Weekend Cooking - Vegetarian Lasagna

From Beth Fish Reads: Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page.

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I normally don't like cooking.  The less time I have to spend cooking, the happier I am.  But there are a few items that I do enjoy making and prefer the taste of them to premade stuff.  This is one of them.

Ingredients:

1 jar of spaghetti sauce

1 cup water

1 box of oven ready lasagna noodles

1 container Ricotta (about 500 g)

2 cups grated Mozzarella cheese

1 pkg Yves Italian Veggie Ground Round

1 large can of diced tomatoes

Supplies:

Large bowl for mixing sauce

Non-stick frying pan

9"x 13" glass baking pan

Mixing spoons

A fork

A drinking glass

Aluminum foil

Measuring cup

Instructions for preparation:

Open jar of spaghetti sauce and can of diced tomatoes.  Add  1 cup water.  Stir well.

Open package of veggie ground round.  Crumble it into the frying pan.  Fry the ground over medium heat until it is browning.  Keep crumbling it with your spatula to make the pieces small.  After 5-10 minutes, take it off the stove and add it to the sauce bowl.  Stir well.

Set out everything on your counter: sauce in bowl, ricotta in its container, grated mozzarella cheese, open box of noodles, pan, spoons, fork, glass.   Half fill the drinking glass with warm water.

Put 1/3 of the sauce into the bottom of the pan (about 1 and 1/4 cups).  Cover with 3 noodles.  Drop half of the ricotta in spoonfuls on top of the noodles.  Dip your fork into the water glass.  Use the wet fork to spread the ricotta.  When the fork gets dry, dip it again.  The cheese won't be perfect, but it should be evenly distributed. Sprinkle with 1/2 of the Mozzarella cheese.  Top with 1/3 of the sauce (about 1.25 cups).

Top with 3 lasagna noodles.  Spread with remaining ricotta.  Use wet fork to spread it evenly.  Sprinkle with 1/2 cup of Mozzarella cheese.  Top with 3 lasagna noodles (no sauce in this layer).

Pour remaining sauce on top.  Cover with mozzarella.

Wipe the rim with a clean, dry paper towel to remove any sauce or cheese. Cover with aluminum foil.

To refrigerate or freeze:

Cover with aluminum foil and refrigerate/freeze.  Take out of freezer about 8 hours before you want to bake it OR take out of fridge 1 hour before you want to bake it.

Baking instructions:

Preheat oven to 350F.  Put in foil-covered lasagna.  After 30 minutes, remove foil.  Insert oven probe (you can find these at most places that sell kitchen gadgets) that has been preset for 160F.  Return to oven.  When probe beeps, check to see if cheese on top is buble and brownish.  If not, turn on broiler. Keep watching.  When it's the way you want it, turn off broiler.  Remove lasagna.  Let sit on rack for 10 minutes so that the noodles will absorb excess liquid.  This helps the lasagna hold together.

I realize that a lot of you here probably know how to make a lasagna, but if you don't, this will help you make one yourself!  Thanks to my mom for giving me the above instructions.  Hope you enjoy.

Weekend Cooking - Easy Spaghetti Sauce

In an attempt to reduce costs and to also start cooking more of my food from scratch, I started looking for fairly easy recipes to cook myself this past winter.  On of the things that I found that I liked doing was making a spaghetti sauce from scratch.  It actually happened by accident, in that I had had some canned tomato sauce instead of some generic canned pasta sauce.  And since then I have have made this on a regular basis and have quite enjoyed making it.  I found the recipe on AllRecipes.com


Ingredients
• 12 ounces spaghetti                        • 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder (just a pinch would suffice)
• 1lb of lean ground beef                  • 2 tablespoons dried minced onion (I only put in a pinch or two)
• 1 teaspoon of salt                           • 2 1/2 cups of chopped tomatoes (I put in one can (19 fl oz or
• 3/4 teaspoon of sugar                       540 ml) of diced tomatoes)
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano               • 1 1/3 (6 ounces) cans tomato paste
• 1/4 ground black pepper                • 1 (4.5 ounce) can sliced mushrooms (this would be optional,
                                                            depending if members in your house like mushrooms or not)


Directions:
1) Brown beef over medium heat.  Drain off fat.

