Lemon Turnips

Totally gratuitous butter shot...cuz butter is purty ;)

It's pretty easy in my opinion to come up with tasty ways to prep meat-based dishes ahead and freeze them for convenience.  Not so easy when it comes to vegetables.  So I'm on particular lookout for recipes that do work for vegetables in the freezer, like this one.

Turnips are maybe not everyone's favorite, but lemon butter makes everything delicious.  They do nicely in the freezer and are lower carb than potatoes.  They pack a good wallop of vitamin C and fiber, and even have a significant amount of calcium per serving.

If you want to do these as a freeze-ahead dish, you will need to basically prepare the turnips in advance and package them up for reheating.  You want to stop just short of fully cooking them so they don't get squishy.  I reheated mine as an oven packet while baking off Chicken Wellingtons, but they could get reheated on the stovetop if it's more convenient to your menu.

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Fez-Style Baked Fish

It's summer, which means on any given day, we're likely to be out playing right up until dinnertime.  So I try to get everything ready for dinner in the morning or the night before so that the most I have to do at dinnertime is stick a prepared casserole in the oven, dump a bunch of stuff into a skillet or even less if possible. 

This is a new twist (for me) on flavors for fish...I love the combination of tomatoes and olives, potatoes and saffron, garlic and cumin but I've never applied it to fish.  The original recipe calls for cilantro along with parsley, but I'm one of those people to whom cilantro tastes weird so I substituted garden mint (read: I can't remember what variety of mint it is anymore) for the cilantro.  I also didn't have cherry tomatoes on hand, so I used a 15 oz. can of cut-up, drained whole tomatoes instead. 

Here's what I did this morning...I mixed up the marinade for the fish (which is still thawing a leetle), parboiled the potatoes and put them in my baking dish, and sliced/assembled the rest of the veggies.  I put the fish in the marinade (even if it's not totally thawed) later in the afternoon before we went out.  When we got home, I put the 3 components together in the baking dish while the oven preheated and baked 30 minutes while wrestling the kiddos into a dinner-appropriate state of cleanliness.  If I had been prepping the night before because I'd be gone all day, I'd go ahead and marinate the fish starting in the morning but not overnight due to the acid content of the marinade.


Another make-ahead thought...if you have leftover boiled potatoes from another meal, use those in this dish!  A single layer of pre-cooked taters in a square baking dish will do you.

One more note...my husband liked this very well as a fish dish, but also thought it would rock as a chicken dish.  Just bake 30-40 minutes for chicken breasts, until they're cooked through.
Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/dining/baked-fish-fez-style-recipe.html



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Lemon Sweet Rolls

That sounds contradictory, doesn't it?  The lemon filling on these sweet yeast rolls is tartly sweet, and the yeast roll is just delicious.  Sort of like a grown-up cinnamon bun.  The recipe is originally from the Argo Cornstarch recipe book and calls for a gooey sweet cream cheese frosting which I left off, but feel free to make it as instructed or use a store-bought cream cheese frosting.

This recipe requires some planning as the dough is a yeast-leavened dough.  However, you can do all the raising over a period of several hours in the refrigerator if that works better.  You can also make this up to the point of slicing the rolled dough and freeze the slices!!  Just arrange them in a pan to freeze, take it out at night and put it in the fridge to thaw/raise overnight, then bake in the morning.  Or make them totally ahead the night before for instant yummy breakfast in the morning.

This is also a handy way to use up a bit more of your Thanksgiving leftovers...1 pan of the rolls needs 1/2 cup of spuds.  Just be sure to use pretty plain cream-and-butter mashed potatoes (or bake a medium potato in the microwave to mash) rather than a heavily herbed or garlicked version.

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Eat it the way you found it: Apples

Harvest Pink Lemonade

Making applesauce is no extraordinary feat of cooking.  But figuring out what to do with all the peels and cores can be.  You could just chuck them into the compost, OR you could turn them in a delicious, refreshing pink apple lemonade. 

I like using store-bought lemonade to make life easy on myself and for the fact that I usually find store-bought lemonade to be too sweet and too lemony...when cut with the pink apple juice rendered from the "leftovers" of your applesauce endeavor, it is just right.

I prefer Jonagold apples for making applesauce.  The flavor is so spot-on that I don't add anything except apple cider while cooking.  Good produce ultimately means less work for a better final product, so it's worth finding a local orchard and finding out what good sauce apples they grow.

I don't sieve my applesauce, as I think it's wasteful and I happen to like chunky applesauce.  Most recipes give a yield of about 2 pints per 3 lbs of apples, but that's if you sieve.  Unsieved, I got 11 pints from 10 lbs, or about 3 pints per 3 lbs of apples.  I give the following recipe per 3 lbs. of apples, scale up as desired.  I needed a 12 quart pot for 10 lbs of apples, and it took about 25 minutes for them to cook fully.  The peels and cores from 10 lbs made 3 quarts of pink apple juice, or 6 quarts of pink lemonade.  I froze the apple juice in quart-sized amounts.

And today's I Screw Up So You Don't Have To...if you make loads of applesauce and plan to can it in a water bath process, keep waiting jars in a pot of warm water.  That way, when you put 2nd or 3rd batches of jars into the already-boiling water bath, nothing explodes.  Just a friendly tip.

Lastly...bonus cocktail recipe!  If you get cidered out, try a Chimayo...a surprisingly un-tequila-like mix of tequila, apple cider, lemon juice and cassis (and if you don't know what else to do with the cassis, try a kir or kir royale).


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Piri Piri Chicken

This was meant to be a one-off recipe...some friends (thank you again, Jason and Michelle) had gifted us some homemade piri piri (a lightly spicy pepper and oil condiment) that I needed to use up.  I marinated 2 spatchcocked whole chickens in it, grilled one, roasted another, and thought I was done with that.  Well, it turned out to be the best chicken we had ever had, so I was obligated to get the piri piri recipe from our friends and make more. 

I can't vouch for freezer-stability of this recipe for more than 2 weeks...there's a pretty high concentration of acid in the piri piri marinade which could begin to have a negative effective on meat quality after some point (how long? I dunno), but I can attest to 2 weeks' worth of frozen marination resulting in uber-tasty results.

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Chicken Francese for a crowd

I love chicken francese, but it's a fairly last-minute intensive dish to prepare...frying those cutlets can really eat up time, especially if you're cooking for a crowd. 

I tried a new twist for a "dinner party" (can you really call it a dinner party when you're eating off paper plates?) wherein I baked many chicken breasts that were seasoned with lemon pepper and served the lemon-caper sauce as a relish on the side.  Captures the same flavors with far less work.

If you prep this in advance and put your chicken in a baking dish in the fridge, plan for extra cooking time (I screw up so you don't have to).  The cold dish slows down the chicken's progression to an appropriate final temperature, and it took an extra 20-25 minutes of cooking to get my chicken up to temp.  Better yet, prep the chicken, store it in a ziptop bag and put it in the baking dish at the last minute. 

I don't have pictures because it was a dinner party and I had better things to do than take pictures of food LOL

Edited to note...this is evidently my 100th "freezer" recipe!  I guess I do more of this sort of thing than I realized!
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Pasta mezzavera

Everyone knows pasta primavera...the heavily sauced pasta dish with tender early spring veggies.  This is pasta mezzavera, made with heartier mid-summer veggies, fresh herbs and a light lemon-infused olive oil.  I like using zucchini and broccoli, but any combination of fresh, seasonal produce will work.  For a slightly more rib-sticking meal, add a cup or two of cooked white beans.

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Lower Carb (and freezer friendly) Lemon Custard Pie

My husband adores lemon meringue pie, but I rather dislike meringue (making it as well as eating it, and it doesn't freeze well to boot).  Cool Whip is the absolute right answer to all meringue-associated problems.  Yes, it's cheating.  In case you haven't read any of my previous pie posts, I cheat at pies and do so with great celebration (I have all that extra time to celebrate, you see, since I don't spend any making homemade pastry or meringues). 

So, on request for a no-sugar version of lemon meringue pie, I give you Splenda lemon custard pie with sugar-free Cool Whip topping and nut crust.  Making the custard with splenda instead of sugar actually speeds the process up...sugar takes eons to melt and thicken properly, while the Splenda version took less than 5 minutes to achieve the proper thickness.  The flour and cornstarch still contribute carbs, but the result is much lower than what you would have with sugar.  You can, of course, use sugar, tbsp for tbsp, in place of Splenda.

Btw, for those playing at home, I saved 2 tbsp (ETA: needed 4 tbsp) of the almond grindings for a chicken wing recipe (Almond Sesame Wings) I'll make in a few days.  Put the "almond flour" in a small tupperware and stashed it in the fridge.  I like to plan ahead.

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Chicken Francese cookery pictures

Pictures courtesy of Darling Hubbie!  I almost forgot to document the cooking of this dish.  It's been a long week.

Cutlets crammed into skillet...you'll space yours out more...do as I say, not as I do!

Browned cutlets, ready to wipe extra oil out of pan and add lemon juice-olive sauce to deglaze



Ready to serve

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Chicken Francese

This is a quick and easy way to do chicken, unless you are starting with chicken breasts and have to pound them into cutlets.  Even then it's not too bad, but cutlet-making is definitely a prep-ahead chore for me.  I evidently didn't take any pictures of this one in prep-ahead process (oops), but I'll update with cookery pics when I make this dish.

