Last Sunday, we made pork tenderloin, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Jeff and I both love Thanksgiving dinner, so this was a psuedo-pre-Thanksgiving dinner.

I’d never made stuffing. It needed to go into the oven first, so out came the How to Cook Everything. However, his recipe called for insane amounts of butter, so I mostly just winged it. I browned up a little sausage. While that was cooking, I tore up some homemade hamburger rolls that I’d previously frozen and thawed Sunday night. They went into an 8×8 pan with some salt, pepper, sage, and thyme, a couple of glugs of olive oil, and just enough vegetable broth to moisten the whole mess. It went into the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes.

The pork tenderloin was easy - we get ours by the pound split into fourths, so I pulled out two fourths, thawed them, and browned them in a pan with some freshly diced garlic. Once they were browned, I pulled them out, sliced them into quarter inch slices, and put them back in the pan with a little vegetable broth, salt, pepper, sage, and thyme. I turned the heat down and let it simmer until the pork was cooked through and tender.

When the pork was most of the way cooked, I put on the cranberry sauce. At some point in the last couple years, I’d read a suggestion online that mixing canned cranberry sauce with applesauce would make very good cranberry sauce, and it certainly does. The twist Sunday night was that my applesauce was homemade. I’d always been intimidated by homemade applesauce, but we had a bunch of apples sitting on the counter that were too far gone to eat straight up, but weren’t too far gone for sauce yet. HTCE said that whole apples could put into a pan with about a half an inch of water, brought to a boil, then simmered until the apples had fallen apart and the sauce was the consistency desired. Lacking a food mill, I peeled and cored the apples first. Other than that, it really was that easy. The peeling and coring took about five minutes, and otherwise, the sauce cooked for an hour or so, with me sticking my head into the kitchen periodically to give it a stir and make sure it didn’t need more water or that it wasn’t burning. We can now cross something else off the list of things that we have to buy pre-made, at least when apples are in season, and once I learn how to can, that won’t be a problem.

So, part of the applesauce went into a can of organic cranberry sauce from the co-op, and the rest went into the fridge for lunches during the week. The cranberry sauce only took a few moments to heat through, and then dinner was ready.

This was a fairly cheap meal to make. The pork is $6 a pound, and we had half a pound. The stuffing cost under a dollar, even with the sausage, olive oil, broth, and and spices, because I can make rolls for pennies a batch. The cranberry sauce was on sale for $1.99 a can, and the apples were a dollar a pound (and, let’s face it, they were apples that we hadn’t gotten around to eating - it’s too easy to buy too much fruit when it’s in season - and would have gotten tossed if I hadn’t decided to try to make applesauce) and I probably used three pounds or so. There was leftover pork and stuffing for Jeff for lunch the next day, and cranberry sauce and apple sauce for days. Active prep time was low too - probably 10 minutes on the stuffing, 10 minutes on the sauce, and 10 minutes on the pork, with some cooking and stirring time in between. Overall, it was a nice Sunday evening dinner (our default for Sunday nights is salad; I’m not quite sure why, since Sunday is one night that I have the time to really cook something involved) for not a whole lot of time or money.

One of my favorite desserts in the world is apple crisp (and really, that’s a bit of a fib, as dessert in almost any form is my favorite dessert.) My sister had bought a bag of apples that turned out to be too tart for her to eat straight, so she’d passed them on to me, figuring that we could do something with them. I turned half the bag into a batch of apple crisp on Tuesday, when she was over for dinner, and so wanted something a little bit different last night. A friend of mine had a mildly infamous apple cake recipe that I’d never tried but had heard rave things about, so on the menu for last night it went. And, of course, it was really, really good (I’ve never had anything bad from Heather’s table). We skipped the apple jack in favor of a little lemon juice (though now I want to try it with whiskey, because I think that would be very tasty), and I made up snickerdoodle dough instead of sugar cookie dough, since Betty Crocker’s recipe for sugar cookies called for powdered sugar, which we didn’t have on hand (and which, in retrospect, I suppose I could have made with regular sugar and the food processor). The result was a fairly light (for what it is) dessert. The cookie layers were much more cake like than I expected. It wanted for a bit of whipped cream (but then again, what doesn’t?) So, if you have extra apple on hand, and you’re tired of pies and crisps, this is something else tasty to try.

A friend mentioned making empanadas with her kids on her blog awhile back, and I said “Hey! Meat pies! That sounds good, we’ll do that.” I looked around and snarfed a dough recipe from Smitten Kitchen, one of my favorite food blogs. I stuffed the pies with ground beef cooked with a packet fajita spices and grated cheese. I cut the recipe in half, and we still had enough for dinner for us one night (and we weren’t shy about eating that night) and lunch for Jeff for two more days. These were excellent; the dough was flaky and flavorful, they were fun to eat, and they traveled well in Jeff’s lunch. He really liked them. These would be totally easy to customize, and would be fantastic for a group dinner and a creative alternative to meals like top-your-own pizza. This is a new recipe that we’ll be making again.

