I know I’d love that butternut squash soup, but then I like pumpkin pie, too. Believe it or not, I’m the only one in my immediate family who does. I bake one at thanksgiving anyway, and end up eating it all (over several days, of course). T
I second Epicurious as an excellent resourse. Go under “advanced seach” and you can look for pretty much anything.
Have you considered Asian food? I’d think a lot of it would meet your requirements. A good stir fry wouldn’t be putting a foot wrong. And if you’re bored, woks can be very exciting. (Or if you want to get labour intensive, steamed dumplings.)
Ah missed that, I guess you have considered Asian cooking…yes you can marinade tofu. Pretty good idea. Treat it rather like fish…depending on what you’re doing with it you can sear it on the outside for a bit of texture but for god sake don’t over cook it or it get’s nasty.
My wife makes a killer vegetable lasagna with zucchini and eggplant. Lots of ricotta, mozzarella, red sauce and pasta. We make two big pans on the weekend, then freeze it in family sized portions in tupperware. Just microwave when needed.
A couple of my recipes from previous threads that meet all your dietary requirements (I think) except for the fattiness; neither recipe is terrible in fattiness, but neither is low-fat, either.
Well, the beans might be, as long as you don’t make the Daniel’s Heartstopper dish.
And Tofu-Kale, which has a lot of peanut buttery goodness, but which also has a lot of fibery goodness in the form of brown rice:
And a bonus: here’s burundi’s spectacular Eggplant Bharta. I normally hate eggplant, but I adore this dish.
For fast, week night stuff, I like Racheal Ray’s stuff. Okay, it never takes 30 minutes the first time around, but by the second or third time, I can usually make it in about that much time. We had spinach risotto with feta/walnut and roasted garlic dips on pita tonight, with fresh tomatos. It was tasty.
Sub lean ground turkey in the meatloaf. Quiches and frittatas are great. Dietary cholesterol i not the bogey man when it comes to high cholesterol–dietary fat is.
Also, it sounds like you need to invest in a crockpot to make some meals that would be ready when you got home.
Crock pot? I have always been somewhat amazed by people who can somehow put together the ingredients for a meal in the morning and still get to work on time. I’m not that sort. I could kid myself and say I’ll get up a half hour early to do that, but deep down I know that’s not happening.
So far I’ve got the turkey phyllo, the free-form meatloaf, and a recipe for Moroccan beef medallions that I got from Epicurius, and the need for further research on how to prepare tofu. FWIW, I went to epicurius. com and searched for quick meals without peppers or chicken. There were, IIRC about 10 of them. Nine were not appealing for other reasons.
For those familiar with tofu, how long does it stay fresh? If I buy it on Saturday, will it still make a good meal on Wednesday?
For the crockpot - you can prep the ingredients the night before. I also frequently make something the night before and throw it in the fridge before I go to work. I usually only make soup in my crockpot but I’ve also made stews and chili. I sometimes forget to put it away in the morning and it never tastes worse from cooking all night and all day.
My favorite soup to make is kielbasa soup. I mainly like it because something in the cooking process seems to remove all the usual side effects of eating kielbasa. It takes about 10 minutes to prep and basically cooks as long as you want.
1 jar (5.2oz) of vegetable stock. I use Savory Basics. No fat cal, saturated or trans fats. 3mg of cholesterol, 550mg of sodium, 1g carbs and 15 calories per serving.
3 qts of water
3 loops of kielbasa
3 potatoes
1 bag of carrots
1 yellow onion
1 head of cabbage
Mix stock and water and put in pot or crockpot
Cut up kielbasa in as large a chunk as you like
Cut up veggies in large chunks - reduces prep time and they hold form better over long cook times. I don’t peal any of my veggies (except the onion of course). Add meat and veggies to pot.
In either the crockpot or regular pot, cook until veggies are tender. In a regular pot, it took about 45 minutes for tender veggies but I noticed that the longer I cooked it, the more mild it became. So I cooked it for 4 hours.
I have issues with kielbasa. I get cramps and very bad heartburn whenever I eat it. But, this soup not only causes no ill effects, it actually made me feel much better when I had a major sinus headache and a stomach ache. It also tastes better the longer it sits in the fridge and freezes very well.
