Unpinned

Destroying Beautiful Meals one recipe at a time

[thevintagebluebird]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Our cooking attempts so far - scroll past for our newest post!

Unpinned - Seared Fish with Creamed Kale and Leeks

Unpinned - Winter Squash and Wild Mushroom Curry

Unpinned - French Onion Chicken

Unpinned - Ratatouille

Unpinned - Skinny Eggplant Rollatini 

Unpinned - Skillet Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs with Roast Potatoes and Sauteed Broccoli Rabe

Unpinned -  Aged T-Bone w/ Green Peppercorn Sauce and Yorkshire Puddings

Unpinned - Brazilian Skirt Steak with Golden Garlic Butter

Unpinned - One Pan Healthy Sausage and Veggies

Unpinned -  Croque Monsieur

Unpinned -  Vodka Sauce Chicken Zucchini Noodles

Unpinned -  Crockpot Chicken & Stuffing

Unpinned -  One Pan Teriyaki Chicken Zoodles

Unpinned -  Roasted Kohlrabi and Roasted Delicata Squash

Unpinned -  Avocado and Goat Cheese Grilled Cheese

Unpinned -  Tuna Zoodle Casserole

Unpinned -  Asian Zucchini Noodle Stir-Fry with Shrimp

Unpinned -  Chicken Meatballs in a Cream Sauce (Tefteli)

Unpinned -  One Pot Spanish Chicken and Potatoes

Unpinned -  One Pan Autumn Chicken Dinner

Unpinned -  Favorite Italian Wedding Soup

Unpinned -  Cauliflower & Chicken Sausage Casserole

Unpinned -  Super Easy (or not) Chicken Pot Pie

Unpinned -  No-Bake Energy Bites

Unpinned -  Soft and Chewy Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Unpinned -  Grandma Ople’s Apple Pie

Unpinned -  Easy Chicken Pad Thai

Unpinned -  Seared Swordfish with Spicy Olive Oil Poached Tomatoes

Unpinned -  Chicken with Lemon Garlic Cream Sauce

Unpinned -  Toasted Gnocchi with Mushrooms, Basil and Parmesan

Unpinned -  Skinny Shrimp Parmesan Spaghetti Squash

Unpinned -  Butternut Squash Goat Cheese Pasta

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Seared Fish with Creamed Kale and Leeks

Hello everyone - it’s been a minute. And Allan has been frequently playing NPR podcasts out loud. So hey! Welcome to the end of the longest winter ever to exist! We made it! I lost my energy to cook for a while there but I’m slowly getting back into it, usually sans instructions - I also subscribed to the NY Times and so now y’all are getting a newspaper recipe. We’re full adulting now. Buckle up.

Seared Fish with Creamed Kale and Leeks! Ah crap, I’ve just realize this is two NY Times recipes in a row. I promise the next one will be a handwritten recipe straight from my grandma. She just bought me a new safety mandolin and things are about to get LIT in my kitchen as a result. Safely. Anyway.

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? Yes. But to be fair, this was a complete struggle meal for me that I did not adequately prepare for and I used freakin’ frozen cod so like what did I expect.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? I classify the NY Times recipes as ‘intermediate’; I found this to have what felt like more steps than necessary, and took a while. It wasn’t too expensive except that kale and leeks are on my shopping list maybe once every five years, and non-frozen fish would’ve been well worth the money.

Does it taste good? YEAH. Way better than it had any right to taste. You’ll understand why later.

Seared Fish with Creamed Kale and Leeks

INGREDIENTS

4 (5- to 6-ounce) Arctic char or other mild fish fillets, such as salmon

Kosher salt and black pepper

1 ½ pounds curly kale

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 large leek (about 1/2 pound), trimmed, white and pale greens quartered lengthwise then thinly sliced

6 large fresh thyme sprigs

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 cup heavy cream

1 ½ teaspoons Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon chicken or vegetable stock concentrate, like Better Than Bouillion

Cooked white rice or pearl couscous, warmed, for serving

2 tablespoons olive oil

Prepare your fish: Pat the fish dry, then salt the skin side to help draw out moisture. Set on a plate and refrigerate, uncovered.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high. Prepare your kale: Pull the leaves off the stems and tear leaves into bite-size pieces. Wash vigorously, drain, then set aside.

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter over medium. Add the leek, thyme and garlic, season with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring frequently, until soft, about 7 minutes.

Stir in the cream and bring to a boil over high. Continue to cook on high until thickened, about 5 minutes. Using a fine-mesh sieve set over a liquid measuring cup or small bowl, strain the sauce, pressing to extract as much liquid as possible. (You should have about 1/2 cup sauce.) Set aside the solids and return the sauce to the saucepan. Whisk in the mustard and stock concentrate, and season with salt and pepper. Cover and set aside.

Discard the thyme sprigs and stir the cooked leek mixture into cooked rice, if desired. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Once the sauce is done, blanch the kale in the boiling water until just wilted, about 2 minutes. Transfer to a colander to drain and rinse under cold water. Once cool enough to handle, squeeze out the excess liquid. Add to the strained cream, then season with salt and pepper. Cover, and warm over low, stirring occasionally.

Cook the fish: Heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high. Pat the fish dry a second time, then season the skin with pepper, and the flesh with salt and pepper. Add to the hot oil, skin-side down, and cook until the skin is crispy and golden, about 3 to 4 minutes. Carefully flip the fish and cook until the outside starts to turn golden, but the thickest part of the fish is still slightly translucent, about 3 minutes.

Divide the rice (if using), creamed kale and fish among plates and serve immediately.

So here’s what you need! Sort of! You’ll notice I have store brand yellow mustard instead of dijon, coconut milk instead of cream, frozen cod instead of fresh char, no fresh thyme, and I forgot to photograph my (brown not white) rice. Like I said, this one was an unprepared-for struggle.

Our beloved, trusty, 15 year old CVS rice cooker. Hasn’t failed me yet. 

My sous chef rushing to help get the dishes unloaded so I can have some space in our new kitchen! It has counters mounted facing each other with just enough room for a Rew and an Allan to get precisely in each other’s way.

Do the ‘ol cold water dethaw on your bland fish. You couldn’t even remember to thaw the fish properly. You probably don’t deserve to be attempting a NY Times recipe. What were you thinking.

Pretend you have any idea how to make kale edible. The stem seems hard so shred the leafy bits off? The smug smile is a lie.

This kale will be edible right?! Definitely not curly, definitely not as much as the recipe called for.

Leeks! I actually LOVE leeks, I just never interacted with them growing up and don’t really understand which parts you’re supposed to chop/cook/eat and which are meant to be tossed. It’s easy with a carrot - cut off the green and eat the orange. But leeks are just ombre gradients of green then suddenly white? We eat it all? Are some parts better than others? How much is TOO much leek? Special appearance in the background by fancy chocolates from Salem.

Pardon my blurry photos, it is way past time for a new phone. They look like veggie clipped toenails. Delicious.

Ok now it’s time to share my real shame: my coconut milk had spoiled. I did not have any cream. I did not have any real milk. I frantically googled different cream replacements, NONE of which I had the ingredients for. So I made this absolute abomination. It is (forgive me): vanilla greek low-fat yogurt whipped into plain almond milk with a little bit of melted butter stirred in. It smelled like frosting gone bad.

OH WELL IN IT GOES. Things got vaguely...creamy. <eyebrow waggle>

Then it tells you to squeeze all the cream out of your beautiful leeks. Easier said than done. This process was messy and resulted in WAY less liquid than I had hoped - if I’d used real cream I would’ve just...added more. Instead I had leek-flavored vanilla greek yogurt almond juice. DO definitely save the leek bits for your rice!

Pour your pathetic amount of leek yogurt juice back into the pan and desecrate it with flippin’ yellow mustard and boullion. Push down the despair. Make sure to do this while hangry at like 9pm.

“Blanche” your kale, aka give it a day at the sauna. Boiling water for just two minutes then squeeze the ever loving heck out of it. Everything you’re cooking for this recipe ends up with tiny portions WHY.

YUM! Go mix your leek leftovers into your rice. Next time maybe just make leek leftovers and rice and skip everything else? At least this time you started the rice first, good job!

Mix the mustard yogurt juice with your wet leaves. How did all those ingredients shrink so damn much? You are so hungry.

Cook your fish. Remember at the very end you were supposed to, y’know, SEASON it. Absolute amatur hour over here.

Your warm wet leaf goo! It actually smells very good. This is my smallest saucepan, if that gives you any sense of what a tiny portion this made. Thank goodness for leeky rice.

Aaaaaaaaand plated! I told you it didn’t look anything like the Pintrest photo. It was promptly inhaled and while I know hunger is the best seasoning, Allan also agreed it was tasty despite him not liking any of the individual ingredients!

Final final verdict: I don’t have a ton of fish/seafood recipes in my repertoire, so I’m keeping this one around for now but would tackle it again with more kale and double the sauce ingredients, as well as, y’know CREAM and FRESH FISH. But for what a Frankenstein’s monster I made of it, it was pretty good! 

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Winter Squash and Wild Mushroom Curry

Tumblr tells me it’s been six months since my last post. That seems pretty on-brand for me and this blog. Valentine’s day is coming up, and I could offer you all flowers, chocolates, and promises I don’t intend to keep: or I can just try to cook new recipes and take photos of them more often. 

Let’s see, what’s new...well, we left the nightmare world of 2020 behind and are now firmly in the nightmare world of 2021. Still in lockdown. Still hanging out on Zoom. Oh! But the fella and I did the unthinkable: we MOVED! Yes, after eight long happy years together in a two-room apartment, the pandemic finally broke us. Working from home gets really cramped when you can’t walk behind your partner’s conference call to get to the bathroom. With everyone fleeing the cities for the space of the suburbs, apartment rents in our little commuter city plummeted! So we finally, FINALLY found our unicorn apartment. Same city, same rent, AND THREE BEDROOMS BABY. And that means no more plastic blue countertops here! So allow me to present my first vegan recipe AND my first post from the new digs: 

Winter Squash and Wild Mushroom Curry! Straight off the never-fail pages of the New York Times cooking section, I printed this recipe sans images and left it hanging on my fridge for weeks, waiting for the right moment. Apparently at 4:45pm driving home during a snowstorm I realized it was THE right moment, because I stopped at the grocery store, loaded up my cart with a concerning amount of mushrooms, and got to work.

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? I need to hit up my local Indian grocery stores because I have no idea where you find a branch of curry leaves in Shaws, but other than that not really!

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? No! It came together shockingly fast! The mushrooms can start to add up a bit but 100% worth it.

Does it taste good? So good I’m considering making it again TOMORROW.

Winter Squash and Wild Mushroom Curry

INGREDIENTS

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

10 ounces butternut or other winter squash, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

Kosher salt and black pepper

1 or 2 small green chiles, such as jalapeño or serrano

3 medium shallots or 1 small onion, finely diced

½ teaspoon black mustard seeds

½ teaspoon cumin seeds

Handful of fresh or frozen curry leaves (optional)

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon ground coriander

Pinch of ground cayenne

½ teaspoon ground turmeric

1 pound mushrooms, preferably a mix of cultivated and wild, trimmed and sliced 1/8-inch thick

¾ cup coconut milk

2 tablespoons lime juice

Cilantro sprigs, for garnish

In a wide skillet, heat oil over medium-high. When hot, add squash cubes in one layer. Season with salt and pepper. Cook for about 2 minutes, letting cubes brown slightly, then flip and cook for 2 minutes more. Use a slotted spoon to lift squash out, and set aside.

Cut a lengthwise slit in each chile to open it, but leave whole. (This helps the chiles heat the sauce without making it too spicy.)

Add shallots, salt lightly and cook, stirring, 1 minute. Add mustard seeds, cumin seeds and curry leaves, if using, and let sizzle for 30 seconds, then add garlic, coriander, cayenne, turmeric and chiles. Stir well and cook for 30 seconds more.

Add mushrooms, season with salt and toss to coat. Cook, stirring, until mushrooms begin to soften, about 5 minutes.

Return squash cubes to skillet, stir in coconut milk and bring to a simmer. Lower heat to medium and simmer for another 5 minutes. If mixture looks dry, thin with a little water. Taste and season with salt.

