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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Fish Tacos

Seasoned fillets

I am in love with fish tacos right now.  It's a different way to get fish into the menu and a really nice way to make use of whatever fish happens to be on sale at the market...tilapia, catfish, cod, halibut, mahi, just about any firm fleshed mild-tasting fish will work. 

It's ridonkulously easy to put together, cooks fast and allows each family member to build their preferred plate (ever the joy of Taco Night).  I'm putting it on my freezer kit list because you can shop ahead for the taco components (tortillas, salsa, cheese) and freeze them/store them in the pantry to have on hand for last minute taco dinner.  You can put a dry rub on the fish and freeze the spiced fillets as well.  The addition of final fresh ingredients like shredded lettuce and diced tomato are optional. 

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Garlic Artichoke Pasta

I <heart> artichokes.  They're supposedly cancer-fighting and they're exotic and they're amazing with butter.  That's the first thing that made me want to try this recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens Better Than Mom's Slow Cooker Recipes book.  The second thing was that this is a recipe that is made practically entirely from pantry goods without being one of those can-of-cream-of-death-soup type of recipes.  You can buy all the ingredients you need for this ahead and keep them on-hand as a pantry meal kit.  You can also prep the crockpot mixture ahead to fridge or freeze.

Until I had a toddler, we never had dairy beverages in the fridge routinely.  I had to buy milk or cream or half-and-half specifically for a recipe that called for it.  These days, I use whole milk for all recipes calling for cream or half-and-half because it is what we have in the fridge.  So use whatever you happen to  have here (or use canned evaporated milk, if you are like pre-toddler, dairy-drink-less me) if you throw this recipe together out of "ingredients on hand".  If you're planning to make a meal kit for this recipe, you can freeze an appropriate amount of milk or cream, rely on having some in the fridge on Dinner Day or buy canned evap milk for the "pantry kit". 

Comparatively, cream and half and half will be the highest in calories and fat, then evaporated milk and regular milk.  If you get non-fat evap milk, you'll get the best of both worlds...the lighter caloric/fat profile of milk with the rich mouthfeel of cream.

So a meal kit for this recipe will look like this: canned tomatoes, canned artichokes, box of pasta and can of evap milk (if using) labelled and stored in the pantry with garlic+dry herbs and milk/cream (if using) on hand or frozen in ziptop bags.  OR everything except milk mixed together and frozen with pasta/evap milk in the pantry.

The one gripe I have about this recipe is that it's a crockpot recipe that still requires significant cooking right before dinner.  The joy of the crockpot is that you don't have to cook at dinnertime, right?  Boiling pasta isn't hard, but getting the water up to a boil takes time...more time than I'm willing to spend to "finish" a crockpot meal. 

The solution is to cook the pasta almost fully in advance, toss it with a bit of oil or butter to keep it from sticking, fridge it and stir it into the crockpot at the end to warm up and finish cooking through.  Or you can boil the pasta at the last minute, whatever works with your schedule.  Just please don't rinse the pasta...rinsing washes away starch which will prevent the pasta from sticking to itself but then it also won't stick to the sauce.  Besides, the starch is where the flavor lives (yes, pasta does have a flavor of its own) so rinsing washes away flavor, too.

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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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Pantry Puttanesca

This is one for which you can have all the ingredients lounging in your pantry/freezer any time, or at least until the canned goods expire.  The only need-to-shop-now, fresh additions might be a handful of chopped fresh herbs or a couple cups of leftover roasted/grilled/sauteed veggies.  I wouldn't go out of my way to cook anything special for this recipe, but if you've got some leftover zucchini or eggplant, this is a great way to use it up.

A traditional puttanesca sauce uses anchovies, black olives, capers and tomatoes for its base.  If you think you don't like anchovies, think again.  Anchovies are the major flavor ingredient in Worcestershire sauce, giving it the full, rich, salty, umami quality that Worcestershire sauce brings to your favorite marinade (which makes Worcestershire sauce not vegetarian, for anyone who cooks for vegetarian types). 

I choose to use sardines here because I'm currently hot for them, dietarily speaking, for the reasons outlined here.  You can use tuna or the traditional anchovies, if you prefer.  If using tuna or sardines, you can choose to leave them quite chunky (so as to be easily picked around) or flake them up quite a bit before adding to the sauce so they become more of a flavorful ghost in the machine rather than an upfront protein.

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Zucchini Tomato Frittata

I betcha you haven't thought about freezing eggs before.  They're so easy, why bother...right?  Because they do expire, and they do run out, and if you want something more than plain ol' fried, you need to have other stuff on hand. 

In other words, it saves a trip to the grocery store on those days when you decide to get dressed at 9am and don't have a chance to do it until noon (that was my first day home alone with two kids under 2, about a week after the birth of Boy-o #2) or during weeks where you try for 3 days straight to put more toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom and just can't manage to do it (that was last week).  If you don't have days and weeks like this, congratulations, here's your trophy, now scram.

A frittata is started on the stovetop and finished in the oven.  I do it under the broiler as my pans are broiler-proof.  If yours aren't because they're non-stick pans, you can bake the frittata at 400F for about 10 minutes to finish it.  If only the handle is not broiler-proof, you can wrap the plastic handle in foil and still put it under the broiler.

