Category Archives: Challenge Recipes

[9] Pork Tacos with Roasted Green Onions

Cook Once Eat Twice Recipes

Since we made the Barbecued Pulled Pork from this cookbook yesterday, today was the day to see how good the premise of the book holds up. Thus, pork tacos!

I won’t say I was blown away with this recipe. However, it was super easy to make, so I’ll accept that this wasn’t really cooking (to make the “Cook Once, Eat Twice” name stick). It kind of reminds me of those nights that you want to eat what’s in the house, but you’ve just got a bunch of leftovers around. “Man, I don’t want another pork sandwich. How about… putting it in a tortilla and calling it a taco?”

Ingredients

8 green onions, trimmed
2 teaspoons olive oil
Salt
8 soft corn tortillas
2 c pork from Barbecued Pulled Pork, reheated

Directions

# Preheat oven (toaster oven in our case) to 425°F.… Continue reading →

[8] Slow Cooker BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwiches

Cook Once Eat Twice Recipes

Oh my goodness, this recipe made a lot of food. That is, of course, part of the point of the first recipe in a pair out of Cook Once Eat Twice, it’s supposed to make enough of the major component of two recipes for four people to eat twice. Even so, I was startled at how much pork we had leftover. I did try to recruit visitors for this evening to come help eat all the food this was supposed to make, but no dice. Which is sort of a shame, because we had way more than “eat twice”, but that said, we’ll have decent leftovers one day as well. And that helps, especially with a move coming up.

All in all, I think we got effectively three dinners out of this recipe (two lunches for me and two dinners for the two of us), as well as leftovers for the freezer.… Continue reading →

[7] White Bean and Spinach Soup

Enchanted Broccoli Forest

The soup I was originally contemplating after we received our first CSA share called for escarole (which we didn’t have), but said we could substitute just about any green for the escarole, including kale and spinach. Since we got what appeared to be an obscene amount of spinach in the first CSA, that’s what we did.

In reality, we only got about a half-obscene amount of spinach, since we got a little over half the amount of greens the recipe called for (and that was truly copious). While we could have, and maybe should have, rounded it out with kale, we instead decided to cook just half the recipe. The only thing that wasn’t super easily halved was the bay leaf, and I just tossed in a small one as my solution.… Continue reading →

[6] Braised Turnips

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian

A delicious (albeit very small) side dish to our salmon dish was a dish out of _How to Cook Everything Vegetarian_. This was our first time eating turnips (at least as adults), so I decided to make something simple that would just highlight their flavor. Furthermore, these were fairly small turnips, which Bittman says are the tastiest. (My friend Pants confirmed this before I’d had a chance to eat them, and who am I going to believe, some nationally known and renowned cookbook author or my buddy?)

Ingredients

2 tbsp butter or extra-virgin olive oil (while we had some amazing butter from the farmers’ market, I opted for the oil)
1 lb turnips, rutabaga, trimmed radishes or diakon radishes, cut into chunks (we used turnips, as should be obvious)
1/2+ c white wine, veggie stock or water (we used inexpensive white wine)
Salt & fresh ground pepper
Freshly squeezed lemon juice (I totally forgot this, and it would have helped)
Chopped parsley leaves for garnish (didn’t have these)

Instructions

Combine the oil, turnips and 1/2 c wine in a saucepan, sprinkle with salt & pepper and bring the mixture to a boil.… Continue reading →

[5] Slow-Roasted Salmon with Yogurt and Cardamom

Big City Cooking

As you can probably imagine, right now a lot of our meals start with, “What do we have in the house?” and “What recipes do we have in cookbooks?” This was particularly hard until 2 June 2010 (when we made this dish) because we had been holding off on buying very much food until our first CSA share arrived. We purchased a few things at one of the city’s farmers’ markets two days before the share arrived to supplement what we already had, but that was it.

This salmon dish was the first recipe we made after going out for groceries. I was rather hesitant about it, but it turned out fairly well. The best part? Having leftover salmon to top salads with the next day!… Continue reading →