kitchen experimentation

Experiment Number One:

If you pick up a bottle of Pace Hot Chunky Salsa, you might see on its label a recipe for a Southwestern Beef Stew or something like that. Last week, I decided to try it out. This was as I was at the grocery store and had picked up a bottle of Pace & had the list of ingredients right there ;-) Ended up gathering everything except cumin, since I wasn't sure if we already had that or not [we didn't. oh well!]. The next day, I got everything together, doubled the amount of green peppers, added onions and yellow peppers, cooked as per the recipe.

The result?

Well, let's just say I think I might have sprained my shoulder I was patting myself on the back so much, LoL!

Seriously - that is such a simple recipe, but it makes a great meal! The only drawback is that the supposed 6 servings actually make 3 servings in this Naranek household. So, on my next grocery trip? Bought DOUBLE the meat & beef broth. Next week, we'll see if a double portion tastes as good ;-)

Experiment number Two:

I've used Onion Soup Mix as a "shake and bake" type thing on chicken and fish in the past few months. But on each pack, they had this recipe for meatloaf which kept calling out to me. Not just because it's "Meat Loaf" lah, but because it looked really simple. So, decided to try THAT out. I already knew that the 2 lbs of ground beef was not going to happen: I made it 1 lb of ground beef and 1 lb of ground turkey instead. I also added I stalk of celery - cut really small, of course. Mixing everything homogeneously took a while, but was fun. Final customization: Kosh, lover of hard-boiled eggs that he is, suggested adding a hard boiled egg or two into the "loaf" as per a family tradition or something.

The result?

A slightly crumbly meatloaf, without an overwhelmingly "dead cow" taste, nice and juicy, excellent taste... yup, yet another successful experiment!

We still have half the loaf in the fridge. We'll probably tackle that this weekend.

So yeah - two recent kitchen experiments that went really really well :-)

Oh, but before you jump to conclusions: while I've only had the one unsuccessful experiment result so far [involving squash and fish - tasteless, urgh!], I'm certainly no expert, and don't even pretend to be. And I'm certainly not one who willingly does things in the kitchen on a regular basis! But yes, occasionally I get bitten by the food experimentation bug... and I gotta say, it does help to have an extremely willing and undiscerning victim like Kosh [he didn't think the fish and squash was *that* much of a disaster, that weirdo!] to partake of these experiments.

And that we have a dishwasher that isn't me.

And even more: this recent spate of bug bites has helped reduce the number of times per week we end up eating food from my fave Thai restaurant [or Mexican. or Chinese.] That should help reduce the grease and carb consumption, eh?