Before serving, stir in lime juice. Transfer to a warm serving dish and garnish with cilantro.

Look at that spread. And LOOK AT THOSE NON-70S-BLUE COUNTERS! I may have gone a tad overboard with the mushrooms but they are nature’s meat, after all.

My sous chef for the evening. Pretty dang excited to marry that cutie in the aftertimes.

Ah yes, my favorite part of any recipe: trying to do shoddy math in my head. It calls for 10oz of butternut squash which, due to packing/shipping small boxes almost every day for the last ten years, I can eyeball fairly well, but this was a 1lb 12oz box. I have no idea why they didn’t pack a pound, a pound and a half, or 2lbs, but there ya go. I hate cutting butternut squash so I really shouldn’t complain.

Stop what you are doing to feed the cat because she is a cruel mistress and demands a sacrifice NOW.

Ask your partner if the 3″ cubes look close enough to 1/2″ cubes and admit that they probably need chopping. Oh well. Chop ‘em.

Does he look fly as hell? Yes. But these are our snazzy utility sunglasses. Not only do they make you the coolest person in any room, they also a) reduce overstimulation in a pounding nightclub b) keep the oils from onions from burning your eyes during chopping c) I guess block the sun sometimes.

Get those now-tiny cubes into a hot pan! Perfect! ...for now. Foreshadowing.

Wash your fungus. Now, I’m not fancy and don’t have wild mushrooms or foraged mushrooms (I haven’t gotten to see my mushroom guy at the Somerville Winter Farmer’s Market in a while). I got some shiitake, baby portabella, and plain ol’ white mushrooms. Store brand baby.

Snazzy sous chef grillin’ the onions.

So it’s about time I admit: I did not have some (read: many) of the spices this recipe called for. I have never seen curry leaves. I don’t know what black mustard seed looks like. I don’t own coriander. We turn into weeping piles of burned sand whenever there’s a pepper in the house. So I did a lot of substitutions: entirely left out the chiles (sorry flavor fans) and skipped step 2, swapped ground cumin for the seeds, used curry powder in place of leaves, and threw in a dash of cardamom instead of coriander (it smelled like something that would be happy in a curry dish plus they’re close alphabetically). I added a good dose of black pepper to make up for the lack of mustard seeds (?!) and, anyway, my meals are often struggle meals. 

Ah yes, the other inevitable moment of the evening: when I realize there’s no way the rest of the ingredients will fit into my pan. Tall Allan to the rescue, pulling down our dutch oven gifted by the lovely Ann and Joe when we helped them move a million years ago! It doesn’t get nearly enough use. Maybe I should store it somewhere I can actually reach.

WHOO NOW TWO DIRTY HAND-WASH-ONLY PANS!

Ok now we’re getting somewhere, starting to smell pretty damn good...

If you are not a cilantro-is-soap person, chop up your fresh leaves. I did splurge on these because I also have salsa and can make next-level nachos next time I need a snack. Or put it in a salad or whatever. Mainly nachos.

This is the moment you realize that despite crafting this blog for a few years and being both a person who cooks food sometimes AND a professional pantry chef in years past, you STILL don’t ever closely read the recipe all the way through first. The curry needs rice. What are you even doing with your life. How could you forget to start the rice. Now everything will be done in minutes and you’re starving and the rice is RAW. Concede defeat, promise to make rice FIRST next time, and pull out some tiny bit of starch: these mini whole grain naan breads. They are my new obsession. They’re $3.50 for four slices but holy heck I love them so much.

Done! The whole thing came together in under a half hour, and looks nice on a plate!

We’re skeptical that sans rice this vegan meal will be filling enough, but moments after this photo was taken and before a single bite was had, our doorbell rang and who was it but THE KENTS with GIRL SCOUT COOKIES!  Delivered to our door in a snow storm no less! Desert safely secured, we sat down to discover our fates: it was GOOD!! Filling! Tasty! 

Final final verdict: I’ve yet to try a NY Times recipe I didn’t end up loving (the one and only salad recipe I have is their orange/radish/pistachio dish I was shown a few years ago - amazing) and this was no exception. We’re trying to eat less meat (and have already virtually cut beef and pork from our normal rotation) so finding easy vegan meals is really exciting. We freakin’ love mushrooms and I can’t wait to make this again. Probably later this week.

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - French Onion Chicken

Welcome back, my lovelies! Since we last met the entire world has turned upside-down. Everything has changed! Holding hands is from the BEFORETIME. Being in other people’s houses is from the BEFORETIME. Restaurants are from the BEFORETIME. I could go on and on about the darkest timeline we find ourselves in, but after losing all sense of self and purpose in this nightmare reality, one thing has become clear: we still gotta eat. On a recent Zoom call with dear friends (the bizarre irony of how we’d never met face to face until a pandemic was not lost on me) I was reminded of this blog. Bless their hearts, they had kind words to say about my ramblings. So I thought WHAT THE HECK, IT’S NOT LIKE I DON’T HAVE THE TIME! (Ha, time and any semblance of meaning are *also* from the BEFORETIME) so here we are. I cooked a thing and now I’ll tell you about it.

French Onion Chicken! From the folks who make those cute facebook cooking videos, Delish! I guess they have a magazine too. I get a little suspicious of any publication that claims the majority of their recipes are ‘TEH BEST EVAR’, but after this dish I could be convinced.

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - I’ll let you be the judge when you see the photo of my finished product, but I’m going to quietly sit over in the corner nodding furiously in the meantime.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - The only pricey ingredient was a block of gruyere, and it was worth every single penny! It took about 45/50 minutes from start to finish but time is a cruel joke anyway so who cares? It was pretty straightforward and easy!

Does it taste good? - YES. MAKE IT.

French Onion Chicken

Ingredients

3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, divided

1 large onion, halved and thinly sliced

2 tsp. freshly chopped thyme

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 3/4 lb. boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1" pieces

1/2 tsp. dried oregano

2 tbsp. all-purpose flour

1 1/2 c. low-sodium beef broth

1 c.shredded Gruyère

Freshly chopped parsley, for garnish (optional)

Preparation

In a large skillet over medium heat, heat 2 tablespoons oil. Add onions and season with salt, pepper, and thyme. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, stirring occasionally until onions are caramelized and jammy, about 25 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook until fragrant, 1 minute more. Turn off heat and remove onion mixture. Wipe skillet clean.

In a large bowl, season chicken with salt, pepper and oregano, then toss with flour. Heat remaining oil in same skillet over medium-high heat. Add chicken and cook until golden on all sides and mostly cooked through, about 8 minutes.

Add beef broth and return caramelized onions to skillet. Bring mixture to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until chicken is cooked through and beef broth reduces slightly, about 10 more minutes.

Add Gruyère and cover skillet with a lid. Cook until cheese is melty, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat and garnish with parsley before serving.

Here’s what you need! You’ll notice a small pile of leaves at the front and may wonder why I’ve thrown foliage onto my counter. Long story short: Allan’s lovely Aunt Kathi and Uncle Eli gave us bags of fresh herbs from their garden, and we’ve been making such fancy herby dishes! These are the last fresh sage leaves; I know the recipe calls for thyme but we’ve got sage so now the recipe calls for sage.

 First thing’s first: oil up your trusty cast iron. You’ll notice that it looks like I’ve smeared dark gritty mud along the bottom of mine, and that is because I am a lazy no-good cast iron owner who does not properly season her pan. It’s frankly a disgrace. I will pay someone to fix it for me.

Slice yer onions! Somehow this giant beast didn’t even make me tear up!

At this point the meal could be done and I’d be pretty happy - who doesn’t love a pan of hot onions? They started to smell tasty, which was great ‘cause our apartment has lately had a weird smell of old meat, which is EXTRA concerning because we haven’t cooked any meat at all this week. Why does it smell like meat.

IT APPEARS WE’RE OUT OF THYME. AHAHAHA AREN’T WE ALL? Sorry guys, I’m realizing now that this cooking experiment was also a litmus test of my current five-months-into-lockdown mental state. Clearly I’m fine. Also we had sage so it was all good.

Sage-y onions. The kitchen was smelling very, very good.

I really had to trust the recipe on this one and let the onions cook for the full 20+ minute time even though I was oddly anxious they would burn. I ended up turning the heat down to low when I started to see a lot of crisping. To distract myself, I started chopping the chicken breast into cubes. They were meant to be about 1″ x 1″ x 1″ but most of them came out more like .5″ x 6″ x 2.89″.

My patience paid off! The onions, looking quite “jammy” and caramelized! I kept wondering what “jammy” would look like but I think it’s just a fancy way of saying “sticky and mushy”. Adding my scoop of jar-garlic because even in lockdown I don’t have time to mince fresh garlic.

This bit was a little tricky: it called for two tablespoons of flour to “coat” the chicken but I wasn’t sure how such a tiny amount of flour was going to “coat” jack squat. So here’s the heavily-seasoned chicken on the cutting board, and my tentative first attempt at adding flour.

It just sort of made the pile of raw chicken into a slightly more-beige, stickier pile of raw chicken. I was unconvinced. 

Ok I got them in the pan to start cooking and it looks vaguely like normal chicken? Now my instinct is to cook the shit out of chicken until it’s just little shreds of carbon to avoid salmonella, but I see that the recipe says that to let it finish cooking once we add/boil the liquid, so against my better judgement I just cooked them “medium rare” and moved on. 

It called for a cup of shredded cheese but I just shredded the whole block because honestly when in history has a dish ever been ruined by too much cheese? (Spoiler: never)

Oh wow! It looked so good when I added the stock and onions back in! We used mushroom stock ‘cause we’re trying to minimize our beef consumption and also mushrooms are delicious.

BUT THEN IT TURNED INTO THIS WATERY MESS WHEN I ADDED AND STEAMED THE CHEESE!

This is not staged, this is 100% exactly the face I was making as I saw what my end result was looking like. It was definitely straight-up soup, and no thickening instructions in sight.

So I harkened back to my years of training as Thanksgiving sous-chef with my grandma! Whip out your trusty cornstarch and turn that soupy frown upside down!

Take out your commemorative New Milford mug (whoot whoot hometown pride oh god I miss traveling across state borders) and make a cornstarch slurry. Starts as cement-like glue-chunks, add drops of water and keep scraping until it becomes an opaque liquid. 

So here’s how it looked immediately after adding the ~1.5 tbsp cornstarch slurry and then after a good stir and extra minute on the heat. No more soup! 

And finally plated: atop some brown rice (cooked with homemade chicken stock) and little zucchini pizza bites (made from one of the monster zucchini from my garden). 

Final final verdict: It really did NOT look like the Pintrest photo, but to be fair I did skip the (apparently essential) step of adding fresh parsley - between you and me I’m pretty sure they hit it with a blow torch to get that nice crispy top. BUT! This was actually DELICIOUS. Like, really really good. The chicken was moist, the cheese flavor was sublime, the onions were jammy to the extreme: I’m definitely going to make this again!

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Ratatouille

Wow. I imagine that after ten months everyone is REALLY FUCKING EXCITED to see how my ratatouille experiment turned out, right? Right?! (And if anyone thinks I can spell ‘ratatouille’ without glancing up at the open recipe tab you are sadly mistaken). Anyway. A lot has happened in ten months! Since last April I’ve started a garden in my community plot (after eight years on the waitlist), gone to two weddings and two book fairs, taken on about three other people’s worth of job responsibilities at work, and oh! Got engaged! Sorry to have dropped off the face of the earth, but finally nabbing myself a hunky fiancé threw everything into a whirlwind of planning (ironically, he also had an eight year waitlist :P). But a venue is booked, a dj is hired, hair and makeup will be wrangled, and now it’s late winter and I’ve got a lot more free time on my hands to bore you all to death with my cooking disasters. So without further ado:

Ratatouille! From the folks who brought you those kind-of-annoying-but-also-addicting-to-watch cooking videos you see on facebook all the time, Tasty!

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Yup. Because they make you think your mountain of veggies is just gonna like FIT in the pan. Lies.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - No! It’s literally just a bunch of sliced vegetables lined up and made hot.

