allergen-free chicken cordon bleu casserole

My family voted to have chicken cordon bleu casserole for dinner this week.

Sadly, I'm not supposed to have dairy! And dairy plays a huge role in chicken cordon bleu. So I had to come up with a solution.

Here is that solution.

First, the regular recipe is: you bread chicken cubes by dipping them in a mixture of egg and milk, and then in bread crumbs. You fry them. Then you mix them in a casserole dish with 8 oz cubed ham, 8 oz cubed swiss cheese, and 1 10.5-oz can of cream of chicken soup mixed with 10.5 oz of milk. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.

So, clearly, since Nathaniel is allergic to eggs and dairy, this was going to involve some work on my part.

For the cream of chicken soup, I used this recipe and it turned out admirably. It made approximately 4x as much as I needed (I made us a mini-batch of dairy-free casserole), so I froze the rest in serving-size bags for the next time I need dairy-free cream of chicken.

I dipped the chicken in straight up coconut milk to bread it; the breading didn't stick to the chicken like I wanted it to, but it worked out in the end.

We used fresh local goat swiss cheese instead of regular swiss cheese, since we discovered on Saturday that the little man can handle goat cheese.

I made our special casserole in a bread pan, and baked it at the regular time.

Actually, I think our casserole turned out better than the normal one. I don't love goat cheese, but it worked out really well for the chicken cordon bleu!

leftovers recipe: chicken and cauliflower

Last night I had to make dinner. I only thought about it about 45 minutes until dinner was needed, so it had to be quick. I had to use a bunch of leftover chicken. Bonus points for using leftover cauliflower that had been blanched and then drenched in cheese (the cauliflower doesn't reheat well, so it's rarely eaten as a leftover).

Normally, I use leftover chicken for chicken alfredo lasagna. But we were missing about half of the other ingredients for that.

So I made up this fun dish, which I guess you could call Leftover Chicken and Cauliflower Pasta. Or something like that.

I cut up the leftover chicken and the leftover cauliflower and heated it up with just a little bit of oil. I added some garlic and crushed red pepper. Then, after everything was heated through, I added a can of cream of mushroom soup. Then I rinsed the can out with milk, adding the milk to the mixture.

Brought it to boiling, then reduced the heat and let it keep cooking until the pasta was done.

Then I put them together.

It was great.

I think next time I would add more red pepper and garlic, and I might use a can of condensed cream of chicken soup instead of cream of mushroom. But it was a good meal and only took something like 20 minutes? Not bad!

spicy tuna wrap recipe

Let me preface this recipe with the side note that while I love fish, I don't particularly adore tuna. And in addition to that, I find mayonnaise super disgusting. Everything about it just creeps me out. But this recipe was actually good and I'm excited to have it for lunch today as well.

INGREDIENTS:
- 1 can tuna
- 1 spoonful mayonnaise
- bunches of hot sauce (I used Sriracha, but I bet Cholula would be great too)
- a little bit of chopped onion
- 1 tortilla
- 1 cup brown rice

Mix everything together and stick on the tortilla. Bam. Done.

I think I ended up using half (or 3/4) hot sauce and half mayonnaise to hold the tuna together and it was good. And spicy. But that's good.

on food, UPDATED

UPDATE: This post posted prematurely due to my weird computer doing bizarre things I don't understand! But I finished it. Here it is, finished.

Over the past week, I've found myself redefining my relationship with food.

Food is a funny thing. We all need it. There isn't anyone alive who doesn't eat, who doesn't need to eat to live. Sorry to be controversial, but the Breatharians are lying! We all eat.

But we all eat different things. And in different amounts. And at different times. We've got vegans and vegetarians and fruitarians and straight up carnivores and people who only eat at Subway and people who only eat at McDonald's. Then you have the people with eating disorders: people with bulemia and anorexia nervosa and compulsive overeating.

The way we relate to food really colors our entire lives.

