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!
Try, try again – Reuben sandwiches
I have this weird thing where it drives me crazy not to like a food. Growing up, there were distinct dishes I didn’t like and while originally, I hated having to “at least try the dish again,” it did stick with me.
I taught myself to enjoy certain things over the years that I likely would’ve never tried again after my first brush with the foods. Often times, it was just a matter of bad preparation the first time. Other times, I’m sure my tastes had changed and I got lucky.
~~For the record, it took me at least 10 years to finally be able to eat and enjoy raw carrots. My mom would buy them for me a couple times a year when I requested the chance, knowing I didn’t like them, but not going to turn me down when she knew I desperately wanted to like them. I still can’t stand celery. ~~
Sauerkraut is a food I was presented with in a single way, over and over again, and I found it absolutely disgusting. It came in a bag, cooked on the stove in a big pot for what seemed like all day, and only contained sliced polish sausage. The smell was horrifying, but the taste was even worse. And because it cooked for so long, even trying to pick the meat out was impossible because it soaked up all the nastiness.
(This looks like heaven compared to what I remember the soggy mush with bloated slivers of sausage. via about.com)
So gross. For anyone that loves sauerkraut or has had it fresh or even had it in a halfway presentable way, you can understand why I avoided the food for years. Not that the opportunity arises often for me to have it anyway, but I certainly wasn’t going to go out of my way to have it in any way, shape, or form.
But then I made the mistake of reminiscing the awful mistake, exchanging stories with a friend who grew up with fresh sauerkraut. “So you’ve never had a Reuben sandwich before?” Uh, no.
Of course, that was put on the menu for the night and I was soon having my first taste of sauerkraut in at least 10 or 15 years. Now we weren’t having fresh, but it wasn’t like the stuff I remembered either. When they opened the can, I braced myself for the whole room to fill with pungent odor, but surprisingly, I could actually sniff the can up close without gagging, and even sneaked a bite. It had crunch….how weird, lol!
When it was all said and done, the sandwich was surprisingly tasty. It was probably just the grill marks, though, huh? Everything tastes better with grill marks.
How to make Reuben sandwiches
– Pile heavy amounts of either corned beef or pastrami onto rye bread. Every picture I’ve seen has large amounts of meat, so I have a feeling that the version I had above was actually on the light side, lol.
– Add a layer of sauerkraut. I’ve been told that Steinfeld’s is a good brand, if you don’t make your own. I imagine most of us don’t, but when done correctly, it’s apparently amazing.
– Add cheese! Swiss is traditional, but I’d imagine others could work, too.
– Russian or Thousand Island dressing goes on in there someone, too, but I don’t know between which layers it should go? We didn’t have dressing, so I guess that’s sorta cheating.
– Grill and enjoy!
^ Those potatoes had an amazing peri peri rub on them, by the way. Delicious meal that I was prepared to grin and bear my way through, lol.
Blooming onions at home
If you go to a restaurant and order a blooming onion, you’ll be brought something along these lines:
Anyone else drooling right about now? I know I am, geesh.
Around here, though, this is how it goes:
Not nearly as pretty and definitely not as big. Seriously, where do they get those gigantic onions? ;)
But when you find onions for $.59 for 3 pounds and haven’t had a blooming onion in years, you take what you can get. And in this case, it meant a blooming onion for each person all to their own.
Prep/cut onions, soak in milk for 15+ minutes, coat in flour and whatever seasonings you prefer (salt and pepper are sufficient), and deep fry until golden. In my case, I put each one on some coffee filters when they were done to help soak up that glistening grease you see. Devour while warm; they’re not that great room temperature, cold, or reheated, bleh.
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