2) In a large pot (a large saute pan would also work well), combine beef, salt, sugar, oregano, pepper, garlic powder, onion flakes, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and mushrooms.  Simmer at a low heat for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally.

3) Cook pasta according to package directions.  Drain.  Serve sauce over spaghetti.


Here is what the final product should look like prior to serving:

                  

Happy cooking!

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen - Lucy Knisley

Title:  Relish: My Life in the Kitchen
Author:  Lucy Knisley
Pages:  192
Published:  2013
Challenges:  Foodies Read, Nonfiction, I Love Libraries, Eclectic Reader
Genre:  Graphic, Memoir, Nonfiction
Edition:  Paperback
Source:  Library

Description:  A vibrant, food-themed memoir from beloved indie cartoonist Lucy Knisley.

Lucy Knisley loves food. The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, this talented young cartoonist comes by her obsession honestly. In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy's original inventions.  (via Goodreads)

Thoughts:  I can't recall how I had first heard about the book, but however I was able to hear about the book, I am glad I was able to find out about it.  It was a nice break from the heavier reading that I had been taking over the past month or so and really liked the illustrations that graced the book and particularly liked the recipes that ended each chapter.  

I had several favourite sections in the book.  My first favourite was the chapter on Junk food and how she craved it while on a trip with her dad.  I also enjoyed the sections on Mexico and Japan and her adventures there.  I also liked the one on when she and friend had some amazing croissants and how she tried to replicate them after coming back from that particular trip.

Bottom line: Overall, it was an enjoyable read and would consider purchasing a copy or at least request the book again and write/photocopy the recipes that I would be interested in making at some point.  The illustrations were really well done and the story really engaged me as a reader and really liked the small glimpse that I was able to get into Lucy's life and her love of food.  I look forward to whatever Ms. Knisley has in store next.  Recommended.

Rating: 4.25/5

Pages for 2014: 3392

Dearie - Bob Spitz

Title: Dearie: The remarkable life of Julia Child
Author: Bob Spitz
Pages (File Size): 576 (7530 KB)
Published: 2012
Challenges: E-Book, Foodies
Genre: Non-fiction, Biography
Edition: E-Book
Source: Library

Description: It’s rare for someone to emerge in America who can change our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture. It’s even rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV station.  And yet, that’s exactly what Julia Child did.  The warble-voiced doyenne of television cookery became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule-breaker as she touched off the food revolution that has gripped America for more than fifty years.

Now, in Bob Spitz’s definitive, wonderfully affectionate biography, the Julia we know and love comes vividly — and surprisingly — to life.  In Dearie, Spitz employs the same skill he brought to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book The Beatles, providing a clear-eyed portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential Americans of our time — a woman known to all, yet known by only a few.

At its heart, Dearie is a story about a woman’s search for her own unique expression.  Julia Child was a directionless, gawky young woman who ran off halfway around the world to join a spy agency during World War II.  She eventually settled in Paris, where she learned to cook and collaborated on the writing of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book that changed the food culture of America.   She was already fifty when The French Chef went on the air —  at a time in our history when women weren’t making those leaps.  Julia became the first educational TV star, virtually launching PBS as we know it today; her marriage to Paul Child formed a decades-long love story that was romantic, touching, and quite extraordinary.

A fearless, ambitious, supremely confident woman, Julia took on all the pretensions that embellished tony French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for everything that has happened since in American cooking, from TV dinners and Big Macs to sea urchin foam and the Food Channel.  Julia Child’s story, however, is more than the tale of a talented woman and her sumptuous craft.  It is also a saga of America’s coming of age and growing sophistication, from the Depression Era to the turbulent sixties and the excesses of the eighties to the greening of the American kitchen.  Julia had an effect on and was equally affected by the baby boom, the sexual revolution, and the start of the women’s liberation movement.

On the centenary of her birth, Julia finally gets the biography she richly deserves.  An in-depth, intimate narrative, full of fresh information and insights, Dearie is an entertaining, all-out adventure story of one of our most fascinating and beloved figures. (via Goodreads)


Thoughts: This my second book about Julia Child that I have read (read My Life in France last year) and I really enjoyed with the book and was quite impressed not only with Julia's life, but also with the detail of that was put into the book.  It made me want to purchased a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1 and more impressed that got published when it did.  I won't say entirely how much I was impressed with the publication of the book, but I can tell you I didn't put the book down during that section and was totally enamoured with that.