Does it taste good? - All I could think as I ate it was ‘this is fine’.

Ratatouille

Ingredients

VEGGIES

2 eggplants

6 roma tomatoes

2 yellow squashes

2 zucchinis

SAUCE

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 red bell pepper, diced

1 yellow bell pepper, diced

salt, to taste

pepper, to taste

28 oz can of crushed tomatoes

2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil, from 8-10 leaves

HERB SEASONING

2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil, from 8-10 leaves

1 teaspoon garlic, minced

2 tablespoons Chopped fresh parsley

2 teaspoons fresh thyme

salt, to taste

pepper, to taste

4 tablespoons olive oil

Preparation

Preheat the oven for 375˚F (190˚C).

Slice the eggplant, tomatoes, squash, and zucchini into approximately ¹⁄₁₆-inch (1-mm) rounds, then set aside.

Make the sauce: Heat the olive oil in a 12-inch (30-cm) oven-safe pan over medium-high heat. Sauté the onion, garlic, and bell peppers until soft, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, then add the crushed tomatoes. Stir until the ingredients are fully incorporated. Remove from heat, then add the basil. Stir once more, then smooth the surface of the sauce with a spatula.

Arrange the sliced veggies in alternating patterns, (for example, eggplant, tomato, squash, zucchini) on top of the sauce from the outer edge to the middle of the pan. Season with salt and pepper.

Make the herb seasoning: In a small bowl, mix together the basil, garlic, parsley, thyme, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Spoon the herb seasoning over the vegetables.

Cover the pan with foil and bake for 40 minutes. Uncover, then bake for another 20 minutes, until the vegetables are softened.

Serve while hot as a main dish or side. The ratatouille is also excellent the next day–cover with foil and reheat in a 350˚F (180˚C) oven for 15 minutes, or simply microwave to desired temperature.

Enjoy!

Yeah that last step is a bit of a stretch. Let’s explore why, shall we?

Well FIRST off the company couldn’t have been better! Back from wandering the wide world, it’s the lovely Melanie from our adventure with zoodles! She recently co-authored a guidebook to Florence and if you want to feel like you’re chatting with your bestie about the inside info for your trip to Italy, her book is all you need :) I was very excited to have her help tackling this heavyweight of the vegetable culinary world.

Here’s what we started with! ‘But Rew!’ you may ask (if you knew me and were sitting next to me) - ‘what’s with all the potatoes?!’ And I’d look at you knowingly, because I get that question a lot. This time I actually have an answer. We were hosting a few other friends, and in order to make sure there was plenty of vegetable goodness to go around, I brilliantly decided that the ratatouille should be served ON POTATOES. Because who doesn’t think of plain baked potatoes going alongside one of France’s best known dishes?

(It was a horrible idea, btw)

The lovely Melanie, starting the endless task of chopping a bajillion vegetables. They never ended - because not only does the ratatouille itself require a metric fuckton of vegetables SO DOES THE SAUCE.

This is not in the recipe but we needed the potatoes to not be raw so I chucked them in the oven.

What’s with the horrible face? Why I’m nearly thirty agonizing seconds into chopping onions, of course! Seriously, I used to get laughed out of the kitchen by my coworkers when I worked in a restaurant and got onion-chopping duty. I’d run wailing out of the back door with tears streaming down my face.  

Proof: I could not take a steady photo of the onions, I was crying so hard.

MOAR VEGETABLES

Ooooh, starting to look like something! These were all the bits for the sauce. I think. I don’t remember the details it was like ten months ago.

The eggplant was the toughest one to cut thin, mainly because our knives could desperately use a sharpening. Starting to run out of plate space for the raw stuff!

Canned tomatoes added! Now we have a pan overflowing with sauce.

Oh okay so now we add two plates worth of vegetables to the overflowing pan? I grow concerned.

Let’s just build a vegetable pyramid! Whatever! What could go wrong?! (Spoiler alert: it took over an hour of scrubbing to clean all the burned vegetable goo off the bottom of my oven).

Post oven! They shrank a tiny bit but this pan is still aggressively full. Good thing we’ve got a full table!

And my worst ‘plated’ shot to date as I forgot to take a picture of the final result before handing them out! These cute mugs are way better anyway :)

Final final verdict: With the potatoes they were…strange. It wasn’t a great pairing - probably just thin pasta or polenta would be better. And I clearly need a bigger cast iron pan. But I might try it again if I found myself with a plethora of veggies!

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Skinny Eggplant Rollatini

Confession time: I cheated. That’s right - I cheated, and I’d DO IT AGAIN. This week I really screwed you all over, because I had a REAL LIVE CHEF join me in the kitchen as we tackled eggplant rollatini! Meet the brilliant Vickie, an actual career chef who I am lucky enough to call my friend, who brought all her years of wisdom and experience into my humble abode and helped make one of the tastiest veggie-based meals I’ve ever had. 

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - No!

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - No! 

Does it taste good? YES! Everyone should make this! Everyone should also have a chef friend who is not only willing but DEMANDS you allow them to make from-scratch tomato sauce instead of store bought!

Skinny Eggplant Rollatini

Ingredients

2 large eggplants

1 cup reduced fat ricotta 9 oz/ 250 g

1 1/2 cups shredded light mozzarella divided in 1/2 cup and 1 cup

1/2 cup shredded Parmesan

9 oz frozen spinach / 250 g, thawed and squeezed to remove as much liquid as possible

1 egg

1 clove garlic germ removed, minced

salt and pepper to taste

1 cup tomato pasta sauce or marinara

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400F/200C.

Remove eggplants' ends and slice them thinly lengthwise. Spray a baking sheet with olive oil and place 12 eggplant slices on it. You may need to use two baking sheets or bake eggplant in two batches depending on the size of your oven). Bake for 10 minutes, remove from the oven and let cool.

While eggplants are cooking, prepare ricotta/spinach mixture. In a bowl, combine ricotta, mozzarella (1/2 cup), parmesan, spinach, egg and garlic. Mix well and season to taste.

Spread 1/2 cup tomato sauce on the bottom of a large baking dish.

Generously spread ricotta/spinach mixture on an eggplant slice (about two heaped tablespoons), roll it and arrange in prepared dish, seam side down. Continue with remaining eggplant.

Top with remaining tomato sauce (1/2 cup) and sprinkle with remaining mozzarella (1 cup). Cover with foil, reduce oven to 350F and bake for 45 minutes. Remove foil and bake another 15 minutes or until cheese is golden brown. Bake for 10 minutes, remove from the oven and let cool

I’m looking at this image now and realizing I have no idea where my spinach was for this photo. Or if we even used it. We did, didn’t we? Was it fresh? Was it delicious? See, right here is the problem with using a chef - she didn’t NEED a recipe. She winged it, slowing down enough to let me snap some photos and help chop some onions, but now here I am alone at my computer and 99% of what happened has left my brain. Ugh.

Here’s our shining faces, ready to jump in. Look at how chipper we are. Ok, I look exhausted, but Vickie pulled me through!

Step one: when the professional chef tells you to put a wet paper towel under your cutting board so it doesn’t slide all over the place and chop off your fingers, you do it - and VOILA, no more slippery board!

How can you be anything but pumped with this lady cheering you on!?

A moment of silence for the untold thousands of heads of garlic I’ve chopped up over the course of this blog. I love me some garlic.

Mmmmm eye-burning deliciousness.

We splurged and bought real live herbs. Give me a few months and I’ll be flush with basil again from my planters; for now I’m still at the mercy of the herb department at my local Star Market.

SALT BAE IS REAL! Here’s Vicky just...whipping up some risotto. Because she felt like it. I can’t even.

We had a GIANT eggplant (bow chicka wow wow) and cutting it into vaguely even and thin slices was honestly hard. It was the second or third time this week I wished I owned a mandoline slicer. Then I remembered the time I sliced off my knuckle skin with one of those. Aaaaaand back to not wanting one.

I turned around and Vickie had magically made tomato sauce from thin air. So there ya go. Just...make sauce appear in your pan. Good luck with that step.

Sliced! Only screwed up one of ‘em!

Here’s where we most violently veered away from the Skinny Eggplant Rollatini recipe I was inspired by: we didn’t give a single f*ck how much olive oil we used. In fact, I don’t think I’d looked at the recipe once by this point. Vickie said go nuts, and I trusted her. She did not disappoint. 

Making the squishy insides of the roll-ups. Ricotta, egg, and green stuff. In the background is the chicken bouillon of shame - for the first time in probably three years I was caught without any homemade chicken stock in my freezer. We needed some for the risotto and I was horrified to find my bag of bone and scraps, decidedly NOT in stock form. Alas.

MMMMMM more cheese. I guess we skipped the spinach altogether and used basil!? Either way, it was delicious.

Meanwhile! The eggplant was cooked! I’m afraid I was a little overly ambitious with my thin-slicing, so a few were rather...holey. Next time I would slice ‘em on the thicker side. 

Still, it doesn’t say anywhere that you can’t just stack two thin slices and create one normal slice!

Rolling up our masterpieces and adding that amazing, amazing sauce. I miss that sauce. It was so good.

I was genuinely thrilled with how cute they looked going into the oven.

BAM! And then there was risotto!

LOOK AT HOW BEAUTIFUL THEY CAME OUT. SO CHEESY, SO MELTY, SO GOOD.

Discussing our success.

Possibly the nicest plating I’ve ever enjoyed.

Final final verdict: I loved this so much I almost made it again the next night (but instead was seduced over to the ratatouille side...but that’s a tale for another blog post)

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Skillet Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs with Roast Potatoes (and Sauteed Broccoli Rabe)

Ha, and you guys thought the LAST title was long. 

Hello all! Back at it again with the cookin’ and the eatin’ - this time around it’s the brilliant James and I, tackling some basics and making them TASTY - we’ve made some Skillet Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs with Roast Potatoes (and Sauteed Broccoli Rabe). Now, if you’re hardcore and not only read these silly cooking rants but also click on my gratuitous links, you’ll see that we actually did two recipes at once! Yeah, we’re badass like that.

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - I mean yes; we did not mince parsley to sprinkle it on to our beautiful slate counter tops.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - No! Honestly, the blanching of the broccoli rabe was probably the most difficult bit. And chicken thighs are silly cheap.

Does it taste good? YAS.

Skillet Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs with Roast Potatoes

Ingredients

4 medium chicken thighs, patted dry (about 1 lb)

Salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons butter, divided

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 medium onion, diced

1 lb russet potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 1-in cubes (about 4 medium potatoes)

4 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup honey

1/4 cup soy sauce

1 tablespoon white vinegar

2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

Instructions

Season chicken on both sides with salt and pepper to taste. Heat 1 tablespoon butter and olive oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat until melted and hot. Place chicken thighs skin-side down and sear 2-3 minutes on both sides until golden brown. Remove from skillet and set aside.

Add onion and potatoes to same skillet and saute several minutes until golden-brown. Season with salt and pepper to taste then remove from skillet and set aside.

Melt remaining 1 tablespoon butter over medium-heat in same skillet, then add garlic to pan and saute 1 minute until garlic is fragrant. Add honey, soy sauce, and vinegar to pan and bring to a simmer, then reduce heat to medium-low and let simmer 5 minutes until slightly thickened.

Nestle chicken thighs and potato mixture into pan and use a spoon to drizzle some of the sauce over top. Bake chicken at 400F 25-30 minutes or until chicken registers 160F and potatoes are tender. Serve warm and enjoy!

Sauteed Broccoli Rabe

Ingredients

Kosher salt

1 bunch broccoli rabe, tough, non-leafy stems removed

Extra-virgin olive oil

3 cloves garlic, smashed

Directions

Bring a large pot of well salted water to a boil. Set up a bowl of well salted ice water. Drop the broccoli rabe into the boiling water and cook for 1 minute. Remove from the boiling water and plunge immediately into the ice water. Once cool remove from the ice water and let dry. It can be used right away or held for future use.

Coat a large saute pan with olive oil. Add the smashed garlic andbring to medium heat. Once the garlic is brown and aromatic, remove it from the pan and discard. It has fulfilled its garlic destiny. Add the broccoli rabe and toss around in the oil to heat up and season. Remember the broccoli is already cooked. Add more oil, if needed and season with salt if needed (it probably will).

