Once a Week Cooking

Ever since I started my new job back in January, my free time has been increasingly limited and I've been quite exhausted after work. For the first few weeks it was tortuous to come home and have to get something together for dinner and more often than I care to admit I just gave up and we either ate out or dinner consisted of milk and cereal. One week got so bad that cereal was even my go to lunch option. Not healthy. Not at all.

To do something about this I decided to try cooking a weeks worth of lunches and dinners over the weekend when I had much more free time and energy. I started slow only doing 2 recipes at a time on Sunday but now I can easily make 4-5 meals plus a tasty treat.

In all I spend about 4-5 hours cooking but it has varied based on what I'm cooking. There are really easy ways to shorten that time too like having one recipe use the crock pot and having another be a stove top only recipe.

Another benefit is that all of the prep work is consolidated. Instead of getting everything ready to chop vegetables each day, I just get it out once chop everything and then I only wash it once too.
A few tips I've picked up on as I've done this the last few weeks:

• Read all of your recipes before starting and get a feel for what order to work in.
• Start by getting out all of your dry ingredients so you don't keep going back to the same cabinets half a dozen times.
• Rinse off utensils and cookware after using so food doesn't dry on
• Have some fun music or a podcast going!

Food for the week.

Here's a brief example of what and how I cooked a few weekends ago.  I made 4 dishes: egg salad, And Noodles, Stuffed Shells, and Tacos.

I started by cooking pasta and quick soaking beans. While that was on the stove I mixed up the sauce for And Noodles and preheated the oven. After the noodles were done they went into the sauce and then into the oven.

Using the same pasta pot I started cooking the shells. I also started the eggs to hard boil. Then I got the cheese filling ready for the shells. By the time the shells were stuffed and ready to go in the oven, it was time to take out the And Noodles so I only had to preheat the oven once instead of twice. I chopped up the vegetables for the tacos and egg salad while the beans finished cooking and then used the pot from boiling eggs to make some brown rice for the tacos.

At this point all that was left was letting the food cool before I packed it into individually sized portions in tupperware. Since I'd ben rinsing dishes off as I went and the dishwasher was empty all I had to do was load it and the kitchen was clean.


It's gotten a lot easier for me over the last few weeks as I've perfected my routines and it also helps if you do all of the grocery shopping a day or two prior since Sundays at the grocery store are always crowded.

Royal Icing Christmas Cookies

I have long been a fan of Sweetopia's beautiful iced cookies, and I recently decided to give them a try in the form of Christmas cookies since I got a huge tub of wilton christmas cookie cutters on Black Friday.

Making cookies with royal icing was a bit of a time consuming process, and overall ended up spanning three days.  None of the individual steps were too hard, but there were a lot of steps to do/prepare, so I used a lot of the tips and advice on Sweetopia's website.  These are the ones I thought were most useful.

Cookie Decorating Tutorial

Storing Royal Icing

Tips for Decorating

Floodouts

I started by picking out the cookie cutters I would need, and decided what colors I wanted to use to decorate them.  I ended up making eight colors of icing, and in the future I'd probably try and limit it to 4 or 5 because of lack of equipment.

Traditional Christmas colors

All the other colors.  The pink is supposed to be burgandy, and I would have liked a slightly darker brown.

I used wilton gel colors.  You can't use regular food coloring because the liquid changes the consistency of the icing.

Before I made my cookies, I made a batch of icing.  It was pretty challenging to get the right consistency, and I'm convinced it could have been better, because my white and yellow were a bit runny while red and green were a bit too thick.  It was recommended to make and color the icing a day in advance because the colors darken with time, but I didn't see much change.  I probably will skip the waiting there in the future.

I decided that I wanted a soft, fluffy cookie instead of a denser standard sugar cookie, so I used a soft sugar cookie recipe from Annie's Eats.  Some of my cookies spread a bit too much, and I found out afterword that leaving out the baking powder helps prevent spreading, so I'll definitely try that next time.  I also wasn't very consistent with the thickness of my cookies so some of them got a bit to crisp in the oven.

