My Take on the TikTok Baked Feta Pasta

You will wonder, in a moment, why I am calling this “My Take on the TikTok Baked Feta Pasta” when my version has neither feta nor tomatoes in it – two crucial ingredients in the original aforementioned TikTok pasta, the third and fourth being “pasta” and “olive oil.” 

You will likely wonder why I even glanced toward the TikTok Baked Feta Pasta, when I neither have TikTok nor can I stand tomatoes nor do I particularly care for feta. 

And yet, here we are, with me sharing a recipe (“recipe”) for my own version of a recipe I have neither tried nor wanted to try nor followed. 

Perhaps – you might think, trying to wrap your mind around my motives and this post – what appealed to me about the TTBFP is its simplicity. You put a few ingredients in a dish. You toss them in some olive oil. You throw the whole thing in an oven and then, 20 minutes later, stir in some pasta and voila! you have a meal. 

Well, you could be right, except that I went and made the TTBFP much more complicated, eliminating its simplicity right from the get go. 

I think it’s time to stop trying to understand me; I sure don’t, and I’ve lived with me for 40 years. Let’s get to the recipe. (“Recipe.”)

Baked Mushroom & Goat Cheese Pasta

Servings: 

Approximately three, if each serving takes up about half a soup bowl.

Ingredients:

• 12 oz mushrooms, rinsed and sliced
• 1/2 red onion, chopped
• 4 oz plain goat cheese
• 1 head of garlic (optional)
• Olive oil
• Balsamic glaze
• Pasta of your choice (I used cellentani because it is pretty and fun to say)
• Arugula (optional)

Directions:

• Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees F.
• Spray a 9 x 13 baking pan with vegetable spray, just because you distrust olive oil’s food-sticking-prevention abilities.
• Throw your chopped onions and sliced mushrooms into the baking pan. Add salt, pepper, and a couple tablespoons of olive oil and mix it all together with your hands. 
• Make a small space in the center of the veggies. Nestle your goat cheese right in there. It’s okay if the veggies want to snuggle right up to the goat cheese. 

Wouldn’t you like to snuggle up to a nice goat cheese pillow?

• If you are using garlic, slice across the top of the whole head of garlic with a sharp knife, exposing some of the cloves. Nestle the entire head of decapitated garlic (how can a head itself be decapitated? I trust you understand.) into a corner of the pan.
• Drizzle everything with another tablespoon or two of olive oil.
• Drizzle everything with a teaspoon or so of balsamic glaze. Who’s kidding who here. I did not measure. Just drizzle until you feel like you’re done. I did some sloppy crisscrosses and called it good. 

Glazey crisscrosses!

• Shove the pan into the oven and set a timer for 25 minutes.
• Boil some salted water. I don’t know how much; however much you need to cover however much pasta you use. I used half a box of pasta which turned out to be FAR too much pasta, because I forgot how dramatic mushrooms are. They get very hysterical about being baked and shrink to almost nothing. I would say a quarter of a box of pasta would suffice, if you like your pasta nice and sauce-y.
• Add your pasta to the boiling water and cook it for two minutes under whatever duration the box recommends.
• When your pasta is done, drain your pasta BUT RESERVE SOME PASTA WATER. I always reserve way more pasta water than I need, just in case. 
• Check on your pan at the 25-minute mark. If the mushrooms and onions are starting to brown and your goat cheese is resembling a puddle, it’s probably done. I had to cook mine longer than I thought, but I also accidentally turned off the timer at some point and have no idea how long it actually baked. It could have been 20 minutes, it could have been 30. I considered, at one point, turning the heat up to 450 F for a while, to see if I could caramelize the onions a bit more. But I was concerned about how those little drama queens (mushrooms) might react (burning into charcoal).

The goat cheese looked much more melty in person. Also, the mushrooms are being deceptive here. They still seem plentiful. But they are NOT.

Different view of those now much diminished mushrooms.