If there was one thing that impressed me about Julia Child is that she was incredibly decisive about getting the book published.  She didn't let moving around due to Paul's job and a co-author not helping out impede her to making sure that this cookbook was published; it was almost like she was a woman with a mission to make sure that American cooks were able to make the same things that were made in France and to let them know that cooking something was something to be enjoyed and to be done with a sense of purpose.  I got the impression that she believed that a meal shouldn't come from a can or a box, but rather something that was to feed not only your body, but also your soul.

Also she didn't like the whole health food movement, but believed that food should be enjoyed in moderation, rather than in large amounts.  So yes, have those foods that are fatty and not exactly good for you, but have them in moderation and have them occasionally.

While for the most part the book was really good, it was a little slow at the beginning, but once it got into her adult years, it just seemed to really get going.

Bottom line: If you are fan of Julia Child and if you are a foodie fan, I would highly recommend this book.  Highly recommended.

Rating: 4.5/5

Pages for 2013: 12129

Weekend Cooking - Roast Potatoes

It has been awhile since I have shared anything and yes, I am still stuck in making the same things over and over again, but I think I know why and it has to do with some health issues that arose last winter and for some reason I can't seem to get out of the mind set that  I can only eat certain things, but I am feeling that I am eating better, whatever that is worth.

One thing that I have been making regularly since this past summer, when I had a food fart in regards to my cooking, are roast potatoes. They are very easy to make and probably much better than the roast potato kits that I have seen appear in the grocery store in the past year.  I find that these are much better tasting and probably healthier for you.

Roasted Potatoes

Preheat oven to 425.

Put 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil into a large mixing bowl.

Wash and dry potatoes (leave whole if they are mini potatoes; otherwise cut into halves).

Add the potatoes and mix well with clean hands until potatoes are coated with oil.

Add spices: 1 tablespoon each of steak spice and rosemary or thyme.

Put in a glass baking dish that is large enough that they are not piled on top of each other.

Bake in oven for 30-40 min.

Use a spatula to flip them after about 20 min.

After 30 minutes, stick a fork into a few of them to see if they are soft.  Leave in oven until done.

I find that the small mini-potatoes work the best, but then I haven't used larger potatoes.  If you are on your own, its an easy recipe to halve.

Weekend Cooking - Need some help...

I hate doing this, especially since I know that this feature is to share things among readers, but I have to.

I am not much of a cook and I would rather make something that comes from a can or a bag and is done within a few minutes.  Basically I am not much of a cook and I really don't like doing it and I would rather just have something to eat quickly and be done with the task, as I would rather be online, reading a book or watching TV, not spending my time cooking.  But in the last few months, I have an itching to cook food that basically doesn't come from a can or a bag.  Problem is I don't have many cooking skills and feel like I am constantly looking for something that I can quickly put together for dinner and have leftovers for lunch.  Sure I have a few meals that I can make, but like I said earlier, they come from cans and bags, not a lot of fresh food.  The other problem is that I am primarily on my own and therefore try to make things that are basically for one person and there isn't much that I can make, as most recipes that I want to try usually are for those with four or more and somehow don't translate well to decreasing the amount for one or two people.  And I have found that the cookbooks that are out there translate mostly to people who know how to cook, not to people who don't have many cooking skills.

So my question is this: are there any cookbooks that you can recommend that are for singles that don't have many cooking skills?  Yes, I do have a Betty Crocker cookbook, but I seem to only use the section for steaming veggies and not much else.

Two Book Reviews - The Kitchen Counter Cooking School and My Life in France

No cooking this week, but I got two foodie books done this past week, one has elements of a cookbook in it and the other is memoir.  I hope you enjoy both reviews and if you feel inclined to do so, leave a review.  (You can view the review by clicking on review.)

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a few simple lessons transformed nine culinary novices into fearless home cooks (review)

My Life in France (review)

Have a good weekend.

