Sweet and Sour Chicken
Buy a box of Tempura batter at Kroger’s.
Tempura batter chicken and deep fry.
Sauce:
1/3 cup rice wine vinegar
4 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon corn starch in 1 tablespoon water
red food color, around four drops.
If Mrs. Plant isn’t eating it, add a bit of Thai Green Curry Paste.
Put this stuff in a pot over low heat until it thickens.
Serve with rice and sliced onions, carrots and bell pepper.
When I was a bachelor, I used to get pork shoulders pretty cheap. Cook one down in a crock pot in apple juice, and move from there right into goulash. Okay, I don’t know if a Hungarian would recognize it as goulash, but I liked it, and it was pretty cheap.
What do you add to the meat to make it goulash? Potatoes? Rice? Pasta? Veggies? It sounds pretty good.
Mom used to use the meat mallet to tenderize a round steak for Swiss steak. Sprinkle it with flour, pound the flour in, brown it, add cooked tomatoes, let it simmer for at least an hour.
I need to get a round steak, I guess. Come the weekend, guess what we’re having for supper.
For non-gloppy (handled with care) but non-sharp, I’d try brie. With extra garlic. Sausage… brie… garlic! NOM NOM NOM
Cut up some onions and carrots and put them in with the potatoes. Maybe even a stalk of celery.
Hungarian goulash (or what’s known as pörkölt over there, as gulyás refers to a soup) is a stew made on a base of onion, lard/oil, and paprika. That’s it for the basics. Sometimes you might add tomato paste to it, caraway seed, or possibly sweet peppers. It’s generally served with potatoes, galuska (spaetzle), or rice.
What people call goulash here, though, I haven’t been able to figure out. It’s basically a catch-all for pretty much any kind of beef stew.
The goulash which isn’t really goulash that I grew up with is browned hamburger, elbow macaroni, and tomato juice. Maybe a diced onion in the hamburger, some salt and pepper. That’s it.
Yes, it is not really goulash, and it is not really glamorous, but it is serious comfort food for me.
I’m no cook, so this is a potentially dumb question.
After you’re done marinating, do you transfer just the chicken or the chicken and leftover marinade into the skillet/wok?
That dish you described sounds like what my grandma used to call slum gullion. I liked it a lot as a kid.
My recent comfort food is my own version of shepherd’s pie. I just brown ground beef, put taco spices on it, and then put it in a baking dish with a layer of corn on top of it, and a layer of homemade mashed potatoes with skins left in on top. It takes about 30 minutes to bake and it’s sooo good as work lunches all week.
2-3 HOURS ? You’re brave Auntie. Who else spends that much time in the kitchen nowadays ?
I don’t think you have to stay in the kitchen with it. My grandmother used to throw a version of this in the oven before we left for church so that “supper” would be ready when we got home.
A recent cheap/easy addition to our rotation is “unstuffed peppers”
Saute chopped onions 'til soft. Add ground beef and brown. Drain. Add cut up bell peppers and stir a few more minutes. Add tomato sauce and cooked rice or instant + water. Simmer for a while 'till everyting’s cooked through.
One of our favorites.
1 can cream of mushroom
1 can cream of chicken
1/4 of a bag of frozen peas
2 cans of chuck chicken
1 cup of cheddar cheese
1 bag of egg noodles
Heat oven to 350 degrees
Cook egg noodles until almost done. Drain
Mix the soup, chicken, peas and 3/4 cup of cheese with the noodles.
Spray the bottom of 9X13 glass dish and fill with the noodle mixture.
Bake for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle the remaining cheese on top and cover in foil for five to ten minutes.
Presto, easy cheesy chicken cassorole.
I sometimes put Frenchs dried onions on top as well but you don’t really need them. They also make a chicken and mushroom cream soup now. I used that last time and it came out even better.
I put the chicken and the marinade in. It’s really not very much juice, so by the time the chicken is cooked, it’s not sitting in a lot of sauce or anything…it’s just coated, basically.
Huevos rancheros. Spread refried beans on a warm flour tortilla. Make a sauce with a can of diced tomatoes, some cilantro, and whatever spices you feel like (cumin, chili powder, cayenne, whatever). Fry up eggs. Put egg on bean-covered tortilla, top with shredded cheese.
Can be made healthy with fat-free refried beans and lowfat cheese, which is what I usually do.
That sounds like my “Chicken Noodle Stuff!”
Into a skillet put:
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 can milk
1 can sliced mushrooms, undrained
1 box frozen peas and carrots
1 large can chicken chunks
1/4 lb velveeta, cubed
Cooked noodles
Stir together (all but noodles) and cook over medium heat until cheese is melted and peas and carrots are tender. Stir in the noodles. Eat!
This is one of my son’s favorites, and it takes literally 10 minutes to produce. I make it on those nights I have only that much time.
Take a baking potato, poke it with holes and bake it in the microwave. Mine usually take 6-7 minutes, till they’re softish to the touch.
Cut potato in half and scoop out middle leaving about a half iof potato shell.
Fill with leftover chili/any meat dish of the tomato-y ground meat-y variety or canned chili and top with grated cheese
Microwave again until filling hot and cheese melts - usually about 2 minutes.
Viola
Heh. It’s kind of a running joke around here, because if I start cooking six or seven p.m., it usually means dinner will be ready by about ten or eleven. Yeah, I have a lot of slow stews in my repertoire, at least during the fall/winter. And during the summer (and also the rest of the year), there’s a lot of barbecue, so that takes anywhere from three hours for ribs to twelve hours or so for brisket.
You can also do this in a crock pot the exact same away, only substiutute cream of mushroom soup for the tomatoes.
My family really seems to like my pot roast, and it couldn’t be easier to make. I throw a hunk of chuck roast in the crockpot and pour a can of French onion soup and a glug or so of red wine over it. When it’s done I strain off the onions from the juices and thicken it up with some corn starch for gravy. Serve with mashed potatoes and your vegetable of choice.
I’m not a big fan of the stuff, but the others like it.