• Remove your pan from the oven and marvel in an irritated way at how drastically your mushrooms have shrunk. 
• Remove the garlic. Use the tip of a sharp knife to dislodge some of the cloves from their papery outfits and add them back to the pan. I used about 1/5 of the garlic, I’d say, because it seemed like an appropriate amount of garlic for the quantity of mushrooms remaining. Plus, I am going to use roasted garlic in some focaccia this week – I have been saying I would make focaccia for a year and I have NOT DONE IT YET, despite wanting to and planning to and even putting it on my meal plan twice, but THIS IS THE WEEK, it is happening – so I saved the rest of the garlic for that purpose. 
• Stir everything together. Add some reserved pasta water to achieve the sauce consistency you prefer. 

The goat cheese stirs up so nicely. Far better than FETA, I’m sure.

• Add some pasta to your pan and stir some more. Add more reserved pasta water if you like. 

Are you beginning, now, to see just how FEW mushrooms remain? It’s like half of them took the day off.

This is it. Even with the pasta, it takes up less than half of the pan. Also, it’s not the most photogenic meal.

• Put your mixed pasta into a dish. If you are so inclined, add a handful of arugula. 

Now it’s pasta salad! No, just kidding. I do think the arugula adds a nice peppery contrast to the richness of the pasta.

• Drizzle the bowl with more balsamic glaze. Enjoy!

Will I make this again? I can’t honestly say, at this point. It was tasty! And it was filling! The goat cheese makes it super rich and creamy, so one serving was plenty. It was easy! (Though the mushrooms, all on their own, the prima donnas, make it time consuming.) But on the side of NOT making it again, it is so disheartening to spend eight hours washing and peeling and slicing mushrooms only to have them minify in the oven. How is minify an actual word? I seriously thought I was just being lazy, but it has a dictionary entry and everything. I also wish the onions had had a chance to caramelize a bit more. 

If I made it again, maybe I would have to use EVEN MORE mushrooms. And maybe I would cut them into larger chunks. Using more would increase the amount of prep time… but it might also increase my enjoyment? Hard to say until we try. And we may never try. After all, have we learned nothing from the focaccia intentions?

In all, it was fun to try. It was yummy. And now the recipe has been recorded for posterity. 

The end.

Read Full Post »

Slow Cooker Lemon Garlic Chicken

I have been meaning to post this for a long time, primarily so I don’t have to go back and forth between the original recipe and my adaptations, trying to figure out what to do.

This is a fairly easy, fairly tasty slow cooker meal. The garlic gets very soft and almost sweet (I love smushing a half-clove onto a bite of chicken), the sauce is luscious and lemony, and the chicken is very tender. 

As written, this produces a good amount of sauce; notes below, sauce-wise. I have (heavily) adapted this recipe from a Martha Stewart recipe to amp up the flavor, but you can find the original here if you like.

Slow Cooker Lemon Garlic Chicken

1 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts 

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

1 head of garlic, cloves peeled and halved

1/2 cup dry white wine + 1/4 cup for deglazing

1/2 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup chicken stock

2 teaspoons of dried thyme

Salt and pepper, to taste

The worst part of this recipe is peeling all the garlic.

1a.    Sauté chopped onion and garlic, in olive oil, in a small pan, on medium high heat, until the onion is translucent and the garlic is beginning to brown. 

1b. Optional step: Brown chicken breasts in sauté pan. This is truly optional; I almost never do it, and the chicken is still flavorful.

2.    Pour onion and garlic (and browned chicken breasts) into your slow cooker; deglaze the sauté pan with 1/4 cup dry white wine, scraping up any browned bits. Pour the wine and browned bits into the slow cooker.

3.    If you didn’t brown your chicken, put that in on top of the onion and garlic.

4.    To the slow cooker, add lemon juice, remaining 1/2 cup wine, and chicken stock, plus the 2 teaspoons of dried thyme, plus salt and pepper to taste.

Wow, this is an unflattering angle. But this is what it looks like after you add everything to the slow cooker.

