Saturday, February 14, 2015

Food Fun

Today I got "The Flavor Bible" because it looked like a unique addition for my cook books and food magazines. I have been missing the good ol' days of a couple years ago when I would live to cook and eat rather than the ho-hum cooking and eating just to live like what has been happening lately.

After flipping through "The Flavor Bible" for an hour or so, I decided to do a simple Swedish Meatballs and baked sliced potatoes for dinner tonight. I contemplated roasting some peas in butter on the stove top too but that didn't happen.

Sorry I don't have any pictures, but here is the tale of this evening's culinary adventure...

For the meatballs I took two cans of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup with two cans of water. Next time I'm just going to do one can of water because it ended up being too thin. It was more soupy than saucy. But there was around two teaspoons of coarse ground black pepper and half of a small onion diced and added in which gave a good flavor. I stuck all that in the little crock pot on high heat with some frozen meatballs, since I was starting this at 2 or 3pm. The Campbell's soups seem pretty bland to me, but maybe that is how they are designed to be, for cooking with and fun with spices in the soup on their own?

Our potatoes were a small bunch of red new potatoes sliced 1/16th inch thick or thereabouts. I plan on using a mandolin slicer next time because I nearly took off my fingernails a couple times! Once all sliced up, the potatoes were seasoned with a couple teaspoons of dill weed, the other half of the small onion sliced thin, and some vegetable oil.  The potatoes were laid out slightly overlapping in a casserole dish and baked at 400 degrees F for 45 minutes. The recipes I found online said that the potatoes only had to cook for 30 minutes but we're high altitude here. The potatoes didn't get quite as brown as I would have liked so next time they might go under the broiler for a couple minutes after cooking.

This stuff smelled wonderful as it was cooking! I was pleased that the onion wasn't overpowering. We had no leftover potatoes, and just a few meatballs. There is enough of the 'sauce' leftover to heat up for a light soup lunch with a nice big chunk of bread with butter and perhaps a salad.

Yesterday I made a nice tuna salad lunch for the hubby and I. It was two cans of tuna, a few sliced up Baby Gherkin pickles, a packet of Ranch dressing mix, and mayonnaise. Not bad for throwing it together spur of the moment. We both had ours on it's own in a bowl because it was getting a little late for lunch.

Thinking about future dinners, I think the hubby and girl will probably have a Stouffer's lasagna because I have to work until 7:30 tomorrow. But Monday I am going to play with fish. Probably accompanied by pasta and I'm not sure what sort of veggie. Hopefully I will remember to take pictures next time. It's more fun to see the food with the information about it, isn't it?

2 comments:

C. Shawn Smith said...

For the Cream of Mushroom soups, I generally add a little extra finely chopped onions or some smoked Paprika (or both!), with a liberal dose of pepper (I'm a pepper fanatic though).

carakitty said...

I like pepper too. In the Cream of Mushroom soup on it's own I like adding black pepper and dill.

The Marshmallow is a Cream of Chicken soup addict. She doesn't like anything added to it though. :p