Menu Plan Monday

See other great menus here, at the Organizing Junkie.

At this blog, I cook and photograph recipes from magazines (and occasionally cookbooks) to share how they turn out and whether they're actually as delicious as they look in print. (Amazingly, they usually are.) You can take a peek at the earlier posts for some of my earlier experiments. So here's what's cooking this week:

Monday: African Chicken in Spicy Red Sauce with rice and honeydew

Tuesday: Tomato-Joe Soup with oatmeal muffins and cantelope

Wednesday: Creamy Chicken and Noodles and grapes

Thursday: Basil-Broccoli Tart and Asian pears

Friday: dinner out

Saturday: something from the freezer and roasted broccoli



Hmm, all about chicken, broccoli and tomatoes this week! I'll let you know how things turn out!

-Jessica

p.s. Disclaimer: not everything I make is from a magazine of course - for examples, the Basil-Broccoli Tart is a recipe from LeAnn Ely's Menu Mailer (we got her vegetarian version once upon a Lent) and the Creamy Chicken and Noodles is a Better Homes and Gardens Red Plaid Cookbook crockpot recipe. But I showcase the ones here that are from magazines - and occasionally from elsewhere. I'm almost always pleased with how recipes from magazines turn out - they must have some amazing test kitchens! Wouldn't it be fun to peek in there sometime?

Anyway, what I like is that I can cook something new, with a reasonable expectation of it turning out well. And what I really like is being introduced to new ingredients, or being taught new techniques with ingredients I already use, so that I can get more and more comfortable making my own alterations, or even inventing whole new recipes. Following magazine recipes - so often accompanied with interesting commentary - feels like cooking school on the cheap!

(And no, I'm not associated with any of the magazines I link to - just a fan!)

jasmine-turkey meatballs: Cooking Light

So, I played around a bit with this recipe when I made it last night. Mostly because baby bok choy is not nearly my favorite vegetable. So I made the meatballs without alteration*, skipped the bok choy, water and green onions (not that I don't like green onions), and put the rest of the ingredients together into a nice, shiny, cornstarch-enhanced sauce:



Isn't it lovely how shiny cornstarch makes everything?

Verdict: delicious. Love that ginger and garlic. The sauce, however, is best served on the side if you've got little kids, 'cause the red pepper gives it quite a bite. We at ours over whole-wheat fettuccine.

I would note that mine version cooked a bit faster than the recipe indicated, so keep an eye on them as they brown and then cook through. But as for taste? I whole-heartedly recommend this recipe.

happy eating!
-Jess


Alterations:
-*okay, so I used frozen, mechanically separated turkey instead of fresh ground. What can I say? It's cheaper. Like, lots. :)
-Rereading the recipe just now, I realize that I accidentally put in two eggs instead of two egg whites. Oops.
-due to the above alteration (I'm presuming), my meatballs were more like mini-meat-patties, and were browned on only two sides. Still yummy, not quite so pretty.
-I cooked the rice according to package directions, not recipe directions.

ALTERATION I WILL ALWAYS MAKE:
-I used low-sodium nothing. I used reconstituted bouillon instead of real chicken broth. You can just always assume I'll do this. Yep.
-left out bok choy, water, oil and green onion, and tweaked the sauce preparation instructions, as noted above.

Mummy's Brown Soda Bread: Cooking Light

Dinner at our house tonight, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, was corned beef, cabbage and this soda bread recipe from Cooking Light.

First good thing about this recipe: it's easy. For a bread recipe. No rising, hardly any kneading.

And, verdict? Yummy. Very yummy, but mine ended up squishy and slightly raw in the middle. The crust, however, was one of the best crusts I've ever tasted. So, next time, I think I'll make this recipe into two smaller loaves, which should get rid of the mushy middle, and give us even more yummy crust.

(The squishy middle, btw, might have been due to my oven, which is a cantankerous beast, or possibly to the fact that I substituted yogurt for buttermilk.)


Happy St. Patrick's Day!
-Jess

Orange Chicken: Cooking Light

Tonight, I made this Orange Chicken recipe from Cooking Light. This is actually one of their "reader recipes", sent in by reader Deborah Eckroat.



