#staying fed

Tentative plan for probably tomorrow--but making half a batch with a couple of freezer leg quarters and a couple of sad baking potatoes we have, along with some middling tomatoes I need to use up.. Should be fine once they're de-eyed, peeled, and chunked up for a stew.

I may add a sad carrot or two to get that out of the fridge, and maybe a cup of liquid because I don't trust the halved recipe to have enough already in the ingredients for an electric pressure cooker. A little extra broth couldn't really hurt anyway. It'll turn out plenty rich from the bones and connective tissue either way.

Even half a batch will probably keep me fed for a couple days, with some other veggies on the side.

The details are a bit different, but the basic outline reminds me of this simple but absolutely delicious stew my mom used to make and just called "Pressure Cooker Chicken". I think she adapted some recipe out of a probably '70s pressure cooker cookbook, and its name didn't stick to her take.

Tonight's delight: some chicken noodle soup, made with fresh homemade broth/meat and broken-up brown rice linguine today. Which did work out pretty well.

Since Mr. C brought back a cold from his latest long fencing weekend, I decided to go for a vaguely East Asian spin here with garlic, ginger and plenty of black pepper in the soup. Then we have shichimi togarashi (for chili heat!) and sesame oil to top the bowls with. Unfortunately out of Chinese chili oil right now.

Also a good excuse to eat up some of that latest homemade bread, now very stale and in need of microwave refreshing. I do plan to stash the remaining scraps in the freezer for dressing/stuffing or something later.

Mr. C cooked the obligatory Swedish Christmas ham again, so I got him to chop the leftovers up this evening. (Still awkward for me.) Most went in the freezer for later, some is going in a soup tonight.

I was originally considering pea soup, but I could easily get to the lentils so we're having those instead. Also don't need soaking like the whole peas you get here.

Not really going by any recipe outside of my head, but this is not far off along the general theme:

The cooking time called for on that one is funky. My batch is getting 25 minutes under pressure, from experience.

The Instant Pot is even more tempting since I do have it set to be easily and safely usable fully seated in the wheelchair. Unlike the stove, since I still can't reasonably kneel the problematic-side knee on the seat to stand up and use it.

We're also going to get some leftover veggies he cooked added in toward the end.

Tonight's delight underway!

I decided to put together a pan of lazy lasagna with what we had. Using cold water soaked noodles (the best way with the "no boil"!), cut up prepared meatballs, thawed and squeezed out frozen spinach with a little seasoned salt mixed in, jarred pasta sauce, and that carton of Knorr bechamel that I picked up to try. It's made with cornstarch, and no gluten ingredients. 👍 That's sort of dotted around over the top of the layer I already laid down.

(That carton white sauce actually did taste pretty decent, and it should come in handy for other things if I don't get glutened this time!)

Also a few liberal sprinkles of some very Swedish "Italian salad seasoning", which is basically a salty take on Italian seasoning and pretty good for jazzing a bunch of things up. I use it over pizza a lot.

There I was still waiting for Mr. C to come back from the store with some suitable grated cheese, but decided to get going on the first layer anyway.

The more Northern Italian bechamel style of lasagna isn't my personal fave, but any lasagna is pretty good and we had that to use. (Same with the meatballs, tbh. Better than thawing and cooking ground meat with my current spoons level!) I have found that I like to do an OTT hybrid version sometimes, with ricotta layered in and bechamel on top as a crowning touch.

It was definitely foil pan night, and thankfully we had one about the right size left in the cabinet. Those ingredients came out perfect, except for a few leftover soaked noodles that I plan to oil a little so they won't stick together, and stash in the fridge for something else.

Ready for the oven, with mozzarella and a grated "pizza mix" involving Gouda layered in. This can bake covered for 45 minutes, then get more cheese on top and probably another 15 minutes uncovered.

Plans for tonight, only going for a half-sized batch using cottage cheese. Closer to this version:

But, using some frozen meatballs thawed and cut in half for the extra protein component and some frozen thawed spinach added in just because I like it.

Penne on soaking now. This is actually a brand I haven't tried before, which can be dangerous with GF pastas if you have texture issues. But, I did want penne for this. And the "soak to rehydrate, then bake" approach has worked well with pastas that were tricky to cook right before.

Idgaf about "healthy", what I'm looking for is tasty and easy.

