The worst part of coming back from a trip is unpacking all of the wires that are absolutely critical to my ability to live life.  The phone charger.  The laptop power supply.  The iPad charger.  Can we say “first world problem”?

But also, I’m determined not to take more than one bag when I travel to my parents’ house.  I mean, one bag for my clothes/toiletries.  I have a bag for kitchen tools/ingredients.  And of course, a bag for wii games, computer, etc.  And then usually a cooler.  No biggie.  But sticking to one bag for clothes/toiletries is no small feat.  I’ve left out pajamas and just borrowed from my sister before.  I also never take shampoo of my own.  But my sister has much drier, much curlier hair than I do.  And she has the shampoo to counteract her hair-type.  The kind of shampoo that makes my hair a little crazy.  I’ve missed my shampoo.

While I was home for Thanksgiving, I cooked lunch for my brother and his family.  I made the easiest baked “pasta” in the whole world.

My mom turned me onto this, and it’s delicious.  It’s gluten free on top of that, and you’d barely even notice.  It’s a super simple baked pasta without any pasta.  Use butternut squash for the noodles.  Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

I wish it were more complicated, and I could post some fancy recipe.  But basically…

Baked “Pasta”

• peeled discs of butternut squash (or half moon shapes from the bottom)
• your favorite spaghetti sauce (with or without meat)
• mozzarella cheese

Layer the squash and sauce.  Top with mozzarella.  Cover and cook at 350 for about an hour and a half or until tender.  Uncover and cook until the cheese is just starting to brown.  Just like that.

Then I saw this come up on my google reader.  For starters, I don’t make anything fancy.  I take fancy and make it casual.  It’s what I do.  I’m good at it.  So “Fancy Sloppy Joes” isn’t really my style.  But do you know what is?  Sneaking veg into sloppy joes.  So I ran by the grocery store on my way home from work, all prepared to pick up some carrots and zucchini to put inside of them.

These are a bit on the spicy side of things, but feel free to modify them to your taste.  I wouldn’t at all frown on you if you wanted to use a spice pack, either.  I was going to, but the only brand I could find put all kinds of gluten into it.  Dumb.

I ate it on two slices of Rudi’s multigrain, and while the flavor was great, the texture wasn’t quite right.  The bread fell apart in my hands so I went at it with a fork.  Manageable, though not ideal.

Sneaky, Sloppy Joes:

• 1 lb. ground beef
• 1 zucchini, shredded
• 2 carrots, shredded
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 1 small can tomato paste
• 1 c. water
• 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons corn starch
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
• dash red pepper flakes
• salt to taste (I probably used a couple teaspoons)

Cook the ground beef and onions over medium high heat.  Drain off any excess grease.  Mix in veg, water, tomato paste, and the remaining ingredients.  Cook until veg is soft and cooked through and excess liquid has thickened.

Photo by Nathan Clendenin

I have this steak marinade recipe that came from my brother’s roommate’s mom.  Did you follow that?  It’s really good.  But what I realized is that it’s really good even if you’re missing half the ingredients.  So here’s the deal.  You should make steak sometime.  And when you do, use garlic, vinegar of some sort (red wine, white, balsamic, whatever…), brown sugar, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and steak sauce (if you have it; I didn’t).  Marinate half an hour.  Then make your roommate grill them to perfection while you finish off the mashed potatoes and roasted asparagus.

Photo by Nathan Clendenin

Then eat like a pig.  It’s the only way, really.

It’s not that.  It’s really not.  But between you and me, I’m sometimes a bad rememberer of things I don’t really want to do to begin with.

But I’ve been cooking up a storm.  And Nate hasn’t been around to photograph very much of it.  … so you’re going to be seeing some really rough looking pictures of really yummy food.  And you just have to trust me that you want to make these things, mk?

Today, I’m not going to post any picture at all.  Just say that I did a fruit and veg cleanse, which required me to try out that whole spinach in a smoothie thing.  It’s delicious.  Really is.  I didn’t believe it, but everyone was right.  My basic smoothie was this:

• 1/2 avocado
• 1 banana
• 1 cup fresh spinach (loosely packed and all that)
• orange juice until proper consistency

Sometimes I put strawberries in it.  But that was unnecessary, really.  Try it.  Amazing!  And healthy!

That said, I like reinvention.  It’s fun.  It’s familiar.  But only sort of.  It’s perfect.

Remember the time I made empanadas?  They were really good.  Seriously.  Whoa.  This time, I made them like this…

• 1 lb. chorizo, casings removed
• 1 zucchini, shredded
• 1/2 head of cauliflower
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 2 cups shredded cheese

I roasted the cauliflower, then mashed it up with my potato masher.  It felt good.  While that was roasting, I shredded the zucchini in Lola, and sauteed it just a bit with the onion.  I set aside the onion/zucchini mixture, and cooked up the chorizo.  Now this is very important: I drained the chorizo of all that disgusting greasiness.  Then I mixed it all together.  And into my beautiful little dough it went.  Baked as usual.  Then I totally snarfed it.  All by myself.  That’s a lie.  I ate with other people.  But still… I would have made these even if nobody had told me they were “dank”.

Taquitos and other stuff

I made them for new years.  It was pretty awesome.  But… I changed them up a bit, I did.  I took the ideas behind some of my other recipes, and made them ten times more awesome.  I made them more like that pasta I made once.

Sneaky Vegetables Pasta

And a little more like that soup I made on Halloween.

Cauliflower soup

And even more like those empanadas.  Remember the empanadas?  Mm… empanadas.

Empanadas

So how’d I do it?

I took the zucchini, shredded in my Lola, and dumped it in with the chicken.  It went something like this:

• 1 cup chicken, shredded
• 2 zucchinis, grated
• 1/2 onion, sliced
• 1 small can enchilada sauce
• 2 cups cheese
• ~25 corn tortillas

Cook the zucchini and onion in a bit of olive oil until onion is translucent.  Mix with chicken, enchilada sauce, and cheese.  Set aside.

Fry corn tortillas briefly on each side.  Just enough to make tender.  Place on paper towel lined plate to cool enough to work with.  As tortillas cool, place a smidgen of the filling in them.  Roll those babies up.  Then place in a greased baking dish.  When you’re finished rolling, bake the taquitos at 350 until crispy and golden brown.

- Saute yellow squash, onions, and garlic in olive oil
- Sprinkle with salt and red curry powder to taste (I used McCormick brand)
- Add a can of kidney beans (drained)
- Serve over brown rice

Yum!

By the way, I’m not scared of salt like Jenny is.  Seriously, who rinses their canned beans?

You bake some potatoes.  Cut them in half, then scoop out their insides.  Mash them up.  Mix in butter, sour cream, and milk.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Stuff back into the potato skins.  Top with cheese.  Bake.

Twice Baked Potatoes

I didn’t give you exact measurements because it’s really up to your personal tastes.  So why did I write an entire post on this?

Because twice baked potatoes are interesting, but what’s more interesting is when you stuff some of the potato skins with mashed cauliflower for the carb-resistant in the clan.

Lola pureed the cauliflower, and I added butter, sour cream, and milk.  Just like the potatoes.  Salt and pepper.  I was rather proud of myself.  That’s the brown one in the picture.

This baby was 12.7 lbs. of tasty goodness.  I’ve heard a lot about how to cook it, some advice more helpful than others.  The most interesting was about how you can flip the bird upside down so that the juices drip down into the “pretty breast skin”.  That phrase was literally used.  In my office.  By a man.  I felt so uncomfortable.

Upside down is the way to go!

I mentioned this to my mother.  Leaving out the word “pretty”, to be sure.  And I might have just called it “white meat” instead of using words that typically make boys in grade school giggle uncontrollably.  My mom had heard something similar, but what she had read suggested that you flip it right side up for the last hour so that it still looks nice in the end.  We did this with amazing success.

Look at my beautiful turkey!

Cooked for 5ish hours at 300 in a convection oven.  Stuffed with my cornbread stuffing.  Topped with gravy.  So let’s talk about these two.

The stuffing went like this:

• 1 recipe of cornbread (12 corn muffins), recipe to follow
• 1 small onion
• 3 stalks celery
• 2 carrots
• 1 lb. sage sausage
• 4 eggs
• 2 cups chicken broth

Saute the veggies with salt and pepper to taste.  Remove from pan and transfer to large bowl (really large, trust me).  Now use the same pan to cook the sausage.  Brown that beautiful sausage.  Meanwhile, crumble the cornbread into the veggies.  Add the sausage to the cornbread/veg mixture.  Add eggs and chicken broth.  Don’t be a wimp.  Mix with your hands.  Then stuff it into that beautiful bird you’ve got waiting for you.

Now for the gravy:

• 2 Tablespoons of the turkey drippings
• 3 Tablespoons flour
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1/2 teaspoon sage
• salt and pepper to taste

Over medium heat, mix the drippings and the flour until smooth.  Whisk in the broth.  Add the seasoning.  Stir carefully until the gravy thickens.

So what about that cornbread?

I got this recipe from my mother, who got it from her grandmother.  I cannot claim it, nor can I tell you its original source.

• 1 cup flour (if you wanted to go gluten free or just a heartier cornbread, you can replace this with cornmeal)
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup sugar (we like sweet cornbread, but feel free to skimp, if you’d rather)
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 cup milk

Mix the dry with the wet, then pour into a greased baking dish (or muffin tins).  Bake at 350 for approximately 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

So let’s talk about stuffing vs. dressing.  Dressing being the stuff that doesn’t get stuffed, while stuffing is, by very definition, stuffed in something.  So this is my first year with real, actual stuffing.  It’s no joke.  Stuff that bird.  There’s no reason not to.  And every reason to.  The stuffing gets all that yummy bird fat flavor throughout.  I had no idea what I was missing.

… and thinking.  And when I was grocery shopping, I thought some more.  And before you knew it, I had bought all the ingredients for this:

I was going to do a picture, but it basically looks just like brown goo… not very appealing at all.  But it was tres delicious.  Trust me.  It was a bean dip kinda thing.  Here’s what I did:

• 1 lb. ground beef
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 1/2 green peppers, diced
• 2 teaspoon cumin
• 1  1/2 teaspoon coriander
• 1 teaspoon chipotle chili powder (or just regular chili powder)
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 Tablespoon salt
• 2 sweet potatoes, baked and mashed
• 1 can black beans
• 1  1/2 cup cheese (I used “mexican blend”, but I don’t think we really need to be picky here), shredded

Brown the beef along with the onions and peppers.  Stir in the spices, sweet potatoes, and beans.  Spread into a baking dish and top with cheese.  Bake on 350 until cheese is melted.  Serve with chips, tortillas, or pita bread.  Top with plain yogurt or sour cream (they’re kind of really similar).  Or do whatever you like.  That’s not a bad plan.