However, this recipe is a prime example of why it’s important to read the whole recipe all the way through more than once before you start cooking. I glanced through the recipe, said “Oh, ok, it’s just a pastry dough like I’d use for chicken pie or something, no big deal” and went on my merry way until it was time to start dinner. I’m mixing and mixing and get to the part that says “Form dough into two flat rectangles and chill them, each wrapped in plastic wrap, at least 1 hour.” I can tell you that you can skip the plastic wrap and just throw the dough in some tupperware, but it’s got to sit in the fridge at least an hour, preferably longer. I hadn’t allowed enough time for this because I hadn’t read the whole recipe all the way through. I let it sit for about 45 minutes before I said “Okay, good enough, we need to eat dinner.” The dough was fiddly and not terribly structurally sound, but I got the pies made up, and dinner was tasty. However, the dough that sat in the fridge overnight and got turned into Jeff’s lunches was much easier to handle.

The reason I’m going on about this point is that I’m hoping to encourage people to cook more and to try new recipes, and I’d say one of the leading causes of cooking failure, especially with new recipes, is not reading the instructions. I beat the dough into submission and got it to do what I wanted to do, but it was very fiddly, and if I were a new cook, it would have been easier to chuck the whole thing in the trash.

Anyhow, lecture over. Dinner was delicious, and maybe one day, I’ll remember to follow my own advice. :)

As anyone who has ever eaten my cooking will tell you, I love garlic. It’s bad enough that my sisters have started asking me to scale it back when I cook for them, and I’ve been mostly succeeding. So, I saved trying the garlic soup for a night when it was just Jeff and I. I used Smitten Kitchen’s recipe, and it turned out quite tasty. It was a touch plain - that was probably partially my fault for forgetting to get Parmesan - and we both agreed that while it was good, it would have been better with the cheese, and maybe topped with thick croutons, ala French onion soup. I also thought it would have made an excellent first course for a big meaty dinner, such as steaks.

Meal: cheddar studded meatloaf patties, mashed potatoes
Cost: about $3.50 per person
Time: 45 minutes
Leftovers: 3 meat patties, lots of mashed potatoes
Local ingredients: beef, potatoes, cheese (Ohio), butter, milk, egg
Organic ingredients: tomato paste, flour, spices, tomato puree, Worchestshire sauce, garlic

This week’s one local summer meal was from Rachael Ray’s 365: No Repeats–A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners, which I picked up from the library in hopes of getting some new dinner ideas that wouldn’t take forever to make. I don’t understand why Rachel Ray gets looked down on so much by foodies - yea, she’s way too perky, but she’s encouraging people to cook and spreading the message that cooking real food, not eating take out, every night is doable.

Anyhow, these were big beef patties, a pound of ground beef dosed up with an egg, Worchestshire sauce, tomato puree, lots of garlic (5 cloves), some spices, and a quarter pound of sharp cheddar cheese. You form these up into patties (she says 4, which would have been huge; I got 7 out of the mixture) and fry in a couple of tablespoons of oil until they’re done, then use the drippings in the pan to make gravy, which went on top of mashed potatoes. I left the called for green pepper out of the meat patties, and the cream out of the mashed potatoes, and the butter out of the gravy (that much oil in the gravy, and then butter added to it? Oy), as there was a lot of fat in this meal already, and everything turned out fine. Also, this was supposed to be a southwest-themed meal, so the recipe called for finishing off the gravy with… lime juice and cilantro, something I just couldn’t bring myself to do to a good cream gravy. I’m sure this meal is great as the recipe is written, and it was fantastic the way I made it. We’ll be making these again.

We had used the same pizza crust for quite awhile. However, it makes a very thick, bready crust, even on our 16 inch pizza pan. So, we started looking around at other recipes, and eventually tried a recipe from a Moosewood cookbook. It was tasty, but didn’t freeze very well; it stretched out too easily and came out very thin. So, next, we tried this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. The first time, I doubled it, since our pizza pan looked quite a bit bigger than theirs. It was good, but thicker than we were aiming for. I tried a single recipe on a vegan pizza with some friends, and it was tasty, but too thin; it didn’t hold up to the toppings very well, even without the cheese (again, I emphasize that I was using the dough on a pan probably twice the size of the one pictured. The dough being too thin was not the recipe’s fault.) Last night I tried 1.5 times the recipe, and, presto! It was perfect. Not too thin, not too thick, yeasty and chewy and everything I like a pizza dough to be. I think we have a winner.

