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Emeril’s Cheese & Beer Soup with Spicy Popcorn Garnish - Food Network

Limey says: After yesterday’s lighter fare, it was time to get seriously self-indulgent with a meal that virtually requires extra gym time to work off, and when it comes to indulgences, it’s hard to beat an Emeril Largasse recipe and this soup from the Food Network proves that rather handily.

As alluded to above, this recipe is highly calorific, clocking in at an eye-watering 988 per bowl. A figure not helped by us deciding that it was four and not six servings, but not reducing the ingredient proportions accordingly.

As to those ingredients themselves, did we make many changes? Not really. We did substitute Italian Blue Cheese crumbles for the Stilton because our local grocery store didn’t have Stilton. We also used Victory Dirt Wolf Double IPA as our two cups of “amber or pale ale beer” which is arguably not a change, and was mostly done to use up the beer in our refrigerator, as I, at least, find Dirt Wolf a little bit too hoppy to drink comfortably.

This was a fantastic soup, and I would never in a million years have thought of pairing it with popcorn, not even the Cajun-spiced savory popcorn used here. It’s a combination that worked incredibly well together, though some of that was because the soup itself was so creamy and good that I think it would pair with literally anything you can name without an issue.

Easy Indian Lemon Chicken - Soni’s Food

Limey says: More citrus recipes abound, and after hitting China for inspiration yesterday, we went with India for our inspiration today with this very light chicken recipe from Soni’s food.

In what is a frankly shocking move for the Little’s Bites kitchen, we didn’t make any changes to the recipe, and ended up with four bowls that clocked in at a mere 227 calories each.

I will say that despite lemon being in the name of the recipe it wasn’t a particularly strong note in the overall flavor of this, which tasted like a less creamy than usual mild chicken korma to me. That’s still good, because I don’t think there’s really any bad Indian style curry recipes, but it was a minor disappointment due to our little citrus-y theme.

#boneless skinless chicken breasts #fried chicken #chicken breast #ground ginger #ginger #garlic #turmeric #cumin #coriander #garam masala #paprika #lemon juice #salt #kosher salt #yogurt #plain yogurt #canola oil #soni's food

Orange Beef - New York Times Food

Limey says: We were still doing citrus-themed recipes, and had decided to do a Chinese inspired meal. Specifically this beef recipe from the New York Times food section.

If you don’t count the white rice (which I didn’t have with mine, but FoFacy did), it came to 555 calories a bowl and tasted just great.

As has become increasingly common here in the Little’s Bites kitchen, we made minor changes to the recipe. Basically, switching the ribeye beef for a cheaper London Broil, since the meat was going to be battered and tossed in a sauce so it didn’t need to be the highest quality meat in the meal.

And since the recipe called for two to four dried red chiles, we went with three as a good number. also, our definition of “neutral oil” as the recipe called for was to use the canola oil we had in the kitchen.

Thai Grapefruit Salad - Lands & Flavors

Limey says: I felt like it had been a little while since we had done a non-pasta salad, and our Facebook group was still doing citrus-themed recipes, so we combined both with this recipe from Lands and Flavors.

We did make a couple of changes to the recipe, both in the dressing, for streamlining purposes. Most notably, rather than make vegan fish sauce, I just used the regular fish sauce we had in the cabinet (sorry vegans/vegetarians, but if it’s any consolation, we do have plans for a vegan recipes “week” coming soon). Also, I didn’t have palm sugar, so we just used regular brown sugar.

We also fried the shallots in thee tablespoons of peanut oil, and used a Serrano pepper as the “small chile.” These changes made each of these salads 360 calories a bowl.

The Asian-style (I guess Thai, but not sure if it’s actually Thai style) flavors to this salad were great, and the acid of the grapefruit counteracted the spice of the Serrano pepper nicely and the fried shallot and chopped peanut garnishes worked really well.

Healthy Chicken Piccata - Healthy Seasonal Recipes

Limey says: For tonight’s meal, we had a couple of goals we wanted to achieve. It’s a Trivia Tuesday Night, so we wanted a dish that would take under thirty minutes to cook. Also, the Facebook cooking group we belong to was having a citrus themed competition for this particular fortnight. This recipe from healthy seasonal recipes met both of those targets.