Practiced some piping on parchment paper first to get the hang of it.

The first round of icing just filled in the cookie.

My white icing was a bit too runny so some of my snowflakes and snowmen had drips falling down the sides.

I used two colors of icing here and a toothpick to make a really cool marbling effect, and these were some of my favorite cookies.

After the cookies dried, I added all of the details to the gingerbread men, candy canes, and snowmen.

I didn't give my little snowmen any noses because I didn't want to make up orange icing for such a small detail.

After I got done icing all my cookies, I still had plenty of icing left, so I decided to make an icing floodout, which is icing piped straight onto parchment paper instead of a cookie.  I copied the general shape of the snowman from sweetopia's floodout tutorial.  I thought he turned out really cute, but he was very fragile and broke into four pieces after it dried completely.

So that was my christmas cookie experiment, and I definitely think I'm going to make more cookies!

Homemade Apple Butter

It's been years since I've had homemade apple butter.  I remember my mom making it when I was younger, but not recently.  When we were visiting the orchard during our trip to Illinois over Labor Day, one of the treats we bought was a jar of apple butter.  We have thoroughly enjoyed it, especially as a topping for homemade oatmeal.

One of the downsides of buying apple butter was the cost.  The 19 oz jar we got from the orchard was 8 or 9 dollars, which is a bit steep if we want it more often than one jar a season. Turns out apple butter is just as easy as applesauce to make, although it does take longer to cook.

The recipe I used was from Dream Home DIY and it uses a crockpot, so most of the time was just idle cooking time.

My first batch was only 1/4 of the original recipe because I only have a small 2.5 quart crockpot.  This batch went really well, but I did not want to do another 4 or 5 tiny batches like this.

Thankfully, Steve's mom let me borrow her 6.5 quart crockpot, which easily handled the whole recipe.

After 11 hours of cooking it had reduced by about half.  Since I didn't peel the apples I used the cone colander to strain it because I wanted a smoother texture.  If you don't mind the pieces of apple peel mixed in, skipping the straining would be an option.

I didn't properly can the apple butter; instead I plan to freeze it.  From 1 1/4 batches I used about 7 pounds of apples and got 13 cups of apple butter.  Orchard bought apple butter was about $3.80 per cup so we saved about $49 making it ourselves!  Realistically this is a bit high because I did have to add a few other ingredients and use electricity for the crockpot, but these were pretty negligible expenses.

I've still got about 6 or 7 pounds of apples left so I'm trying to decide what other goodies to make.

Any suggestions?

Party Desserts

I love making food for pot lucks because it's a great chance to make new desserts without having to feel the need to eat all of them.  For our recent family gathering I went all out and made five desserts, four of which were new.

I made:

Brigadeiros

Malted Milk Chocolate Chip cookies

Toffee Bars

White Chocolate Lemon Truffles

Brownie Roll Out Cookies

While I mostly did a good job making everything, I did a mediocre job taking pictures of it all.  I didn't get a picture of the truffles or any of the brownie roll out cookies either.

The brigadeiros are a Brazilian sweet that I had at a party in Saudi and fell in love with.  They are pretty easy to make; the hardest part was getting the right consistency when cooking it on the stove.  Turns out that chocolate pudding consistency was the way to go.

Traditionally, they're served in tiny paper cups, but I had none and no desire to hunt down such an obscure baking accessory, so I used a Jello jelly bean mould tray instead.  Yay improvising!

I've made the malted milk cookies several times in Saudi and they quickly became one of my favorites.  Making them here was trying at best.  In Saudi we didn't have regular malted milk, just chocolate malt milk powder, so I added a tablespoon of cocoa to the regular malted milk to emulate what we had in Saudi.