So we had Sarah over at Whole and Heavenly Oven do all the leg work of recipe creation. I’ve got to be honest, I hadn’t checked out her blog until just now for *this* blog, but she’s 21, cute as a button, and seems like a genuinely lovely person, so give her site a quick browse and drool over the photos of peanut butter cookie chocolate ganache tarts like I did (holy shit I might need to try that). The broccoli rabe recipe is from Anne Burrell via Food Network, and I love that it looks like the snapshot-quality photos of dishes I do on this blog; like they probably perfectly edible, but slapped on a plate and scooted across the table for a photo moments mere before eating. 

James and I ready to get started with raw chicken.

Lessening the rawness of the chicken. Very important step.

Peel and chop those potatoes! Pardon the lime - we were making fizzy water at the same time. I don’t imagine lime potatoes are terribly good.

Throw your small raw potatoes into a pan and turn them into small slightly-less-raw potatoes! (I know, I always make this joke).

James using the master spatula (super wide, fantastic for pancakes and quantities of slightly-less-raw potatoes) to move our tots and free up some space for the chicken.

Treating that cast iron pan with the good loving it deserves - oil, butter, spices, and garlic. I was pretty close to just pouring that into a bowl and calling it a night.

After a few minutes of chicken-browning, throw the potatoes back in. Capacity reached!

I was hunting for something in the fridge and stumbled upon this monster jug of maple syrup. I mean, this is probably why we’re all friends - I love maple syrup like no one else. But even I thought this jug might be too big.

Broccoli rabe: washed and healthy and ready to smother in oil

So in order to blanch the broccoli rabe, I had to set up a sort of station. On the stove was the boiling water, where I dunked handfuls of rabe for a few minutes. Then plucked them out and threw them into the bowl of ice water on the bench at my knees for just a few seconds, then right into the hot oil and garlic in the wok. 

So far so good...

Aaaaaaand when I noticed the garlic was starting to burn.  This is actually the face I’m usually making throughout the cooking process.

But it all turned out fine in the end. 

And voila! No plated photo because we were too damn hungry and this was SO GOOD.

Final final verdict: I’ll probably make this all the time because it was cheap, healthy (ish), and tasty. Salut!

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Aged T-Bone Roast with Green Peppercorn Sauce and Yorkshire Puddings

Wow, that’s a heck of a long title for a blog post. Welcome back, dear reader! As you can see, we’re sticking to our FANCY food trend right now and cooking up some OLD MEAT! ‘What the heck is old meat?’ you may ask. According to Wikipedia, dry aging is a process where meat is hung or placed on a rack to dry for several weeks. It results in meat that is more flavorful and tender due to science and magic. And at first I scoffed and thought that I’d prefer my food NOT left in a cupboard for a few weeks, thank you very much. But now that I’ve tried 45+ day aged T-bone? Ruined. I’m ruined for boring normal meat for life.

And so I present to you:  Aged T-Bone Roast with Green Peppercorn Sauce and Yorkshire Puddings

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Not really! That’s pretty much what it looks like, although we don’t use polished wooden platters to eat off of.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - Yes. Because we’re on a fancy kick. That shit is like $50 A POUND. 

Does it taste good? - YES. It tastes like it’s WORTH $50 a pound.

Aged T-Bone Roast with Green Peppercorn Sauce and Yorkshire Puddings

INGREDIENTS

1 kg aged T-bone steak

1 T olive oil

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the Yorkshire puddings

2 free-range eggs

125 ml milk

60 g flour

½ t salt

65 ml oil

For the green peppercorn sauce

375 ml beef stock

1 T olive oil

2 shallots, finely chopped

250 ml cream

2 T brandy (or 1 t brandy extract, which is alcohol free)

2 T slightly crushed green peppercorns

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Make the batter for the Yorkshire puddings 1 hour in advance.

Beat the eggs with the milk, add the flour and salt, and mix until smooth. Transfer to a jug and set aside.

Heat a frying pan, rub the meat with the olive oil and season. Brown the steak on both sides.

Remove from the pan, reserving the juices in the pan. Place the steak on a roasting tray and roast for 20 minutes, or until done to your liking.

To make the green peppercorn sauce, place the beef stock into a clean saucepan and simmer until reduced by half, about 10 minutes.

In the pan containing the meat juices, heat the olive oil and fry the chopped shallots until soft. Add the reduced stock, cream, brandy and peppercorns. Simmer until thick, about 15 minutes.

Remove the steak from the oven, cover with foil and allow to rest in a warm place for 15 minutes.

Increase the oven’s temperature to 220°C.

Place 2 t oil into each mould of a muffin tray. Place into the oven to heat up. Once the oil is hot, pour in enough batter to half fill each mould and return to the oven immediately. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until golden and risen.

Serve immediately with the T-bone and green peppercorn sauce.

Here it is, all its dry-aged beauty. The first thing you may have noticed about this recipe is that the cooking temperatures and certain word spellings seem a little...foreign? Backwards? UNAMERICAN? Only my dear cooking partner James would be crazy enough to find us a UK recipe that required constant googling of ‘180 degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit’ (also god bless spell check because units of temperature measurement are hella hard to spell). 

The next thing you may notice is that the recipe calls for brandy, which I have quite a lot of sitting on my bar. This did us absolutely no good when I failed to pack it and bring it with me to the Kent household. So rather than trek back out into the cold, we improvised and used ‘White Christmas’ rum and brandy spirit mix. It’s a cheap and delicious way to booze up your hot cocoa and I highly recommend everyone grab a bottle the next time they spot one - excellent bang for your buck, and surprisingly delicious in a cream shallot sauce!

Thankfully a few years now of writing this blog has taught me a couple of things (remember the pie fiasco that required a whole bunch of dough refrigeration at 11pm?). I now actually READ the recipe before we begin, and so we knew to make the Yorkshire pudding mix first, so that it could chill while we worked on the steak. I would’ve left it for the 24 minutes it took us to finish the steak. James insisted we wait the full hour. Damn it.

MMM. Searing stage. Not nearly as quick as the skirt steak from our last attempt, but still surprisingly fast. I had fewer concerns about poisoning ourselves since this beauty just sears for flavor but bakes in the oven for actual, y’know, cooking.

My mouth is watering while writing this blog post. Can’t you just SMELL this picture?! It was amazing.

Then it was time to chop the shallots, wherein (as is custom) my eyes turned into pits of fiery red splintered glass shards. And there was much rejoicing. Rews and raw onions just don’t mix.

Here’s our reduced beef broth, getting the ol’ shallot and cream treatment. I don’t know what brilliant human realized that cream + broth = magic, but I love them for it.

Getting saucy! I probably spent 15+ minutes staring at the wall of spices in my local grocery store trying to find green peppercorns. Were they squishy? Dry? Did I need to pick them out of the tri-color peppercorn grinders? Were they strange British slang for something else, like capers? I did eventually find them, and behold - our green peppercorn sauce was born.

The steak while it was ‘resting’. Yup, that’s actually a thing we did. I figure if you’re gonna drop $50+ dollars a pound on some meat, you may as well do everything you can do to make it taste perfect.

Yorkshire pudding time! I can’t be the only one who had no clue that Yorkshire pudding does not actually refer to pudding. It’s a popover. Yes, I know - I was as shocked as you are. We heated the oil in the tin then poured our batter mix in. There was some serious bubbling and splatter, but we survived.

Little poufy pudding puffs, ready to bake!

LOOK AT THEM GO!

James modeling his Yorkshire puddings. Aren’t they cute and slightly grotesque looking? Like bread mushrooms. Or golden squishy rocks. They were delicious.

(I suppose they just look like popovers, really)

The table set for four, with some tasty peas on the side and epic red wine courtesy of Dave’s Fresh Pasta, where our hosts are part of their wine of the month club. The fancy meat is thanks to the brilliant folks over at M.F. Dulock, who offer an amazing meat share program.

My plate in its final form. I LOVE the bones.

Final final verdict: This was a fairly time-consuming recipe that wasn’t too difficult - things just needed time to rest and chill. Worthwhile, as it was INCREDIBLY delicious. If you’re ever looking to cook for a super special occasion or find a crazy deal on dry aged beef, go for it. Just be forewarned that it will ruin your appreciation for regular meat forever. 

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Brazilian Skirt Steak with Golden Garlic Butter

Oh ho ho I am SO behind. Hello, beloved reader! I’ve got oodles of photos to upload, tons of recollections to write, and numerous amusing anecdotes to share! I’m frankly playing catch up, because I’ve joined a SUPER COOKING TEAM to try and get this cooking thing really rolling - and we’ve cooked three whole meals already! And you’ve heard about NONE of them! My bad. Let me rectify that now. Let me also apologize in advance that our tutorial involves cooking some unscripted sides for this dish, ‘cause the recipe is literally just butter-meat, but I have faith y’all will still be able to follow along.

Straight from the (web)pages of Fine Cooking, I present to you: Brazilian Skirt Steak with Golden Garlic Butter!

Holy. Shit. LOOK AT THAT.

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Yes.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - It’s higher than my normal price point, but when your new cooking buddy is part of a local meat-share, EVERYTHING is possible!

Does it taste good? - YES. YES IT DOES. OH SO GOOD.

Brazilian Skirt Steak with Golden Garlic Butter

Ingredients

6 medium cloves garlic

Kosher salt

1-1/2 lb. skirt steak, trimmed and cut into 4 pieces

Freshly ground black pepper

2 Tbs. canola oil or vegetable oil

2 oz. (4 Tbs.) unsalted butter

1 Tbs. chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Preparation

Peel the garlic cloves and smash them with the side of a chef’s knife. Sprinkle the garlic lightly with salt and mince it.

Pat the steak dry and season generously on both sides with salt and pepper. In a heavy-duty 12-inch skillet, heat the oil over medium-high heat until shimmering hot. Add the steak and brown well on both sides, 2 to 3 minutes per side for medium rare. Transfer the steak to a plate and let rest while you make the garlic butter.

In an 8-inch skillet, melt the butter over low heat. Add the garlic and cook, swirling the pan frequently, until lightly golden, about 4 minutes. Lightly salt to taste.

Slice the steak, if you like, and transfer to 4 plates. Spoon the garlic butter over the steak, sprinkle with the parsley, and serve.

Firstly, my cooking buddy is none other than the dear JAMES KENT! You may remember him as a taste-tester from such blog posts as Super Easy (or not) Chicken Pot Pie,  Vodka Sauce Chicken Zucchini Noodles, or everyone’s favorite One Pan Autumn Chicken Dinner. This time around, we were tearing apart his (incredibly well-stocked) kitchen and acting on HIS (vastly greater than my) cooking knowledge, and - well, I think the results speak for themselves.

So here’s our haul! I actually went out and bought fresh parsley (this is how you know it’s not my normal corner-cutting attempt; I would’ve thought dried was just fine!), we’ve got a few root veggies, a tasty looking skirt steak, and some VERY ill-advised barley. More on that later.

Step one. Put your barley in a rice cooker. Assume it will cook over the course of a reasonable half or even full hour. Please note: this assumption will be DEAD WRONG.

Look at their adorable little space-age rice cooker! Puts my dented CVS special model to shame. It even sings a little happy tune when it’s done cooking!

Start making your raw veggies more acceptable for polite society (and cooking) by removing all the non-eating bits like peels and bottoms.

You’re going to attempt to use an actual garlic press to, y’know, press your garlic. This will not work, because you’re weak and the garlic is strong. You’ll make a mess and eventually resort to chopping by hand, but by god we tried.

Giving up and letting James mash the garlic.

Let your steak sit and get warm, salty, and peppery while you fight with the garlic. This is called ‘bringing up to temperature’ and is 100% not a thing I’ve ever actually done with meat. 

Peel your roots, make them naked and ready to cook! Parsnips are pretty big in our house, so I was excited to mix them with their orange brethren as the main side dish for the night.

Mmmm - all the root veggie goodness. Those babies are gonna get a big splash of olive oil and pop in the oven. Yum. Note to self: try not to write up this blog when I’m hungry.

