Roast Vegetables in Pita

School started, and looking for a little convenience, I bought a tray of those pre-cut roasting vegetables in the produce department for the first time.

What's cool: when you toss them in a little olive oil, they completely loose that exposed-to-air look. I tossed in some fresh thyme and basil I had leftover, and salt and pepper. Into the oven for 30 minutes at 450F, more than enough time to have them well cooked.

Serve with pita bread, and a little whole milk yogurt for those who want some creaminess and more sense of the Greek. I offered cubed meat leftovers to add for the insistently non-vegetarian.

Okay, and what was in the tray of pre-cut vegetables? Carrots, green beans, zucchini, summer squash, onion, yam. I thought I would be sad I didn't have mushrooms, but really, I didn't miss them.

Vegetarian Enchilada Pie

This is my riff on a Utah standby Chicken Enchilada Pie, that my dear friend Nicole taught me how to make back in Ohio in 1995. The Chicken version layered tortillas with sour cream, cream of chicken soup, sauteed onions, cheese, and cooked chicken. My new version, adapted to vegetarian tastes and my progress at Weight Watchers (25 pounds down, yay!) is a different kind of yummy, and it has that quality I love about a good casserole: leftovers that last in the fridge, handy for lunching or snacks for me and other adults in the house for the days that follow.

I hear Nicole's in China now. She's lived around the world since our days in Ohio. She's such an excellent cook (and seamstress and business manager) I wonder what great things she's done since our daughters were small.

1.5 to 2 TB oil
1 medium summer squash
1 medium-small zucchini
1 red bell pepper
red or other onion, half a large
8-10 oz mushrooms
half a pound frozen corn kernels
2 1/2 cups shredded cheese
5-7 corn tortillas, which tend to be small.
28-ounce can of enchilada sauce, I like the green kind.

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350F, because that's how to cook any casserole.

2. dice up small the vegetables, medium-high heat the oil in the pan, then add the vegetables and saute. Here you can see the proportions.

Oh, I forgot to add the mushrooms and corn. I buy the pre-sliced mushrooms, and then chop them further from there. The corn really ought to be microwave cooked first, but I just threw it in the pan, slowing down and reducing the quality of the vegetables cooking. Oh well.

Now it's all mixed together. I really love the colors--this is why one of my Christmas side dishes for years was zucchini-bell.pepper-corn.

Now that's cooked; it's time to layer. Cover the bottom of the pan with 1/4 of the sauce, layer two tortillas, half of the vegetables, and another dose of sauce, and some (1/3 of) cheese.

Let's peek ahead with this layers diagram for the finished casserole. The fraction is how much of that item to put in that layer.

cheese (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

tortillas (1/3)

cheese (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

vegetables (1/2)

tortillas (1/3)

cheese (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

vegetables (1/2)

tortillas (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

\________pan________/

Here I'm in process covering those first tortillas with my first layer of veggies.

Sauce on the second layer, and repeat as before.

Cheese going on just before another layer of tortilla. If I'm going to use cheese, I use real cheese, not reduced-fat stuff. It doesn't take much (relative to what I used to do, perhaps) to give it that cheese-in-mix taste. I would have loved a Jack cheese here, but was happy to use the sharp cheddar that was in the house. I think it really adds to the nourishing deliciousness of the meal to use what I have.

And on that front, I wasn't stopped by the fact I only had five corn tortillas in the house. I tore the last one into pieces and spread it around for the top layer thus.

Last layer of sauce and cheese.

Cover and bake the standard 350F for 30 minutes. This pretty dish (from IKEA years ago) didn't have a lid, so I used foil.

And it's done! I suppose you could remove the foil at the end, if you want the cheese browned as well as bubbly, but for me this is good. Too often I burn the cheese at the end trying to do that. Feel free to send me an acetylene torch.

Was delish, and delish as leftovers for a couple days. Loved and appreciated by everyone over the age of 16--probably could have won the heart of the younger teen if it didn't fall into the inaccurately-named category "Mexican Food." Apparently my love of all things bean, cheese, and tortilla more than met her quota five years ago.

But never mine.

Asparagus Dudes

Tonight's quick dinner was penne pasta with asparagus and cherry tomatoes in an alfredo-type sauce.  We had honeydew as a side.  It was my riff on the Bertollini frozen pasta dinner.

First, I boiled penne pasta in a separate pot.

I melted butter in a saute pan, added asparagus cut in 2 inch pieces, threw in some shredded parmesan, added cream.  When it was getting warm and melty, I added the pasta and the cherry tomatoes and mixed that in.