Baking them turned into a disaster of a learning experience.  Do not start baking on a new stove with different ingredients and use a full try of cookies because when they go terribly wrong you end up with a whole plate of pathetic ruined cookies.  I ended up ruining four more batches of single cookies before I got everything mostly worked out.  More flour, cooler temperature and less time in the oven than when we were in Saudi.  And always write notes for next time; way fewer future screw-ups that way.

The toffee bars were really easy to make, but I forgot to take a finished picture.  The only thing missing from this picture was the chocolate layer on top.  I had high hopes for these, but they ended up being somewhat of a disappointment.

The white chocolate lemon truffles were pretty easy to make and a big hit for everyone except the little kids. Only advise for this one is to make a double batch and microwave cautiously.  I accidently had a butter explosion because I was doing too many things at once.  Sadly, no final picture here either.

The brownie roll out cookies were fun to make and easy, but weren't good enough to make again.  They weren't bad by any means, just not my style.

Overall, the party desserts turned out really well and I thoroughly enjoyed trying some new recipes.  I definitely have more dessert recipes to try than any other kind!

Homemade Applesauce

Making grape juice a couple weeks ago was so much fun that I really wanted to try making something else, and being fall, apples are in abundance so I thought applesauce or apple butter would be good options.  Both store well frozen, so I don't need to worry about diving into the world of canning; we'll leave that for next year perhaps.

As with grape juice, I got my applesauce recipe from Simply Recipes and again it worked great.  I started with 24 pounds of Jonagold apples so I could have made about 2 1/4 gallons of applesauce.  To start I only made one batch using 4 pounds of apples and that made about six cups of applesauce.

Again, as with the grape juice the whole process was made considerably easier with the core colander I've not so temporarily borrowed from my mom.  Because I had this, there was no need to peel the apples, saving considerable amounts of time.

I only used about half the sugar called for in the recipe and probably would reduce the lemon juice in any future batches.  The best part about this was how quick it was to make; it cooked for about 25 minutes and coring the apples didn't take long either.

This probably isn't the most cost effective use of time or apples considering store-bought applesauce is so cheap, but I think the overall quality was much higher and it ends up exactly as sweet as I like.

Making Grape Juice

One of the most interesting pieces of advice I've gleaned from the internet is to never turn down something free.  If you want to be on the receiving end of free stuff you need to accept it when it comes along.  Apparently that makes you more likely to be offered goodies in the future since the giver already knows you're interested.

While I do a lot of giving away for free, I haven't had much opportunity to be on the say yes end until recently.  When we were in Ohio a couple weeks ago, we volunteered to pick grapes from my grandmother's bountiful supply of concord grapes so that she could make jam.  Since we were already out there she let us pick a box for us and my mom too.  My first thought was what are we going to do with all of these grapes.  I knew eating them as is was out of the question because after a year of eating seeded grapes in Saudi it is just a pain.  I didn't think jam or jelly was really a feasibly option because we don't have any of the basic start up gear.  Then my mom suggested just making grape juice and that seemed totally doable.

I spent time taking off all the stems and picking out all of the bad grapes and then we were ready to go.  I didn't weigh the grapes before cooking them, but based on the amount of juice we got we probably had about 4 1/2 pounds of grapes.

I followed the recipe for grape juice from Simply Recipes which was quick, easy, and spot on.  The only thing I didn't have was a colander so I borrowed my mom's old cone colander.  Using this worked really well because the wooden pestle was great for squeezing out the juice and it was much quicker than if we had let it sit and drip via gravity.

In the end we had about 3 1/2 of these jars of undiluted juice.

This doesn't seem like much juice for the effort, but it was really potent and we ended up diluting it with water by about half giving us about 72 ounces of fresh grape juice.

It only took us a couple of days to drink it all but it starts to ferment if it's sealed air tight for several days anyway, so using it quickly is recommended.

Out of the whole process, the only thing I would have done differently is to use old towels to protect the counters.  Grape stains almost everything metal and glass excluded and I ended up having to use baking soda and vinegar per advice found on Associated Content to get out the stains on the counter tops.  Grape season is almost over, but if we get more grapes in the next week or so we might get one more batch of juice this year.