Mister James chopping some celery for the veg. To be honest I’ve never actually cooked celery outside of turkey stuffing, so this was surprising to me. I guess it’s in chicken soup, too, right?

OH NOW WE’RE GETTIN’ TO THE GOOD STUFF. Slap that steak down in a hot pan!

One. Flip. Later. My mind was absolutely blown at how quickly the steak cooks - like three minutes per side. Bonkers.

Ok so we’ve moved the steak to a plate to ‘rest’ (which IS something I’ve actually done with meat before, because I know it keeps cooking a bit after you take it off the heat) and now we’re making the super-healthy low calorie BUTTER SAUCE. Seriously, you could pour this stuff over a handful of rocks and they’d taste delicious.

This is the moment we realized there was no estimated cook time showing up on the rice cooker yet. 30, maybe 40 minutes after starting it and the barley was only just starting to cook. We’re realizing that my brilliant idea to cook barely may have been a tragic mistake.

But the root veggies cooked! Mmm! *Actually* healthy and sprinkled with herbs!

STEAK SLICING TIME. The Kents actually have good, sharp knives in their house and if you’re ever looking to try being a real grownup, getting your knives sharpened is a cool way to not slice your fingers off when cutting things. I’m jelly.

PLATED! Look at that mound of garlic butter! And those tasty strange greens James found that were actually really good! Note the lack of barley.

The beautiful Mrs. Kent prepares to taste test. Spoiler alert: these plates were cleaned *fast*.

Final final verdict: This was actually a REALLY easy meal to make, and super fast - I’d definitely do it again, and the end result was epic.

Bonus: our discovery of the cooked barley, about an hour and a half after starting it and ten minutes after finishing dinner. It was desert barely. 

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - One Pan Healthy Sausage and Veggies

New year, new blog post. As I sit here eating my chicken kielbasa leftovers, I’m inspired to reflect on my hopes and dreams for the months ahead. To say that the end of 2018 was a bit hectic and difficult would be…lacking. There were a number of days when I didn’t eat a single meal at home. There was a whole week when I didn’t spend more than an hour awake in my own apartment. I was working 14 hour shifts, drinking a whole lot of coffee, and enjoying an unhealthy amount of takeout. So here we are, dear friends - finally fancy free and ready to be a human again! Which brings us to:

A really lazy first recipe attempt! No but seriously, I read this over once and didn’t even bother to look at it as I cooked. Here’s my attempt at a barely-referenced version of Chelsea’s colorful One Pan Healthy Sausage and Veggies

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Not really, no

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - Nope!

Does it taste good? - It’s fine! I mean, slap a little sriracha on there and it’s pretty good, otherwise it tastes like healthy food.

One Pan Healthy Sausage and Veggies

Ingredients

2 cups (~1 small) red potato

¾ths pound green beans

1 large head of broccoli (~ 1 and ½ cups)

1 and ½ cups chopped bell peppers 2 large or 6-7 mini sweet bell peppers

9 ounces smoked sausage I use turkey or chicken, not ground sausage

6 tablespoons olive oil

¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes optional

1 teaspoon paprika

½ teaspoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1 tablespoon dried parsley

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

Serve with: fresh parsley, quinoa/rice, lots of freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Line a large sheet pan with foil or parchment paper.

Prep the veggies: chop the red potatoes (pretty small pieces here so they will be tender in time), trim the green beans and halve (see video above recipe), chop the broccoli, chop the peppers into thick squares, and coin the sausage in thick slices.

Place all the veggies and sausage on a sheet pan. Pour the olive oil and all the spices on top. Toss to evenly coat all the veggies and meat.

Bake 15 minutes, remove from the oven and flip/stir all the veggies around. Return to the oven and bake for another 10-15 minutes or until vegetables are crisp tender and sausage is browned.

If desired, sprinkle freshly grated Parmesan cheese over the veggies and sausage as soon as they come out of the oven.

Enjoy with rice or quinoa and fresh parsley if desired.

I was feeling like a bit of a trash monster due to all the not eating anything healthy stint, so my only criteria for this meal was a) vaguely healthy and b) easy, so once I saw the words ‘one pan’ and ‘broccoli’ I was sold. Reading up about Chelsea on her blog I appreciated that she actually studied health/nutrition and didn’t write eight paragraphs about Jesus (no dis to those who love reading about the Lord’s blessings on a food blog, it’s just not my jam). Bonus points for meeting my three-word-title criteria.

So this isn’t exactly everything you need - I also grabbed a bag of carrots and threw a few in there, and you’ll notice a startling lack of cheese in this photo. It was not until three days later, while eating this dish as leftovers and writing up this blog, that I realize I completely forgot about the cheese element. Clearly all that overtime in December broke something in me. How could I forget the cheese. How.

Chop your big broccoli into little broccoli.

Chop your big onion into little onions. Chop your little garlic into even littler garlic. Drown all of the above in olive oil, aka nectar of the cooking gods.

The recipe calls for red potatoes, but Allan had grabbed a bag of mixed potatoes from the store so I just pulled out and used the ones that were vaguely in the red color family. Side note: there’s rice cooking in my beloved $5 CVS rice cooker in the background, but it’s SUPER SPECIAL rice, because it’s being cooked entirely in freshly made turkey stock that I made from my grandma’s leftover Thanksgiving bones. Awwww yis.

Chop them into what you think are small enough pieces and drown in olive oil.

Realize there’s no way in hell those potatoes are gonna roast through at that size, so after carefully arranging them on your pan, go back and take every single one off individually to cut it in half again.

Ahh, much better. Tiny ‘tatoes.

Since your guy doesn’t like peppers and your pan is a little lacking in color, chop up a handful of baby carrots and add them to the mix. This is really going off the rails though, because everyone knows that carrots are some of the hardest veggies on the block. By adding them in place of gentle, soft peppers, will I doom my dish to undercooked failure?!

Don’t forget your green beans! They’re annoying as heck to trim, aren’t they? Stupid little buggers, each a different length, slightly bendy, impossible to line up and chop all at once. Who do they think they are, anyway?

Admire your pan of raw ingredients after slicing your turkey kielbasa - it almost looks like edible food! Pat yourself on the back! You chopped a bunch of raw things and mixed them together!

MAGICALLY COOKED FOOD!

Now the point of this recipe was to make up lunches for the week, so line up all your matching take-out containers and fill ‘em up with special Thanksgiving-reborn rice, leftover spinach (and/or raw cherry tomatoes when you realize you don’t have enough spinach) and your beautiful sausage veggies. BAM. Three days of lunches for us!

Relax with your stuffed animals and a whiskey sour, you earned it.

Final final verdict: Silly easy, fairly healthy, and a good base for meal prep. 10/10 will lazily make again.

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Croque Monsieur

Thought you could get rid of me that easily!? Hello all - yes, it’s been a while. These past few months I’ve been running around New England as my favorite people in the world get married, buy houses, and have babies. Celebrating life milestones with my loved ones has been wonderful, and I’m so grateful to all of them for sharing those special moments with me. And now that all the excitement has died down, I’m settled back at home to celebrate the truly big things in my own life: rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation, fixing the scratching post my cat destroyed, and successfully making a grilled cheese with ham.

Also I’ve been spending a lot of money on wine lately. Can’t find any correlation. Hmm.

Anyhoo, Allan and I had the distinct honor of hosting one of our favorite people Zach for dinner the other night, and this mad lad was inspired to teach us FRENCH COOKING. Seriously, if you’re not friends with this guy you’re missing out - funny, nice as heck, and a master chef. He’ll even bring you laundry detergent if you ask nicely! Zach took our lumpy, lifeless forms and turned them into PASSABLE SOUS CHEFS! Meaning we didn’t burn down the kitchen. Join us as we are taught how to make the New York Times’ Croque Monsieur!

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - We did not have fresh-baked, hand-sliced country white bread, but other than that it’s not totally fake!

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - Stocking up on cheese was probably an expense, but since Zach did the shopping I have a nice buffer and can pretend it was FREE!

Does it taste good? - I’m sorry, have you ever met a dish made entirely of melted cheese that WASN’T good? ‘Cause I haven’t.

Croque-Monsieur

Makes 2 sandwiches (we doubled it for four)

Time: 20 minutes (eehhhhhhh)

INGREDIENTS

5 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon flour

⅔ cup milk 

Sea salt 

Freshly grated nutmeg

4 1/3-inch-thick slices country bread (not sourdough or whole wheat)

4 thin slices French ham

2 thin slices Gruyere cheese

DIRECTIONS

Preheat a two-sided electric griddle on medium-high to high for about 20 minutes, or preheat the oven to 300 degrees and preheat a cast-iron skillet on top of the stove for about 5 minutes. Prepare a bechamel sauce: in a small saucepan over medium heat, melt 1 tablespoon butter. When bubbles have subsided, add flour and whisk vigorously for 1 minute. Slowly whisk in milk until smooth. Bring to a boil, and cook until thick. Remove from heat, and season to taste with salt and nutmeg.

Spread two slices of bread generously with sauce. Lay two slices of ham on top of each, and top each with a slice of cheese; ham and cheese should slightly overlap edges of bread. Top each with a slice of bread.

In a small saucepan, melt remaining the 4 tablespoons butter. Brush the sandwiches on both sides with butter, making sure that the edges are well covered. If you're using a griddle, place cheese side down, close the griddle and cook until the bread is toasted dark and cheese is leaking out and bubbling. If you're using a skillet, place sandwiches cheese side down and cook on stove top until well browned, then turn and brown again. Transfer skillet to oven, and bake until heated through and cheese is bubbling. Serve hot.

A motley crew, to be sure. Allan and I had just rushed to run home and jumped in and out of the shower, hence why we look like drowned rats. Zach looks lovely. I can’t really comment about the state of the New York Times cooking website because honestly, Zach brought it and I didn’t find it wandering among the shiny editorial photos of Pintrest. Plus they’re a really good resource for recipes (my favorite salad dressing is from a NYT recipe). So just trust they’re cool. 

This is sorta vaguely what you’ll need. We’ve also got cooking drinks and snacks mixed in there too. And dish soap. Don’t cook with that.

Here’s Zach, casting a spell over his phone to ensure the success of our undertaking. Spoiler alert: it worked!

Mandatory cooking wine. Angry Bunch is my current favorite (aka the Hapke/Knowles house wine) and if anyone from Angry Bunch wants to send me a free bottle for the shameless plug, just send it to Somerville. Doesn’t matter where. I’ll find it.

Ok, so you get your bowl of ice water out. This made me nervous, because it was starting to seem like this was going to be really complicated like making a pie crust from scratch, but it turns out it was just for de-starching the potatoes. Oh, did I mention we were making our own french fries? ‘Cause HECK YEAH folks, we were also HAND-MAKING FRIES!

Turn yo potatoes into fries! Cold, wet fries!

Zach checking the recipe while poor Allan is (once again) put on potato peeling duty. What can I say, kid has skills. Also I realize that at this point I’ve told you nothing about making a croque monsieur. Patience, dear reader.

To make a croque monsieur you’re gonna need an amazing cheese sauce to pour over your actual slices of cheese. It’s a modified roux. And being a Rew, it was only fitting that I had roux-making duty (with the watchful eye and helpful directions of our fearless leader Zach). Here I am attempting to grate just enough cheese to make the sauce. We found out shortly later that ‘just enough’ cheese was actually all the cheese he brought. 

Had to leave enough Gruyere to slice, ‘cause no one wants a grilled cheese made of only cheese sauce. You need cheese melt AND sauce. Obviously.

Teamwork makes the dream work! Zach gently adding flour while I stir WITHOUT STOPPING to make a damn fine roux. My grandma would be proud. She re-teaches me this every single year at Thanksgiving when we make gravy. Also note the banana cream pie in the top right because Zach is a super guest and not only brings all the ingredients and know-how to a dinner party but he even brings *desert*. Damn.

Allan on ham duty! We were running out of counter space, hence the sink-shot.

A PERFECT CHEESY ROUX! If you dip your spoon in and it comes out drippy but coated, you know you’ve hit that sweet spot.