5.    Cover and cook on high for 3 hours, or low for 5-6 hours.

6. Taste and adjust for seasoning.

7. Remove chicken breasts carefully with tongs, as they fall apart easily. Top with sauce.    

Notes: 

1. If the sauce is too thin for you, you can mix in a little cornstarch slurry (1 tablespoon cornstarch mixed with 1 tablespoon water) before serving. 
2. Because I make this for just me and my husband, I always use two chicken breasts. HOWEVER, this dish makes a LOT of sauce. You could easily double the chicken without needing to double the sauce, it will cook just fine and, yes, you’ll have less sauce for drenching your couscous, but some people are less interested in making dinner purely for the sauce than I am.
3. The type of white wine you use will affect the flavor; I usually just make this with whatever open bottle of wine I have on hand. Riesling makes it very sweet, but still palatable. I think Chardonnay is the best fit. 
4. When I feel fancy, I throw in a little lemon zest with the other ingredients. Does it add anything? Hard to say. 
5. Because this is very saucy, I like to serve it with sauce soppers: couscous is my favorite, but rice or quinoa would work well, too. Steamed broccoli is a good vegetable pairing, in part because you can dip the florets in the sauce and the flavors go well together. Sauce sauce sauce.

It’s not a photogenic meal (although a lot of that can be blamed on the photographer), but it TASTES good.

Read Full Post »

Super Easy Goat Cheese + Mushroom Pizza with Arugula and Onion Jam

The night before my baby brother got married, his brother-in-law-to-be and some of the couple’s friends threw a pizza party for themselves and our families. It was so much fun – everyone was so game and friendly. One of the guys manned the giant wood fired pizza oven at the fancy mansion where we were all staying (and where the wedding took place) and one of the guys helped with dishes and my brother’s brother-in-law made the pizzas. He had a huge array of toppings and sauces and he asked people what they wanted, but he would also just… throw stuff together. And my favorite of the night – probably one of my favorite pizzas of all time – was one of those impromptu creations. It had some sort of creamy balsamicky sauce on the bottom, and then it had goat cheese and caramelized onions on the top. It was exquisite.

Anyway, I have been thinking about that pizza for more than a year. And this weekend I decided I would try to recreate it.

What I came up with is not exactly what my brother’s brother-in-law made, but it was close. And it was delicious. AND it was super easy. I didn’t measure ANYTHING.

Goat Cheese and Mushroom Pizza with Arugula and Onion Jam

Ingredients

Pizza dough (obviously, you can make your own dough or buy one pre-made; I always use Papa Sal’s because it is delicious and foolproof.)

Herbed olive oil (I used this Classical White Pizza Sauce with Oregano, but I can’t find it online in a single bottle; you are probably NOT going to buy 12, but then again I don’t know your life)

Goat cheese – 6 to 8 oz, depending on how much you like goat cheese

Onion jam (I got the Stonewall Kitchen Roasted Garlic Onion Jam because it was available at my grocery store)

Mushrooms (I just used a handful of regular old white mushrooms, but you can really go crazy here! Trader Joe’s has a bag of mixed mushrooms in the freezer section that I am going to use the next time I make this pizza.)

Balsamic glaze (this one looks very similar to what I have – and I use it liberally when I make caprese salad with chicken)

Arugula (I use a couple of handfuls of arugula – this is a pizza, not a salad) (but if you can only buy arugula in bulk, I heartily recommend this spinach and arugula salad – for which you can also substitute goat cheese for the feta, in case you have extra goat cheese)

Directions

1. Leave the pizza dough to rest on a greased baking sheet, covered with lightly oiled plastic wrap, until it has come to room temperature and risen slightly. I sprinkle a little bit of corn meal on the baking sheet before I put the dough on it – I think it adds to that authentic pizzeria-style flavor.
2. Once your dough is room temperature, flatten it out a bit. Move the top rack of your oven to the very highest point it can go, about three or four inches beneath the heating element. Then pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. While your oven is pre-heating, wash and slice your mushrooms. No need to be particularly precise. And there’s no specific amount of mushrooms – if you love ‘em, put on more. If you don’t love ‘em, maybe choose a different recipe to follow. My only recommendation is to slice them thin, so they don’t make your pizza damp.
4. Shape your dough. Sprinkle the dough with your olive oil and herb mixture. No need to be super careful, or to assure full coverage.
5. Using a fork to prevent messy hands, distribute your goat cheese around your dough. Okay, you may need to use your hands to do this part.
6. Plop some large spoonsful of onion jam in and around and between your chunks of goat cheese. You can use the back of a spoon to smear everything together, if you want more even distribution. But it’s really okay to have pockets of cheese and pockets of jam speckling your dough.
7. Sprinkle your mushrooms all over your pizza.
8. Drizzle with balsamic glaze.
9. Cook for 15 minutes, or until your cheese is melty and your crust is golden brown.
10. Once you remove your pizza from the oven, top with arugula, and serve.

