Tuna Bean Salad

I don't like canned tuna.  It's one of those foods, like "potted meat" and pickled eggs, that just creep me out.  I do, however, LOVE a few recipes that use canned tuna.  This is one of them.

It's a shop-ahead recipe at heart...a can of corn, a can of beans, 2 cans of tuna, salad dressing and some cheese.  All live happily in the pantry or freezer for several months.  Fresh onions/scallions are optional if you're planning this as a "rescue" meal (you know those nights, when all other plans have fallen through and you just need *something* for dinner without going to the store or carrying in).  It's also a great meal to plan on nights when you don't know for sure that dinner at home will happen...if it doesn't, your ingredients will keep and not go to waste.

It's also a make-ahead recipe...in fact, it tastes better after blending overnight (and therefore is delicious as leftovers).  If you want to serve it immediately, you can do that too, and it takes about 5 minutes to put together.  This is also pretty inexpensive at less than $1 per serving for the filling when I buy the ingredients at normal grocery store prices and even cheaper when you strike good sales on canned goods or cheese.

I usually serve it as a sandwich, but you could also use it as a stuffed veggie filling...whole tomatoes, cucumber "boats", well-steamed eggplant halves, boiled whole onions or lightly steamed zucchini halves.  Hollow out the veggies (after cooking, if they need cooked) with a spoon and fill with the salad.  If you are low-carbing, you could substitute 1/2 cup of edamame (frozen, for shop-ahead planning) for the can of corn.  And thanks to the increasing availability of low-sodium or no-salt-added products, a meal made of canned goods doesn't need to carry a huge sodium tab.

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Sweet potato ravioli

A great way to use up leftover sweet potatoes.  You can freeze the baked sweet potatoes (especially if they're leftovers), the made-up filling or the made-up ravioli.  I use wonton skins because I don't want to fool around with rolling pasta dough for ravioli, but you can make your own pasta if you want.  You can also choose to oven-fry these for a crunchy finish or boil them, if you feel more confident that your ravioli are sealed well. 

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Peanut Butter Oven-Baked French Toast

Another recipe pilfered from my husband's grandma's 1944 home ec cookbook.  Back in the day, this recipe was called "Peanut Chops", another attempt to pass off an alternate protein source as being "just like meat!!".  The virtues of this recipe in 1944 were being inexpensive, offering protein when meat was rationed, and bearing a passing resemblance to actual pork chops.  Today's virtues are that it's inexpensive, freezer-friendly, kid-friendly, easy to cook (think oven-baked French toast), and it does actually feel like an oven-fried pork chop in your mouth...strange, huh?  Actually they remind me of a vegetarian oven-baked chicken nugget.

My husband is still commenting on how filling this meal was...I guess he had expected differently?  But with 18g of protein and 5 grams of fiber (or more, if you use whole wheat crackers and whole grain bread), who is surprised?

The original recipe calls for cutting 6 slices of rye bread into "fingers".  I used 1/2 a loaf of "cocktail rye", you know those tiny 3"x3" loaves you see up by the deli.  The slices are easy to handle and are perfectly sized for the recipe, but feel free to use regular slices of rye, or even pumpernickel. 

You can also substitute any nut or seed butter you wish to make this recipe allergy-friendly to those with peanut sensitivities.

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Pork Rind Bean Patties

I've heard about using ground-up pork rinds as a low-carb substitute for breadcrumbs for some time, but have never tried it.  Until today.  I decided to try the bean patty recipe again and try making it more low-carb as beans are already right starchy little buggers.  The only significant differences I noticed were that the pork rind crumb coating was perfectly adequate in a single layer (as opposed to the crumb-egg-crumb double layer for breadcrumbs) and that the pork rind crumb coating didn't brown quite as dark as a breadcrumb coating. 

When you make these patties, whether you use breadcrumbs or pork rind crumbs, the mixture will be SOFT.  Don't add more crumbs to firm it up or you risk having dry, crumbly bean patties.  The right texture is like a soft cookie dough.  To make it easier to handle, refrigerate it for an hour or more before shaping.  Use a spoon to plop a blob of bean patty mixture into the crumbs, roll it around a little, then do the egg-wash and more crumb thing if you want.  Take a deep breath, it will be messy and that's ok. 

Making the crumbed patties and freezing them ahead makes them MUCH easier to fry, since you cook them from their rock-solid frozen state.  When you flip, use two spatulas...use one to gently lift the patty, and turn it onto the 2nd spatula held at about a 90-degree angle to the first, then lower the patty gently to the pan from the 2nd spatula.  It makes a much gentler turn than slamming the delicate patties a full 180 degrees with just one spatula.

One 6 oz. bag of pork rinds blitzed down in the food processor yielded about 2 1/2 cups of crumbs, just right for this recipe.  Don't add any extra salt as the pork rinds are already salted.

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Sage Ravioli

This hardly qualifies as a recipe, but again a reminder that good food can be fast and simple.  And I've never seen directions that I'm happy with regarding browning butter.

