A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Herbed Tilapia for One

Since my husband works evenings several nights a week, DJing at (five) local radio stations, or "slaving over a hot mic" as he calls it, I'm often left to scrounge up dinner on my own. Don't get me wrong. I do cook for him.  I've actually changed our eating habits to a 3pm dinner (biggest meal) and then sometimes I eat again later ir more often, I don't. And sometimes he grabs a Jimmy John's on the way to work or not and sometimes he's ready for a meal when he gets home at midnight.  My point is that in the war to at least give lip service to eating healthily no matter what time it is, this fish is super easy and hits all the right notes.  It works on just about any easily available species of fish but we usually buy frozen tilapia or cod in bags with individual filets, and sometimes when we're lucky, and my cousin Kim has been to Alaska to fish, we get frozen bags of assorted fresh caught fish, which is a huge treat.  

Let me just cut to the punchline of this post.  The recipe I'm going to give you is a bastardization of the recipe my cousin, Ann (Kim's wife) gave me.  So delicious, and she doesn't even like fish!  

You ready? I promise you this is super easy, very quick, and oh so yummy!

Orange Cranberry Bundt Cake

I baked this Orange Cranberry Bundt Cake as dessert when a couple of  good friends came over to dinner.  In full disclosure, not only did they come to dinner, they brought dinner.  I needed a special dessert to stand up to Janell and Jerry's wonderful lasagna, which we've had before and knew would be delicious treat.   However, did I get a photo of it? No. Did I forget to try to wheedle her recipe out of her? Yes.  Another time.

But I digress. I was talking about Orange Cranberry Bundt Cake.  Wanted something citrus to offset the richness of the pasta but nice and sweet as an ending note to the meal. This works quite well.  The orange and cranberries are tart in a sweet velvety, almost pound cake-like texture.  Perfect with a glass of milk to catch up with old friends over.

The cake is a simple straightforward two bowl method, well, two bowls and a cutting board when you count the fruit. Preparation is creaming the wet ingredients, followed by adding the dry ingredients, and stirring in the cranberries.   The most time consuming part is the zesting the oranges and chopping the cranberries up a bit.  The cranberries are then tossed with a little flour to help keep them suspended in the batter, instead of racing to the bottom. The only "odd" addition is a bit of corn starch to help lighten up the batter a bit and create a finer crumb.

Easy Chicken Cordon Bleu Casserole

I'm a firm believer in Ecclesiastes' saying "To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.."  It's true for everything in life, including the sometime mundane things in life like cooking.  I love spending hours in the kitchen making long, complicated recipes....when I'm in the mood. But there are just as many days when I just want to put dinner on the table without a fuss or other days when I crave something cheesy, comforty, and gooey and uncomplicated.  Today was a comfort food day: all the taste of Chicken Cordon Bleu in a velvety sauce, without all the fuss.

I've made a couple of cordon bleu casserole recipes and the idea is pretty simple, very genius, really.  Instead of taking all the time and effort to pound out chicken breasts, fill them, roll them up, bread them, sauté' them, and then bake them....you layer those same ingredients in a casserole dish and serve it up.  Definitely not as elegant and pretty, but it's the same yummy eats in a fraction of the time. Some recipes go to the trouble to bread and pre-cook the chicken bits, some don't. Some heavily spice, some don't.  My recipe is different in one crucial way: the sauce.  Most Cordon Bleu Casseroles are put together with cream of chicken soup.  Mine uses alfredo sauce to pull those simple, easy layers together. 

Gene, the hubs, is my best taster.  He's always honest even if it's not what I want to hear.  Tonight, he thanked me at least three times.  He'd been in the mood for something cheesy, gooey, comforty too.

Dr Pepper Meatballs

T    Two of Gene's favorite eaty drinky things in the whole world are meatballs and BBQ.  One of my favorite things in the whole eaty drinky world is Dr. Pepper.  Yep, prune juice drinkers unite!  (Actually, that's a myth. Dr. Pepper is beloved even if it did have prune juice as its base but it does not. Too bad. We could drink it and pretend to be healthy.)  What do you get when you put all three of those eaty drinky things together?  Dr. Pepper Meatballs.  Which is three words that equal the three-lettered word:  YUM!

One of the great things about this recipe, aside from its deliciousness, is how customizable it is.  Don't feel like making meatballs by hand?  Use bagged ones from the grocery.  Don't like Sweet Baby Rays BBQ sauce?  We can't be friends. Just kidding! (Although it is my absolute favorite bottled BBQ sauce)  Feel free to substitute your favorite.  Don't need 24 meatballs? Freeze half.  Need 48 meatballs? Double the recipe.  You see what I mean, here.  It really is a jack-of-all-trades recipe.  We eat it over mashed potatoes, over sautéed zucchini and rice, by itself as appetizers.  You really can't go wrong with Dr. Pepper Meatballs and the recipe is very easy to make. The sauce comes together in a flash and the longest time spent is all about how fast you can make meatballs by hand.  I use a Pampered Chef cookie scoop to make the balls even but if you don't have one, a little diversity in size never hurt anything.  And let me tell you, not only will the spouse love these, the kids are going to love the idea of them so much they'll want to help make the sauce.

Meditteranean Chicken Spaghetti Salad

Mediterranean Chicken Spaghetti Salad is a cold pasta salad that makes for a wonderfully refreshing summer meal.  Pasta, lovely fresh veggies, and rotisserie chicken also make for a quick prep that can be made ahead and is even better the second day after the dressing has had a chance to combine flavors with all those veggies and pasta.  It's a win win, can't lose dish that works well into busy schedules and hot summer days.  