Having grown up with this small grape arbor it astounds me that it has taken this long to pick grapes and you can bet we'll be back next year for more.

Inspiration Board

There have been so many things I've missed doing, eating, and making while we've lived in Saudi Arabia, and since we're both returning without jobs for the time being, I'm going to indulge in a lot of what I have missed.

In an effort to resist the inevitable "I'm bored" that is going to come once we're home and I have nothing that I have to do beyond finding a job, I came up with this idea board of all the goodies I want to do.  This really isn't everything I would want to do, but it's a good start and I can always add to it after I get a better idea of how long joblessness will last.

Pina Colada, Brussels, Asparagus, Jones Soda, Red Creme Soda
Googly Eyes, Tote Bag, Dresser, Quilt, Bracelet

Indians, Jerzee, White Ravens, Harry Potter

Rainbow cake, Butterfinger Cookies, Toffee Cookies, Smores Pie

Eating Fruits and Veggies

After delightfully eating our way through Milan and Florence we were on carb overload.  I felt like I didn’t want to see any more pizza or pasta for many a week.  I knew that we needed to beef up our fruit and veggie consumption because we were nowhere near the recommendations made by the USDA. (2-4 servings of fruit and 3-5 servings of veggies)

Eating that many servings can be hard to do and hard to remember.  Yes, this is a ridiculous affluent problem to have, but a problem none the less.

Our solution was a blender so we could make smoothies!  Buying a blender has actually solved another problem by also giving me a much better breakfast option.  Since we bought the blender, I’ve eaten cereal twice!  We’ve been buying much less cereal and replacing it with bananas and frozen strawberries and other fruits and veggies.  Carrots have been a great addition to our smoothies because they don’t have a very strong flavor so they are easily masked by the fruits.

We’re also trying to steer away from some less healthful additions like yogurt or milk instead favoring water or pineapple juice as our liquid addition.

After two weeks of smoothie noming, I can declare this a success.  We’re still trying to add more veggies to the mix and we discovered an interesting addition in the produce department.  Stay tuned to find out more about our interesting grocery find!

The Photo Series: Apple Pie

This was the first pie we made after we finally bought a pie plate.  Best decision ever, because I love pie!

We used Alton Brown's pie crust and it was flaky deliciousness through and through.

Does Traveling Affect Home Cooking?

Since we've gotten back from two trips, I've started to notice a disturbing trend when we settle back in at home.  We're much less gung ho about cooking at home.  It wasn't as bad after we visited Cairo, because honestly we were sick of eating out.  It was harder to find restaurants that had vegetarian options and even challenging to find non traditional options, so by the time we got home we craved home cooked meals.  But we still didn't go out of our way to make them.  All of the amazing food we ate in Athens made this especially bad when we got home.

This is especially disturbing since there aren't really any healthy options for dining out on campus, so when we eat out, it's usually junk like pizza.

I've gotten a bit better in the few weeks before Italy; by trying to focus on making favorite recipes instead of trying new ones that might not turn out as well and also by sticking in some easy dinners like pancakes or spaghetti it's been easier to get into the kitchen.  We've also tried to keep more snacks like yogurt in the fridge, in hopes that a quick snack will give us enough of a boost to whip something together instead of going out because we're already hungry.

Since we're fully expecting the food in Italy to be just as good as it was in Athens, I already know it will be hard to go back to cooking our own meals when we get back to campus.  Lately we've made several great recipes, which are all worth checking out and didn't take long to make:

The Perfect Pancake Recipe

Sour Cream Enchiladas with Homemade Enchilada Sauce

Mexican Casserole

Pizza Stuffed Pretzels

Check them out, I guarantee they are all tasty!