A few days ago I was watching one of my friends eat--we were eating together, PS, I don't just like watch people eat--and I noticed how when everyone else got up for seconds, including me, she didn't. She just wasn't hungry for more.

That was the first time it ever occurred to me that I, myself, might eat more than I need to at mealtimes, just because. Maybe that makes me stupid, that I never thought about it before. But oh well. I'm twenty-three years old and I just realized that at dinnertime, I usually eat more than I need.

And then I came across an article in the NYT about how junk food is actually way more expensive than home-cooked food, despite the rumors to the contrary. Honestly, I'd heard the same lines over and over myself: that junk food is far cheaper than healthful food. But it turns out, that's a LIE! And when you think about it, of course it's a lie. You can make healthy food for cheap, if you actually bother to make it.

I know in my life, I've had strange relationships with food in the past. For the first six months of my first pregnancy, I couldn't keep down a single meal, pretty much. I lost 15 lbs from the whole ordeal. I had to force myself to eat in the hopes that my body would absorb a few nutrients before the morning-afternoon-night sickness kicked in.

In high school, since my schedule was jam-packed from 5:45 am until 9 pm at night, with literally no breaks (I skipped lunch to take extra class... yeah. not my whole high school career, but a significant portion of it), I would do nothing but eat from 4:45 am until 5:45 am. Then I would snack a little around 1 pm in between classes. That was pretty much how I dealt with food. Tons and tons of food in the morning, and then nothing all day.

Then I went to college, and had an opposite problem: as the opening baker, I had to be up too early to eat before going to work (on campus, the cafeteria wasn't open when I left... for obvious reasons. I was the one opening it, basically). So I had to put off eating until the afternoon, and that changed up all my eating habits, also for obvious reasons.

One year for Lent I gave up sweets: chocolate, sugar-based things like cake and cookies, anything with corn syrup in the first five ingredients. For the first week it was killer but then after that it was so easy. I was going to do it forever but a few weeks after Lent I got back into my old habits. A few candies was all it took to bring back the "need" for them in my life again.

I've always had the problem of when I get super stressed, I stop feeling hungry--but then I force myself to eat more than I need, because I know starving isn't healthy but I can't always sense when my body is satiated.

Now that I'm a stay at home person, it's both surprisingly easy and surprisingly hard to eat whenever I want. Most of the time when I'm hungry, it feels like, Nathaniel gets hungry too, and he comes first most of the time. So there are days when I spend all my time nursing and don't get my first meal in until the afternoon, sometimes even late afternoon. On the other hand, I am the captain of my day now, and if I wanted to tell my baby to suck it up and take a binky, I could probably spend the whole day eating if I wanted to.

Food is complicated.

Our relationships to it are complicated. And even worse (or better?), they change over time. It's kind of like reading your scriptures every day. Some weeks, or months or years, you can be really good at daily scripture study. And then sometimes you lapse and forget to be intentional about it, and the lapse can last just as long as the disciplined times did. With food, sometimes we're good about it, and sometimes we're not. As we saw in the last season of The Biggest Loser, a person can go from being an Olympic athlete to being hundreds of pounds overweight in a single lifetime. That is amazing to me. Every person has the potential to go to extremes with food. Just because you took care of your eating habits for the first 25 years of your life is no guarantee that you'll continue for the next 25.

This whole synchronicity of food thoughts popping up in my life has got me thinking: I'm going to be more intentional about what I eat. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thoughts, anyone? Do you have any thoughts about food you'd like to share?

recipe: better than lasagna

Today was Pasta Day at our house! And in celebration I found a recipe online called "Easy Italian Pasta Bake," or something like that. Oh look, I found it.

Anyway, that recipe is all right, but mine is better. In fact, it is not only better than that recipe, it is also better than any lasagna I have ever had (minus my chicken alfredo lasagna, which was also awesome). Here's how I made it.