We have both a slow cooker (round) for beans and soups, and a roaster (oval) for roasting. For some reason, the veggies never cook well in the roaster. However, last Friday I put in a chuck roast, poured in about a third of a cup of red wine, one medium onion (diced), and poured in a jar of mushrooms, liquid and all. I let that sucker cook on low for about 12 hours, and had tender, flavorful pot roast in the evening. We had brown rice with it, but any complex carb is good. Before you get upset thinking about the fat, we use a fat separator on the broth, and the solid fat separates easily from the roast itself. In addition to the first evening meal, we’ve had several sandwiches from this, and made soup. LI’ve heard of people shredding the meat and heating it with barbecue sauce, and I think that would be good, but we all love pot roast very much, and we all enjoy pot roast sandwiches.
An easy winter side dish is simply various root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, onions, maybe a turnip) sliced and cut into chunks, put in a roasting dish, and then tossed with chicken buillion (we like Better than Buillion brand). Sometimes I put a couple of ribs of celery in it, sometimes I don’t. Then I roast it at somewhere between 300 and 450 degrees F, depending on what else I’m making, and it’s very tasty, and almost no fat. Sometimes I stir the veggies around, sometimes I don’t. Stirring them will get them coated again with the broth. Your husband might like this form of chicken flavoring, but if he doesn’t, I’ll bet that he WILL like it with beef broth.
[QUOTE=Chefguy]
Absolutely. When you cook the meat in a loaf pan, you are basically stewing it (braising). It sits and bubbles in it’s own grease and juices and usually comes out kinda dry.
Make your meat mix 1/2 pound very lean beef, 1/4 pound not-so-lean (10-15% fat) and 1/4 either ground lean pork or (my favorite) ground lamb. QUOTE]
Where in the heck can you get ground lamb? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
About once a month or so, for a Sunday dinner, I make a roasted turkey around here. I look for a smallish one, and do most of the whole deal. Well not really. Occasionally I do stuffing, often I use those simply potatos mashed potatos. I also do gravy. After dinner i carve out the rest of the turkey. I make some frozen dinners out of some of the leftovers, I usually leave enough turkey in the fridge to have one night of hot turkey sandwiches (we love us some hot turkey sandwiches.)
The carcass also goes into the freezer for later use along with the turkey neck. On a saturday I tend to do the turkey soup. I like to throw it in with onions carrots and celery and maybe a couple bay leaves. In the last hour or so I add cauliflower and rice. The cauliflower was a leftover in the fridge once and worked so well with the turkey soup that I have done it ever since. Noodles of course work well too. To this soup (Which i think takes 10 minutes prep, especially since I tend to cheat and buy cut up veggies at the store). I add fresh bread, either from the breadmaker or the little frozen rolls you can just heat up.
I am a huge fan of cooking ahead. If you are doing a more or less complicated meal like meatloaf, and one that everyone likes, don’t just make one. Make a couple so that at some point next week you have a meal. It also can work if you have made a meatloaf ahead and defrosted it you can have your husband pop it in the freezer if you are getting home late. (Mine can’t boil water near as I can tell, and even he will do that if I give specific instructions.) Add mashed potatoes and some frozen peas and you have a great meal without much hastle.
Soup and grill cheese night is good, you can use the turkey soup from above reheated or you can use tomatoe soup or some such.
How does the OP feel about chickpeas and lentils? I went semi-vegetarian 18 months ago and have found chickpeas and lentils (which I’d barely had at all before and assumed I wouldn’t like) to be a revelation. I can give you some recipes involving these if you are interested.
No love for my recipes? 
(I kid; obviously not to everyone’s taste)
Tofu can last a pretty long time in the fridge–a week or more. THere should be an expiration date on the package.
Quick tofu marinade: throw it with some soy sauce, ginger, garlic and water into the microwave, and microwave it for 6 minutes or so. It should be cubed, of course.
Daniel
Whole foods carries it in the Butcher shop. So do the local grocery chains in Chicago (Jewel (Albertson), Dominick’s…)
I just made some great Shepard’s pie this weekend, YUM!
Those dumplings can be made in advance and frozen (uncooked). I do this all the time. Hallgirls boyfriend (who is Vietnamese) makes the best dumplings and when he come to town, he’ll help me make as many as we can.
Our recipe–ground pork, chopped shrimp, a bit of fish sauce and some finely grated carrots if we’re feeling adventurous–combine and roll into balls small enough to fit into the dumpling papers or wonton wrappers. Use egg to seal and throw into a freezer bag and into the freezer. When you’re read to cook them–I usually put them into chicken soup–just take directly from the freezer and throw them into boiling soup until they become soft and float. Steaming would work the same way, I would imagine.
About the meatloaf–you could also use ground turkey in place of the ground beef. Less fat than beef, but be careful about cooking it too long. The lower fat in the turkey may make a dry meatloaf.