We made a single change to this recipe, in that we added the bed of fettuccine to serve it on. That addition pushed the calories all the way up to 461 per plate, so still pretty light.

This tasted utterly fantastic, but I’m biased in that lemons, capers and pasta are three of my absolute favorite foods and this contains decent amounts of all three.

It was also super easy to prepare, especially with FoFacy and I teaming up to attack the prep together, so I’d guess this was maybe twenty-five minutes from prep to plating.

Curried “Shepherd’s” Pie - New York Times

Limey says: For tonight’s dinner, after the relative lightness of yesterday’s ratatouille, we wanted something a little heavier, a little more feeling, and dare we say it, a little more comfort food. Enter this slightly misnamed recipe from the New York Times. (I say slightly misnamed as a point of pedantry. Technically if it’s made with beef it’s cottage pie, it’s only shepherd’s pie if it’s made with lamb, but I’m probably the only person who gives a fig about that.)

As ever, the recipe didn’t survive the Littles’ Bites kitchen unscathed. The only changes to the ingredients were switching the chicken broth to beef broth, because we had left over beef broth and 85/15 ground beef is the meat here. Also, I’m never sure how minced garlic translates, so we used three chopped fresh cloves of garlic as our equivalent of the tablespoon. We also decided that the recipe yielded four BIG servings rather than the six to eight it alleged. These changes meant each serving came in at a whacking great 871 calories, but as a comfort food, I’d say it was worth that.

I’m currently congested with a bit of a heavy cold, so I couldn’t fully taste whether the curry flavor to the meat was there (FoFacy tells me that it was...), but the stick-to-the-ribsness of a good cottage pie was definitely present. And since I couldn’t decide whether a picture of the baking dish or a serving was the better option, I’m going with both.

Ratatouille - Allrecipes.com

Limey says: We wanted something a little lighter after yesterday’s soup, and this cheeky little vegetarian recipe from allrecipes.com provided that. This was extremely light, coming in at under 300 calories a plate. I’s also pretty colorful, which always adds a nice bit of dynamism and “pop” to proceedings, after all “the first bite is with the eye.”

No changes were made to the recipe at all, and it was an excellent and tasty little dish, I was a little disappointed in how poorly it held together, I think that’s mostly a consequence of my slicing the vegetables a little bit thicker than they needed to be so they didn’t anchor themselves in the tomato paste quite as effectively as I would have liked, but that’s being very nit-picky.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this was from a saved list of “media-inspired” recipes we’ve built up over the last few months. The media this was inspired by should be pretty obvious, but just in case it isn’t here’s a clue:

(And yes, I did refer to the meal as “rat patootie” a time or two whilst preparing it.)

Slow Cooker Pasta e Fagioli Soup - The Recipe Critic

Limey says: Well, it was Slow Cooker Saturday (It’s A Thing™) once again, and since it had gotten significantly colder again after the weather had lulled us into a false sense of hope on Thursday and Friday, a warm soup seemed like an excellent bet. Enter this recipe from The Recipe Critic.

We didn’t make many changes to the recipe. In fact the only one I can think off was switching from two fourteen and a half ounce cans of beef broth to one thirty-two ounce carton of the same. Also, we decided that it was four servings rather than eight. This meant that each bowl was 675 calories, a number that was probably boosted by using 85/15 ground beef rather than the “lean” the recipe requested.

This was really good, but some of that might have been circumstantial, as we ended up eating it later than planned, and after spending a little more time walking outside than we had initially planned due to a slight misunderstanding between ourselves and the schedule for our local buses..

Rumbledethumps - Food.com

Limey says: I’ll be honest, 90% of the motivation for making this hearty recipe from food.com was how hilarious I find the name to be. Rumbledethumps! It’s impossible to say without laughing. Rumbledethumps!