WHAT YOU NEED

- a box of pasta (I used ~12 oz farfalle, my second favorite pasta)
- 1 jar tomato sauce (I used Sweet Tomato Basil Ragu, I think 26 oz)
- 2 cups or water (or whatever it calls for in that other recipe)
- 1 lb ground beef
- 1/8 tsp granulated garlic (which equals 1 clove fresh garlic, or 1/4 tsp garlic powder)
- a pinch of salt
- some pinches of cayenne pepper (optional!)
- 3 handfuls of chopped onion (I chopped the pieces to be about the size of my thumbnail)
- a bunch of shredded cheese

WHAT YOU DO

1. Brown the ground beef with the onion in a pot. You'll notice that I included probably about three times as much onion as the original recipe called for. Well, onions are awesome. So that's why. Also at this time, add the salt, cayenne, and garlic. Also at this time, preheat your oven to 350.

2. You're supposed to drain the ground beef when it's done cooking. I didn't do that. Instead, I cooked it a little extra, so most of the fat cooked out. The thing is, the fat is what absorbs the taste of the spices. So I left it in there. At this point, I poured the tomato sauce into the pot. I used the water I needed for the recipe to rinse out the remaining sauce from the bottle into the pot. Once the water and sauce are in there, stir and heat to boiling.

3. Throw in the pasta and stir. I let my pasta boil for 12 minutes. Now, I used slightly less tomato sauce than the original recipe called for, and so the sauce kept getting a little thick. Several times I threw in an extra quarter cup of water to compensate for the water boiling out.

4. When the pasta is done, pour the entire contents of the pot into an 8x13 glass baking dish.

5. Cover it with that cheese, and pop it in the oven for 25 minutes.

~~

The whole thing took me maybe... well, a full hour or a little more, if you count the 10 minutes it took to defrost the meat. But during most of the time, the pasta was in the oven, and otherwise I was just stirring, and even during that oh-so-strenuous onion-chopping phase, I was able to watch TED lectures.

Carl and I decided we like this recipe way better than lasagna. It's easier to eat (no having to chop up all those noodles), and it cooked faster, and didn't involve cottage cheese.

Also, I liked it because the way I made it, it only got four things dirty: my chopping knife, my spatula, the baking dish, and a single pot. In the original recipe you have to use at least two pots.

At the end of the day, you could really just skip out on baking the pasta, if you needed to. The result would be basically pasta soup--like a ghoulash that just had tomato and onion, meat and pasta in it. You could add cheese to the top and it would be pretty good, I bet. That would put the entire meal prep time at only about half an hour.

recipe: yellow cake with chocolate crust

I tried making this one kind of cake the other day, and it definitely didn't turn out as planned. I had to substitute one ingredient and I think that made all the difference.

However, the cake is delicious, incredibly moist, and has a chocolate crust that I hadn't anticipated, and so if you like things that are moist, delicious, and have chocolate crusts, then you will like this recipe.

WHAT YOU NEED
- yellow cake mix
- vanilla pudding mix (5.9 oz or 5.7 oz or however big that box is)
- 3/4 cup sour cream
- 1/4 cup milk
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 cup oil
- 4 eggs
- 2 cups chocolate chips (I used milk chocolate)

WHAT YOU DO
1. Preheat oven to 350
2. Mix everything together, minus the chocolate chips (I beat it on low for 1 minute, then medium for 2 minutes)
3. Add the chocolate chips and stir manually
4. Pour it all into your greased baking dish
5. Bake for 40-50 minutes (until toothpick comes out clean)


What happens is, you get really moist yellow cake on top--but then while the cake is cooking, the chocolate chips sink to the bottom of the cake. I was not anticipating that, because if you use Devil's Food cake mix and a full cup of sour cream (and no milk), the chips are suspended in the mix.

But the crust is pretty awesome. It's like reverse frosting. In fact, I have not frosted this cake but it's almost gone anyway. Yum.

good recipe: sausage pasta

Not to inundate my blog with recipes, because this is not really a recipe blog, but I was planning to put this up instead of the chicken alfredo lasagna one and didn't, and I just need to get this recipe out of my system.

