I made a sort of casserole - some chopped up Italian spicy sausage (cooked), some chopped up chicken (cooked), a bag of frozen mixed veggies, a couple cans of mushroom soup, and some sharp cheddar crumbled on top before baking. I feel like I just stepped out of a time machine from the 1970s, but... it was tasty! And there's leftovers for several days' lunches, so... I win!
Healthy eating here tonight too! Sous vide sockeye salmon, roasted baby broccoli with panko and parmesan cheese, and air-fried garlic fingerling potatoes.
I love mine! It gets things so much crispier than the regular oven, and gives off no residual heat when it's hot in the summer and the last thing I want to do it turn the oven on. I sued to live in Western NY so the idea of chicken wings that weren't fried would send me into an uncontrollable rage, but the air fryer changed that for me. They come out soooo good, as does frozen foods like french fries, breaded fish, etc. Oh, and it makes the most amazing baked potatoes in only 40 minutes!
Is it essentially like a turbo-charged convection oven? It washes hot air over the food constantly? Or...?
A Vitamix was one of the best investments I've ever made in the kitchen. 5 years later I use mine all the damn time. An air fryer's a lot cheaper though - should be right around $80-100.
Pasta Marinara (made sauce the other day in the slow cooker) with Chicken and Winter Vegetables. Mostly vegetables. Should clock in around 350-380 calories.
We have to start sharing some of these recipes. Sounds like there are some real tasty dishes being made. I started doing the lower cal stuff for my wife about two weeks ago; so far it's going well. I've been using a cook book from the Eat This, Not That people. The recipes are good and we've stopped doing so much takeout, but there are only so many recipes in the book. The book presses lower calories, lower carbs, good carbs V bad carbs, lower sodium, no over processed boxed foods, and bigger flavors. I like the book and I like the food. That baked ziti I did last night, by their numbers should have been about 410 calories, 600 mg sodium, 12grams fat; compared to the restaurant dish they copied at 1150 calories, 2370 mg sodium and 48 grams fat. And it was really good. That's part of the plan to stay on a diet, food that you want to eat. That's what I'm trying to do for my wife. She wants to lose weight, but our patterns haven't been conducive. We've been trying to build better, healthier habits. I'm sure the people at Godfather's Pizza are wondering where I've been.
I'm making risotto with mushroom tonight. Or sort of risotto. I've made a meal plan for most days this week. Thursday is some weird protein pancakes. I got a test package for free, so it's not something I'd usually eat. But hey, free food and pancakes - you can't blame me for that! It has maple syrup flavor and to be entirely honest I've never tried maple syrups! Though maple syrup flavor and actual maple syrup might be quite different. It's free food - I'm not one to judge
I know. It's just not that common around here, and rather expensive from what I remember. I'll give it a go at some point, though.
My plans include a Hawaiian chicken with a teriyaki glaze and pineapple. The chicken is marinating now.
We do. Though I can't remember seeing any in ages. My parents have a small piece of forest. While mostly pine trees, there is different leaved ones as well. I'll check if any of them are maple trees. I'm guessing that tapping (or whatever the word is) the trees in public wouldn't be too popular. We get to pick berries and mushrooms however we like in other peoples forests, but I think there are restrictions on what you can do with the trees. Is it easy to make your own syrup - provided you have the tree?
You know how to forage for mushrooms without dying? Colour me impressed. And yeah, it's easy to make Maple syrup. You just take your collected sap and simmer it down until it's the consistency of maple syrup (duh).
It's easy, but slow - you need to boil the sap down 40:1 - like, 40 litres of sap makes 1 litre of syrup. And the steam can be sticky, somehow, so you really want to do the boiling outside. And in order to have enough sap all at the same time you'd need to either collect over a long period (and refrigerate) or tap several trees. All of which makes it sound like a pain in the ass. And I guess it kinda is, but it's fun to do at least every now and then! Have a nice fire going in the sugar bush, stand around and drink beer or rye while you stir... it's good clean Canadian fun!
Pretty easy. You need to tap a lot of trees to get enough sap. In cold weather, maples basically sweat the stuff. Gather it in buckets, pour 'em all into a big pan or pot, and boil the sap over a fire outdoors. Sample it every once in a while - once it's halfway boiled down (just getting that beautiful syrup color) try a cup. It's a delicious hot drink - sweet and mapley and kinda wild-tasting and very Canadian. The rest is all as @BayView says. Don't forget to pour some of the finished sap onto clean white snow. It cools and hardens into a maple sugar stick thing that's a real treat for Canadian kids. Check out a sugaring-off party. The pour-it-onto-snow bit is at about 7:25 of the video.
Yup. Every time I tried I kept getting poisonous ones, so I decided to give it up on my doctors advice.
Are we talking the kind you find in forests - or the ones you can by from that guy that a friend of your friend knows? Though looking closer I might miss used the word. I thought mushroom was a word for all kinds of... mushrooms, but it seems to mainly mean champignon/ common mushroom. Those rarely grows around these parts. The ones I was referring to were yellow chantarelles. My favorite mushroom? Fungus? Eatable thing you find in the woods!
Where I'm at we have a few edible varieties it the bush, but what's mostly available around me is Black Morels, but last time I went picking I'm pretty sure I got a False Morel mixed in there somehow. It was rather unpleasant. Generally now I just stick to Giant Puffballs if I see them because they're pretty hard to misidentify, but they're also not as common.
Morels are awesome. We get those with the local oyster shrooms (look like giant yellow brains) and chantrelles. It's so slow at work I've been picking taco meats out of the steam table all night... feeling a little full. Maybe I'll go "clean" the beer cooler and wash everything down.