If you've never done it, you take a chicken breast and cut it in half lengthwise.  Put one half in a quart-size ziptop bag and press all the air out.  Tip #1: Use the flat side of a meat mallet to pound...if you use the spiky part of the mallet or you'll puncture the plastic bag and it will be beyond messy.  Tip #2: Pound the chicken from the side the skin used to be on, not the "meaty" side.  Pound until the cutlet is about 1/4" thick.  Set aside to fridge or freeze, and repeat until all your chicken is nice and thin.

If you're making a freezer kit, you can get one of the small cans of sliced olives, label and store it in the pantry as part of the kit, or you can freeze a large handful of chopped olives with the rest of the ingredients.
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Eat It the Way You Found It: Lemon

I am not a professional nutrionist, so what I propose is merely my own crackpot theory.  Disclaimer over. 

In general, I think food is better for you when you eat it the way it comes in nature...leave the peels on fruits and vegetables, leave the bran on grains, eat meat in the proportions it grows on the animals (fyi...there is shockingly little actual bacon on a pig despite the disproportionate number of appearances bacon makes in this blog), and so on. 

And so...lemons.  My grandmother ate citrus fruits peel and all.  I mean, she chomped into an orange and ate it like an apple.  It turns out that my 2.75 year old is the same way.  I'm not going to go that far, personally, but I do freeze the zest from citrus that I've peeled for eating or juicing.  I mix all types of citrus zest together, but you can keep them in separate zip-top bags as well.  Here are a few other ideas for ways to use the whole lemon.
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Easy-easier-easiest sides: Mashed potatoes

Lemon Olive Oil Smashed Potatoes

You don't always have to do the full-out Thanksgiving mashed potato rigamarole.  I leave the skins on my taters because that's where the vitamins are (so says my mom) and it's way easier.  Here's how to do the mash with as little on hand as a couple of pounds of potatoes.  Two pounds of potatoes will give about 6 servings, at least that's what goes at my house.

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Chicken Villaggio

This is one of our favorite recipes ever.  EVER.  I've been making this one for nearly 8 years, and that's saying something.  A lot of recipes come into vogue at our house for a couple of years and then fall out of favor, but this is one of the few that's lasted.  Easy, tasty, low-carb, versatile, quick-cooking, freezable, inexpensive...what isn't good about this recipe?  Although you gotta like lemon.

I bought a big package of boneless, skinless chicken thighs on sale this week for another recipe that only needed about 1/2 the package.  This is what I'm doing with the extra chicken.  I already had packages of pepperoni frozen from a sale several weeks ago and just needed to pick up 3 lemons to turn this out.  Shopping magic!

Note on breasts vs. thighs: I really think you need to use thighs for this recipe.  I've tried chicken breasts because my husband, known hereafter as The Princess, used to claim that he would only eat white meat.  It comes out criminally dry.  If you're going to ask an animal to give up its life so that you can eat, the least you can do is prepare it properly and with dignity.  Using chicken breasts here does not meet that standard IMHO.  If it's more important to you to use white meat than to eat a meal that tastes good, by all means, sub in breasts.  Rant over.

Chicken Villaggio (serves 6)

2 lbs. boneless, skinless chicken thighs (about 6)
3 lemons
3 oz. pepperoni (any kind you like)
black pepper

Zest the lemons.  Put the zest aside for the moment.  Then cut away the white part so that you have the whole lemon peeled down to the flesh.  Either cut the segments out or just dice up the lemon flesh.  Put the diced lemon in a small zip-top bag.

Combine the thighs, lemon zest, pepperoni and black pepper to taste in a zip-top bag.  Mush it all around, making sure none of the pepperoni slices stick together.  Marinate at least 24 hours, if you're going to cook this without freezing.  Otherwise put the bag of chicken and the bag of diced lemon into a larger zip-top bag and freeze (don't put the lemon into the chicken bag, tempting though that is, since once it's time to cook, the lemon bag will be all raw-chicken-y).

To cook: Thaw.  Heat a large skillet over medium heat.  Dump the contents of the chicken bag into the skillet, NO OIL NEEDED, making sure the chicken is in good contact with the bottom of the pan.  Sauté 10 minutes on the first side, flip all the chicken pieces and as much of the pepperoni as you can manage, and sauté for 10 minutes more.  Add the diced lemon and cook another 3-5 minutes until the pan juices thicken a bit. 

I don't have a picture of the finished dish because it is still sitting in my freezer.  I'll update when I make it.

UPDATE: The particular brand of chicken I bought this time released a lot of water as it thawed.  I had to drain the pan a couple of times to get a good sizzle going, and alas, the chicken didn't brown as much as I usually like.  But here are the pictures!


First side





Second side, with lemons added



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