The other 10% motivation was mildly more complex. Back when we were making the Horseradish Pot Roast, I couldn’t find parsnips initially, and turnips were recommended as a substitution. Subsequently, I did find parsnips, and so the turnips were now superfluous in our vegetable basket. This recipe happened to incorporate turnips, so we were able to use them up.

This was really good, and definitely filling. This came in at 509 calories per bowl, mostly because of all the butter and potatoes involved. The only change that we made to the recipe was to use regular green cabbage instead of savoy cabbage, as we couldn’t find the latter.

Also, I tried to some research into the name Rumbledethumps and drew a blank. It’s apparently a Scottish variant on the English “bubble and squeak,” but no origin or etymology. I like FoFacy’s scholastically dubious theory that “it’s named for the sounds that come out of your butt after eating it,” but didn’t notice any significant upturn in flatulence myself.

#vegetarian #meatless #potatoes #turnips #cabbage #green cabbage #butter #salted butter #cheese #cheddar #cheddar cheese #food.com

Spicy Thai Basil Chicken Kebabs - The Flavor Bender

Limey says: I don’t recall the initial impetus for this recipe from the flavor bender, but what better way to follow up a salad than with big lumps of meat on a stick?

Well, by giving those lumps of meat a decided Asian-influenced flavor, that’s one way, and the way these kebabs went. After marinading the chicken for a while, it imparted some real spiciness to each kebab, despite the strongest, hottest flavors being cracked black pepper and red pepper flakes. This was on top of good old faithful ginger and garlic of course.

Some slight deviations from the original recipe were using regular basil instead of Thai basil, because I couldn’t find the latter, using metal skewers rather than soaked wooden ones, because that’s what we had available, and lastly switching from a grill to the oven broiler and broiling these at six minutes a side on high to simulate grilling. That was mostly done because January’s not a good month for grilling, as well as a vain attempt to avoid our smoke alarm going off. The concierge of our building who came up to investigate the smoke alarm to make sure that we weren’t on fire (that’s more of a brisket thing) was rewarded for his diligence by FoFacy presenting him with one of the skewers of spicy chicken.

Each of the skewers came in at 108 calories, which meant each serving was 315 calories. Of course, we ended up eating two servings each because it was so good. this also meant that we didn’t have to deal with the minor palaver of unskewering and reskewering meat for reheating since metal skewers and microwaves don’t make for a happy combination.

FoFacy says: Yeah, I feel bad because every time we do something with the broiler or sear steaks on the stove top, we inadvertently set off the alarm and if it goes off long enough, the concierge will come and investigate. So I went downstairs and said, “I promise we’re not trying to set the building on fire, we just cook a lot.”

These were VERY tasty and I wished we’d had some peanut sauce to soak them in. I’m so glad I bought these stainless steel skewers. As they’re flat it keeps items from twirling around willy-nilly, and because they’re pointy it’s easy to puncture things onto them. These are definitely a repeater.

I just wish we could find an easier way to keep the smoke alarm from going off while we’re cooking.

Goat Cheese, Roasted Beet and Basil Pasta Salad - Half Baked Harvest

Limey says: One of the things I wanted to do this week was try some of the recipes I had saved during the past few months, and this pasta salad recipe from half baked harvest was one of the first ones.

What I liked about this was the amount of different vegetables and things that went into it. I don’t know if I’d ever had roasted beets before, but they seemed like a pretty good option here.

No real recipe changes here, more decisions based on what the recipe suggests. Notably that we went with the two beets and four ounce of goat’s cheese options, since a pound of pasta seemed more than filling enough. Also, as you might be able to tell in the picture above we opted for a bunch of fresh spinach rather than watercress for the greens. This is mostly because I’m not a huge watercress fan.

Also, the recipe claims that this makes six servings, and that is a blatant lie. For us, it made a grand total of TEN 391 calorie servings, each of which was substantial. As you can see here, we had plenty of salad leftovers that are now just chilling in our refrigerator:

Also, this is the first meal I’ve cooked since Thanksgiving when I didn’t have to wear a cast or brace on my wrist, so it’s finally not a single handed recipe!

FoFacy says: I really enjoy roasted vegetables and I’d never had roasted beets before, and this was so good that I don’t want to have beets any other way.

