Red Velvet Cupcakes

My youngest baked these heart-shaped red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for her boyfriend for Valentine’s Day. Too cute!  And totally easy!  She shared the extras with a neighbor family and we had a few to nibble on here too.

Here are the recipes for the red velvet cake and cream cheese frosting.

Thanks to Desperation Entertaining! (affiliate link) for this fantastic recipe which has become our go-to dessert when company’s coming!

Taco Soup without the Mixes

Another good recipe from Family Feasts for $75 a Week: A Penny-wise Mom Shares Her Recipe for Cutting Hundreds from Your Monthly Food Bill. I’ve seen various recipes for taco soup before but they all call for packaged mixes and seasonings, which I rarely buy. This came out great and she provides you with alternatives to the packaged mixes! Initially, the broth was a little salty but that was my fault as I was using a jarred soup base and mismeasured. ;( But adding some extra water fixed that in a jiffy. I modified her recipe a bit. She called for 2 cans of chili-style beans, which I didn’t have, so I used two cans of kidney beans instead. She also called for a 28 ounce can of diced or pureed tomatoes or 2 cups fresh pureed tomatoes. I used a 15 oz can of diced tomatoes and a 15 oz can of diced tomatoes with green chilies because that’s what I had in the pantry.

• 1 tsp oil
• 1 onion, peeled and chopped
• 1 pound of ground beef or turkey
• 1 packet of Onion Soup mix (or make your own)
• 1 packet of taco seasoning (or make your own taco seasoning)
• 2 15 ounce cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed (unless you use the chili-style beans)
• 1 15 oz can of corn (don’t bother draining)
• 28 ounces or so of some sort of diced or pureed tomatoes
• 4 cups beef broth
• taco chips, sour cream and grated cheese for garnish

Heat the oil in a soup pot and start the diced onion cooking for a few minutes. Add the ground beef and cook until browned, using a wooden spoon to break it into small pieces as it cooks. Drain any excess fat, then stir in the onion soup mix and the taco seasoning. Add beans, corn, tomatoes and broth. Simmer, partially covered, for 45 minutes or so. Serve with sour cream, grated cheese and chips at the table.

All the other taco soup recipes I see call for a packet of Ranch dressing mix as well. All these packets would easily add $3 to the cost of the soup even if you managed to find them on sale!  I do wonder what the flavor of the Ranch might do, but if you’re curious you can always make your own with soda crackers!  But the soup was quite good without.

When I served this I had  no tortilla chips so made some cheese quesadillas to go with the soup.  I swung by the grocery store for some cat food yesterday so picked up some tortilla chips, knowing several of us would be eating this for lunch. I quite enjoyed dipping the chips into the soup or just crumbling them into the bowl.

She says this serves 6 and I don’t doubt it. So far I’ve gotten 5 servings from it and still have at least 2, probably 3, left. But we’re 2 teen girls and one woman here now so probably lighter eaters than average

Other recipes I’ve enjoyed from this cookbook or Mary’s blog OwlHaven (always a fun read, whether you have a large family or a small one, like me!):

• Chicken Chimichangas
• Mexican Migas
• Panda Style Orange Chicken

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Working at home as I do, my lunches are usually leftovers, salads, soups in the winter, or sandwiches. Leftovers for lunch are great unless I’m planning on having them for dinner as well. Same with the soup. And I get bored with plain sandwiches pretty quickly. Adding some avocado to a turkey sandwich makes it a treat. And yesterday I discovered the ultimate sandwich add-in: chermoulah!

I may have just added a new Sunday chore to my list and will need to make a batch each week. Adding these cooked and spiced peppers into my turkey sandwich made all the difference between having a “turkey sandwich,” again, and having a great lunch!

School starts tomorrow here. I asked the girls what they wanted for dinner tonight. One said “mashed potatoes and anything.” The other said “steak.” So I decided to make chicken fried steak, which fit with the “cheap” cooking theme since round steaks (aka London Broils) were on sale locally in a buy one get one free mode. I’ve never made chicken fried steak before. But what I think of as Southern “poor man’s food” has always been a taste treat for me somehow. I mostly followed the recipe in the book my sister gave me for my birthday, The Complete Meat Cookbook, which I think is pretty traditional. Some variations I saw in other recipes included using cracker crumbs rather than flour and various different herbs mixed in with the crumbs or flour, as well as stuff like Worcestershire sauce in with the egg (which I have done quite successfully with chicken cutlets before).

Basically, you slice a thin (1/2″) piece of round steak and pound it even thinner (to 1/4″). Then you dip it in flour, dip it in egg, and dip it in flour again (or cracker crumbs) and fry in oil, bacon grease, lard, or whatever fat you have lying around. I happened to spot lard at the grocery store, although I swear I was not even looking for it. But once I saw it, I decided to try it. I have been tempted before to try pie crusts with lard and I may now have an excuse. But tonight I just fried the steaks in it.

I’m not sure where to give the credit (the lard, the meat, the frying, the seasonings) but these chicken fried steaks were out of this world. So simple and so good! My eldest, who dislikes chicken at the moment, was not all fond of the name of the dish but once I assured here there was no chicken involved, that it was merely named after the style of cooking/frying, she dug into it and pronounced it wonderful.