Immediate plus? Short ingredient list. Second immediate plus? Getting to pound chicken flat with my husband's rubber mallet! (And he bought it thinking it'd be used for carpentry - ha!)



The above picture is the orange sauce (just orange juice and white wine) simmering itself away into a reduction. The sauce is to be poured over the dredged, cooked and sliced chicken meat:



Verdict? Very yummy. Even approved by my greasy-takeout-orange-chicken-loving husband. (I pulled this recipe out because I knew he liked the flavors in it.)

Next time I make it, I think I'll toss the chicken slices with the sauce, instead of serving the sauce alongside to be poured over the chicken slices. But certainly repeatable.

-Jess

Alterations:
-I used chicken thighs rather than chicken breasts. What can I say? They're cheaper.
-I used canola oil instead of the olive oil and butter because I was, um, out of olive oil and unfrozen butter. (Last of the soft butter went into the rice I was cooking to go with the chicken.)
-I doubled the amount of sauce; probably a wise decision, though it did leave us with more sauce than chicken.

Broccoli with Red Pepper Flakes and Toasted Garlic: Cooking Light

As you might have read on my other blog, Homemaking Through the Church Year, I've made this before (that might be the case not infrequently on this blog).

But tonight's our second try on this lovely recipe.

The result? Still a very yummy way to eat broccoli, but the toasted garlic is really the best part.

-Jess

Alterations:
-again, canola oil instead of olive. I really have to buy more olive oil!
-I put in extra garlic. Yum!

two notes

First, I promise I will cook from magazines other than Cooking Light, despite what the next few posts might make you think.

Second, I'm probably going to post just every other day or so, and not so much on the weekends. Why? Well, those will be the days I'm either not cooking, or not cooking something from a magazine.

But just RSS away, and stop on by when there's something new. Hopefully it'll be delicious!

-Jess

farmhouse crackers: Cooking Light

If you look closely in the previous post, you can see these crackers on the plate next to the colcannon soup (almost overwhelmed by chunks of honeydew melon).

The crackers were more of a success than the soup, I think. We ate them with butter, as the recipe suggests, and they were great dipped in the colcannon.

Nice and crispy (I thought "oh, that's why they call them 'crackers'" as I cracked one in pieces to feed to my infant son), with a faint hint of dairy richness (the recipe calls for both butter and whipping cream). I wish I'd followed my initial impulse to sprinkle them with salt before sticking them in the oven though.

We're going to try the leftovers tomorrow with peanut butter and jelly. Mmmmm!

-Jess


Alterations:
-NONE! (unless you want to be picky about the fact that I didn't roll the dough into an exact square. :D )

Irish Colcannon and Thyme Leaf Soup: Cooking Light

My first recipe is in honor of St. Patrick's Day: a nice potato and cabbage soup from this year's March issue of Cooking Light. You can find the recipe here.

I don't think that this is a repeater. It wasn't memorable, wasn't awful, but it was, like most soups, a great way to eat some extra veggies.

However, I have to admit, part of the lackluster result might have been due to my substituting dried thyme leaves for fresh (the recipe calls for one tablespoon fresh, so I substituted one teaspoon dry). You can take a peek at my other alterations below.

If you're a soup-as-side dish person, this isn't a bad one. But it falls a bit short as a main dish.

-Jess





Alterations:
-I used reconstituted boullion instead of "fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth"
-I used dried thyme rather than fresh.
-Being unable to find savoy cabbage, I used red cabbage - giving the soup its pretty purple color. :D
-I estimated, rather than measured, the amount of potatoes and cabbage.

Welcome to I Made It!

On this blog I'm going to show you what happens when you take those pretty-looking recipes in magazines and cookbooks (but especially magazines) and try to reproduce them in real life. I'll be posting when I try something new, and I'll provide pictures, links to the recipes (when possible), notes on how it turned out and if my family asked for seconds, and what alterations I made to the recipe.

I hope you enjoy the journey as we go from page to plate!

-Jess