Guest Post! #BachelorCook Round 1

Hello everyone! So, as I mentioned a week ago, our friend Krysti declared her interest in cooking from our fridge. Something about it having more content than her own fridge. I agreed to let her cook for us on the condition she wrote a post about it for you all. I thought having someone else’s thoughts & comments might be a fun change. Upon reading this (and adding my commentary in the footnotes), I am now SURE having someone else’s thoughts & comments is a fun change. Hopefully, you all will encourage Krysti to do this again, and I can convince some of our other bachelor friends to do the same. IT’S AN ADVENTURE.

Thus begins Krysti’s quest…

Natasha and I have toyed with the idea of doing a guest blog post in varying degrees of seriousness the past few months1, then all of our dreams suddenly came true last week.… Continue reading →

Individual turkey pot pies.

I have to admit, guys, that part of the reason I was so motivated to post Pioneer Woman’s mashed potatoes was because this thing I threw together didn’t make sense without them.

Well, that’s kind of a lie. It made SENSE, but wasn’t as much fun. So, I bided my time & insisted on doing it “in order”. And so here we find ourselves.

As you may have realized by now, one of the things I’m worst at is coping with leftovers. I’m constantly pushing leftovers on people who come over for even just a normal dinner. With a meal like Thanksgiving, where the foisting of leftover is not just normal, but practically required? Feh!

This is, in fact, a huge part of why I was so worried my initial turkey wasn’t big enough and so acquired a bigger one.… Continue reading →

[121] Pioneer Woman’s Mashed Potatoes

Cover of The Pioneer Woman Cooks by Ree Drummond

Wow. So, I had memories of making this recipe once or twice when I went to go do it for Thanksgiving. Thus, I was sure I had already posted it to the blog. You can imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find it in the archives, no matter what tags I searched, no matter how much “did I forget to tag it?” searching I did. Basically, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find it on the blog.

I finally found it in the “upcoming recipes” list to the right…

Now, I’m sure, you can imagine my chagrin.

Anyway, better late than never, I suppose. Of course, this means you’re going to get this recipe as if I made it for the first time for Thanksgiving.… Continue reading →

[23] Turnips in Creamy Mustard Sauce

Cover of How to Cook Everything, Revised Edition by Mark Bittman

I just posted about a meal that was made basically based on what was in the fridge, where the main dish was pork chops. This was the major side dish. This recipe is actually a variant on a recipe in How to Cook Everything; the mustard sauce is not normally creamy. However, I had cream in the fridge that didn’t have any other recipe home and was going to go bad, so creamy mustard sauce it was.

Very good choice, I’d say. But maybe that’s just because I didn’t want the cream to go bad. 😉

h2. Ingredients

2 tbsp butter or extra virgin olive oil
1.5 lbs turnips, cut into chunks about the size of radishes (He says really most root veggies will work here.)… 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 →