 

Easy peasy and so yummy.

Read Full Post »

Dinners This Week

Since we went and had last minute dinner guests, I am once again recycling recipes from last week, although it’s only one this time:

Salmon Cakes with Zucchini: I have decided that I am going to adapt this recipe (https://www.thatskinnychickcanbake.com/fresh-salmon-cakes-with-homemade-remoulade/) by replacing the mayonnaise with two large eggs.And ignoring the Old Bay, which I don’t like. I will further adapt it by using the oven-baked method in this recipe. I am also planning to do a homemade tartar sauce for my husband. (I prefer a bit of mayo mixed with sriracha, myself.)

Follow Up: My take on the salmon cakes went pretty well. They were a little crumbly, but held together well enough overall. My husband did not like the addition of capers to the cakes, although I did, so we may have to find a compromise.

Poor salmon cakes. The salmon is frozen, so there’s no time pressure to eat these. And they are pretty high maintenance, which means I rarely want to go to the trouble of making them. But I am pretty sure the zucchini is on its last legs, so I MUST make these this week. Carla is off school today, so maybe she and I will make them together (and this also means I can avoid dragging her with me to the grocery store).

We are going to the house of new friends this weekend (yay! look at us being all social!) so I only have six days accounted for. That leaves us one wild card. (Although my husband and I have recommitted ourselves to low-calorie eating, so we’ll see.)

Here’s what else we’re planning for dinners:

• Thai Veggie Quinoa Bowls with Shrimp & Bell Peppers: https://avocadopesto.com/thai-veggie-quinoa-bowl-gluten-free-vegan/#wprm-recipe-container-19442 

Note: I made these veggie quinoa bowls as a side a looooooong time ago. And now I am going to attempt to alter the recipe to make it more My-Family-Friendly for a main course. I’m adding shrimp, which I will probably marinate quickly in some lime juice and garlic and paprika, and I am replacing the broccoli with red and green bell peppers. Also, I am going to increase the amount of quinoa so there’s enough to satisfy my husband’s appetite. Also also, I am not including the peanuts.

• Cod with Warm Farro & Vegetable Salad: http://www.brummelandbrown.com/recipe/cod-with-warm-farro-and-vegetable-salad.html

Note: I am not 100% sure what “Brummel and Brown” is, although my sense is that it’s a brand of margarine? I am replacing it with butter. I have never had farro before, so this will be an adventure.

Follow Up: I sort of cheated with this recipe. I ended up dipping the cod into a mixture of two tablespoons melted butter and two tablespoons lemon juice, then sprinkling the top with a mixture of two tablespoons panko, one tablespoon melted butter, 1/4 teaspoon paprika, and some salt and pepper. I baked the cod in a 9 x 13 dish at 400 degrees until it was cooked through, then I broiled it for two minutes to crisp the panko. But here’s where I REALLY cheated. I made the farro. I steamed some peas. But then I put the cut up green beans and diced red onion in the 9 x 13 dish — before I put the fish in there — with some olive oil and salt and pepper. I roasted the veggies for about 10 minutes, then added the fish and let the veggies continue to roast. Then when everything was cooked, I mixed all the veggies into the farro. IT WAS SO GOOD. My husband loved it, I loved it. The cod was delicious but the farro and veggie mixture was the star of the show.

• Mushroom Subs: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/grilled-mushroom-salad-subs-recipe-1944471

Note: This is an old favorite, although I skip the roasted red peppers entirely. I love the marinade and I love the mushrooms. My husband always complains about this meal when I tell him it’s for dinner, but then he enjoys it. So I’m taking a chance on it again. Because even if our grill was operational, it is buried under 85 feet of snow, I will just marinate the mushrooms and then roast them. I use mozzarella instead of whatever cheese this recommends but I think many varieties of cheese would be delicious. I like to layer the cheese on the bottom and top of the scooped-out baguette, and then gently toast it in the oven. This helps prevent the bread from getting too soggy from the marinade. The biggest problem with this recipe is that the mushrooms shrink down to nothing, so you need way more mushrooms than you think a human could possibly need.

