Sunday, March 6, 2011

Afternoon

Week 2 of The Once-a-Week Cooking Plan took me about 3 hours this morning. So I'm hoping Week 16 will go about as quickly. Or even faster! A girl can dream.....

But because I'm a glutton for punishment. Or don't know my limits. Or am smoking crack. Anyway, for one of those reasons, I'm also going to start this tomato jam recipe. It's pretty no muss, no fuss. When I first got my hare-brained idea, after brunch in Madison, I found this recipe. But on closer inspection, it was for refrigerated jam only. I'm not sure I want it enough to eat it all at once, I wanted to can it. So I Googled again and found this recipe from my friend Marisa's blog. I don't know why on earth I didn't check there first. It's called Food in Jars, ferchrissakes. Anyway. I'm using about a pound of Roma tomatoes that I froze from the farmer's market last summer. Though now that it's started, it's really only enough for one small jar. Oh well. If it's good, I'll make a monster batch for canning this summer.


So chicken week!! Starting with...um...bacon. I don't make good bacon. I mean, it's bacon, so it's always good. But I can't get it to cook uniformly. Luckily this is going in something. I'm not sure what, but something. And apparently I'm to cook the onions in the fat. That idea definitely doesn't suck. And the aroma of the tomato jam and the bacon blending together is absolutely heavenly.

Chopping cheese is hard. Well, chopping a semi-soft cheese, like Gouda, is hard.

I don't know why it has to be chopped. That's weird. Is Gouda semi-soft? I just made that up, 'cause it's sticky when you try to chop it. I hope no one ever takes this information on the blog for anything more than my own ridiculous ramblings and ideas. I have no cooking expertise. At. All.

And then I dripped salmonella on my Diet Coke.


These soups are nice and easy, mostly just assemble - the dijon chicken soup is cubed chicken breast, dijon, evaporated milk, white sauce (flour and butter), bullion, garlic and cayenne. No cooking beyond the chicken, just combine and freeze.

This chicken-asparagus casserole looks delish!

I used yogurt instead of sour cream, because I'm still not great with estimating what I need in actual packaging. I guess it's not so much estimating as paying attention to actual amounts. Ahem.

And chicken fettuccine, again easy, looks good....I'm a little skeptical about the freezing and reheating pasta. But we'll see. It's cubed chicken, alfredo sauce (half and half, the chopped gouda, shredded parm all melted together), and spinach mixed with fettuccine.

Then there were two fish things. I made them. There was papaya.


But I'm done talking about fish.
Instead, I'm going to talk about what I did with the tomato jam:

The chicken asparagus casserole had biscuits on top and there were 4 left over. I baked them with cheese on top and then spread the jam over them. It is yummy. Not as yummy as what I had at the Old Fashioned. It's not as jammy. It's kind of spiced ketchupy. But I think I'll try it again with a full recipe. 

1 comment:

  1. You should definitely make the full batch of tomato jam. It is one of my favorite things, though I didn't cook my current batch down quite far enough. It's a bit runny. Still, so good with roasted sweet potatoes or scrambled eggs.

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