Meal: garlic-butter roasted pork, scalloped potatoes, plus a side salad for me
Cost: about $2.30 per serving, 3 servings all together per person
Time: 50 minutes, 30 of which was active prep time
Leftovers: a serving of pork and a serving of potatoes, which went with Jeff for lunch today
Local ingredients: pork, potatoes, cheese (Ohio), lettuce (mostly local, with some organic greens mixed in), tomatoes, mayonnaise, butter, milk, cream
Organic ingredients: garlic, spices

Our One Local Summer meal for this week was Thursday night, and was garlic-butter roasted pork and scalloped potatoes. Despite having made plenty of combinations of potatoes and cheese, I’d never made scalloped potatoes. I browsed a bunch of recipes online and a few in various cookbooks before I started.

First, pull the pork out of the freezer (our egg farmer sells pork tenderloin split up into 4 smaller pieces per package, so I cut two away from the other two, and get to leave two in the freezer. Nice.) and get it into a bowl of water to thaw. While that’s thawing, slice up a couple of pounds (8 or so medium) of potatoes thinly (1/8 to 1/4 of an inch) and place into shallow skillet of water. Bring to boil on your stove and boil for 3 minutes or so. While that’s boiling, grate your cheese (about a 1 1/4 cup, or more if you like your potatoes extra cheesy). Mix 1/2 cup milk and 1/4 cup cream and butter a 9×13 pan. When the potatoes have boiled, layer them into your pan. Dot them with butter, pour over the cream/milk mixture, and sprinkle with cheese. Put the pan into oven and turn it to 400.

Next, heat a stainless steel frying pan or other oven safe skillet. Melt a bit of butter in it, and while that melts, peel and chop several cloves of garlic (how much is up to you. We like garlic around here.) Pull the pork out of its wrapping and plop it in the pan. Cook the pork briefly on each side, until it is just brown. Dot the pork with more butter (this is not a particularly healthy meal), and sprinkle with thyme and salt and pepper. Coat the pork with garlic and put the pan into oven. Roast 20 minutes or until done. Your potatoes will be done by this point, with a nice crispy brown crust over a creamy cheese mixture. Make yourself a side salad out of some local greens and your dad’s tomatoes, and ranch dressing you made the night before. Feast.

Meal: pork goulash and dumplings
Cost: about $3.25 each
Time: 30 minutes prep, 1.5 hours simmering, 15 minutes for the dumplings
Leftovers: a small lunch portion
Local ingredients: pork, butter, milk
Organic ingredients: tomato puree, spices, sugar, onion

I’ve found myself lately, as we faced a 90-degree-plus heat wave (it has since cooled off a bit, thank goodness), craving a hearty, rich stew. There is no accounting for taste buds. Thus, last Thursday we did another new recipe, and another recipe from Simply Recipes: Goulash. We used pork instead of beef and tomato puree instead of paste. Also, I didn’t use quite the quantity of onions specified; Jeff loves the taste of onions but not the texture, so I grated an onion on a box grater and then chopped it up more finely from there. The result was tiny bits of onion that disintegrated into the sauce and tasted delicious. I made a half a batch, which was enough for 2 generous dinner portions and 1 small lunch portion the next day.

Jeff’s only quibble with the recipe is that the dumplings soaked up a lot of the sauce; he loves sauce. However, he’s not normally big on dumplings, but loved these - they were light and fluffy, not heavy as dumplings often are. If you like sauce, you may want to make more to account for the dumplings soaking it up. Otherwise, this was something new and very tasty, and the recipe was every bit as good as it looked. We’ll be doing this again.

Meal: crustless quiche, bread machine baguettes, green salad
Cost: about $2 each
Time: 40 minutes in the oven, 15 minutes prep for the quiche, plus some time for the salad and bread machine time for the bread dough
Leftovers: a small chunk of bread that I used for a sandwich for Jeff’s lunch. Apparently, we were hungry. (And salad makings, but I deliberately cut up way more than we would need, so that we would have salad makings for dinner tonight.)
Local ingredients: cheese, eggs, milk, salad greens, tomatoes, green peppers
Organic ingredients: flour, carrots

We’ve talked about quiche before, but last night was a new recipe, and it was definitely a winner; we’ll be sticking to this for our crustless quiche from now on. The recipe came from Simply Recipes, where quite a few of our new recipes come from. Elise features recipes that use whole ingredients, that are generally pretty easy to prepare, and that are easily modifiable, and this quiche was no exception.

