A hearty breakfast favourite, done a little differently: Curried Potato & Turkey Bacon Breakfast Hash

I know I’ve posted a lot of dishes today. I’m trying to make up for some lost time, in truth. I’m off work this week and so Family Day seemed to be a good day to just get a little caught up. All of the posts put up today are dishes I’ve made since the beginning of the new year. I’m sorry if you’ve all been disappointed by the lack of activity as of late! Also, none of these have any nutritional data right now. I might be able to add them later. Keep checking back.

Some of these are better for you than others. Many are comfort foods. Keep in mind that my cooking is usually a balance between comfort and healthy — sometimes a recipe is more comfort-food than anything and sometimes, it’s made with healthy-eating in mind. But due to a seven-week illness, I haven’t been focusing upon low fat, low-carb, low calories or anything of the kind.

Make something new out of something old: teriyaki meatballs and pasta

This one’s real easy. After New Year’s Eve, we found that we had far too much in the way of the teriyaki meatballs I had made in my slow-cooker, so we froze half of them. Keep in mind that they are not great if you’re trying to watch your sugar intake. But hey, when you’re looking for a really fast meal and you have leftovers in the freezer, you use what you have on-hand!

I won’t even hide this one behind a  ‘read more’ link because it’s pretty short and sweet.

Ingredients

• 2 portions whole wheat pasta of your choosing
• 1-2 Tbsp chopped red onion
• 2 tsp olive oil
• 10 frozen leftover teriyaki/Swedish/Hawaiian meatballs w/sauce
• 1/4 cup low sodium chicken broth or water
• 2 green onions, sliced and divided

Method

1. In a small saucepan over a medium heat, saute red onions in the olive oil for a few minutes until softened.
2. Add frozen meatballs and broth or water. Cook for a few minutes until meatballs are heated through.
3. Allow to bubble away until sauce begins to thicken. Add half of the  green onions and stir.
4. Divide in half and serve over two portions of pasta, topping with the remainder of the green onions.

Sorry, I have no nutritional values on this right now, but man, this was very, very yummy. 😉

Beef vegetable soup with a kick

We’ve had cooler weather as of late, so I’ve been craving more and more soup and stew. After having the hearty goulash soup from the Black Forest Inn upped my cravings for beef soup, specifically one I would consider to be hearty. I already had a large eye of round roast cooking in the slow cooker, so I thought why not use half of that for a soup and slice up the rest for sandwiches?

Then I considered what I wanted in the way of a flavour profile. I knew I wanted something deeper in flavour than usual and maybe something that cleared the old stuffy sinuses a bit. So here’s what I did…

Kitchen sink… soup!

What do you do when you have a whole lot of bits and bobs in your fridge that need to get used up? Make soup!

I was faced with this dilemma this weekend while fighting off a bit of a bug of some sort. all I wanted was soup. So I looked around and found that I had a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but not a lot of anything that seemed useful, until I started pulling things out of the fridge. I like to call my soup creations that are made in this fashion “kitchen sink soups”. You just throw everything you have, sometimes including the kitchen sink! 🙂

Here’s what I did with this one…

REVIEW & REJIG: Hungarian mushroom soup recipe

I was off sick from work today and slept most of the day away. When I awoke, I was feeling much better, but was absolutely famished. I considered calling and ordering some take-out chicken soup from Swiss Chalet until I looked up the nutritional value. For one bowl of chicken and vegetable noodle soup was over 1000mg of sodium!! No thank you!

My husband suggested that I make my own. The problem with that was that I had no chicken in the fridge! I had veggies and broth and whole wheat egg noodles (no yolk) but no chicken. Can’t have chicken soup without chicken, can we?

But by this point, I knew I wanted soup. So I went scouring around the web, looking for ideas. I knew I had about a pound of mushrooms that needed to be used up soon, so I based my searching on that ingredient. What I found was an intriguing recipe over on AllRecipes.com called Hungarian Mushroom Soup. I was surprised to find out that with the exception of the fresh parsley (I just had dried), I had all of the ingredients.

Homemade chicken biscuit pie

We’ve had grey skies on and off this week, so I’ve found myself craving comfort food. Keeping in mind my new meal plan regimen, I decided to see how I could revamp an old favourite: chicken pot pie. My old version was no doubt loaded full of sodium, fat, calories and carbs. This new recipe still has all that, but the values are no doubt cut back. Choosing lower sodium ingredients and limiting portions on the bread-like topping by using perfectly sized biscuits helps keep some of those values in check.

Here’s what I did…

Curried tomato pepper soup

Despite the summer heat, I’ve been craving tomato soup lately. So I picked up some ‘no salt added’ canned tomatoes and thought, “Why the heck not?” Who says you can’t have soup in the summer? I’ve been hiding in air conditioned spaces, anyway, so it’s not so strange.

I didn’t have a recipe. I didn’t even look. I just went into the fridge and cupboard and started pulling ingredients out that I thought might taste good together. Here’s what I did…