• BBQ Crockpot Pork with Baked Potato + Coleslaw: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/classic-coleslaw

Note: This is the one where I throw a pork tenderloin, a chopped onion, a jar of BBQ sauce, some minced garlic, and some squirts of sriracha into a crock pot and cook for a few hours. So easy, so good. I like it on top of a baked potato, but my husband likes to make little pulled pork sandwiches with the pork and some easy coleslaw. My husband has a meeting one night this week, so I’ll make this, which is easy to leave in the crock pot and eat whenever you can. I usually make rolls with this recipe, but I am not going to. Maybe I will pick up some sweet Hawaiian rolls for my husband.

• Oven Baked Pork Chops with Broccoli: https://www.recipetineats.com/oven-baked-pork-chops-with-potatoes/

Note: This is one of my favorite marinades. Simple and delicious. Instead of having potatoes two nights this week, I will pair it with broccoli.

 

We are also bringing a salad to our friends’ house this weekend. I think I’ll make this salad with pecans and a maple vinaigrette (although you can bet I am buying candied pecans from Trader Joe’s) or this apple, cranberry, walnut salad… or maybe I’ll find some way to mishmash them together.

(This simple butter lettuce salad sounds divine to me, but a) my husband doesn’t like olives and b) the panko topping sounds like it might be better warm, and I won’t be at my house.)

What are you eating for dinner this week?

Read Full Post »

Meal Planning System Failure

I woke up at five this morning after dreaming something ridiculous that I won’t go into here. (It wasn’t salacious, sadly. Just odd.) The key part was that my husband was somehow melded into my high school boyfriend in that weird way of dreams. So that when I woke up my brain decided to replay in gory detail how awful I was to said boyfriend when I went away to college. There’s nothing I can do about it now, and also I don’t think it was really THAT bad, and also we were friendly years afterwards so I don’t think there are lasting scars on his end, plus we are both married and I haven’t thought about him in countless months. But thank you, brain, for steeping me in shame at so early an hour so I can bask in it all day long.

Last night I made an excellent recipe for zucchini noodles. Let me state for the record here that I have no patience for foods masquerading as other foods. I love zucchini, and therefore I enjoy zucchini noodles (although in their noodleishness they are difficult to eat). But I’m not going to try to convince you that they are a good or even fair approximation of noodles themselves. I’m not going to replace them in my recipe for spaghetti and meat sauce, for instance. I am not going to dress them with cheese and pretend they bear any resemblance to macaroni and cheese. They are not noodles. They are zucchini in noodle form. If you don’t like zucchini, you will probably not enjoy them. I discovered this the hard way, by trying cauliflower rice a few years ago. NEVER AGAIN, Internet. Never again. I don’t like cauliflower and spending nearly an hour rasping it against a box grater and getting cauliflower shards all over my kitchen did not change that in the least. I keep hearing about cauliflower mashed potatoes and cauliflower pizza crust and while I am intrigued, I am NOT going to fall for it. STOP PRETENDING, cauliflower. Just be who you are.

ANYWAY. The recipe I tried last night is really good, but it is good in a zucchini way. If you like zucchini you should try it: Easy 10 Minute Asian Zucchini Noodles from Gimme Delicious.

What do you do when you find a recipe you like, and you want to try it again? I’m really curious, by the way. Do you have a list on your phone? A folder on your desktop? A physical file folder into which you stow printed recipes?

I really want to know, because I haven’t found a good system.

As pretty much sole cook for our household, this is the kind of boring thing I spend a lot of time thinking about. As I’ve mentioned previously, we eat a lot of meals that look like Chicken + Vegetable. That is a combination that gets boring realllllllllly quickly, so I am always on the lookout for new, delicious ways to shake up the boring. But there are three problems I’ve run into:

1. What is the best way to keep track of recipes that look good but I haven’t tried?
2. What is the best way to separately track recipes that I have tried and want to use again?
3. What is the best way to avoid re-making a recipe that I have tried and was terrible?

Okay, maybe they are three variations on the same problem. What it comes down to is that I need some sort of filing system. One that is more efficient and comprehensive and located in one, easy-to-access spot than what I currently use.