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Marinated London Broil and Carrots with dill butter

I hate the lack of standardized nomenclature for cuts of meat at the grocery store/butcher/farm processor.  Makes me crazy.  A "London broil" cut is basically a thick top round steak, but might be labeled "top round roast", "london broil", "round steak", "top round"...you'll know it when you see it though...about 1 1/4" thick and kind of rectangular.  This is adapted from the South Beach Diet cookbook.  The nutritional info is skewed a little high for calories, sodium content and carbs because the SparkRecipes website doesn't allow you to discount nutritional content from a marinade which doesn't get completely consumed as part of the final dish (or if it does, I don't know how to make it work).

I like this carrot dish (adapted from Better Homes and Gardens) since it jazzes up cooked carrots and can be frozen as a kit...no need for last-minute shopping to insure there's a vegetable side dish to go with your roast.  You can make this with fresh carrots, but if you plan to make a freezer kit, you'll still have to blanch the carrots to keep weird enzyme things from happening in the freezer.

Also, I don't know if I've ever mentioned that when I use butter, I use unsalted butter.  Makes a difference regarding sodium content and how strongly the dish tastes of salt if you add more.
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Muffaletta, or Really? You don't have time to make a sandwich?

If I think back 2 1/2 years, I know that's the question I would have asked after reading what I am about to write.  How can you possibly be so tired, so disorganized, so worn-out that you can't make one little sandwich?  Any soon-to-be first-time parents who are reading and wondering the same thing, please take note of the response I have for my pre-baby self...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Call me back in 3 months and let me know how that "sleeping through the night" thing is going.

Anyway...freezing sandwich fixings is mostly about having something in the freezer so that you don't have to go grocery shopping and possibly snagging a good sale on deli meat.  But deli meat, sliced cheese and rolls do freeze really well (provided you've packaged them airtight), so put an easy-peasy dinner in your back pocket for those days when even take-out is too hard. 

Hummus is a good veggie sandwich option that freezes nicely, too.  You can even assemble some cheese sandwiches for grilling (go ahead and butter the bread) and wrap them invidually in plastic wrap to freeze.  Total lifesaver when there's a screaming baby, a hungry toddler and no lunch plan.

For something a little more interesting than a plain ol' bologna sandwich, I love muffaletta.  Love the New Orleans Central Grocery muffaletta, love this one too.  It's adapted from Emeril Lagasse's muffaletta recipe.  I double the amount of olive relish since the giardiniera called for only comes in containers twice the size required by the recipe at my local stores.  Work once, eat twice.  I also hate standing in line at the deli counter -- Publix...Boca Raton...Parkinsonian retiree with half a loaf of bread stashed in her purse wanting "samples"...'nuff said -- so I'd rather buy twice as much deli meat and freeze it so that I've got all the making for TWO of these delectable sandwiches on deck.  You can make this ahead the night before even, so it's a shop-ahead, prep-ahead and make-ahead meal...fabulous for parties, too.

Emeril calls for some authentic Italian-type deli meats that we just don't get in my neck of the woods, so I sub out a spicy ham for capicolla and P&P loaf for mortadella.

Muffaletta (makes 2 sandwiches, each serves 8)

Olive Relish:
2 cups pimento-stuffed olives, plus 1/4 cup of liquid from the jar
2 cups giardiniera (pickled Italian vegetables), plus 2 tablespoons of liquid from the jar (a 16-oz jar is about 2 cups)
1/4 cup drained capers, plus 4 teaspoons of liquid from the jar
1 cup pitted black olives
4 cloves garlic
1 small minced shallot
2 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons dried parsley
Pinch of dried thyme
Pinch of crushed red pepper
3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Pulse the garlic cloves and shallots in a food processor until finely chopped.  Add the olives, giardiniera, capers in the processor and pulse several times until coarsely chopped.  It's ok if there are some big chunks left. 

Combine the brines, olive oil and herbs and spices in a medium bowl.  Add the chopped vegetables and stir well.  Divide into two zip-top bags.

Deli Meats/Cheeses:
1/2 pound sliced fresh mozzarella
1/2 pound sliced capicollo or prosciutto (or spicy ham)
1/2 pound sliced Genoa salami
1/2 pound sliced mortadella (or P&P or bologna)
1/2 pound sliced mild provolone cheese

Divide each type of meat and cheese in half and put them in zip-top bags.

To serve:
for each sandwich, one large round loaf (10"-12") of sourdough or Italian bread, split lengthwise

When you're ready to make the sandwich, thaw all your fixings.  Cut the bread in half and scoop out some of the crumb from the top and bottom halves of the bread. 

Fill the scooped out part with olive relish. 

Cover each half with slices of cheese.  Arrange each type of meat in a layer over the cheese.  CAREFULLY close the halves together.  Wrap in plastic wrap and put this in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, if you have time.  To serve, cut into wedges.

FYI...if you want to make your own bread for this sandwich, I made a half recipe of the Pain Ordinaire Carême from Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads. Pin It