Scrambled Eggs with Bacon and Avocado - Martha Stewart

Limey says: Tuesday Night Trivia had once again rolled up upon us, so we were looking for a speedy recipe. This breakfast for dinner recipe from well-known felon and Snoop Dogg associate Martha Stewart seemed like a fine candidate.

As you might imagine we made changes to the recipe, most notably switching from regular bacon to turkey bacon for the usual reasons. As a consequence of this, the recipe approach had to be altered slightly, since the lower fat content of turkey bacon meant that it wasn’t really possible to reserve a teaspoon of bacon grease for scrambling the eggs, so I just used all of the meagre amount of turkey bacon grease that was produced by the eight rashers. Another change was quadrupling all the ingredients so that we had four servings rather than the single serving that Martha gives us.

This was done in under 15 minutes and was a mere 279 calories per plate. I thought this was okay, but as ever, a little bit of taste was sacrificed for speed. I think if I did this again, I’d probably add toast or an English muffin or similar.

FoFacy says: Man, I miss pork bacon so much but this was still tasty.

#single handed #breakfast #breakfast for dinner #bacon #turkey bacon #eggs #avocado #martha stewart #fast eats #quick meals

Famous 21 Club’s “Steak” Diane - Food.com

Since our cooking Facebook group was using Brandy and/or Cognac as the theme ingredient for the fortnight, and we had approximately a pound of beef brisket left over from our Spicy Beef Stir Fry, we decided to get a little adventurous with this recipe from food.com (Substituting our brisket for the recommended steak)

FoFacy says: I haven’t cooked since the cinnamon swirl cheesecake, Limey informed me, because of health reasons (body pain issues...mostly manageable, mostly I just suffer through it). Even still, I had to pull my wheelchair up to the stove. I managed okay.

I’m a little less skittish cooking with live fire than Limey is. When camping, I’m the “cookie” and I have lots of experience cooking over a campfire. This is different, however. This is instant, lighting-things-on-fire-with-alcohol cooking which is completely dangerous so take precautions when cooking. Have the lid that matches your cooking vessel within reach to smother any flames that may occur. Also have baking soda on hand if you have a grease fire that you can’t smother. 3 tablespoons of cognac will create a pretty impressive fireball, so keep your head and hair back as well. It burns quickly enough so just power through it and let it do its thing if you’ve managed to get through the steps of this recipe without incident.

This recipe is pretty methodical and quickly completed so I measured everything in advance and placed the items in the chronological order in which they are used. Be sure you keep the alcohol portions of your mise en place far enough away from where you’re cooking to avoid any potential crossfire.

Sorry, I’m yammering. I just want you to be safe but also brave when cooking en flambé!

This sauce came out so delicious that I want to make it and use it with burgers. We used sliced and butterflied brisket because that’s what we had left, which was a bit chewier than other cuts of beef. It was nearly impossible to pound it down to a quarter-inch thick. It still works though. I kinda wish we’d had mashed potatoes on hand as a side to use to mop up the remainder of the sauce. Next time!

Limey says: I’m going to echo FoFacy’s thoughts here on the sauce, it really was an absolutely excellent pile of flavor and would work well with mashed potatoes and a few more veggies to absorb them. Despite all the butter, heavy cream, cognac and brisket this was only 653 calories per plate.

I’m glad that FoFacy took the lead on this one, not just because I fear live flambé and flames in general (having crazy sensitive smoke alarms contributes to that) but because it seemed rather more complex than my typical level, especially as I was still wearing a cast on my right arm. I know my level of ability and this was just slightly above it.

I’d certainly like to try this again on an actual steak, but not for a while, simply due to it being somewhat time consuming.

FoFacy adds: Oh COME ON. “all the butter and heavy cream.” It was two tablespoons of butter! And 2 of the cream! Shut uuuuup. And it’s not time consuming, it took 20 minutes tops to prepare. You’re being silly. (But yes, burgers and mashed taters...we should do this soon).