If nothing else, various baked pasta fixings will also cover a multitude of sins and make subpar stuff more edible.

On the side, whether it really matches or not? We're getting some leftovers of one recent take on Mustard Pickled Cucumber (involving sweet-hot prepared Swedish mustard and a little rice vinegar, no extra sugar needed) filled out with some salted and drained sliced daikon. Should make a decent salady side dish.

Been getting ready for tomorrow's plans by mixing up some sauce in advance, to save effort tomorrow and let the flavors blend for longer.

Ours got some fairly aged miso, partly because I have yet to see commercial GF doenjang. I also added a splash of vinegar, because the flavor balance seemed like it could use just a little acidity. Whatever, it already tasted damned good when I put it into the jar and the fridge.

I did actually make one of my kitchen sink batches of rice noodles with a bunch of veggies and some of the same ground meat yesterday--and decided to go with gochujang-based seasoning, which ended up being an awful lot like ssamjang in flavor profile. 😅 (Delicious, btw!) The seasoning sauce for that reminding me of ssamjang was what actually inspired this plan.

But, this should be sufficiently different from fried rice noodles that it hopefully won't feel too samey to Mr. C.

My plan:

We have a head of Romaine and some ground pork and beef mix that either needs used or stashed in the freezer. So, some type of lettuce wrap seemed like an idea.

Going the simple bulgogi-seasoned ground meat route, with some jasmine rice to spoon in as we like. (It'll work fine, and that's what we have right now besides basmati.) I will probably go lighter on the rice with mine, and really like having that flexibility like with the folded gimbap that I really need to pick up more ingredients for.

(Somewhat amusingly, most of the places making sushi here are run by Thai people. The local Thai N Sushi For You small fast-foody chain is really not an anomaly with what they're serving. So yeah, you're getting a lot of jasmine rice used in sushi. We're just sorta going local style with the ssambap. 😅)

Anyway, I was also going to cut up some cucumber, and pull out those white kimchi-inspired daikon and carrot pickles to add in the wraps. And of course the sauce. That'll have to be good enough.

I may also break into that small overflow jar of white cabbage kimchi which won't have had more than a day to start fermenting, for mine. That said, with this weather and how fast kimchi tends to take off anyway? I would be surprised if it hadn't started bubbling by then.

Some good old comfort food underway, using what we've got! This is too simple and freeform to post to the dedicated food blog.

(Plus I didn't feel like completely getting working surfaces neat enough for those pics. Everything is hygienic enough around the food. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

This is another thing that I grew up eating fairly often, and my mom already preferred to make it with leftover rice and canned pasta sauce.

Today my own main little refinement is to make the meatloaf-type crust with all ground pork and sage sausage seasonings. If you live where that's a thing, you could just use half breakfast-type or bulk Italian sausage, and half other ground meat of your choice. That's basically the effect I was going for.

This also got finely chopped red sweet pepper and some leftover chopped green onion that you can see, besides grated regular onion and some garlic powder.

Parbaked for 15-20 minutes for about a pound/500g worth of meat mixture, and mixing up the rice filling.

Didn't have leftovers, so I cooked like 200ml/¾ cup of rice in bouillon for extra flavor last night. Add to that like the ¾ that was left in an open jar of pasta sauce, and a teaspoon of dry oregano. (Whatever seasonings you want, basically.) That could have been saucier, but it's all good. I didn't feel like opening anything else to add to it.

Since this was Basmati, I decided to try also stirring in an egg to help the filling hold together better. Besides the usual grated melting cheese which should also help glue the rice together, this got a couple tablespoons of grated Parmesan.

We're just going for enough cheese right now to give it some taste and help hold it together. More goes on top later.

Tomorrow I am planning to go at least a little more elaborate with the "meals only I really want to eat" theme. I picked up a couple of these pretty much individual sized packs of vacuum packed firm tofu to try, and I've got some zucchini and homemade white cabbage kimchi.

So, I thought I would try making a noodle version of kimchi fried rice with those. May also try using the Lao Gan Ma black bean chili oil basically in place of gochujang again, since that turned out delicious before and we are almost out of gochujang.

Not surprised that I'm hardly the first person to come up with the idea of using noodles instead of rice there. Though I may actually use some Western short pasta shape because it sounds good. But, here's one actually tested take that sounds promising: