Protein in the morning is recommended as part of a healthy eating plan. Hubby has taken this to heart. Eggs are his staple. And he loves cheese.
For this breakfast Hubby uses a meat, eggs, cheese, and vegetables. He began with a frozen pepper and onion mixture as well as frozen chopped spinach. Now he will use whatever frozen veg is available. This may include green beans, spinach, broccoli (for me), mixed veg and/or peas, even leftover roasted potatoes. For meat he began with bits of bacon and then Steakums. Recently he bought beef stew meat and chopped it into bits. He also uses leftover chicken, Canadian bacon, leftover pork.
All of this is sautéed in the cast iron skillet with an egg on top and then covered with cheese and served in a bowl.
It is a hardy breakfast and tasty. The different meats and vegetables make it variable.
This is another food item that does not require a recipe, in my opinion. You may have a family recipe tradition with particular herbs and spices or quantities but I do not. I did not grow up eating this dish although Mom served us a lot of casseroles. I have seen a variety of recipes for this and I know that I have Americanized this dish as I do not use lamb. I have made this vegetarian using lentils but Hubby does not like that much. At a restaurant in Boston recently the chef made this with a tomato based meat mixture. My step-daughter and I thought that was odd, or at least, rather unique. That chef also put a piece of puff pastry atop the mashed potatoes for an interesting presentation.
The church I attend has a rotation of serving a weekend meal at our local soup kitchen. For simplicity they serve Shepherd’s Pie as the main dish and not have a potluck by the parishioners. The recipe suggested is as follows:
2 pounds ground beef, browned
1 large onion, chopped and sautéed with the meat
2 cans creamed corn
2 cans green beans, drained
Mashed potatoes to cover, instant or real (about a 2 /1/2 pound bag)
Salt and pepper to taste
The meat and onion is put in a 9 x 13-inch pan. Spread vegetables over meat and mashed potatoes on top. Bake at 375 degrees F for 25-30 minutes.
I indulge in a delivery service of locally sourced meat and I receive a pound of ground beef each month. This month I made a Shepherd’s pie, pictured below. I do not use the above recipe although it does make a tasty dish. Mine is a mixture of ground beef with sautéed vegetables in gravy. This is topped with mashed potatoes and baked until the top is crusty but not brown. The insides will be bubbling. Cool for a short while, serve, and eat.
The type of vegetables can vary. For me it depends on what I have around but mostly consists of a bag of frozen mixed vegetables added to sautéed chopped onion. This is cooked with the browning of the meat. I then add a half cup of broth and then another half cup mixed with a tablespoon of cornstarch. This makes a moist but not loose meat mixture under the mashed potatoes. Cheese and sour cream can be added to the mashed potatoes as desired. Although it is a hardy meal Hubby and I usual have two serving each! We won’t be losing weight this way!
I like custard: tarts, pies, plain, caramel, the lot. I was wandering the house wanting to make a simple dessert of some sort. I looked up custard in several cookbooks and settled on the custard pie from Pushcarts and Stalls: the Soulard Market History Cookbook. When in St. Louis I like visiting the Soulard Market. Just walking into the spice shop is an olfactory treat.
I had one sheet of frozen puff pastry which I took out to thaw. I thought a puff pastry crust would add a bit of interest to a custard pie. Custard is milk/cream, eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Very simple and most ingredients are already in most kitchens.
One unbaked pastry shell
½ cup sugar
3 eggs
2 cups cream: I had 1 1/2 cups cream so I topped it off with oatmilk.
1 teaspoon vanilla
Nutmeg
1 egg white beaten until frothy
I omitted the last two ingredients. I forgot completely about the nutmeg, and did not bother coating the inside of the pie shell with the egg white.
I blind baked the puff pastry in the pie tin. I should have rolled it out a bit to fit better but I did not. This would have prevented a bit of seepage behind the crust. Ten minutes in a 400 degrees F oven did nicely.
Beat the custard ingredients in a mixer with a whisk or just by hand. Pour into the pie shell. Place on a baking sheet (important in case of leakage) and bake for 30 minutes.
In rereading the recipe now I find that I was supposed to reduce the temperature of the oven to 350 for the pie and the higher temperature was for the par-baking of the shell. Well, my pie took 35 minutes at the higher temperature anyway.
It was not that pretty coming out of the oven. So I found a small amount of frozen mixed berries in the freezer and cooked those down with a splash of cranberry juice to make a small compote to serve with the pie.
This was a tasty pie. It is not too sweet and the puff pastry was a nice shell for it. It made it a bit lighter than a regular piecrust. Yummy!
Hubby was sick with a prolonged cold, not Covid, thank you for asking. He has not been sick for years, actually since he had Covid three years ago. But this was not Covid, no fever, no sore throat. He tried researching and decided it was allergies. We had recently been to the regional agricultural fair and had wandered around the animal barns with horses, cows, sheep, goats, and hay. He recalled that he may have had an allergy to hay in his childhood. But antihistamines did not clear this up, so he went back to cold medicine. Lo and behold, he got better on the 11th day, so his cold ran just over the 7 to 10 day course.
What to feed a cold? Or is it starve a cold, feed a fever? Either way soup is the answer. Now soup is just liquid with bits of food floating about in it. I have read and followed recipes for soups but unless it uses specialized ingredients is a recipe really necessary?
Liquid: broths and stocks of multiple varieties: chicken, beef, vegetable are the most popular. Milk and cream are possibilities as well.
Bits of food: vegetables of all sorts, meats of all sorts, and combinations of the two. I don’t know of any meat soup that does not use veggies as well. Pasta and grains are a nice addition as well as canned beans. One of my favorite things is to throw open packages of frozen vegetables in the soup. This uses up the veggies and adds variety to the soup.
I made a chicken noodle soup. I had a quart of chicken broth and a package of two boneless chicken thighs. This would be the easiest. After thawing the chicken I put it in a pan of water to poach. The advantage to this is that it makes an additional chicken broth!
The key to good soup is to sauté the mire poix. My usual is finely diced celery, carrots, and onions. For a different flavor profile one could use red and green peppers and garlic with the onions. Sautéing makes these bits of vegetables more flavorful and less bland when swallowed up in pots of broth.
Notes on pasta and rice: I cooked the egg noodles separately and did not add them to the soup itself. We put noodles in the serving bowls and ladled the soup over. This way the noodles don’t keep absorbing the liquid and become mush. I suppose if that happened one could put it all in a blender and make cream of noodles soup!
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