Food rut

Do you ever get in a food rut? Where you’re eating and/or cooking the same things day after boring day? We are in such a rut at The Little Yellow House. Our current boring dinner rotation includes pizza, baked potatoes and eggs. At least we aren’t eating delivery pizza, Kent makes our pizza from scratch.

Lunches are boring right now too as we come to the very end of winter. We’ve been eating spicy vegetable soup or lentil soup for lunch almost every day. While we love the soups, they are most definitely winter lunch staples and with luck, winter weather will soon be a thing of the past.

But all of that adds up to boring meals. You’d think that breaking out of the rut would be fairly easy – we are decent cooks and we enjoy cooking. But for some reason, we’re both just flat out of cooking inspiration. Couple that with our various pickinesses (I am far more picky than he is about the food we eat, I fully own that complicating factor) and the lack of interest and what do you get? Why, you get pizza, baked potatoes and eggs, that’s what you get.

So I’m scrounging through our cookbooks and favorite online recipe places to find one dish meals or super-fast and easy meals that we will like and eat. Got any suggestions? If so, just remember I won’t eat any strong tasting dark green vegetable (looking at you, kale, spinach and the like) and he hates sweet potatoes and liver, and isn’t very fond of carrots or Brussels sprouts (which I also detest). But don't be afraid to suggest recipes that do use the dark greens. I'll just leave them out.

Salt Roasted Potatoes -- how to do it

I wrote about the salt roasted potatoes we had in Honolulu, but realized that pictures would go a long way toward showing how easy these potatoes are to make. Since Kent made the salt roasted potatoes again Sunday night, we got pictures all the way through the process.

Here we go!

We used a total of 10 small red potatoes, with five in each baking dish. We also use kosher salt because of the texture. I've read other recipes that use a mixture of rock salt and kosher salt and we'll give that a try. I don't think that normal salt would work as well since the salt would bake to solid rock-like consistency. If you try it with table salt, let me know how it goes.

This picture is one we'd have found very helpful when trying to make these potatoes for the first time. These salt roasted recipes don't really say how much water to use, or salt either for that matter. Well -- use  enough salt to cover the potatoes entirely; moisten the salt with water to form a thick paste. You don't want it to be runny, just sort of sticky.

Cover the potatoes with your salt mixture and bake at 400°F for about 30 minutes.

And this is the other picture we'd have liked to see. The salt bakes into a hard crust, and you have to break it to get your food out. See the indentations left in the salt? Once you get your food out, just brush off the excess salt if you have any. Bonus: clean up is a breeze -- rinse out your dish and you're done.

Now you get to enjoy these amazing potatoes! I know they don't look like anything, but they are incredibly good. Best of all, even I -- a butter fiend when it comes to potatoes -- didn't miss or even want butter. They don't need salt or pepper either. They are that good.

I don’t like spiders and snakes

Yesterday I made a slow cooker faux beef bourguignon, and I have to be honest. I didn’t much care for it. I’ve never had the real deal but I suspect I wouldn’t like it either. I tend to prefer my food to be simpler and less complex—when you start mixing things like bacon with beef, well that just tastes yucky to me.

Kent will tell you he doesn’t know all the food rules, he just knows they exist. And I do have food rules; well not exactly rules, but there are food pairings I find utterly disgusting. I guess in a sense those are rules. Granted, they tend to be don’t ever do this rules, but I have positive food rules, too.

Anyway. Bacon is a breakfast food, and in only one case is it suitable for a non-breakfast item: the lovely BLT. You can even put a slice or two of a really good Cheddar cheese on there and I’m OK with it. But I don’t like bacon on burgers or meatloaf or anything else.

The recipe I made yesterday called for six slices of bacon, and that flavor permeated everything. It left such a taste in my mouth that I had to eat some saltines to get rid of it. I’d make the recipe again, because it’s easy enough and other than the yucky bacon taste, I liked it. But I would ditch the bacon and put in a lot of baby bella mushrooms instead.

Copy cat

That’s me, and I’m OK with it. In addition to copying a recipe, I’ve also copied this skirt. To be honest, I didn’t copy the recipe, not exactly. I came up with my own variation but the idea was not original to me.

In the same way, the skirt I’ve made is slightly different than the original one. But I wouldn’t have thought to make mine without having seen hers.

My skirt material isn’t ruffles, although I would have used that material if I’d found any at my favorite fabric store. Also, I sewed my fabric to the elastic wrong side out and then flipped it. My fabric is so very soft that I didn’t end up with any unwanted bulk at the seamline.

But the color is pretty darn close to the example skirt and black elastic was the only way to go. I used navy thread for sewing and while the material isn’t actually navy, the thread still pretty much disappears.

Neglected, overlooked or forgotten recipes

I'm sure I'm not the only one to do this. I'll find a recipe and go nuts over it for a few weeks, maybe a few months and then it will just fall out of rotation. Then I forget about it. Well I went through my recipe box the other day (quick aside, do people even use recipe boxes any more?) looking for something to make since I was bored by the usual suspects. I got a nice little trip down memory lane and rediscovered a couple of favorites.

For example, I have a recipe from my mother that's a chicken, rice and swiss cheese casserole. It's really fast to make since I tend to steam a big batch of rice every week or so and also tend to keep baked chicken on hand. All that's left then is shred the cheese, saute an onion and mushrooms, add a few herbs and a dash of sherry and bake it.

Another yummy favorite also from my mother, and one that works even for people who aren't curry fans is a curry-glazed chicken dish that uses a mild curry powder with honey and Dijon mustard. It's so tasty and quick to make.

I also found yet another recipe from her that's sort of a vegetable quiche, but made with Bisquick. Did you know Bisquick now has a low fat version? I altered that recipe quite a bit by substituting diced cooked chicken for the broccoli and also adding in sauted mushrooms and onions. It's like a chicken pot pie and it turned out really well.

Finally for those of you with Joy of Cooking on your bookshelves, I made the Almond Thumbprint Cookies (in my version, it's on page 836) and did a nutritional analysis of it on Calorie Count. The recipe makes 36 cookies and each cookie is just 59 calories. Now that's a guilt-free treat in my book.