Take your hand-me-down lobster pot (that you usually only use to cold-brew coffee) and actually use it to cook things! Here I discover that every attempt I’ve ever made to deep fry has resulted in hot-grease arms/hands/walls because I wasn’t using a deep enough pot. Look at me now!!

We’ve got ham, cheese, cheese sauce, and more cheese. It’s...beautiful. And ready to go in the oven!

Pomme frites!

As you can see we didn’t quite get that orange glow on top of ours like the NYT photo, but they still look DAMN fine to me.

All three of us are former restaurant employees. As such, plating is very important. Notice we even made the effort to pretend this isn’t just a cheese-stuffed 10,000 calorie cheat meal. ‘Cause it has a salad. Healthy!

Aaaaaaand the reaction? Thumbs up!!

Final final verdict: Fucking. Delicious. Make this as the ultimate comfort food dinner, and follow it up with banana cream pie. EPIC. Thank you Zach!!

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Vodka Sauce Chicken Zucchini Noodles

Since our last meeting, I have stopped cooking all our meals at home. As a result I am now broke and have gained two pounds. It’s a sad state of affairs, folks. Two business trips and BAM. Ordering takeout every night like my life depends on it. In a weak effort to get back into the cooking game (and eat a meal that might clock in at less than 1,000 calories) I busted out the ole’ Pinterest board and whipped up this sad effort. Join me as we explore what went wrong with: vodka sauce chicken zucchini noodles.

It looks beautiful, doesn’t it? Creamy, glistening, a rich golden color - I’m getting hungry just looking at it.

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Yeah, a little. ‘Cause like EVERY SINGLE DISH I try to make with zucchini noodles, the sauce instantly turned into water. This despite salting the zoodles for nearly an hour and rolling them up TIGHTLY in paper towels.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - It calls for about 40+ minutes of cooking, and working with two people overlapping tasks it took us a solid hour, but that’s not far from the estimate. Not expensive tho.

Does it taste good? - It’s solidly okay, but not for the amount of time it takes.

Vodka Sauce Chicken Zucchini Noodles

Prep time: 15 mins, cook time: 45 mins

Ingredients

3 to 4 zucchini

2 tablespoons olive oil

12 ounces boneless skinless chicken breasts

1 teaspoon dried thyme

salt and pepper , to taste

FOR THE VODKA SAUCE

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 garlic cloves , minced

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 can (14.5 oz) low sodium diced tomatoes

1/2 cup vodka

1 cup 2% milk

1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

Peel zucchini lengthwise with a vegetable peeler to create long strips.

Lay zucchini strips flat on a paper towel-lined baking sheet; set aside to dry.

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.

Season chicken breasts with thyme, salt and pepper; add to skillet and cook for 4 minutes per side, or until cooked through.

Remove from skillet; cut into strips and set aside. Cover to keep warm.

In the same skillet, heat the butter and olive oil over medium heat.

Add garlic and tomato paste and cook for 30 seconds, or until fragrant.

Okay, I just read that the blog author doesn’t want the entire recipe posted on other blogs, so if you’d like to see the final steps just click here for her full recipe. Or read on and see how I royally muck it up!

First off get yourself a sous chef, ‘cause this recipe would take probably two hours if you don’t get the chicken cooking long before the whole zucchini nonsense is done. Found this guy in my living room, so he’ll do.

I found this recipe on a website called ‘Diethood’, which is not nearly as whimsical a blog name as our usual fare, but I’m seriously trying to eat better. However, our mom-of-two blog author Katerina reassures me that her site is NOT about diet food, but rather the sum of everything you eat. M’kay. ...wait, she has some BOMB ass cookie recipes on there, so there might be some truth in that. Hmm, haven’t done a desert in a while...

Assemble yo shiz-nit! Favorite purchase of all my unpinned adventures? Vodka. Also please note the glaring lack of tomato paste. I ended up using a blob of leftover turkey bolognese from last night’s dinner instead. 

Casually peel a heaping pile of zucchini into delicate little strips! Ha ha just kidding, struggle and nearly slice your knuckles off trying to use a 2$ plastic peeler to get anything resembling a noodle strip from a zucchini. Wish desperately you had a mandolin, then remember the horror from working in a restaurant kitchen with a mandolin. There was so much blood. Decide you don’t want a mandolin.

My ever-cheerful sidekick prepares to cook all the chicken at once. Although I’m the more adventurous (and definitely more focused/driven) cook in the house, I will give him one thing: this man cooks meat *perfectly*. For some reason I often over or undercook our chicken just a bit (or undercook and immediately overcook in an attempt to undo my undercooking), but with what looks like zero effort his chicken always comes out moist and exactly right. I don’t know how he does it.

Three pans at once. A bold move, Cotton. Let’s see how it plays out for him.

Chicken in progress, I asked my sous chef to squeeze half a dozen lemons for whiskey sours - it’s a good backup plan. If the recipe comes out terrible, at least everyone will be tipsy off of the cocktails and may not notice as much!

About halfway through fighting with my impossible-to-grip zucchini I had an epiphany. What the hell was I doing? I have a SPIRALIZER. So half our zoodles were curly and flat and the other half were straight and flat. I do what I want. I ain’t a part of the SYSTEM. I BREAK RULES.

Use literally half a roll of paper towels in a desperate effort to avoid the pitfall you experience EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. you try to cook with zoodles - watery sauce. Surely if I wrap them up like a sleeping bag and salt them and leave them forever I can avoid the water breakage I always end up with?

In case you’ve ever wondered what our poorly stocked, desperately outdated kitchen actually looks like, here it is in most of its early-80s glory. We make it work.

Checking the chicken. The one cooked in the older, thinner pan is done, the rest need more time. Such is life with mismatched, hand-me-down cookware.

OK NOW IT’S GO TIME! Bust out yo vodka! Dump in in your sauce! Be alarmed at how overwhelmingly your kitchen now smells like a dive bar!

The sauce is definitely looking like a sauce. A really, really boozy sauce that sort of stings your eyes. I trust that science will indeed burn off most of the alcohol. It calls for ten minutes of simmering but your guests are already arriving so we might just have to have sauce with an illegal alcohol content.

TOSS IT ALL IN DA PAN! Notice that lovely sauce we used to have now looks like orange water. Crap.

Plate that stuff. It looks nothing like the Pinterest photo. The sauce is broth. All is lost.

Serve it to your poor unsuspecting game mates and watch as they all try to comfort you that it’s ‘really quite good!’ and ‘it’s okay the sauce is watery’! But you know the truth. The zoodles have defeated you once again.

Final final verdict: Once again, I THINK this could be a recipe I’d do again, if I could just defeat the water sauce. It’s pretty tasty. I think if I just threw the zoodles into their own frying pan and the chicken into the sauce, then strained/dried the zoodles, plated them, and THEN drizzled the sauce right on top (rather than heating it all together at the end) this might work. If I try again I’ll let you guys know.

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Crockpot Chicken & Stuffing

Something in me finally clicked and I’ve been making almost all of our meals at home (*finally*) because it’s hella expensive to eat out all the time. I have no idea what happened to finally get this through my head, but here we are and my bank account thanks me. Welcome back, lovers of culinary suffering! Today’s recipe is a bit of a cheat as well, because rather than find this gem on Pinterest, it was brought to my attention on Reddit! They lovingly call it ‘chicken gloop’, which is now offically what it’s named in our house as well. Behold: chicken gloop.

Verdict: Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Nope! The guy even admits to chopping up a bunch of unexpected parsley and throwing (clearly cold) cheddar on top just for the photo. It’s got natural light, it’s got a cheap fork, there’s no sprigs of rosemary on a lovingly-worn farm table. Perfect. I love this.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - Not at all!

Does it taste good? - YES. If you like delicious, delicious slop. And I do.

Crockpot Chicken & Stuffing

Ingredients

2 10.5 ounce cans 98% fat free cream of chicken soup

1 box Stove Top Stuffing for chicken

2 cups low sodium chicken broth

2 lbs chicken breast , raw, trimmed

2 ribs celery , chopped finely

1/2 small yellow onion or 2 T dried minced onion

Instructions

In a medium mixing bowl add stuffing mix, cream of chicken soup, chopped celery, and onion. Mix together thoroughly. Grab a your crockpot, lightly spray with cooking spray, add your chicken. Pour chicken broth over the chicken and then spread the stuffing mix on top and press down so that it gets moistened with the chicken broth. Cook on low for 7-8 hours. When it's finished slow cooking. Take a couple forks and just shred the chicken and mix it all together. Serve & Enjoy!

So first off, a selfie to show you guys how much I love you. I could’ve just ordered Thai. It would’ve been DELICIOUS. It was cold out, I was tired, and Allan had the car. And you know what? I walked to the damn store ANYWAY, and lugged home two heavy bags of ingredients and two giant containers of paper goods (unrelated but we needed them so it’s RELEVANT) *just* so you folks could have an unpinned recipe. The lengths I go to for you people. Geez.

Today’s recipe is straight from one of my favorite subreddits, r/slowcooking. User Costner_Facts seems very lovely, as evidenced by a little stalking on their profile. I see just the other day they were commenting on a weight loss subreddit: “Don't get discouraged! I would bet that your "out to eat" meals had a ton of salt and you're retaining some water. Try weighing yourself in a couple of days and I'd bet those 2 lbs are gone.You can DO THIS! :)” Okay, I now love this person. Their post linked to a proper recipe on a blog but we’ll ignore that for now, as I smashed their directions and the blog directions together anyway.

Here’s what we need! It’s like....super reasonable! I use all my poultry bones and veggie scraps to make stock, so there’s a freezer full of stock to pull from, and then we’ve got yer onion, yer celery, and yer carrots. Wait, there’s no carrots on the directions. Shit. Guess Costner_Facts decided to throw some carrots in there so TO HELL WITH CAUTION, we’re gonna do it too!

Step one: make your stalks into bits. I recommend using a knife, but teeth will do in a pinch.

Pause to try and tie back your brand new short hair! It’s difficult ‘cause you’ve never had it shorter than your shoulders but it’s getting in your eyes so up it goes. Very important to feel adorable whilst cooking. Please note this feeling does not need to correspond with the reality of how you look. Thanks Grace!!

Start to dump out your baby carrots for chopping so they’ll look nice and coherent alongside your neatly chopped celery.

Realize that’s a stupid waste of time and dump those babies into the crock pot, cohesion be damned. Please note the time on the coffee maker in the background. What is wrong with me.

Plop da chicken.

Check on your dethawing stock, since you didn’t plan this ahead and give them time to thaw normally and had to resort to throwing them in a dirty sink pan full of hot water.

Begin to chop your carefully selected onion. Realize with horror that it has a rotten layer. Worse, it’s incredibly overripe. It’s potent. TOO POTENT.

WRITHE IN PAIN AS THE OVERLY RIPE ONION TURNS YOUR EYEBALLS INTO BLEEDING SHARDS OF GLASS. Do you guys have any idea how long it took for my vision to clear enough to take this damn photo? It was AGONY. Why do I do this to myself!? They make perfectly good frozen onions! They’re even PRE-CHOPPED!

Dump some alarmingly unappetizing cream of chicken on top of your napalm onion bits. Mmm. Looks like vanilla pudding. Delicious, onion-y vanilla pudding.

Mix in the gift from the gods, freeze-dried tasty bread! I don’t know about you guys, but in my house, stuffing happened once and only once a year: Thanksgiving. Allan has introduced me to the idea that stuffing can actually be eaten anytime and anywhere, which is a dangerous idea for a newfound calorie counter. We’re throwing caution to the wind here, guys.

Mix your chicken vanilla pudding, your Satanic onion pieces, and your freeze dried bread. This already sounds amazing.

Whoo! The stock mostly unfroze! Boo. It’s not quite two cups. Add some water in there ‘cause it’s late and we sure as shit aren’t dethawing any more stock. Seriously it’s like 11pm at this point.

Pop on your newly-repaired crockpot lid (’cause you melted the handle off the other one) and set it for eight hours! Sweet dreams, chicken-y gloopy mess!

Wake up, fall out of bed, drag a comb across your head. Check on your chicken gloop! DESPAIR! It has turned into chunky brown mess! Where did our stuffing go?! Where’s our chicken?! Oh wait - we still need to shred it. Swallow your panic and get out two forks to shred this mo-fo.