What I do now is a combination of things. First, I have a folder on my laptop where I bookmark recipes that I want to try. Since I follow a bunch of food blogs on Feedly, it’s really easy for me to put things into my Recipes folder.

But it’s super unwieldy. I have SO MANY recipes. And there’s no rhyme or reason to them, either. Chicken dishes and veggie sides and frosting recipes and how-to posts for making rainbow layer cakes and the best marinades for steak are all jumbled together in the same folder, and many of those are recipes I’ve tried and either liked or NOT.

This blog post is chock FULL of really boring, really poorly lit and off-kilter photos! I know my photography skillz keep you coming back!

You may be thinking, Why not just go in and set up some additional folders? And you would be smart for thinking that, and also I tried that and it isn’t working. First, I had been collecting recipes for about a year before I went in and tried to organize them, so it was already a jumbled mess. Second, the organization tools at my disposal are not particularly user friendly. I can’t easily grab a recipe or ten and drag and drop them into the Veggie Sides folder, for instance. Getting things into the appropriate folder involves a lot of scrolling and it is tedious and time consuming. Third, I still run into the issue of what to do with things I’ve already tried. Sure, I could set up a sub-folder in each category for Make Again and Don’t Make Again… but that gets to be even more unwieldy and also I am kind of lazy.

To the left is an example of what’s inside one of my folders. Supposedly, this contains favorite recipes that I should return to again and again. This is the first time I’ve opened this folder in many months, so it’s not really working as planned. Also, you may notice that I occasionally (okay, more often than reasonable) bookmark something I’ve already bookmarked. I REALLY need a better system.

PLUS, I am not always on my computer doing stuff. I do a lot of recipe finding on my phone. So I have a folder of recipes on my phone, too… and getting them to my computer is not simple. I really need a system that works across devices.

The best part of my system is my weekly dinner plan email. Each week before I go grocery shopping, I create an email to myself that lists all the meals and includes links to online recipes. Sometimes I’ll open the email a few days in advance, if I already know that I’ll be making something specific, or if it’s a week where I’m feeding people beyond my own immediate family. I always reply to the previous week’s dinner email, so there’s a single record of everything I’ve ever planned to eat since March of 2017 when I started it.

Then, after the week’s meals, I try to write notes to myself about what worked and what didn’t. So after last night’s zucchini noodles success, I responded the email and wrote, DELICIOUS! MAKE AGAIN.

This email is also really useful for any modifications I do to a recipe. For instance, last year I found this Martha Stewart recipe for crockpot garlic chicken that sounded so good, but wasn’t. But instead of giving up on it, I kept tinkering with it until I got it right. And I put those notes to myself in my dinner planning email. If I get any feedback on the recipe from my husband, I put those in the notes. So it’s all there in one place.

I first tried the Martha Stewart recipe in May of 2017. My reaction was that it was too sweet. Hot tip: “More lemon juice” can solve most of the world’s ills. At least foodwise.

Here is where I recorded the modifications that made the Martha Stewart recipe not only edible but delicious. Ah memories. This is also the day when I discovered my husband — whom I’ve known for SEVENTEEN YEARS — doesn’t really like soup.

(Sometimes, when I have the wherewithal, I post the modified recipe here. Like with the “chicken tikka masala” recipe I revamped to suit my own needs. It got to be too annoying to look at the original recipe and try to remember what I changed each time I made it.)

So my meal planning email is the best part of my meal planning system. But it’s not perfect. Sometimes I have to scroll and scroll through old emails to find what I’m looking for. And, because I haven’t mastered the art of organizing what I haven’t tried, I tend to go back to the same things over and over.

I’ve contemplated doing a weekly meal plan blog post. Many bloggers do this, and I always enjoy reading them. And I could always add notes to myself in the comments. But again, this does nothing for the stacks and stacks of recipes I have yet to try.

There’s got to be an app that handles this, right? But I don’t want to look for and evaluate and try a bunch of them. And honestly, thinking about moving all my carefully curated but as-yet-untried recipes to a new place sounds exhausting. But I WANT something better and I suppose I am willing to do a certain amount of work to make it happen.

How do YOU keep track of what you’re cooking? What’s working and what isn’t? Have you come across a magic app that does it all? If you have a meal planning and tracking system you love, I am HERE FOR IT.

Read Full Post »