The original recipe for this quiche calls for 10 ounces of cheese and a cup of cottage cheese for 5 eggs. That is a heck of a lot of cheese. I love cheese, and I’m not sure that even I can contemplate eating that much cheese at a sitting. So, I used to recipe as an idea and took off. I made the roux, and then once it was cool, added the baking powder and salt, and 1/2 a teaspoon of mustard powder to it, then mixed it into 8 eggs beaten with a third of a cup of milk (to make up for not using the cottage cheese, which would have added some moisture). I stirred in 2 cups (8 ounces) of a mix of shredded colby, vintage cheddar, and muenster, and that was it. (There are too many conflicts between food likes and dislikes with the folks we were do movie night with to do any mix-ins or toppings. Eventually, I’ll get around to buying ramekins, and then we can have customized quiches.) That was it. It went into the oven in an 8×8 dish for the proscribed 40 minutes at 350 degrees, and came out slightly brown and puffy. The end result was creamy and cheesy (I could probably easily cut down on the cheese on the next batch, too, and at one-fourth of the pan coming in at 500 calories, I probably will.) I found it to be slight lighter than my normal quiche - more like a souffle - while Jeff found it to be more substantial than my normal efforts, and liked it a lot more. My cousin and sister also approved, so I think we have a new default recipe.

Meal: cheese souffle, roasted potatoes, raw asparagus
Cost: about $3 each. (All that cheese…)
Time: half an hour active, 50 minutes baking
Leftovers: half the souffle. I know what I’m having for breakfast. :) The next time I make this, I’ll halve the recipe.
Local ingredients: cheese, eggs, milk, asparagus (from my parents’ garden), potatoes
Organic ingredients: flour

So, I’d never had cheese souffle before, so it went on the list of recipes to try, and we did last night. The verdict: not nearly as hard as I would have thought, very very tasty, and way rich (as in, eat once every six months sort of rich.) It’s basically baked cheese sauce with enough egg to hold it together. For the cheese, I used the vintage cheddar and marble that we get from our farmer’s market, in equal proportions. Since this dish is so cheese-focussed, you’ll want to either use something really good, or something you really like the taste of.

The recipe was from Good Housekeeping Great Home Cooking: 300 Traditional Recipes, which I have out from the library. I like to check cookbooks out of the library before we buy them, to make sure the recipes are as good as they look. I think this one may go on the list to purchase eventually.

If you measure out everything and gather all your equipment beforehand and do things like grate the cheese and seperate the eggs before you start, this will be much easier. This isn’t one of those recipes that you want to be scurrying around saying “Where’d I put the flipping salt?”, a scene that occurs with frightening frequency in our kitchen.

If you don’t have a souffle dish, don’t worry about it. I used an 8×8 baking dish.

Ingredients

- 2 tbs plain bread crumbs or Parmesan cheese (if you have a couple of slices of old bread lying around, take a moment to toast them and chop them up. They’ll be much better than commercial breadcrumbs, and cheaper too.)
- 4 tbs butter
- 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1/4 teas salt
- 1/8 teas ground red pepper
- 1 1/2 cups milk
- 8 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese (2 cups)
- 5 large eggs, separated
- 1 large egg white (I saved the yolk and put it in with Jeff’s eggs this morning)

- Preheat the oven to 325 (which I didn’t do, because all of our baking pans are glass. It didn’t seem to affect the finished product.) Grease your baking dish and sprinkle it with bread crumbs.
- In a 3-quart saucepan that you can use a whisk in, melt the butter over low heat. Stir in the flour, salt, and ground red pepper until they’re nice and blended. Slowly add in the milk, whisking to avoid lumps. (It’s worth being slow about this… a little patience and you end up with a non-lumpy cheese sauce, which is never a bad thing.) Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and boils (I’ll confess, I cranked the heat up to medium. It was never going to boil on low). Stir in the cheddar and stir until it’s melted, then pull the whole thing off the heat.
- In a small bowl, mix 1/2 a cup of the cheese sauce into the egg yolks, then mix that whole thing back into the cheese sauce. Stir quickly to avoid lumps. Set the whole thing aside to cool.
- Meantime, in a large bowl, use a mixer to beat the eggs whites until they’re forming stiff peaks (exactly what it sounds like. When you pull the beaters out, small mountains are left in the egg whites.) Slowly fold the whites into the cheese mixture, just until the whole thing is blended.
- Pour the whole thing into your baking dish. Baking 45 to 55 minutes, or until brown and puffy, and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. (I started from a cold oven and it baked for a little less than 50 minutes. The timer was set to 45, but we didn’t get to it right off.)

That’s it. This was fiddly but actually fairly easy; probably the most annoying bit was separating the eggs. Otherwise, it was just a matter of following the recipe and paying attention. The cookbook has a ton of variations listed for this, and I’m wondering how mini-souffles cooked up in a muffin tin would be.

I served this up with roasted potatoes that cooked with the souffle, and asparagus from my dad’s garden. I was going to do something with it, but it was so good, I ended up just eating it up raw.

I’d like to start making an egg main dish once a week or so this summer - they’re tasty and cheap, but I’m running out of material. Quiche, egg salad, and omelets pretty much covers my range of egg dishes. Anyone have a favorite they wouldn’t mind pointing me at?