Frozen Espresso and Cognac Zabaglione - New York Times

Limey says: It’s that rarest of birds on this blog, an actual dessert recipe. This coffee and alcohol flavored treat comes courtesy of this New York Times recipe. We made exactly one change to the recipe, deeming it to be four servings instead of six but leaving the ingredient amounts the same.

Even with that boost to the serving size, each one only came in at 169 calories.

A big shout out goes to FoFacy, who did most of the work in preparing this recipe, as my wrist brace/cast (only 3 more days!) limited my whisking ability. Plus she was able to jerry-rig a double boiler using a stainless steel bowl and a saucepan in a way that I wouldn’t have thought of. My biggest contributions here were finding the original recipe and brewing the espresso.

This was absolutely divine in flavor, and I think I appreciated it all the more because I don’t do deserts often. The fact that it indulged my crippling coffee addiction didn’t exactly hurt things either...

#dessert #vegetarian #meatless #egg yolks #sugar #granulated sugar #espresso #coffee #cognac #powdered sugar #cocoa powder #unsweetened cocoa powder #new york times #ny times #new york times food #ny times food #nyt #nyt food

Thai Beef Chili - Paleo Leap

Limey says: Another cold day (I think the high was 19°F - cue laughter by anyone living north of Philadelphia’s latitude) called for yet another chili, though this recipe from Paleo Leap was more of a meaty soup, and that’s no bad thing.

Only real change to the recipe was omitting the lime wedges, since we used the limes up in prior chilis, and also we went with 2 cups of chicken stock when the recipe suggested “2 - 3 cups,” and as liquid as this was, I’m glad we erred on the side of caution there.

Unsurprisingly, considering the sheer amount of (80%/20%) ground beef, plus sweet potato and coconut milk, this came in at the high end of the calorie scale at 790 per bowl. Of course, as the picture above shows, those bowls were ridiculously full.

One thing I did like about this as a chili was that it had a larger representation of vegetables than is typical, what with the aforementioned sweet potato, red and green bell peppers, cilantro and zucchini all making their contribution, as well as the garnish from the green onions.

Another hearty winter warmer, and worth it for that alone.

Chili Cheese Fries Pizza - Real Food By Dad

Limey says: No Slow Cooker Saturday (It’s A Thing™) this week. Instead we have an unabashed carb overload in the form of this indulgent recipe from Real Food By Dad. This time we didn’t change any of the recipe ingredients (though we did use leftovers from yesterday’s meal as our “1½ cups chili” topping and skipped the green onions entirely) but we did change the methodology slightly to account for the fact that we don’t have a pizza stone or pizza peel.

Instead we had a humble baking tray and rolled out the pizza dough in a big old rectangle to reflect that. Also, as a consequence of that, we baked our pizza for an extra seven minute compared to the original recipe in order to crisp up the crust and melt the cheese a little more. The changes were worth it, and despite not being especially healthy, each of these plates:

Came in at 671 calories. Of course, this didn’t help much when both FoFacy and myself decided that the second plate couldn’t wait until tomorrow’s lunch and so we promptly doubled up on the dinner meal.

That in itself should tell you that this was a fantastic meal, and it certainly was that, even if it is ridiculously indulgent in a comfort food kind of way.

Beef and Beer Chili - MyRecipes.com

Limey says: Another bloody cold day, so it seemed like a good idea to do another chili to warm up (it’s also a bit of prep for tomorrow’s meal) and this easy recipe from the Cooking Light section of MyRecipes.com felt like a good one to try.

Of course, we made a few changes to the recipe. The biggest was instead of using one 14.5 can of plain diced tomatoes, we used two ten ounce cans of diced tomatoes with green chiles. Also, the recipe called for “beer (such as Budweiser,” and Budweiser is more sex in a canoe than it is beer, so we opted for Sneaky Wheat from The Fin City Brewing Company as our beer of choice for this. Also, rather than lean ground beef we used 80%/20%

Compared to the calorie bomb that was yesterday’s hot dogs, this came in positively svelte at 387 calories a bowl whilst still being satisfyingly filling enough, and most importantly pleasingly warming us up from the inside out.

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