THERE. That’s more like it. Fin!

 Final final verdict: This tastes exactly like the inside of a chicken pot pie. We made up a pot of mashed potatoes (five white potatoes, one sweet potato - delicious!) to go with it, and it’s frankly delicious. It LOOKS like gloop. But it tastes like magic :) A+ 10/10 will make again!

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - One Pan Teriyaki Chicken Zoodles

Yup, my posts are monthly I guess. So this disaster happened a few weeks ago, but once I start spending all my nights over with the Boston Pops, cooking sort of...stops. I’m lucky if eating even happens. At least I get to have Sleigh Ride stuck in my head for the entire month of December! But I digress. 

Sometime last month I was hungry, and I had zucchini. So I jumped onto my trusty old Pinterest board and looked for some zoodle-y goodness. And there waiting for me was the perfect recipe: One pan (!!) teriyaki (!) chicken (yum!) zoodles (yay!). A dish filled with things I like, no trip to the grocery store required, and ONE PAN? Certainly it’s too good to be true!

Hold on to your hats. Because it was indeed too good to be true. 

Verdict:

Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Yup. Absolutely. Are those even pineapple pieces in the picture, or are they secretly just tiny carved pieces of tangerine that were hit with a blow torch until they looked juuuuuuuuust right?

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - It’s not expensive or super time consuming but this recipe actually sets a new record for confusing. More on that later.

Does it taste good? - No. It WANTS to taste good, it TRIES to taste good, and it only tastes...meh.

One Pan Teriyaki Chicken Zoodles 

Ingredients

2 medium pieces boneless, skinless, chicken breasts (about 2/3 lb) cut into strips or chunks

salt and black pepper to taste

2 tablespoons cooking oil (olive or coconut oil for paleo)

5-6 medium zucchini, cut into noodles using a spiralizer or a vegetable peeler

1 cup chopped pineapple chunks (fresh, frozen or canned - I used fresh - can leave out for low calorie and swap in broccoli instead)

Sauce

1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce ( gluten free tamari or coconut aminos for a paleo version)

2-3 tablespoons honey, coconut sugar or low calorie sweetener of your choice (depending on how sweet your preference is)

3 tablespoons rice vinegar

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 teaspoon grated ginger

1 tablespoon corn starch (or use arrowroot powder or tapioca starch for a paleo version)

2 tablespoons water, plus more as needed to thin out sauce

Salt, black pepper and red pepper flakes to taste, optional

Optional:

Green onions, sliced thinly

Broccoli florets

Sesame Seeds

Lunch containers, for meal prep

Instructions

In a small bowl, whisk together all the ingredients for the sauce.

In a large bowl, season chicken with salt and pepper and drizzle 1-2 tablespoons of sauce over the chicken. Allow to marinate for 30 minutes.

Heat cooking oil in a large skillet on medium high heat. Add chicken and cook until lightly brown, about 1-2 minutes. Add in the pineapple chunks and cook for another 1 minute, until slightly softened. Pour in the remainder of the sauce and turn the heat to high. Allow sauce to bubble and thicken while stirring - about 1-2 minutes - add more water a little at a time (only as needed if sauce is too thick). Season to taste with salt, black pepper and/or red chili flakes.

*If cooking the zucchini noodles, add into pan and use tongs to toss and coat with sauce. Cook for 1-2 minutes until zucchini is just tender but still firm. Be careful not to overcook.

Remove from heat and drizzle extra sauce in pan over chicken and serve immediately. Garnish with green onions and sesame seeds if desired.

For meal prep: Divide evenly into lunch containers. Store in fridge for up to four days.

Notes

*do not overcook for longer than 2 minutes or else noodles will get too soft and mushy. You can also serve the chicken over raw zucchini noodles if desired.

I was very tired and not really in the mood to cook but also kind of broke and fairly hungry, so this picture is me feeling all of those things at once. Pardon my...face.

Our recipe today comes from Life Made Sweeter, which I’ve maybe used before? It has a whole bunch of ads on it and this lovely little note on every single page: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE SEE MY FULL DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR DETAILS. That’s cool! You go get that ad revenue, girl! The writer and mom-of-two Kelly is in charge. She seems super nice and I might scroll through her site again and try one of her desert ideas ‘cause there’s a ton and they look bomb. 

Here’s what you need. Ah, yes. We meet again, my arch-nemesis cornstarch. This was the moment I should have known we were doomed. But no, surely the recipe will calm my fears?

WHAT!? Add more water if it’s too watery?! THAT’S NOT HOW WATER WORKS. THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS. I’m realizing now that the text on the site and the text I’d printed off a few weeks ago no longer match. Did someone tip her off? Am I going crazy?

Yeah well it’s too late, we’ve taken the picture of the stuff on the counter so now we’re committed. So go ahead and pour our a nice 1/4 cup of soy...sauce...dammit. Out of soy sauce. GOD DAMN IT I’M NOT GOING OUT TO THE GROCERY STORE AGAIN.

But wait! You’re a grown woman living in her own place! That means you have TAKEOUT SOY SAUCE growing in the deep recesses of your fridge/junk drawers! Huzzah! The day is saved! (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

Now you shame yourself by not only using ‘the bear’ honey (is it even really honey?), it’s STORE BRAND bear honey. Please forgive me, Melanie. This is what happens when you peace out of the country and leave me to my own devices. 

My bff garlic. Love garlic. Chop it up and get it everywhere, even some in your bowl.

My not-so-bff ginger. I’m only just starting to come around to ginger, and I prefer it minced tiny and hidden in dishes with lots of other flavors. So chop it up , get it everywhere, even some in your bowl. That’s how we roll.

CORNSTARCH. It promises you a world of gravy-like consistency, and delivers NOTHING. Screw cornstarch, I’m so fed up with getting my hopes crushed.

Chop da chicken, whisk da sauce. So far, looking surprisingly like an in-progress meal. At this point my hopes were high, tempered by my distrust of cornstarch.

Realize you’ve left a load of laundry finished in a dryer in the basement. Run down and rescue it, then woefully fold it so it’s not a wrinkled waste of effort. Sit for a moment and despair about how tired and hungry you are. 

Cheer yourself up my turning some vegetables into strings! I ended up only using four of the zuchinni and then only 2/3rds of my zoodles because this was just too damn many zoodles. I’ve ruined so many recipes by not taking the extra time to let my zoodles sit out, press the water out, and dry up with salt, so I did ALL of those things. Dammit, I was going to have dry zoodles.

Make your chicken less raw. This helps prevent salmonella!

Toss your chunks (heh) into the pan as your chicken is approaching unraw. Save a few to nibble on later. Forget about them in the back of your fridge and throw them away three weeks later when they no longer smell like pineapple.

SAUCE!

Throw in your overly-salted zoodles! Stir and mix and grunt as you try to get a wooden spoon through an impossibly tangled ball of zoodles! Rejoice ‘cause it smells good and looks like food! Panic as you realize you’ve been attempting to mix it up for more than the carefully allotted two minutes of cook time!

Put in bowl, add sesame seeds. At this point I was so hungry I would’ve eaten it no matter what, but looking back I’m perplexed by how much it looks like fake food. Not fake like photoshopped-magazine food, but fake like the plastic food you let children play with in their mini-kitchens, where they serve you empty plastic cups of tea and handfuls of plastic spaghetti as you sit cross-legged on the floor and pretend it’s very yummy.

My lazy roommate joined me when she smelled dinner. We both look cautious. 

The sad reality: within minutes of being taken off the burner, the sauce all turned into water. Soupy, sad, not-delicious water.

ONE PAN MY ASS. 

Final final verdict: Sad. So sad. Winter sucks. I’m just going to subsist off of hot cocoa and wine from now on.

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Roasted Kohlrabi and Roasted Delicata Squash

Well, it seems these posts are going to be monthly instead of weekly. Although as the weather gets colder and the days get shorter/darker, I tend to start to hibernate - which means more cooking at home. Actually, I’ve been cooking a lot lately, just nothing new. Until NOW. Because baby our STOVE IS FIXED! After absolutely ruining an entire roast chicken (seriously, how do you mess up a chicken? Put in stove, heat until not-raw) I realized I was waiting 40-50 minutes for my oven to pre-heat and maybe that wasn’t normal? Lo and behold, the heating element in my stove was on the fritz. Now that it’s working I’m cooking up a STORM! Which leads me to today’s adventure: side dishes.

“But Rew!” (you may shout), “who cares about side dishes?” Me. I do. I love a good side dish. Especially if it’s warm and comforting and autumnal and has cheese. In fact, I love them so much that I pretty much just ate side dishes for dinner this night and I have NO REGRETS. 

So confession time: I sort of broke my own rules on this one. I know the whole premise of this blog is to test out picture-perfect Pinterest recipes and see if they’re any good, but not this time. This time we worked in reverse. At my local farmer’s market I found not one but TWO vegetables I’d never tasted, and decided to just take them home and hope for the best. I went hunting for recipes and once I found them I plopped them into my Pinterest board. So they’re...technically there. But...only...recently. It’s fine, just go with it. May I present: roasted kohlrabi and roasted delicata squash!

Verdict:

Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - Let’s be honest, that kohlrabi one looks pretty legit to me. The delicata squash is a bit too pristine to be real though.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - Not at all, once you get over the confusion of trying to understand a kohlrabi itself. Is it a dragon egg? A mushroom? WHO KNOWS?!

Does it taste good? - Both of these are SO good I’ve made them twice this week!! New normal rotation dishes, as long as I can find them! I fear once the farmer’s market closes up shop for the season it’ll be another year until I can get my hands on either :/

Roasted Kohlrabi

Ingredients

4 kohlrabi bulbs, peeled

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

salt and pepper to taste

1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Directions

Preheat an oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).

Cut the kohlrabi into 1/4 inch thick slices, then cut each of the slices in half. Combine olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Toss kohlrabi slices in the olive oil mixture to coat. Spread kohlrabi in a single layer on a baking sheet.

Bake in the preheated oven until browned, 15 to 20 minutes, stirring occasionally in order to brown evenly. Remove from oven and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Return to the oven to allow the Parmesan cheese to brown, about 5 minutes. Serve immediately.

Roasted Delicata Squash & Onions

Ingredients

2 pounds delicata squash (about 2 large)

1 medium red onion, sliced

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided

¼ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

1 tablespoon maple syrup

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Directions

Preheat oven to 425°F.

Cut squash in half lengthwise, then crosswise; scoop out the seeds. Cut lengthwise into ½-inch-thick wedges. Toss with onion, 1 tablespoon oil and salt in a large bowl. Spread in an even layer on a baking sheet.

Roast, stirring once or twice, until tender and beginning to brown, about 30 minutes.

Combine the remaining 1 tablespoon oil, rosemary, syrup and mustard in a small bowl. Toss the vegetables with the dressing.

Confession #2: This is more than you will need for these two recipes. Because originally, I was going to attempt three. And then I got tired. And bored. So YOU ONLY GET TWO. I’m sorry, you can just toss that soy sauce, paprika, and eggplant right in the trash.

Since I cheated and found both recipes via Google, I’ll just link you to their Pinterest counterparts here and here. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, first: examine your kohlrabi. Seriously. Where do you even start with these things?! What part do you eat!?

First step: although you can eat the leaves (and they’re supposed to be great cooked like collard greens or in a soup), I opted to chop them off and throw them in my stock bag (more on that later).

Realize you’re gonna be at this for a while so go pour yourself a glass of red wine a la Julia Child and laugh at your new bar art. It’s a vintage whiskey advertisement with the STUPIDEST HAPPY LITTLE BIRDS EVER! Seriously, look at their stupid little happy faces. They make me laugh every time I look at them. Shout out to Nate and Miriam for hosting us in Seattle this summer, where I found this!

Ok back to work. You “peel” the kohlrabi the same way you would most any root vegetable. Just...carefully slice all the thick skin off. The ends of the “meat” are kind of tough and woody, so cut those off too. It feels a lot like trying to handle a pineapple.

