taken us elsewhere. I’m cooking in a different kitchen these days–one that is not my own–which presents its own set of challenges.
However, the beauty of this project is that as long as I have my laptop and internet access, I can just keep going. And so I will. 
Our current hosts have been participating in some of my entry recipes, including this one: 9-31: Savory Turkey Patties. This was prepared and cooked in tandem with the recipe I posted after this one, 9-25: Juicy Grilled Meat Patties.
4-17: Crispy Potato Pancakes is one of the last recipes I cooked in the kitchen with the blue tile counters and yellow walls–-our travels have taken us elsewhere. However, even though the backgrounds will change, the project lives on.
These are essentially latkes. Very delicious latkes, I may add. If you have a food processor, these are a breeze.
Here’s another dessert for you. Book 3, Group 3 (Desserts), Subgroup 17 (Baked Goods) gives us card #9: Brownies. I’ve made these a bazillion times, and they are a GREAT base for adding your own ingredients.
These are good, easy, and fast–the trifecta you’re never supposed to be able to achieve. I highly recommend them, and I keep this recipe on hand for whenever I want to make brownies. One big difference: these use actual chocolate, not cocoa powder. 
In 3-13: Velvety Carrot Soup, I talked about how I love old cookbooks for their colorful attempts at trying to make boring recipes sound exciting. Another cookbook “trope” is putting words like easy, simple or quick in the title of a recipe that would otherwise sound…well, not those things.
Sometimes they live up to their titles, and sometimes not. A prime example of the former would be 6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts. To be honest, stuffing chicken breasts doesn’t even sound that hard to begin with, so I suppose it didn’t even need that qualifier.
Unless it sounded hard to you–if that’s the case, ignore that last sentence. It’s really not that hard, is what I’m saying.
Fennel has been a challenge ever since we started receiving CSA boxes a year or two ago. I really never cooked with it before and even now, finding recipes to use with it (that I’ll eat) is difficult.
If you’ve never had fennel, it tastes like black licorice. You eat the bulb part, and usually cut off the stalks & feathery parts. I usually save those parts and put them in when I make chicken stock.
We ended up with two very large fennel bulbs, and so I decided to make 4-13: Fennel au Gratin, because you can’t go wrong when you cover things in cheese.
We paired this with some English cheddar tortilla/gluten-free something-or-other chips as well as put it on top of some veggie patties–both were pretty good. It worked well as a dip–it might be too cheesy as a side dish, unless you added more fennel.
This arose out of a desire to use up some leftover chicken more so than a desire to eat another meat-based crêpe recipe so soon after 5-24: Meat-Filled Crêpes, but it turned out to be pretty good in its own right.
5-22: Crêpes with Chicken really should be “Crêpes with Chicken and Mushrooms”, as mushrooms are just as much a part of this as the chicken.
I had originally considered making it at breakfast, but I’m glad I didn’t–it’s definitely a savory dish. Crêpes are popular in this book–all this practice is making me quite the crêpe-master.
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.
A week or two ago after we returned home from a grocery shopping trip, I found myself with a package of chicken that needed to be cooked ASAP due to having its plastic wrap punctured on the way home. Since I had some red peppers that needed to be used up as well, I chose to make 6-26: Chicken Maryland.
Recipe #26 of Subgroup 6 (Poultry & Game) in Book 1, Group 2 (Main Courses) is Chicken Maryland, which is basically a nicely-spiced fried chicken with a red bell pepper cream sauce. The chicken was delightful–the sauce turned out a bit odd, but that was probably my fault.
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.