Mini wonton lasagnas – Dinner, bentos, or midnight snacks
What does it mean to find a huge tub of ricotta cheese on clearance for under 3 bucks? Lasagna time, of course!
Knowing that we were limiting dairy, I assumed I would toss these lasagnas straight into the freezer. Instead, I only used a thin layer of ricotta and no other cheese, and they turned out too good to not eat fresh.
Wanna make your own? Just use your favorite lasagna recipe and sub in eggroll or wonton wrappers. As Squirrel Bread says, wontons are the new black, and I use ‘em like crazy around here. For these, I just cut my wrappers in half, layered as usual, and skipped the fuss of precooking noodles or wondering if I cooked the dish long enough to avoid crunchy pasta.
When I originally bought these tins (on major sale, might I add), I thought they’d be great to fix all sorts of mini-this-or-thats in. I assumed I’d cut them in half and be able to toss various dishes into the girls’ lunchboxes.
Instead, I realized they’re roughly 2-cup tins and they’re perfect for building fast bentos right in them. Maybe not the most creative, but it opened up a whole new set of ideas of foods I could bake, toss in the freezer, and have ready in a flash for lunches.
And yes, I snacked on these a few times. Leaving them cold or barely heating them up turned them into easy, hand-held craving-satisfiers. Yum!
Quirky midnight snacks – Strange cravings are meant to be indulged
Some people need their food to be separated neatly on plates with no edges or sauces touching.
Me? I have no issues mixing foods. In fact, I often go out of my way to eat multiple foods together at once, even if it’s not the traditional way to eat them.
Khorre teases me on a regular basis about my once nightly habit of eating spaghetti and boiled* eggs. I couldn’t get enough of them and it took weeks to kick the craving.
Others aren’t really strange to me at all, but because I’ve walked through the kitchen with a bowl more than once and gotten a “Really Jessi? Seriously??” I figure maybe they’re not as normal as I suspected. So this last month, I started taking pictures of some of my snack fests, just in case.
Spaghetti, french fries, ketchup, and yes, brown mustard there, too. I wish I could say I tried to keep them separated, but most bites had some of each.
Chips dipped straight into the avocado. What? Sometimes I don’t want to bother with the knife and spoon process.
Orzo rice with french onion dip gravy, along side lettuce and salsa for a pseudo-salad.
Lamb. We’ll leave it at that. Shhh.
This one’s normal, right? Quick sandwich of bologna I got for free, sliced tomatoes, avocado, and Italian dressing.
Leftover corn on the cob….no butter, no salt, eaten over my laptop. Not exactly the cleanest snack, but could be worse.
Cream cheese and pepperoni sandwiches
Who am I kidding? I don’t take the time to make several mini-sandwiches. It’s usually eaten more like this:
Dipping pepperoni in a spoonful of cream cheese is much more convenient. Hey, I never claimed they were healthy snacks…
*If it’s hard-boiled, I add butter. If it’s soft-boiled, I let the yolk make the creaminess and just add salt and pepper as usual.
Cheese, cheese, cheeeesssseeee – The ducks are quacking
Get up and get me some cheese, man!
It’s quite ironic, really. I’ve been working on this huge pre-move freezer stock-up plan and just days before deciding we are cutting out all dairy for a while, I had a hay day with cheese.
Like this much cheese:
Each of those is an 8 ounce block of cheese, so 30 blocks x 8 oz each / 16 oz in a pound = 16 pounds of cheese. Unfortunately, it’s cheapest for me to buy the small blocks than it is to go to another store for slightly larger blocks of cheese, so it kills me to go through that much packaging, but such is life.
Hole-y cheese!
So what did I do with all that cheese? I shred it, of course!
Okay, so not always perfect…
I love my Kitchen Aid mixer and all the attachments make it a huge time saver. It took longer to open all the packages than it did to turn it into all beautifully shredded cheesy goodness.
Each kind of cheese produced a huge bowl of cheese.
And then I sorted it all into lovely little sandwich bags. Each one contains about 2 or 2 1/2 cups of cheese, or roughly just under a block of cheese.
Then came the gallon sized freezer bags….
And the Sharpies…
As for the ducks quacking, it’s from an inside joke that no one else will find hilarious, but years later, every so often, someone will still blurt out “The ducks are quacking. I must melt cheese!” I’m repeating it for no other reason than to have it recorded somewhere so I don’t forget in 20 years. Here’s Mom’s explanation of how it started:
I was making mac and cheese. My pasta was boiling in one pan and in another one, I was melting cheese and putting in milk and such. One of them said, “Oh, cheese! Why are you melting cheese?” and I said “Because the ducks are quacking.” And that’s all there is to it. That’s it.
I don’t know which is more random….that she answered that way, or that the standard silly randomness carried over to being a common thing now. Hmm. Off to go melt cheese now…I can hear the ducks quacking….
Recent Comments