I first heard of spaghetti salad when a gal, Jan, brought it to a work potluck.  Spaghetti as the pasta in a pasta salad? Why,  I'd never heard of such a thing! (laughing at myself)  I think she called it California Spaghetti Salad.  I can't remember all the ingredients except for tomatoes and black olives, but I love the idea in all its easily customizable forms:  spaghetti as a cold pasta base with any kind of chicken whether it's breasts or dark meat, grilled or rotisserie, or even vegetarian.  Not to mention the vegetables can be anything I have in the crisper or pantry:  tomatoes, black olives, snow peas, sugar snap peas, frozen peas, cucumber, zucchini,  red peppers, green peppers, any or all of the above or any other veggies that seems appropriate and willing to be chopped at the time.

I've made this on many occasions, mostly for myself and Gene for no occasion at all but in the photos I served it for lunch for a couple of friends, Maggie and Melissa, and actually took the time to make lunch feel like a celebration by baking homemade bread and getting out the pretty "Sunday dinner" serving bowls.

Low carb diets be damned, I served the salad with tall glasses of tart lemonade and these, my favorite of favorite, go-to daily bread recipe from the awesome Faith Brockoff who taught a fun-filled morning bread class to me, Auntie Susan, and cousin/bestie Ann, for Auntie's birthday several years ago. I've never looked back.  I love that the milk and egg create a tender crumb that lends itself so well to any form or shape I want it take, from rolls, to loaves, to boules, to...  Faith's Farmhouse Bread

Oven Baked Tandoori Chicken

I don't pretend for even a minute to be any kind of authority on Indian cuisine.  My experience is limited to a few heavenly experiences at the local Indian buffet at Taj Mahal, a few jarred sauces I poured over chicken, and a family favorite recipe of Honey-Mustard Curry Roasted Drumsticks that Gene clipped out of the newspaper a long while ago.  But my curry roasted chicken and recent Indian buffet experiences were enough to get me interested enough to start reading and pinning recipes on Pinterest.

Tandoori Chicken by A Fridge Full of Food blog

 

 

Apple Pie Baked Oatmeal Squares

There's nothing like warm, chewy, full-blooded (so to speak, yikes!) oatmeal dense enough to eat off of a napkin along with a cup of ginger lemon tea while reading a good book on a cold winter's morning.  No wimpy packets of water-soaked microwaved oatmeal here!

Pumped up for extra protein with 2% milk and 3 eggs, these oatmeal squares are a full meal of oat-y yumminess and chunks of apple in every bite. After my second bite I jumped up to grab my  camera and blog again after a (like my age, not gonna say numbers) hiatus from my camera and food words.  

So good the extras will be cooled down, cut, wrapped in waxed paper, and placed into a container for the freezer so Geno and I can grab and heat them up in the microwave any morning or any time they sound like the perfect breakfast or snack.

Easy Apricot Jam Baked Chicken

What do you get when you baste baked chicken with Auntie Miranda's homemade low sugar carrot cake jam?  One DE-lish-ous dinner!  Super easy too. In the oven inside 10 minutes. If you skin the chicken, it's also a great diet recipe as well.

Gene said "You can definitely make this again!  You had me scared when you put jam on the chicken but this is GREAT!"   Love it when I scare him...but then make him happy. 

I used Auntie's carrot cake jam but most fruit jams would work (maybe not grape, so much) but apricot, peach, or pear would all be wonderful.  The olive oil keeps the chicken from drying out and the jam adds a nice but not overly sweet glaze.

 

Stuffed Pepper Soup (Two Ways)

 

Our friends, Jeff and Dee, gave us this recipe a few months ago and, for the first time, I had all the ingredients in the house at the same time.  Well, let me be honest, I'd lost the actual recipe so I made this based on what I remembered which is basically all the ingredients for stuffed green peppers plus beef broth so that's how I made it.  I did make two substitutions from what I remember of the original recipe: brown rice for white rice and a small red and yellow pepper for the green pepper, simply because I love the slightly sweeter taste.

Let me share one lesson I did learn from this little kitchen project:  if the recipe says "cooked" rice, pre-cook the rice!  I remember Dee and I saying, when we discussed the recipe, that using a separate pan or rice cooker for the rice was a pain in the patoot.  Yes, but if you don't pre-cook the rice, for some reason and I'm not at all sure what the chemical basis is, the rice either will NOT cook or it takes forever to do so. It's simply easier, even though it shouldn't be, to pre-cook the rice in a separate pan or a rice cooker.  Learn from me, my friends.  Or, make the same mistake I did, confess to Dee, and she'll make fun of you like she did me, which was funny too.

Chicken and Veggie Quesadillas

Quesadillas are one of those Tex-Mex restaurant dishes that's just as good, if not better!, made at home. Perfect for a family, they're easily customizable, delicious, and both quick and easy to make. Anyone can make these and I'm talking to you, Aunt Kay!  All you need is some kind of already cooked meat (or skip it and go vegetarian!) and at least a vegetable (or not and go carnivorous) and a hot skillet.  But since the goal is to eat healthier and get in those 5 servings of veggies a day, I went with the cooked chicken breasts that I had simmered in the chicken and orzo soup I made earlier in the week, and the onions, mushrooms, and red and yellow peppers that magically appeared in my crisper. By magically, I mean that Auntie Miranda found on sale at Aldi's and was kind enough to pick up enough for both of our homes since they were so cheap--thanks Auntie! 

 
 For those who know what a Girl Geek/Trekkie I am, is it really a surprise to know that my pizza cutter is in the shape of the Enterprise?  Yeah, I thought not.  Makes me smile every time I use it.