Looking good! Slice ‘em like fries! Fun fact: kohlrabi is sort of like...if cauliflower and a potato and broccoli and cabbage all had a sort of sweet-tasting baby. I was told multiple times at the market that it’s awesome in coleslaw, and so I snuck a taste of the raw stuff and DANG it was tasty! I ended up eating a whole handful at this point.

Recipe wants you to mix olive oil and garlic in a bowl and then toss in the bowl. Pfft. Yeah. Like I’m gonna dirty another bowl. Not. Mix that shiznit with your hands on the pan.

Ok squash time! The little tag on the delicata squash at the farmers market said it was a popular choice due to its tasty and edible skin - so wait, I don’t need to peel the damn things? Sign me up!

Chop off the ends and scoop out the seeds, so they’re nice and empty - like how you feel after paying your student loan interest :D

CHOP ‘EM! Chop red onions too! Cry into your red wine a little! Salt! Pepper! Olive oil again!!

Here we are getting back to our poor-chef basics: the recipe calls for tasty Dijon mustard. You only have French’s yellow. OH WELL! Use it! We are fancy enough to have wandered outside in the rain to get a sprig of rosemary from our quickly dying garden, so there’s that.

Our squash “dressing”. It only makes a tiny bit but it’s strong, so you just need to mix the squash in the bowl to give it this surprisingly nice little kick. Who’d have thought that rosemary, maple syrup, olive oil and YELLOW MUSTARD would mix up so tasty?

On a side note, my bag of scraps for stock making has NEVER looked so colorful and pretty!

Squash is done! Kohlrabi needed a little extra time. Pro-tip: when making these two recipes at the same time, just pre-heat your (working!) oven to about 440 and keep an eye on them, they’ll cook just fine. Throw your squash into the dressing bowl and mix and mix until everything is nice and slightly smushed/syrupy!

Kohlrabi is nearly done! Sprinkle a handful of Parmesan on top and put it back in the oven for another few minutes. On writing up this review I think I could’ve left them in even longer for more of that nice brown crisping I see in the original recipe. Hmm.

BAM! Dinner is served! Roasted delicata squash with a maple/mustard glaze and Parmesan-roasted kohlrabi, with a tiny side of orange-pink turkey. 

Final final verdict: YES! I’m going to make both of these as often as I can while I can find the two elusive veggies!

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Avocado and Goat Cheese Grilled Cheese

I made this over three weeks ago but I’ve been out of the state four times in as many weeks, so I’m sort of spent. Yes it’s late, yes I’m a little sorry - I’ll cook more. I promise. Mainly because after four trips I’m broke as hell and if I want to not-starve I’ll have to cook! Not one but TWO friends directed me to this article in the NY Times calling for posts on social media of ‘everyday food’ (rather than instagram-perfect restaurant meals) for culinary history. So HERE WE ARE!

Rachel posted this too-beautiful-for-words sandwich on her blog, complete with rectangular plate and tastefully placed leaf of spinach. She seems nice! But has a note about not copy/pasting her recipes on other blogs. Hmm. Wish I’d read that before trying her recipe, but ah well. Lucky for us it’s a sandwich, and I have faith that we can all figure this out together without copyright infringement. Here’s my tl:dr of her recipe: get the ingredients, assemble, grill.

Verdict:

Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - I mean, yeah, a little. Unless you get crazy artisan nut-filled magic bread and a blowtorch, it’s not going to look like that.

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - So expensive you’ll never be able to buy a house. But hey! You’ll have avocados!

Does it taste good? - Mmmmm yes, but not as good as I imagined it would. It was pretty damn heavy.

Sorry, no recipe. You heard the lady. You’ll just have to follow along with the pictures ;)

So this was a vacation meal! I went shopping for enough supplies to make grilled cheese for six, and hauled all of it up into the wild woods of Maine JUST FOR YOU PEOPLE (and also so we could eat). Pardon my messy lake-water hair.

Special guest cabin kitchen! Surprisingly well-equipped! We’ve got STOVE, we’ve got FRIDGE, we’ve got RUNNING WAT...oh wait. Nope, the running water stopped working shortly after this meal. Yup.

Here’s what you need for epic Millennial-approved avocado toast supreme: fresh mozzarella, goat cheese, pesto, a bunch of avocados, better bread than I bought, olive oil, and spinach. So much green, so little time.

Step one: turn your avocados from dragon eggs into mortgage-destroying goodness! I.e. cut your avocados. Please be careful getting the seed out: I recommend one sharp tap with a LARGE chopping knife, then twisting the blade while it’s in the seed to gently pop it out. Most other methods have resulted in me slicing off my fingernails (seriously this is a frequent problem for me).

Get overly ambitious and try to make six sandwiches at once. Magically catch some renegade pesto with your hand, thus avoiding a disaster of oil-stain proportions!

You bought pre-sliced fresh mozzarella, you clever devil! Saves time and effort! Unfortunately also makes for uneven cheese distribution. Tear ‘em apart with your bare hands like the mountain woman you are (this particular weekend).

CAPTURE ON FILM THIS EPIC ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME AVOCADO SAVE! I nearly dropped 1/4 of an avocado but my Millennial instincts kicked in and I CAUGHT IT, at the expense of my shirt. Worth it.

Mmm. Get you a log of goat cheese. You may, like me, find yourself staring at the sad leftovers of your cheese log at the back of your fridge for weeks to come. I should probably toss that out soon.

We’ve got spinach, we’ve got goat cheese (maybe buy it crumbled next time), we’ve got other cheese, we’ve got avocado. We’re making a tasty, tasty mess. Go us.

Round two: FIGHT!

Put it in a pan! Remember too late that you are AWFUL at gauging cooking time/temperature with a skillet (so many dry, tasteless chicken breasts...) but shrug it away. Not this time, SURELY you can grill a cheese without too much hassle, right?

Wrong. You are a monster.

You can’t even make grilled cheese. You’ve brought shame and dishonor on your name. You’ll go on to literally ruin everything about roasting a chicken (a dish you’ve done a million times) the very next week. Ugh.

Learn from your mistakes and offer to eat the burned one, as the rest came out much more edible-looking. Sweet, lovely Kelsey offered to eat the overly-toasty one <3

Gather your hungry companions for this is the moment of truth!

It’s edible!

Final final verdict: It was kinda tasty, but sort of an odd mix of cheeses. It wanted to taste healthy with the fresh mozzarella and spinach, but the pesto was SO strong and the goat cheese so heavy. I think I’ll stick with apples and brie for my fancy grilled cheese needs. Fun to try once though.

[thevintagebluebird]

Unpinned - Tuna Zoodle Casserole

Welcome back. ‘Rew, why on earth didn’t you post for weeks? What happened?’ LET ME TELL YOU. This recipe happened. This recipe was SO BAD that it literally turned me off from cooking for WEEKS. I became a Breatharian. Just kidding, I’ve been draining my savings and eating out way too often. But seriously, this was probably the worst recipe I’ve made for this project, and it actually made me no longer want to cook. I’m writing it down to warn others. That’s all.

So here’s what I wanted to make. Tuna Zoodle Casserole. It looks pretty damn tasty, right? It’s healthy! It’s creamy! It’s paleo! Wait, what? About the time I was finishing getting my supplies together I realized I’d made a terrible mistake, because it calls for homemade ‘cashew cream’. Which requires over four hours of prep. Now, to be fair, she does warn this before sharing the recipe and she puts it in bold. But I am a fool, and was like ‘psssh, whateva, I’ll just use COCONUT MILK!’ What I’m trying to say is Cristina, your Castaway Kitchen blog is lovely, and there’s nothing wrong with a paleo diet. This is entirely my fault. I fucked up. I hate this recipe because of MY OWN HUBRIS, and I’m sorry. So keep in mind, I am only tearing this apart as made by me. Which was a complete fuck-up.

Verdict:

Is the Pintrest photo complete bullshit? - No! Mine came out surprisingly similar-looking!

Is it crazy expensive/time consuming/confusing? - Erm, it’s complicated if you make it correctly, but I bet it’s actually edible too.

Does it taste good? - NO.

Tuna Zoodle Casserole

15 min prep time, 30 min cook time

Ingredients

1 large zucchini

2 cans Safe Catch Albacore Tuna, in water

1/2 cup diced onion

1 minced garlic clove

3 large cremini mushrooms

1 tsp mustard

1 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp dried rosemary

1 tbsp lemon juice

2-3 tbsp paleo mayo (Primal Kitchen or Homemade, search one minute mayo for my recipe)

1 broccoli crown

1/2 cup chopped pecans (or walnuts, or cashews)

2/3 cup cashew cream (see text above for details)

Instructions

First, make sure you have your mayo and cashew cream ready!

Pre-heat your oven to 325F.

Zoodle your zucchini. Lay the zoodles flat on a clean kitchen towel and sprinkle with salt. Let them rest here to they release liquid while you prep the rest.

Mince onion and garlic, add in to the casserole dish.

Thinly slice mushrooms and add them to the dish too.

Open and drain tuna cans, flake the tuna into the casserole dish.

Add in the salt, pepper, 1 tbsp mayo, mustard, lemon juice and rosemary.

Mix well.

Wrap the kitchen towel around the zucchini and squeeze the water out.

Add the zoodles to the casserole dish and toss to combine.

Pour in the cashew cream. Gently Mix.

Cut your broccoli crown into florets and mince them into 1/4 inch pieces.

Toss with chopped pecans in a bowl and mix with remaining mayo.

Spread this mix over the top of the casserole.

Sprinkle lightly with salt.

Place in the oven and bake for 30-35 minutes.

It will be toasty on top and creamy inside! Make sure to use a knife to cut your pieces before serving or your zoodles will pull out the whole thing!

First off, I was a hot mess. Unwashed, exhausted, did NOT want to cook. It wasn’t boding well.

Here’s what you need if you want to completely fuck up this innocent recipe. Notice the flavor murder suspect: coconut milk. Also the farmer’s market mystery zucchini on the left. God, what was I thinking?

Zoodling. Credit to myself where it’s due, I FINALLY remembered to cut my damn zoodles as they came out. Fat lot of good it did me in the end...

Cut da garlic, cut da onions. All good meals start with a nice mirepoix. This was not one of those good meals.

Bam. Casserole dish. Feeling like my mom, using a casserole dish. Most of my food gets cooked in a frying pan.

Chop up your fancy mushrooms ‘cause they were on sale. My lord, do you know how bad this meal was that not even fancy mushrooms could save it?!

Scoop da tuna. So far everything looks edible. But it’s a lie.

Glop on da mayo. Ew. In case anyone was wondering, I’m not going into too much detail because I actually don’t want anyone to try this at home. If you’re intrigued, go to the original recipe and DO IT RIGHT. DON’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES I MADE.

Squeezed zoodles. I don’t think I squeezed them enough because it came out awful watery, but in the future I might try a little tip I saw on one of those facebook cooking video thingies where you salt your raw zoodles and leave them for twenty minutes so they can dry out a bit like an unfortunate garden slug found by spiteful children. Oh wait, she actually said to do that in the recipe. Dang.

Attempting to chop broccoli makes a mess. Attempting to chop raw nuts makes a mess. This whole thing was getting out of control. Why wasn’t I using an actual cutting board!?

*sob* DOESN’T IT LOOK BEAUTIFUL AND TASTY AND HEALTHY?!

*more sobbing* OH GOD WHY!? IT LOOKS SO GOOD! IT SMELLED GOOD! IF ONLY WE’D KNOWN!

I don’t even have a plated picture. Here’s Allan, deep in sorrow, eating a turkey sandwich. That’s right: for the first time, my result was INEDIBLE. It was just awful. And it’s all my fault, because I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, using COCONUT milk instead of cashew cream stuff. It tasted like zucchini noodles dunked in coconut milk covered in broccoli and nuts. Look at Lila’s face. That says it all.

Final final verdict: Awful. Terrible. Horrible. Don’t do it.

That said, I MIGHT try again. But at the risk of wasting a bunch of food/time again, I’d either a) make it like the damn recipe told me to or b) substitute cream of mushroom soup for the cashew milk, basically turning it into a zoodle version of the tuna casserole I grew up with. Complete F.