Weevils in the Kitchen

The most disgusting thing in the kitchen is to see bugs rising to the top of a pot of cooking pasta.  Turns out we have weevils in our kitchen.  I have no idea how we got them, but they were in the pasta, barley, bread, kidney beans, and black eyed peas. So we had to go through all of the dried goods and throw out anything that had the weevils in them.  Every thing else got put into ziplock bags and put into the upper cabinets.  According to the internet, it could take up to a month before weevils appear from eggs, so our lentils, popcorn, and orzo are in quarantine until the end of April.

Probably the worst part about weevils (besides just being gross) is that we have no way of knowing where they came from.  It could be that they came in from outside, or that they were already in one of the packaged foods.  A lot of our dried foods do come from manufacturers in the Middle East, so I'm not sure what the general cleanliness of their facilities is like.

From now on, we'll store open dried goods in zip lock bags or maybe glass storage containers if the weevils can get into plastic.  This is a gross inconvenience, but hopefully we'll get rid of them all quickly.  Or they'll eat us out of house and home by the time we get back from Italy!  Bay leaves and cloves are apparently natural deterrents for weevils, so we might try putting some leaves in the cabinets as a bit of extra protection.

Spring Rolls

International cuisine isn't something we can just order in or head to a nearby restaurant to get our fill, several weeks ago we tried spring rolls.  Something about other cuisines makes them seem hard to replicate at home and generally challenging, but much to my delight, they are normally so easy to make!

I based our spring rolls on recipes from Little Birdie Secrets and It Works for Me.  Neither recipe fit our needs exactly, as one was for 200 rolls and the other involved pre-cooking the filling.

These were surprisingly easy to make!  Rolling them didn't take long either with two people doing it.

2 carrots
1 head of cabbage
1/2 box of vermicelli noodles
2 cans bean sprouts, drained
1 Onion sliced thinly
3 Green Onions sliced thinly
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 egg white
2 packages of spring roll pastry

Soak the vermicelli noodles in hot water for 10-15 minutes until soft.  Drain and dry thoroughly.

Grate the carrots and cabbage and squeeze out any extra liquid from the carrots. Slice the onions and green onions and combine all of these vegetables in a large bowl.  Add the noodles and mix very well.  After mixing well, add the bean sprouts, soy sauce, and mix again gently to avoid breaking the sprouts.

Allow the spring roll pastry to defrost, but keep it covered with a damp towel as they dry out very easily.  To fill them, place one pastry in a diamond shape and put a few tablespoons of filling in the nearest corner.  Start rolling the wrapper, using the egg white to dampen the remaining three corners.  Fold each side into the middle and continue rolling.  Stack them on a plate until all of the wrappers are filled.

Fry 2-3 at a time in hot oil.  Since this recipe made about 40 spring rolls, we spread the rolls onto a baking sheet so they weren't touching and froze them.  After freezing for several hours, pop them off the baking sheet and store them in a freezer bag.

We tried baking one batch, but we both agreed they were just better fried.

These lasted weeks in the freezer and it was pretty quick and easy to cook up a few at a time.

In retrospect, I probably would have used fewer noodles and added more carrots.  The hardest part of this whole cooking adventure was not having a bowl big enough to mix all of the ingredients easily, so I had to split it into two smaller bowls.

Christmas Day in Saudi

Since yesterday was our first married Christmas and we celebrated it in Saudi Arabia, I thought I'd give you an idea of what we did.  It was just the two of us, so it was pretty low key, but we still had a nice Christmas dinner.

We had presents under our tree, or maybe trees over our presents?

Steve really wanted a steak, so he made this Pan-Fried Steak.  The meat selection here was far from the best, but it turned out alright in the end.

I also made Baked Brussels Sprouts Au Gratin, Red Pepper Risotto, PW's Parker House Rolls.  This was a pretty big affair, because I just don't cook more than one thing at a time.  It's too much coordinating to get more than one thing on the table at the same time, and the amount of leftovers would be ridiculous.  To help move things along quickly we did some mise en place which generates a ton of extra dishes, but spread out the work to less busy times.

Ready for dinner.