My Life in France - Julia Child with Alex Prud'Homme

Title: My Life in France
Author: Julia Child with Alex Prud'Homme
File Size (Pages): 6828 KB (353)
Published: 2007 (first published 2006)
Challenges: 2012 Support Your Library
Genre: Memoir, Non-fiction
Edition: E-book
Source: Library


Description: Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story – struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took them across the globe – unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years. (via Goodreads.com)


Thoughts:  I really enjoyed this book and loved the description of the restaurants that she and Paul went to when they first arrived and how she, a self admitted non-cook in her late 30s, became a cook by diving into French culture by learning the language, the customs of buying food at a local market and by taking classes at the famed Le Cordon Bleu in Paris (which was also attended by the author of Kitchen Counter School) in the late 1940s.  While I am not a cook myself (as you probably all know by know), I could really appreciate the chance that Julia took to learn to become an accomplished cook (she came across as the sort of person that has the expectations to become an accomplished cook; I think also the fact that she was trying to get to the same sort of level as Paul's mother had a large effect on her) and even though I probably will never get to the level of Julia herself (somehow we always compare ourselves to her), I think even taking the chance to cook or bake something is a step in the right direction.


I did appreciate her frankness about her frustration in writing the first cookbook and even though there was great success with the second one as well, she didn't bow into pressure into writing a third book.  I also appreciate that the book felt personal, even though it was only a glance into her private  life, and that not everything was perfect and how she worried about things just like we all worry about things and how concerns about what was going on in Paul's work in the 1950s was of equal concern for her and probably didn't make things any easier when living abroad in Europe, far away from family and friends in the States.


Also, I appreciated that she didn't constantly talk about food in the book and that you felt like you got to know Julia and her husband, albeit on a surface level, and the fun little facts that she passed along in the book (did you know that Judith Jones, the editor for Mastering Vol.1 & 2, was the person that got The Diary of Anne Frank into the hands of American readers in the 1950s, when it was just sitting on "the pile" of manuscripts that had been submitted to her while she was working for Random House in Paris?) that made the book enjoyable to read.


Bottom line: It's probably the best "foodie" memoir that I have read and for once it was more about the life of the person rather than the food, even though one could probably taste one of her famous dishes as you read the book (I haven't so I can't exactly say).  But whenever I would pick up the book, I would be transported into a world in which food wasn't just for survival, it was meant for feeding the soul and to be enjoyed by everybody around.  Recommended for those that are fans of Julia Child, those who have watched "Julie & Julia", or just generally like good food with a good glass of wine.


Rating: 5/5


Pages for 2012: 5430

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices Into Fearless Home Cooks - Kathleen Flinn

Title: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices Into Fearless Home Cooks
Author: Kathleen Flinn
Pages: 304
Published: 2011
Challenges: 2012 Support Your Library
Genre: Non-fiction, Foodie books
Edition: Hardcover and Audio
Source: Library



Description: The author of "The Sharper Your Knife" tells the inspiring story of how she helped nine others find their inner cook.

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, writer Kathleen Flinn returned with no idea what to do next, until one day at a supermarket she watched a woman loading her cart with ultraprocessed foods. Flinn's "chefternal" instinct kicked in: she persuaded the stranger to reload with fresh foods, offering her simple recipes for healthy, easy meals.

"The Kitchen Counter Cooking School" includes practical, healthy tips that boost readers' culinary self-confidence, and strategies to get the most from their grocery dollar, and simple recipes that get readers cooking. (via Goodreads)

Thoughts: I quite enjoyed the book and learned a lot when I read the book.  One reason that I don't read a lot of foodie type books is mainly because a lot of the writers talk about the food that inspires them as cooks, rather than inspiring others to learn the proper techniques and Kathleen Flinn has certainly has inspired me to start making more of my food by scratch rather than buying my food from the center aisles.  Sure I know that I am to do that, but where do you start when you basically have little or no cooking skills and Kathleen's book clearly illustrates the fact that there is likely an entire generation of women who don't really know how to make things from scratch and rely heavily on the "center aisles" to feed not only ourselves, but also our families and to also realize that its much healthier for not only our bodies, but also our budgets to make our own food.