For some reason, I have it in my head that asparagus must always been steamed.  But this saute method worked well, the asparagus came out great.

I cut the cherry tomatoes in half.  I don't like my food to explode when I bite into it.

Anyway was delicious--why not with all that cream.  My son was bored though, and put the asparagus pieces into the penne pasta to make Asparagus Dudes.

This could be a split-meal for part-vegetarian families by serving slices of cooked chicken breast separately, for the meat-eaters to mix in on their plates.  My husband had to be away from us for dinner tonight, so only the youngest child wanted any meat.

Add the bouillon at the table

My own copy

The kids are in finals, so of course half the kids, and me, are coming down with a cold.  An excellent occasion to try at least the idea of Mark Bittman's Clean-Out-the-Fridge Vegetable Soup.  My soup was comparatively limited by what I had in the fridge to clean out, and I wasn't about to go out in the rain in my mildly sick and tired state to pretend I ever had on hand as wide a range of vegetables as Bittman.

Wannabe Mirepoix: leeks, carrots, mushroom.

Mine was a leek-carrot-mushroom-tomato-potato-spinach soup.  No pistou.  But served with cheese sandwich or hamburgers to take the pressure off.

I added my bouillon paste right into my soup bowl!

I serve a vegetarian soup at more than half our dinners in the winter, but tonight I was impatient with the thought of another vegetable bouillon broth.  So I did a crazy thing--I cooked the vegetables in water, and served a choice of vegetable or turkey Better than Bouillon soup base paste at the table.  I know this doesn't allow the vegetables to season in the broth while cooking, but it was worth it to me to serve vegetables in turkey broth to those who wanted it, without having to divide the soup into two pots so the vegetarian version would be available to those who require it.

One-Bowl Easy Apple Slices Cake

Like most desserts, only ovo-lacto vegetarian, and not remotely vegan.

Box cakes are great--except that I have a hard time remembering to keep the mix on hand for when the impulse to make cake strikes.  I like this recipe because it uses vegetable oil, so it's as easy as a box cake: no separating eggs, no creaming the butter into the sugar.   And, my version takes advantage of my apple peeler-corer.

I suppose though it is based on a basic one-bowl cake from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, the way we're making it would put it in the genre of Breakfast Cake or Snack Cake or Coffee Cake. Does anyone say Coffee Cake anymore?

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease 8x11 glass baking dish

Throw in the mixing bowl:

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 TB baking powder
• 1/2 teas salt
• 2 teas vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cup brown sugar, not necessarily packed
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup milk
• 2 eggs

Mix it like pancakes or muffins--just enough to get it barely mixed, like less than ten strokes.

• Then slice/core 2 or 3 apples, depending on size.  Quarter the slices, fold them in.

Bake an hour.  The basic recipe is supposed to take 30 minutes, but it always takes an hour at my house.

And no, I don't frost it.  Happy FHE.

Potato through an Apple Peeler-Slicer-Corer

Yes, that's a (sweet) potato in an apple peeler/slicer/corer. I'm making "Double Potato Soup" from Leanne Ely's Saving Dinner and I couldn't find a vegetable peeler in my kitchen to save my life. Then I noticed that potatoes--aka pommes de terre--are as solid and thin-skinned as apples. And I've easily peeled and sliced some 15 pounds of apples for Thanksgiving pies, using a handcranked apple peeler-slicer-corer. I was going to pull back the slicer/corer blade and only peel tonight's potatos, when I realized I needed the potatoes cut for soup anyway.

I had to cut the potato in half--the ones I bought were too large to fit the hand-crank machine otherwise. I'm loving this shortcut. The potatoes were all peeled and cut miraculously fast.

Leaving me with plenty of energy to enforce dishwashing upon children this evening, making sure this time all my cooking tools go back into proper place.

Cooking after the holidays

We went visiting friends across country for their best New Year's Eve party ever. Great company, and great food. They were making assemble-your-won pizzas for a crowd, at least half of whom were vegetarian.

I arrived home lazy, unused to making dinner.

--I made that Indian tomato curry with Pulao Rice the day I got back, since it's a pantry meal.
--Then sloppy egg joes: fried eggs on a whole wheat buns, with sloppy joe sauce.
--then vegetarian enchilada casserole: zucchini, mushrooms and corn, layered between tortillas with jack cheese and canned green enchilada sauce.
--The swedish meatballs, meatballs optional. I should have come up with some kind of vegetarian meatless ball, but I have never solved that problem. Nevertheless everyone loves egg noodles with swedish cream sauce, and lingonberry jam. The sauce was from a packet from IKEA.
--running out of ideas, I made pasta wheels with marinara sauce. Tried to get the sometimes meat eaters to finish off yesterday's meatballs that no one loved.