I'd love to say that I make homemade ravioli.  My boys' great-great-grandparents were from Italy and there's an antique family pasta roller somewhere at my in-laws' house.  I envision trooping over once a month with the kids, making tons of homemade pasta and drying it while we sit around and look at old photos, the boys learning about family history and cultural heritage as much as cooking skills (not to mention the fun of hand-cranking pasta)...but that's not what we do.  Maybe someday.

So I use store-bought ravioli (or another filled pasta).  Feel free to use homemade if you make it (brava! brava! if you do).  Using pre-frozen ravioli makes this an easy freezer kit...freeze the pasta and butter in a bag or container together and either make sure to have fresh sage when you cook or freeze a handful of sage sprigs wrapped in a paper towel.  Pat the thawed sage dry before cooking...it won't be quite as crispy as fresh would be, but it's still good.

I use the highly scientifically measured amount of a "big ol' fistful" of sage leaves.  It's about 1/2 ounce if you buy them, but really...if you've got a square foot of sunny space in your yard, plant a sage plant!  This isn't a gardening blog, so I won't go into great detail, but it's perennial, retains leaves in Zone 5 through the winter (for year-round use), and is way cheaper than buying fresh herbs at the store.  And no, you can't make this recipe with dry sage out of a tin pot. 

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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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Quiche

Quiche is a glory of the kitchen.  It can be as budget-friendly or budget-busting as you want, made with humble chopped ham, caramelized onions and grated cheddar cheese or with luxe smoked salmon, asparagus and chèvre.  It is a perfect vehicle for upcycling leftover cooked meats and veggies.  It can be vegetarian and completely seasonal.  It can be prepped ahead in a pie plate for same day cooking, fully cooked and reheated for next day service or assembled as a kit for the freezer.  It plays well for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner or midnight snack.  And it's as easy to make two as it is to make one, so you can double the ingredients to make one for dinner right now and freeze the second.

Some suggested filling combinations: ham with caramelized onions and cheddar, chicken with sauteed mushrooms and pepper jack, leftover pork roast and sauteed zucchini with swiss, leftover salmon and thawed frozen spinach with goat cheese, canned tuna and peas with American, roasted butternut squash and white beans with havarti, diced cooked bacon and radicchio with provolone, sliced baked potato and bacon with bleu cheese.

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Bean Patties

Let me start with this: these are delicious, my kids ate them for dinner and reheated for lunch, they're freezable, vegetarian-possible (also baconarian-possible), fairly healthy if you use healthy fats and inexpensive. 

Pardon the kiddie plate, most everything is served on the finest licensed character melamine at our house :D

The 1944 title of this recipe is "mock sausage".  I don't know why.  These don't really resemble sausage in any way, so rather than insulting anyone's intelligence by asking them to be fooled into regarding this some kind of sausage substitute, I call them "bean patties".  Besides which, they're good enough to stand on their own without any nominal porcine support.

American Woman's Cookbook, Anacostia HS 1944 home ec textbook

I used limas b/c the original recipe calls for those beans specifically and b/c my dear husband lerves lima beans.  You could use whatever type of bean you want.  The original recipe calls for sieving the cooked beans to mash them up and presumably to remove the skins.  I wonder if removing the skins would have been so important if food processors had been available in 1944.  I think not.  I chopped mine up in the food processor...skins still present without noticeable defect in the final product. 

I reduced the number of eggs used b/c I thought 3 eggs would have made the mixture far too wet, so you will only see 2 in mine (difference in standard egg size from 1944 to present?...I feel a reference question coming on).  I served ours plain, no tomato sauce as suggested in the OR, but feel free to whip some up for your dinner. 

Lastly, I LOVE the advice to serve the dish with "milk, egg or cheese" to present a nutritionally complete meal.  It makes you stop to think about how much we "know" to be "true" about proper diet and nutrition and how in 60+ years, it will all be bunk anyway.

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Aglio e olio

I think by the time one graduates high school, everyone should know how to cook 4 dishes:

1. your favorite meal (so that you don't have to rely on anyone else to make you happy)
2. an inexpensive and relaxed menu for having a few friends over
3. something impressive suitable for special occasions
4. something you can throw together quickly and with minimal effort at the end of a long day so that you don't spend your life eating crappy take-out

This is my #4.  All the ingredients are pantry or freezer staples (freeze whole peeled garlic cloves), except the fresh herbs which can be left out if none are available. 
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Tuna Ramen

This is going to become my new "back-pocket" menu...that is, the meal I keep the ingredients for on hand for days that I've forgotten to thaw something, don't have any prep or cooking time, haven't been to the store and just need a quick dinner to throw together out of pantry ingredients.  And it's yummy.

You can switch up the vegetables, protein, stock and noodle flavor to keep things interesting and/or suit available ingredients.  Use a can of cooked beans, or if you have some on hand, leftover chicken, pork or beef.  Match the ramen noodle flavor to your protein, if you like, and match up the flavor of stock as well.  If you have fresh veggies, use those. 

Be sure to use sodium-free stock, homemade or store-bought, as the seasoning packet with the ramen is plenty salty.  Tonight, I used 2 cups of homemade shrimp stock with 2 cups of water because that was what I had on hand.  If I had had a full quart, I'd have used that. 

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