Sausage, Potatoes, and Broccoli Dinner

Sometimes, dinner is just a matter of putting things together. Tonight I
had a package of beef sausage, already cooked. I had leftover baked potatoes from the other night. I had a jar of applesauce. And I had broccoli. The broccoli is about the only thing I would consider "cooked" (even if I just steamed it) yet this was a great dinner.

I chopped up the leftover baked potatoes, which I cooked ahead of time with this end in mind, and started them sauteing in a mix of butter and olive oil. If you want more flavor, use some leftover bacon fat instead. (I know it's horribly bad for you, but I always have a can filled with bacon grease in the frig. Just a smidgmen lends a healthy amount of flavor to nearly any recipe, from cornbread to greens to fried potatoes.)

I sliced up the sausage and heated it up in a frying pan.

The broccoli I put in a covered microwavable dish and added a bit of water. When we were within 5 minutes of eating, I started it cooking.

Sausage, fried potatoes, broccoli, and applesauce. Pretty good for a thrown together dinner. And if you kept a pound of sausage in the freezer, you could surely throw together dinner quicker and cheaper than take out!

In Which Half a Frozen Already-Cooked Pork Roast Comes to the Rescue!

Working a lot these days and the menu planning thing has fallen by the wayside. I typically finish up about 6 and am often cooking while watching my laptop for IMs and emails. Several clients are in heavy-duty push mode. Last night was one of my brain-dead nights. Hungry children were doing homework and I was staring in the frig and pantry, thinking. I can also do burritos or chicken quesadillas and everyone's happy. I thought I might quickly cook up some chicken, but remembered the half a pork roast I had in the freezer and decided to make chili verde. Cheater Chili Verde since I start with already-cooked pork.

I put the roast in the microwave on defrost and set about gathering everything else. From the pantry I pulled out a can of green chilies and a can of refried beans and grabbed half a bottle of green salsa from the frig.

Once the roast was defrosted, I chopped it up into small pieces and set it to simmer with the chilies and green salsa. I filled the bottle of salsa about halfway full of water and shook it to get the last flavor out and dumped that in as well. Sprinkled some garlic salt in it, then some garlic powder and cumin. I left this simmering for 20 minutes or so, maybe 30 minutes. Turned it up a bit at the end to evaporate more of the liquid.

From the refrigerator, I pulled out some cheese, sour cream, flour tortillas, and lettuce.

Heated up the beans, grated the cheese, heated the tortillas and dinner was ready!

They tasted great last night and the leftovers were good for lunch today!

Flexible Fish Filets with Honey Mustard Sauce

I love recipes that scale, that are just as easy to do for two people or ten! You could bake or broil (or grill?) these filets. I broiled them. I'm not a big fish expert but would venture to guess this would work pretty much the same on each white fish filet. I used a couple of frozen talapia filets.

For each filet, mix together:

1 tsp honey
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp rice vinegar

That is, if you're cooking 4 filets, mix together 4 tsp each of the honey, mustard, and vinegar.

Preheat the broiler.

Put the filets on a broiler pan (lining the bottom with foil if you'd like an easier clean-up). Brush the top of the fish with half the honey-mustard sauce. Broil 3-5 minutes, turn over, brush the other side with the rest of the sauce, and broil another 3-5 minutes, until the fish flakes easily with a fork.

That's it! Can't get much simpler. I served these with couscous and peas. Dinner was on the table in 15 minutes and you REALLY cannot beat that!

Other easily scaled recipes I like are:

• Chicken quesadillas
• Chicken curry salad
• Baked chicken with Worcestershire or brown sugar
• Mustard Baked Pork Chops

Falafel and Homemade Yogurt

Excuse the absence... We've been off an a holiday adventure and I did NOT take a computer with me. For shame! But since we ate out for every meal I wouldn't have had much to post anyway. I don't do restaurant reviews. Although there was this to-to-for restaurant in DC called Skewers. It was so good we ate there twice in 5 days. Nice people, delicious food, and walking distance from our hotel...but I digress.

I'm not sure this counts as a recipe. I don't use many boxed/prepared foods, but I saw a box of falafel mix when shopping the other day and since we've all enjoyed the gyros in pita bread, I thought I'd give these a try.

I just followed the recipe on the box: Dump the falafel mix into a bowl and add 1 1/2 cups of water. They were still pretty moist after soaking 15 minutes so I might do 1 1/4 cups of water next time, to make it easier to shape the balls.

The box also had a recipe for a yogurt and cucumber sauce that was a bit different from my gyro version, so I tried it. The main differences were the addition of lemon juice, salt, and dill. I'm not crazy about dill. It always makes me think of canned green beans. I swear my mother used to add dill to canned green beans but she denies it, so I'm not sure where this flavor-memory comes from. I like my old sauce better anyway, although the lemon juice was nice. Next time I'll do my old sauce with a bit of lemon juice perhaps.

I served these with shredded lettuce and sliced cucumbers. I'll definitely do them again in the summer when I have home-grown tomatoes available to augment. I just planted 10 tomato plants so we should have plenty! This recipe reminded me that I've been remiss about making my own yogurt. I have a hard time regularly going through the amount I need to make each week to keep the cultures active, so I end up making it for a while, then slacking off and needing to buy another pint and start all over.