I've got to come up with dinner for tonight and tomorrow. It all feels like pulling a full sled up a mountain. And since I've not come up with something, now tonight's shop, prep and serve is down to the hour between picking up little kid from her class, and taking the big kids to Young Women and scouts.

What are you making? And what's your go-to when you've got to come up with the no-idea dinner quick?

A Lazy Woman's Strategy for Feeding The Part-Vegetarian Family

Yes, I was once vegetarian too; now I am only half the days of the week. However, one of my daughters is a full-time vegetarian.

And once I flipped through food magazines and great cookbooks and made beautiful meals. I still love the family dinner, but I don't love the planning and creating time anymore. I'm all about dinner on the table at 6:00 night after night after night, so someone can help with the dishes and everyone can do their homework. Perhaps after a few years of rest I'll be interested in cooking again--right now we just need to eat.

Despite my avowed non-interest in preparing food, I've managed to get a lot of split dinners on the table for the last three years. My daughter went veggie at age 11 (ovo-lacto). I had been telling her to wait until she goes to college to become vegetarian, like her father and I did, but once she was taller than me the "stunt your growth" lie wasn't very effective. Though it was typical for us to happily have two or more vegetarian dinners a week, the entire family didn't want to be pulled into meatlessness because of one preteen. Hence the split meals: dinners that have a vegetarian and meat version at the same table.

For example, after church today we had pulao rice (a sort of saffron rice) [rice recipe] in the rice cooker, with an approximately indian tomato curry garnished with hard-boiled eggs [tomato curry recipe], and some rewarmed chicken leftovers. Served with some green salad and carrot sticks, each person in the family made his or her own plate, though I do expect the younger ones to have a taste of everything. And that simple meal, with pretensions to ethnicity, is considered a fancy one in my current reign of culinary laziness.

Here are some other split meals. I'm sure you've already done some of these, and I'd love to hear what other ones you've done that I haven't thought of.

Tacos--tacos are a natural meal for the vegetarian/meat loving family. Put out the beans and meat in separate bowls, along with the bowls for cheese, lettuce, and salsa, and let everyone assemble their own. imo, watermelon is always a good accompaniment to tacos.

Spaghetti--we went through a phase where one kid wanted spaghetti every night. Once a week is really over my limit. I bought frozen meatballs and cooked a few each time to supplement the meat-eaters, and provided scrambled eggs for the vegetarians. Hey, scrambled eggs with marinara sauce is really good. A couple times I was caught skipping the pasta. I love it with green beans and a green salad. Isn't it almost blue lake season?

Chili Dogs. I've got to have them every month or two. I don't make my chili--remember I'm lazy--I just keep a few commercially canned cans of vegetarian chili in the pantry. The young meat-hungry purist child wants a dog and a bun and wouldn't allow even ketchup--the vegetarian happily fills her bun with chili and tops it with cheese. I'm somewhere in the middle, with chopped onion and pickle relish.

Stir-fry. Remember how in all the recipes have you cook the meat, set it aside, stir fry the vegetables, and then return the meat to the pan? Stir fry for a split family means the meat and vegetables each get their own pan, then maybe a small third pan for a little stir-fried egg or tofu. I love it when I can splurge on commercial vegetarian spring rolls or pot stickers as a side, or follow up with family-pleasing fortune cookies from a box.

Pumpkin pancakes. I love pumpkin pancakes. The easiest way is with a whole-wheat pancake mix--you just make it as usual and throw in a couple spoonfuls of canned cooked pumpkin and a dash of cinnamon. Fancier ways are to make the pancakes from scratch, and to throw in mashed winter squash leftover from dinner two nights before. I like to microwave a couple frozen sausage patties to serve with the pancakes. It helps throw off the non-vegetarians who are keeping score.

Hawaiian haystacks, a nostalgic delight. I did something with cream of mushroom soup and curry powder as the sauce, and offered the cooked chicken separately. No one but you will realize, it's just another form of taco bar.

Vegetarian Soups of all sorts, serve with baked chicken or pork chop--from today or from leftovers--as an optional side. They say the meat-eaters only need a serving the size of a deck of cards anyway, and they don't mean an Uno deck. Add some whole wheat rolls and milk (we're not vegan) and we're all covered.

And finally, keep some gardenburgers in the freezer. For those days when someone just has to have broiled red snapper, or aunt lucy's casserole spam delight.