For me not only are their budget considerations to making my own food, but there are also health reasons.  As some of you may know, I have been battling a rash for the past month that basically came out of no where and has resulted myself to go on a more restricted diet than I have been accustomed to.  Its been frustrating, but this book gave me hope that I can eat most of the food that I have eaten on a regular basis and not break the bank doing so.  I hope that in the coming months I can tackle the recipes from the book that I photocopied and use them to my benefit (and yes, I do plan on purchasing the book).

While the breaks from the classes were nice, its hard to say if they added anything, other than maybe a few extra recipes (one of which I realize I missed, but when I purchase the book, I'll get it)

Bottom line:  This is a really good book, especially if you find yourself fumbling in the kitchen, not sure where to start.  It is a perfect book for those that are learning to live on their own and really don't know the cooking basics.  And judging by the carts that I see in the grocery store on a weekly basis, there are clearly a lot of people who could use the help!

Rating: 4/5

Pages for 2012: 4213

Weekend Cooking: Not much of a cook, but…

For those that now me really well, you will know that I am not much of a cook.  True I will spend most of my time avoiding anything that resembles work that I don't like doing.  But because of an elimination diet that my doctor has had me on, I have had to avoid most of the food that I like eating (mainly quick and easy and not requiring much effort and ready within 10-15 min) and concentrate on eating things that are more natural and not as processed (I should be doing this anyways, but I am lazy) and when one lives on their own there isn't much incentive to make food that takes longer to make mainly due to the fact that sometimes you get way more leftovers than you want.  So the last two weeks have been an interesting adventure in cooking to say the least.  There have been overcooked chicken and brussel sprouts and asparagus that were very soft (yuck; like them a little harder, don't like mush so much).

Anyways to introduce a little variety in my diet and because my doctor said it was ok, I made a Shepherd's Pie (for Brits and Aussies, it would be called Cottage Pie) and it turned out pretty good.

I halved the recipe and I still ended up with quite a bit and yes, I made the mashed potatoes from actual potatoes and not from a prepackaged mix (I saw one in the grocery store the other day and I couldn't believe how expensive it was for the mix; as I left, I thought its so much cheaper to actually make your one instead buying a mix).  While it took me longer to make the dish before I put it in the oven, it was really good and it smelled really good as well.

I got the recipe from Mennonite Girls Can Cook:
Shepherd's Pie is one of those dishes that can be prepared ahead of time with a little planning, assembled and served later in the week when you have a busy day. I will make extra potatoes one day to make the mashed potatoes for this dish. Also another tip if you are pressed for time, is to brown ground beef a head of time, and freeze in the amount you need to be ready for days when you are busy with other things.

TOPPING -

• half a 5 lb bag of potatoes
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons butter
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 cup old cheddar cheese (any cheese if fine)
• I add onion or garlic powder to taste (optional)

FILLING -

• 1 tablespoon oil
• 2 garlic cloves minced
• 1 large onion chopped
• 2 lbs of lean ground beef
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 cup milk
• 1 796 ml / 19 oz can tomatoes diced, drained (save the liquid for hospitality soup)
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce
• 1 teaspoon thyme
• 3/4 cup of fine bread crumbs or quick cooking oatmeal
• 1 cup of frozen peas (use corn or any other frozen vegetable of you preference)
• 1 teaspoon paprika

1. Cook and mash the potatoes with all the ingredients.
2. Saute onions, garlic with the ground beef until the beef is brown.
3. Drain any fat.
4. Sprinkle the flour over the meat, and add the milk.
5. Bring to a boil and cook while adding the drained tomatoes.
6. Cook a few minutes til the mixture thickens up.
7. Add the bread crumbs or oatmeal, and the peas.
8. Put the meat into a greased casserole dish or 9x13 pan.
9. Top with the mashed potatoes, sprinkle with the paprika.
10. Bake uncovered for 30 minutes at 400 degree or until the potatoes get lightly browned.

They suggest serving it with a salad and a ice-cream parfait.  You can find a direct link to the recipe here: http://www.mennonitegirlscancook.ca/2011/02/shepherds-pie.html

I made it Monday and even though I realize I didn't do it over the weekend, I thought I would share it with you anyways.

This is being shared over at Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking, which is open to anybody who has a food related post to share (novels, nonfiction, cookbook, movie reviews, recipes, quotes, random thoughts, etc.)