What are you Cooking the Week of March 27, 2022?

[Mike Nolan]

We finished off the meat loaf tonight, plus salad.

[BakerAunt]

Leftover pizza at our house.

[RiversideLen]

I roasted a salmon filet and had it with linguine and kale.
I am going to roast another salmon filet tonight, this time seasoned with fresh grated ginger and a little garlic powder. I haven't decided on the sides yet, maybe with a salad.

[Joan Simpson]

We had deer sausage,cooked cabbage and scalloped potatoes.

[cwcdesign]

I have been out of pocket for a while. I had my physical on the 21st and on Tuesday I had an allergic reaction to the pneumonia vaccine I had at my appointment. Ended up in the ER and got pumped full of prednisone and Benadryl. It took a few days to get back to normal, but I had the weekend off to celebrate my weekend. Nathaniel my elder, got engaged for my birthday! Will is moving to Dallas tomorrow- I’ll take him to the airport after work.

So I made him his favorite on Wednesday (his birthday is also coming up) which we call Chicken Juniper but is a 60s recipe known as Elegant Chicken - chicken breasts wrapped in bacon on bed of dried beef with a sauce of mushroom soup and sour cream, sprinkled with paprika and cooked low and slow. I have been frustrated making this recipe because the sauce has not come out right due to the changes in can sizes. So I decided to try something a little different this time, based on the original recipe which calls for 4 ounces dried beef, chicken breasts (I use 2 pounds chicken tenders to mimic the smaller size of chicken breasts in the past), bacon, one can mushroom soup and 8 ounces sour cream.

When I went to the market, I first looked at the weight on a jar of dried beef - turns out it’s 2.25 ounces, so I bought 2 jars - I’d only been using one), I also bought 2 cans of mushroom soup - I decided to use 12 ounces as the amount of an older can - when I weighed the soup from one can, I only got a little over 9 ounces, not even the 10.75 they claim. And, I left the amount of sour cream alone.

I ended up making extra sauce because I had a lot of soup left over, but kept the proportions I decided on - 12 ounces soup to 8 ounces sour cream. When I added, it was 6 ounces mushroom soup to 4 ounces sour cream. This is as close to the original as I have made in years. The sauce was as thick as I remember. Doubling the dried beef was also the right thing to do. I’m going to rewrite the recipe using weight so we can get it right every time.

[Mike Nolan]

We had takeout Chinese food from a place we haven't ordered from before. Bigger portions, higher prices, really good food. They're a lot further away than the place we usually order from, but my wife has frequent appointments in that shopping center with her physical therapist, so we'll probably order from them again soon.

[Joan Simpson]

Cwcdesign sure hope you're feeling better!I hope Will likes Dallas and I know you are gonna miss him lots!Congratulations on Nathaniel's engagement too!

The chicken dish sounds great!

[cwcdesign]

Thanks Joan! If you want the recipe, let me know and I'll fix it up and post it here - very short.

[Joan Simpson]

Yes Cwcdesign I'd like the recipe,I Googled it and came up with three recipes.

Tonight we had hamburger steaks and fries.

[Mike Nolan]

We had the leftovers from last night's Chinese, and had some salad. Need to go pick some more lettuce from what's left of the dwindling crop before the next one starts to come in, 4 or 5 weeks from now.

[Italiancook]

I purchased a Loaded Potato Soup mix from KABC. I made it this afternoon. It involved a little work in that I had to fry bacon and dice a potato, but everything else was in the mix. It used a cup of cream. Recipe claims it can be made in a hour, but it took me 75 minutes. I've never made potato soup from scratch, so I don't know how long that'd take. I'm assuming, however, that the mix saved me some time. My husband thinks it's delicious. I think it's tasty but has too much pepper. It has 3 types of pepper. The only pepper I cook with is white. That didn't stop me from having leftovers for dinner. Because of the pepper, I won't buy it again, but I like it enough that I'm going to try some of the other soup mixes KABC sells.

[Mike Nolan]

When I make potato leek soup, it usually takes more like 120 minutes from start to finish. There's some overlap, I can prep and sautee the leeks as the potatoes are cooking, but 3-4 pounds of potatoes in cold stock (or cold water) will take close to an hour to be fully cooked.

And that doesn't factor in the time it took me to make the chicken stock I use. That's another half hour of prep time, 3 or more hours of cooking and another hour waiting for the stock to cool enough for straining, chilling it for storage in the refrigerator and freezer and pulling the meat of the chicken bones. (Sometimes I do that after the chicken has cooked for about 2 hours, by which point it is fully cooked, putting the bones back in the pot for another 60-90 minutes.)

My favorite chicken stock/soup recipe says to boil the chicken for as long as you can stand it or 3 hours. It DOES start to smell good after about 45 minutes.

I usually make croutons ahead of time, too. Not counting the time it took to make the bread, it takes 15 minutes or so to dice it, and 90-120 minutes in a 200 degree oven to dry the cubes out. I usually do that before I start prepping the potatoes.

I saw a note on another site the other day complaining that the time estimates in most recipes are always WAY TOO SHORT, because they tend to assume, among other things, that you have all the mis en place, um, in place. Cooking times are often understated, as are resting times.

Most experienced cooks look at a recipe and add in extra time for most of the steps.

[Author]

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