Cleaning Out the Fridge for Holiday Travel

As I started writing this, I realized that I am becoming one of the THOSE cooks who share a recipe they threw together with lots of vagueness about what to do. However, I am not a particularly adventuresome and creative cook when it comes to making stuff up. I tend to look at cookbooks and food blogs for inspiration, so I really do keep it simple if it is something I put together without a recipe. And since this is not really meant to be a cooking blog, I don’t feel too bad. So, this week’s cooking adventure was intended to clear as much out of our fridge as possible before starting holiday travels and not do too much grocery shopping before we left. We had lots of lovely CSA goodies to use up. It also helps that I am pretty much at loose ends. I am much more motivated to cook when I haven’t been on the go all day.

Day 1: Spinach Enchiladas

I modeled this off a chicken and spinach enchilada recipe I have used as a repeated standby through the years. We have cut back our meat intake back quite a bit, so I decided to see how it was with just spinach. It was a pretty good team effort by R and I. We always forget how much we really like working together in the kitchen when we both have the time and energy. We are slowly figuring out a rhythm and pattern that works in our teeny kitchen.

Note: I realized how used to pre-cleaned produce we get. Man, that spinach was DIRTY! Had to do the whole submerge in water thing.

The filling:

I used two bags of fresh spinach. Guess I could have weighed it, but I didn’t.

Chopped and cooked down an onion till soft and brown. Added about 4 cloves of chopped garlic and the spinach. Let it all cook down.

The Sauce:

It called for 8 oz of sour cream, but I only had about half that, so I added extra yogurt and didn’t notice a difference

Original recipe called for ¼ c. plain non-fat yogurt. Clearly used more than that (see above).

About 1 ½ cups of low fat milk.

1 tbsp cumin

4 oz can of chopped chilies (we used a package of our frozen CSA chilies)

2 tbsp of flour

Mix it all up. I added several big spoonfuls to the spinach mixture to make it a little creamy.

Making the Enchiladas:

We used flour tortillas, but it would be yummy with corn tortillas, too.

Put some filling in, and roll. Yep, that simple. Biggest challenge is eyeballing it to make it stretch evenly for amount of enchiladas you are making. I can’t really help you with that one. Just use your common sense!

I recommend greasing your pan. I used cooking spray. We filled a 9 x 13 baking dish.

Dump the rest of the sauce over the enchiladas and spread it out to cover. Sprinkle with cheese.

Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 – 40 minutes until browned and bubbly.

We served ours with rice as a side. Enjoy!

Day 2: Beans, Greens and Cornbread

My inspiration came from this recipe, although honestly, it didn’t taste particularly “mexicany” to me.

Have I mentioned how much we love our slow cooker? We used to do “Slow Cooker Sundays” all

the time before moving. We are slowly getting back into the groove. I have found it is absolutely amazing for cooking a big old pot of beans all day long. I do love the simplicity of a bowl of beans. This also worked out well because we had one of my classmate friends, L, and her fellow, D, over for dinner since we had been chatting about getting together before we went our separate ways for the break. They had been packing all day as they are moving to a new place, so it was nice to treat them to a hot meal. We all know how tiring packing can be!

Note: A lot of our spices comes from Penzey’s. I guess this is a bit of a free plug for them. LOVE them. In many cases, they will be the same price or cheaper than what you can get at your local grocery, especially if you buy the bigger bulk bags.

Crockpot Bean Soup

1 lb of dried pintos (no need to soak!) Just rinse and look for rocks and junk that shouldn’t be there.

1 chopped onion

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

Seasonings: 1 ½ tbsp of cumin, Adobo seasoning, Chicago Steak Seasoning, Smoked Spanish Paprika, 2 spoonfuls of brown sugar, Trinidad Seasoning. All of this was to taste throughout the cooking process.

Fill the cooker about 2/3 of the way with water and cook on low for at least 8 hours. I added some more water along the way to keep the beans barely covered so they would not get dry and crusty.

Greens

This was an attempt to use up random bags of mystery greens we had received from the CSA. I used half a bag of something of which I had no clue what it is, but knew it had tasted good last week! The other bag was little baby kale. This was pretty simple. I pulled all the stems off (hate stems), and gave it a good rinse. Threw it in a big skillet with a drizzle of olive oil and 2 Tbps of butter. For spices, I used an Herbed Season Salt, Trinidad seasoning, red pepper flakes, and some ground pepper. After they wilted down, I drizzled them with some red wine vinegar. That’s it, people! You wanna know what else? Greens are kinda starting to grow on me, especially when I season them the way I like it. I think that is the key: Use seasonings you like to accent the flavor of the greens.

Cornbread

As I mentioned, this was an effort to get rid of stuff in our refrigerator. Well, we were out of eggs, so I went in quest of an eggless cornbread recipe on the internet. This is the one I picked, and I followed it as is (Well, we were out of wheat pastry flour, so I used a mix of all purpose and wheat flour). It got pretty good reviews from all of us, and I would make it again. I typically rely on good old Jiffy mix, but as I threw together this one bowl wonder, I realized how EASY it is to make cornbread from scratch. Why on earth I have not figured that out before now… who knows?

Day 3: Couscous Salad with Butternut Squash and Sauteed Radishes and Peas

Again, we were trying to work our way through as many vegetables as possible before travelling, so that was the primary goal with this menu. The added bonus is that both recipes called for citrus and we have gotten a ton of oranges through the CSA. I had been eyeing this salad for a while after reading about it on two different blogs. I found it pretty yummy, but I think I would cut it in half next time. The leftovers were okay but not great, and actually, we left some behind that we just could not get through before travelling. I went light on the cinnamon because R is not a big fan of it in savory dishes and I subbed allspice for nutmeg as we didn’t have any. I also added more oil to the dressing as I thought the proportions were a little high on the acidic side. The radish dish was an experiment. I have always been curious about what cooked radishes would be like. I did make a few minor changes from the original recipe. I used frozen peas instead of sugar snaps. We are not fans of dill, so I subbed dried tarragon. Overall, it wasn’t bad and not nearly as weird as you might think it could be. It mellowed out the sharpness of the radishes but left the crunch. I don’t think I would make it regularly, but it is an unusual way to fix radishes if you are looking for something different. It also looks really pretty. I wasn’t crazy with how it reheated, so I would only make enough for one meal or make sure you are fixing it for more than two people.

Here is the link to the Couscous Salad with Butternut Squash

Here is the link to the Sauteed Radishes with Peas