The Parker House Rolls were a learning experience to say the least.  Rolls really aren't challenging, but I did have to cut the recipe in half, since when PW cooks she apparently feeds a hoard of people, but us not so much.  Well I think we can all see where this is going.  Despite the fact that I rewrote the ingredient list with the new amounts, I still managed to use the original amount of butter instead of half.  On the plus side, we didn't need to butter the rolls at the table!

Let me teach you a lesson about cooking rolls in the oven.  They don't need to bake for 50 minutes, I promise.  I managed to make two baking sheets perfectly fine, but the last one, let's just say it got a bit toasty.

Napping after a big dinner.

We were also going to have Spinach Artichoke Dip to munch on, but guess who can't get artichokes?  They've had them at the store in the past, but not right now I guess.  The lack of dependability on the grocery stock makes it hard to plan dishes with slightly exotic ingredients.

We also had a bit of the Chocolate Biscuit Cakes leftover from baking earlier in the week.  These are basically a British version of no bake cookies, but so much tastier!  We've got a lot of unusual items at the grocery here, like digestives and drinking chocolate, which made this recipe possible.

So delicious.

Dishes galore after we were done cooking!

We also made these tasty pizza pretzels for Christmas Eve Dinner.  They didn't look amazing, but they sure did taste great.

Pizza pretzels!

Make It, Bake It, Do It: Day 5

Today we made paper stars, homemade oreo cookies, and booked tickets to Athens!

We actually made the oreos last night, but I'm counting it for today because they were just too good not to share.

There used to be more than one; I promise.

The paper stars were from Martha Stewart, and we decided to turn them into bunting.  I am normally not the kind of person who finds bunting attractive.  It seems to be all the rage these days, but almost every time I see it, it makes me go meh, but I guess it was bound to happen with the right bunting material!

Star bunting.

We spent a lot of time debating on where to go for winter break.  We were hoping that Steve might be working at this point, but things are progressing as slow as ever so we stopped waiting and made up our minds to move on for now.  We wanted to go somewhere relatively warm, since we don't have any winter clothes here, but I didn't really want to spend too much on plane tickets.  We contemplated Thailand, the Maldives, India, Italy, Northern Africa, staying here in Saudi Arabia, but finally settled on 13 days in Athens.

The flight wasn't too expensive, and the weather, while not really warm seems to be in the 50s-60s, which seems manageable. We'll probably have to pick up some extra warm clothes if we can find some in Jeddah, but since we're not leaving until the 29th we've got some time to go clothes shopping.  Oh how I love shopping for clothes in Jeddah.

All of this making, baking, and doing was a lot of fun.  It's been nice to have something to focus on since classes have ended.  I don't know what we'll do in the next week and a half before we leave (perhaps finish talking about Cairo) but we'll be sure to keep you updated!

Check out the beginning, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and finally Day 4 of Make It, Bake It, Do It.

Make It, Bake It, Do It: Day 4

Our day started a lot earlier than normal today because I was supposed to give a campus tour at noon, but the school ended up canceling it and bumping me to a later tour with basically no notice.  So we went and got doughnuts since it was so early in the morning (11:30) and then hung around until the tour at 2.  The tour was basically for parents who are here for the graduation ceremony tomorrow, and we went to all the major areas of campus.  Kind of boring, but I earned some free meal tickets, so it was a good deal.

There was a gift bazaar down by the harbor and Steve got a jolla bag hand made in Nepal and we also got a stained glass Christmas ornament.

Steve's new bag

Stained glass Christmas ornament

It would have been great to make traditional Christmas crackers from Squawkfox, but we didn't have anything fun to put in them, or the cracker part that makes the noise, so we just made empty crackers.
 

Noiseless crackers

We also made gingerbread men.  Like with the cinnamon applesauce ornaments we had to use makeshift cookie cutters, but at least this time we can nibble on the fruits of our labor.

Tasty gingerbread men

Check out the beginning, Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 of Make It, Bake It, Do It.