For this, you need:

- sausage! I like Polska Kielbasa or whatever. 1/2 lb

- pasta, probably around 14 oz. I use rotini because of my rotini love <3




- canned tomato product (I've used crushed tomatoes, diced tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce, and tomato puree and they all work fine), maybe around 30 oz

- 1/2 onion

- 1-2 cloves crushed garlic, or garlic salt to taste

- crushed red pepper, as much as you like

- cheese to taste. I use Mexican Blend cheese because it's what we have around when I make it, but you could use parmesan and that would probably be very good



HERE'S WHAT YOU DO

1. Dice the onions finely. For me, I try to get each piece the size of my pinky nail or so.

2. Chop up the sausage into bite-size pieces. I prefer mine to be around the size of my thumbnail.

3. If you're using fresh garlic, mince it now.

4. Put water in a pot, bring it to a boil, and get those noodles cooking.

5. Mix the onion, garlic, and sausage together with red pepper in a saucepan. Saute the onions and garlic and pepper in the fat from the sausage until the onions are cooked through. Another good way to tell if it's ready (if you can handle it--be careful! It's hot!) is to taste the sausage fat. The fat should assume the taste of the onion, the garlic, the pepper, and the sausage. DO NOT DRAIN THIS. It is what makes the pasta good! And if you cook it long enough, most of the fat seems to boil out (I think it's mostly the water content that evaporates, leaving you with essentially a sausage fat reduction).

6. Pour in your tomato product and let it simmer until the noodles are done cooking.

7. Drain your noodles, pour them into your sauce, stir, and add a bunch of cheese.

8. Rejoice as you eat because the pasta is just SO AMAZING.

~~~

I usually make a double or triple batch because everyone here loves it.

You can also add other vegetables if you like. One time I added some peppers--they were good, but I forgot that peppers are aromatics and I added too much. The pasta tasted very much like red peppers. So just be careful about the amounts you add in.

good recipe: chicken alfredo lasagna

I feel driven to share some new favorite recipes with you all.

For chicken alfredo lasagna, you need:

- leftover chicken (my dad likes to grill excess amounts of mesquite-marinaded chicken, so I use that, but you could also use a rotisserie chicken from Costco or something)

- a jar of alfredo sauce, or homemade alfredo sauce if you were that cool (remind me to share my recipe for homemade alfredo sauce one time, it's good)

- 2 cups cottage cheese

- 1 cup parmesan cheese

- 1 cup mozzarella cheese

- probably 12-14 oz noodles? I use rotini because those are my favorite, and I hate lasagna noodles, but you could use lasagna noodles (since this is a lasagna and all)

- a 13 x 9 pan (mine is glass)

- aluminum foil

- a pot for boiling noodles

- a bowl for mixing together the cheeses, plus a spoon to mix

- a cutting board for the chicken, and a knife to cut it with




WHAT YOU DO

0. Preheat oven to 375.

1. Put water in pot.

2. Heat water to boiling.

3. Put in noodles and cook them.

4. While those noodles are cooking, chop up that leftover chicken into pieces that would not be annoying to eat. I try to get each piece to the size of my thumbnail (which, for the record, is small).

5. Also mix the three cheeses together in their bowl.

6. Spread a little smidgen of alfredo sauce in the bottom of the pan.

7. Drain those noodles and then put a layer of them on top of the spread sauce in the pan.

8. Spread some cheese on there. I put it on in spoonfuls and the heat of the noodles melts the spoonfuls enough to spread a little.

9. Layer on some chicken.

10. Layer on some alfredo sauce.

11. Repeat: noodles, cheese, chicken, alfredo sauce.

12. When you get to the top of the pan, cover it with cheese (for me, I usually only get through 2 layers before I reach the top).

13. Put foil on top, and stick the whole thing in the oven for 45 minutes.

14. Uncover it and let it keep baking for 5-15 minutes (I just leave it in there until I feel like it's time to take it out).

15. Take it out and eat it happily because chicken alfredo lasagna = joy.