Pondering Food

I had leftover challah bread that had been chillin' in the fridge and I wasn't feeling like making anymore French Toast so I decided I was going to make Bread Pudding instead. My mom used to make Bread Pudding back home but they (my mom and the cook) used to steam it and I don't have those huge Asian-style steamers here so I knew I was going to have to bake it. I found a simple recipe shared by Ellenmarie on the allrecipes site and took it from there. The original recipe called for 6 slices of bread but I was using challah so I basically crammed all the bread that I could into an 8 x 8 Pyrex dish for this recipe, about 2/3 of the loaf, which was all I had left. There are two things that you need to glue together in this recipe. Your bread with the rest of the dry ingredients and the egg mixture with all the wet ingredients. The main thing that you have to achieve is some well-soaked bread. However you get there is up to you. You'll want the bread cut up int...

I thought to make some chicken pot pie the other day and knew I was going to have to make everything from scratch instead of following a typical "dump" recipe. Although I'm all for convenience, I'm not comfortable with calling anything a dump ____. In this case, I wasn't feeling like making the crust so I looked in the fridge and found some crescent roll canisters. That should do the trick! You can use whatever chicken you have on hand for this recipe. I usually end up using fresh chicken breasts but thighs will work too, or a combination. If you have leftover rotisserie chicken, chop that up and you're ready to go! A cup to a cup and a half of cooked chicken meat is enough for one pie but you can also supplement with a few little sausages. I like the Hillshire Farms Lit'l Smokies and would use up to 10 pieces in one pie. Or you can try a can of Vienna Sausage like in chicken pastel. The vegetables are the same story. Use fresh or frozen, it all...

I took my daughter out to lunch one weekend at Grand Lux Cafe and we ordered the Pot Roast Cheese Fries. I was thinking that it sounded similar to poutine, something that we quite enjoyed over the summer, and I figured that she would like it. The pot roast on top of the fries was a bit oversalted to me but it made me think that I hadn't made pot roast in a really long time. I decided to browse online and found a Food Network recipe that became the starting point for our dinner last night. The Pot Roast Cheese Fries from Grand Lux Cafe I bought some beef chuck roast at the supermarket, opting for one of the smaller family packs that didn't have too much fat (but I also didn't want anything incredibly lean). I wanted each roast to be in the three-pound region and I ended up with two that were just slightly less. Buying something huge will take forever on my slow cooker and I don't really like eating the same dish for days in a row so they were perfect. ...

Banana Bread is one of those things that we make all the time. Everyone in the house loves it, especially my four year old. She can be terribly picky but she never turns down homemade banana bread. Ironically, it's one of those things that you're just trying to use up leftovers (too ripe bananas, in this case) but it seems everyone prefers the reinvention to the fruit. I always buy bananas but nobody eats them! So we always have enough to make banana bread. I start with some seriously overripe bananas. For the full recipe, which will yield a loaf and 24 mini muffins, I like to use 4-5 bananas. I like it better with more bananas than less, but the recipe works even if you only use 4. They've got to be so ripe that you can mash them with little effort using a fork. If the bananas are just ripe enough to eat, they're not ripe enough for banana bread. And trust me, using bananas that aren't very ripe can be disastrous. They will not taste good. At all . If you ...

Now that school has resumed, we've gotten back into something of a schedule as far as our food shopping goes. And I'm not just talking about when we go to the supermarket, but even what we buy. The kids and I troop over to Wegmans on Thursday after school where I order a large cheese pizza for us to eat and we buy a french baguette and rotisserie chicken to bring home, along with various produce, milk, eggs etc. My husband and daughter frequently pack a lunch and we must never be without bread, cheese, some kind of meat to put in the sandwiches, lettuce, tomato and cucumber. But if you think about it, if you change up the proportions a little, what you've got are also ingredients for a simple salad. Have a great dressing on hand and make your own croutons. Ever since I started doing it, I've never bought pre-made croutons at the store ever again. I start with the leftovers of an old french baguette, sliced into cubes. I adjust the amount of butter and garlic sa...