Cooking | Table for Five

I have a million Healthy Recipes cookbooks. And still don’t know what to make for lunch.

June 13, 2010 By Elizabeth

I have a serious weakness. I can’t walk by one in a bookstore without stopping to take a peek inside. What is it? Cookbooks. If the title of a cookbook has the words Healthy Recipes in it, and especially if the words “QUICK” or “EASY” are prominently featured, those are my weakness.

But the thing is, although I like to READ cookbooks, I rarely COOK anything in the ones I buy! If a cookbook promises me that it will provide me with recipes that take 30 minutes or less to prepare and are made with non-gourmet ingredients that I think my family will eat, you can bet I will buy it. But it’s like in my head, if I bought the cookbook, I’ve somehow transformed the meals I serve my family into healthier ones. I’m delusional, I know.

And now that it’s summer, I’m thinking about breakfast and lunch for all three kids every day. I want them to eat something else for breakfast besides cold cereal, and something else for lunch besides ham and cheese sandwiches. So, I started flipping through my bazillions of cookbooks, and you know what I didn’t find? Breakfast and lunch! Why can’t someone publish a cookbook with healthy recipes for breakfast and lunch? All the ones on my bookshelves are just appetizers, entrees, side dishes, and desserts. Sure, if I dig deep enough into Taste of Home Quick Cooking, I might find some egg dishes or muffin recipes, but they aren’t all in one convenient place.

So, in the comments, please post your favorite healthy, easy recipes for breakfast and lunches for your kids! Mine will eat pretty much anything, no food allergies or anything, so the sky’s the limit here. I’ll put my favorite ones together in a post on MomCooks, which you can access from the MomCooks link at the top of the page. Think of it as us making our own cookbook!

Filed Under: Food & Recipes Tagged With: cooking, Food & Recipes, healthy recipes

Baked Penne and my husband’s smiling face

March 26, 2010 By Elizabeth

Even though Chris is managing a super-stressful project at work, and often has hours more work to do on his computer when he gets home (which is an hour or more commute depending on traffic), he takes care of me and the kids without any sort of complaint. He often stops on the way home for dinner stuff, helps Nathan with homework, gives Kaitlyn a bath and gets her in bed, and did I mention the laundry? Chris designated himself the Chief laundry-doer, and at least twice a week, stays up late after everyone else is in bed to fold baskets of laundry. He sorts it all out by family member and leaves it in neat piles for me to put away in the morning. I might be the stay at home Mom, but it’s really him who keeps things running smoothly around here.

Which is why it makes me so happy when something I do puts a smile on his face. The other night for dinner, I made the Baked Penne recipe from The Stocked Kitchen, a cookbook/cooking system I picked up at the Home & Housewares Show in Chicago. The recipe is very similar to what my Mom called goulash – ground beef cooked with onions, garlic and diced tomatoes (this recipe uses fresh basil as well), mixed with cooked penne (my Mom used macaroni). Then, it gets topped with a whole lot of mozzarella cheese and baked in the oven until it’s ooey gooey (yes, that’s an official cooking term!)

It smelled so good that while he was helping me pour the meat/pasta mixture into a baking dish, Chris grabbed a small bowl and scooped some in, then sprinkled some shredded mozzarella on it and popped it in the microwave to melt. This is what the bowl he microwaved looked like:

And this was the look on his face while he was eating:

For all the times he has a scowl on his face when he comes home from work, for all evenings when the exhaustion of working nonstop on this project is clearly showing on his face when he sits down at the dinner table, all the times he tells me he hasn’t had time to eat lunch at work for DAYS – this made me feel like I was helping. It felt good to put a meal in front of him that he really liked and that made him smile.

I love you, sweetie.

Filed Under: Family, Food & Recipes Tagged With: baked penne, Chris, cooking, Food & Recipes, marriage, The Stocked Kitchen

The Turkey is Brining…

November 25, 2009 By Elizabeth

I did this sort of product review for Kikkoman two weeks ago. They sent me a bunch of soy sauce and a gift card towards the purchase of turkey and other groceries for a practice Thanksgiving turkey dinner. I had NO idea you could brine turkey in soy sauce, in fact, I had never even tried to brine a turkey. After getting the Brine recipe, we realized that our biggest obstacle was what the heck to put the turkey IN so it could soak in the brine overnight. I had bought an 8.5 pound turkey breast, so my clever husband looked around the house and came up with this styrofoam cooler that some frozen food samples had come in. The turkey fit perfectly!

Turkey1

Chris came up with the great idea to take out the bottom drawer of our fridge and set the cooler right down on the bottom of the fridge. I mixed up half a batch of the brine recipe and it filled the cooler to the top.

Turkey3

The next day, Ryan carried the cooler to the sink for me, I drained the brine and then rinsed the turkey with water, put it in a roasting pan, and put it in the oven. Turkey should cook for about 15 minutes per pound, so it was done a few minutes past two hours. I didn’t have all the side dishes ready yet, so I covered it with foil, turned off the oven, and that turkey sat in the cooling-down oven for another hour.

It. Was. PERFECT.

Turkey4

That turkey was so juicy inside that we could cut our slices with just our forks. The five of us devoured so much of that turkey that we barely had leftovers for the next day!

So, it was so successful, we decided to brine the turkey for tomorrow as well. Only, this time we have a 20 pound turkey given to Chris by his company. Once again Chris came up with the perfect solution for something deep enough to hold the turkey plus the two gallons of brining solution-the refrigerator bin! Thumbs up to Frigidaire for designing a plastic bin strong enough to hold that much weight. It’s not quite deep enough, so the turkey is upside down so that the brine soaks mostly into the breast meat, we don’t care much if the bottom of the turkey isn’t brined. Can you believe this is in our refrigerator?!?

TurkeyBrining

I know I”m posting this kind of late for those of you who might want to try this for yourselves, sorry about that. If you have soy sauce in the house and a container that’s big enough (or an empty refrigerator bin!), and you read this post early enough, get your turkey brining for as long as you can. It really does improve the juiciness and flavor!