If you haven’t pounded meat before, I find it easiest to place the meat between two pieces of plastic wrap and use the flat side of a meat tenderizer or I suppose anything else heavy and flat. Just whack away at it until it’s as thin as you like.

4 pieces of round steak, cut 1/2″ thin and pounded to 1/4″, about a pound total
1 cup flour
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 eggs
3 Tbs lard or other fat

If you want gravy:
2 Tbs flour
2 Tbs diced onion or 1 Tbs dried onion flakes
1 and 1/2 cups milk or milk and chicken broth or milk and water mix
salt and pepper to taste

Pound the meat and set aside. Heat the fat in a frying pan large enough to hold 1 or 2 steaks.

Put the egg in a pie pan and mix it up. If you like, you can add a bit of milk or half and half or water. Put the flour and seasonings in another pie pan and stir together.

When the fat is hot, use two forks to lift a pounded steak into the egg and coat it, then over to the flour and coat it on both sides, pressing down slightly to make it stick. Put the steak into the fat and cook for about 2 minutes on each side. Remove to a plate and keep warm until all are done.

To make gravy, drain off all but about 2 Tbs of the fat. Add the onion and cook a minute, then sprinkle the 2 Tbs flour over it and cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes or so. Slowly add the liquid, mixing each addition in so there are no lumps. You can use a whisk for this or one of those springy things my girls called the “bungee mixer” to get the lumps out. Stir constantly a few more minutes, until it cooks down to the thickness you like.

Serve the chicken fried steaks with mashed potatoes and the gravy and some sort of vegetable. Tonight I did another squash and onion and tomato saute.

Postscript: I hadn’t realized that frying was the theme of Is My Blog Burning this month until I read some of my favorite cooking blogs this morning. At Our Table is the host so go check out the other honest entries, as opposed to my happenstance one!

Sunday afternoons often find me with some free time and the desire to make a few things in the kitchen that cause the weekday dinners to go easier. School starts tomorrow for us. So I might normally think about baking a batch of muffins “egg McMom’s”, pancakes, or breakfast burritos for weekday breakfasts. In the summer, I might make a pasta or potato salad to serve up a few days in a row. In the winter, I often make a big pot of soup. In terms of a main course, I might roast a chicken and then have some “planned over” burritos (sounds much nicer than leftovers doesn’t it?). Or cook a roast and make hash or burritos or fried rice another night.

Today I made chermoulah. This is a recipe I found in Fine Preserving: Jams and Jellies, Pickles and Relishes, Conserves and Chutneys and Brandied Fruits for City and Country Cooks. I had actually begun to collect cookbooks long before blogging. When I moved into this house, with its 14 fruit trees, I was struck by the idea of canning. My own mother had canned a variety of home grown produce and fruits when I was growing up, everything from stewed tomatoes to applesauce and jams. I guess it just seemed natural that I try my hand. I found this book and bought it, long before I knew who MFK Fisher was, although in fact it was her annotations that made the book interesting to me. I’ve made a spiced cherry jam that is to die for, lemon marmalade, and chermoulah, peppers cooked in oil and vinegar, MFK Fisher’s favorite in the book as well as my own. When I saw green peppers on sale at the grocer, I remembered this recipe and made up a batch today. Like MKF Fisher, I like to make mine with a mixture of different colored peppers, although you could more easily just make it of a single color. The original recipe calls for green peppers only.

You cook up sliced peppers and whole garlic cloves in a mixture of olive oil, vinegar, paprika, coriander, salt, and pepper, then refrigerate. Serve it as a side dish, an appetizer, or whatever. If you’ve got some crusty French bread, the oil and vinegar mixture is to be sopped up with the bread. I could easily make a meal of the chermoulah and bread.

1 cup olive oil
1/4 cup vinegar
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp paprika
1/8 tsp ground coriander
salt and pepper to taste (1/4 tsp each maybe…)
2 peppers, seeded and sliced into 1/2″ strips

Cook this all together over a low heat. I do it so that the oil is barely making bubbles. The original author, Catherine Plagemann, says 15-20 minutes. MFK likes it a bit crisper and does 10-15 minutes. Cool and refrigerate. It should be eaten within a few weeks, although, like MFK notes, it never lasts long enough in my house to push that time limit.

Today I did one batch of green peppers and one of red peppers, then combined them afterwards. It is a beautiful concoction, in addition to tasting heavenly!

Reading Tomatilla’s post about weeknight cooking and pulling dinner out of a hat must have sparked this… The dinners you create out of what’s around, with no clear plan from beginning to end, are often the best dishes.

My original plan was to make a quiche tonight, because I had lots of eggs and was going to do something vegetarian. But then one of the girls asked for macaroni and cheese. That sounded too heavy but I said I’d do pasta and something. I put the pot of water onto boil and went out to the garden. I picked some cherry tomatoes, both red and yellow pear ones, some small yellow crookneck squash, and some basil. I was thinking of a pasta primavera kind of thing, so I heated up some olive oil and chopped half an onion and a garlic clove and started them sauteeing.

While they were cooking, I sliced up the yellow squash and halved the various cherry tomatoes, then sliced up the basil into thin strips. (I know there’s a word for that but I cannot think of what it is. Chiffonade maybe?) I also sliced up some baby carrots (from the grocer alas). I added them all to the onions and garlic after a few minutes. They smelled good–and even better after I added some seasoned pepper and salt. As I was pouring a glass of cheap white wine ($2 Chuck: this is CheapCooking after all!), I figured the wine would help the vegetables so added half a glass to the pan.

When I put the wine back in the frig, I spotted the leftover tarragon chicken from last night. I chopped up one of the pieces and added it and some of the leftover sauce to the vegetables. When the pasta was done and drained, I put some on each plate and topped with the leftover vegetable chicken mixture.

One child had not liked the chicken last night. I think it was the tarragon. Of course, she actually doesn’t like chicken these days so it’s hard to tell. But she loved this dinner tonight! Maybe it was the fact that the chicken was not the focal point, but merely an accent. The other child had liked the chicken last night and also loved this dinner. Both pronounced it a “repeat”–our highest praise.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to fix it again, exactly the same of course. Such is the bittersweet reward of dinners like this. All I can do is make note, as I’ve done here, and hope that I’ll be similarly inspired some other night when everyone’s starving and I’ve not much time to put dinner on the table.

I love exploring new cookbooks. The fancy ones with beautiful pictures are fun to look at but when it gets down to the nuts and bolts of putting dinner on the table reliably my favorites are often not much to look at but chock-full of good everyday recipes most people I know would like. Clear easy to follow directions, ideas for side dishes to go with particular entrees, and notes about which recipes are “entertaining worthy” and which be made ahead or prep work started ahead at least are big plusses for me.

“What’s for Dinner” by Maryana Vollstedt has it all so far. The subtitle is “Over 200 delicious recipes that work every time” and I can believe it. The other night I was looking for an easy “little attention required” chicken dish. I found several that sounded promising and could be made from things I already had in the pantry or frig.

Tarragon is one of those herbs I don’t use very often for some reason, although I like it. This dish caught my eye because of the tarragon. It was super easy to do and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it for company. I like dishes I can prepare ahead of time and then have cooking in the oven while I visit with my guests.

Chicken with Tarragon Sauce

4-6 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs Dijon mustard
1/4 cup white wine
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp dried tarragon
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Spray or oil a baking dish large enough to hold your chicken and lay the chicken breasts down in it.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter, then over low heat add everything else and stir with a whisk until smooth. Pour the sauce over the chicken. Bake until the chicken is done, about 35 minutes. Serve with the sauce spooned over the chicken.

This would go excellent with rice to spoon the sauce on, although I made it with some leftover red potatoes that I sauteed.

I love exploring new cookbooks. The fancy ones with beautiful pictures are fun to look at but when it gets down to the nuts and bolts of putting dinner on the table reliably my favorites are often not much to look at but chock-full of good everyday recipes most people I know would like. Clear easy to follow directions, ideas for side dishes to go with particular entrees, and notes about which recipes are “entertaining worthy” and which be made ahead or prep work started ahead at least are big plusses for me.

“What’s for Dinner” by Maryana Vollstedt has it all so far. The subtitle is “Over 200 delicious recipes that work every time” and I can believe it. The other night I was looking for an easy “little attention required” chicken dish. I found several that sounded promising and could be made from things I already had in the pantry or frig.

Tarragon is one of those herbs I don’t use very often for some reason, although I like it. This dish caught my eye because of the tarragon. It was super easy to do and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it for company. I like dishes I can prepare ahead of time and then have cooking in the oven while I visit with my guests.

Chicken with Tarragon Sauce

4-6 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs Dijon mustard
1/4 cup white wine
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp dried tarragon
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Spray or oil a baking dish large enough to hold your chicken and lay the chicken breasts down in it.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter, then over low heat add everything else and stir with a whisk until smooth. Pour the sauce over the chicken. Bake until the chicken is done, about 35 minutes. Serve with the sauce spooned over the chicken.

This would go excellent with rice to spoon the sauce on, although I made it with some leftover red potatoes that I sauteed.

The tomatoes are in full swing in the garden. Ya gotta love August around here! I’ve got tomatoes, squash, apples, lemons, and various herbs available for the picking out back. I skipped planting my winter crops of garlic and onions last year and am really missing them when it’s time to make salsa! I’m pretty flexible with my salsa. Sometimes I add garlic; sometimes I leave it out. Sometimes I add jalapenos or green chiles; sometimes I leave them out. The essential ingredients, for my taste buds, are:

fresh tomatoes, seeded and chopped
onion (white or green), chopped
fresh cilantro
salt
a squeeze of lime juice if you have it, but it’s okay to leave it out

Optionally add:

minced garlic
minced jalapeno or green chiles

You can expand beyond the basic tomato and cilantro version by adding chopped ripe mango or peaches and some fresh minced ginger. Then it makes a great topping for fish or pork.