Eatin' Fred

Sorry I’m behind in my posts peeps, I’ve been a busy lady. After all that basement work, my poor home and yard have needed some tender lovin’ care. Today I have a very simple recipe to share with you. I’ve thought a lot about this and I’m not sure if you can even call this a “recipe”.  I am actually just going to tell you a bunch of stuff that is yummy in a pan together. You can add to or take away from it to make your own yummy goodness.

This is Fred. Why is it Fred? I have no idea. Fred is just what my Mom calls it so that is what I call it. This could be a unique name to my family or millions of people around the world may call it Fred. I have no idea. Fred sure does taste yummy though!

Hello Fred:

·         Cabbage (I recommend slicing up as much as you can fit in the skillet with all the other ingredients)

·         Onions sliced or diced it’s up to your preference

·         Potatoes again, slice or dice (I don’t like taters in my Fred, but my sister loves them, again your preference)

·         Dice smoked sausage, kielbasa, turkey sausage, brat wurst (basically some kind of yummy sausage/meat product that comes in a long snake form) I buy whichever is on sale

·         Oil

·         Salt and pepper

Ok, coat your skillet, large or small, with a thin layer of oil and throw in your potatoes if you are going to add them. Cook those for a few minutes alone since they need a longer cooking time. Then add all of the other ingredients and cook until they are nice and browned. If Fred starts to stick to the pan or looks parched, just add a ¼ cup of water and scrape him up. Poor Fred, we’re goin’ cook him good!

I have been creative with Fred. I have had an abundance of cabbage these last 2 weeks so I have eaten Fred a lot, and no, I’m not sick of him yet. I would eat him today if I had more cabbage. Anywho, I have cut up chard and added that to Fred. I’ve also added fresh spinach. I imagine that any number of different things could be added to this dish to make it yummy. My sister, #3, says that carrots are also excellent in Fred.

What makes Fred so delicious? The flavors in the pan all meld together. The cabbage soaks up the meat flavor. Wow this makes me hungry and it’s 8:30 am. Fred is easy to make and yummers to eat.  Cook up ol’Fred and give him a try! Leave a comment if you get to try him and tell me what you added.

Stawberry Bread

I think I promised a recipe for strawberry bread.  I got the recipe from allrecipe.com my favorite site for recipes. If you’ve never been there check it out. My favorite part is the reviews because they give you so many ideas on ways to change the recipe for your liking. No, I was not paid to say that either. Click here to see the original. Here goes:

• 2 cups fresh strawberries
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ¾ vegetable oil
• ¾ unsweetened applesauce
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 1 1/4 cups chopped pecans (optional but yummy)

Slice the strawberries, sprinkle with sugar (not the 2 cups just some extra) and set aside. Heat oven to 350 and grease two 9 x5 pans. Mix all of the dry ingredients together. Slightly beat the eggs and add them to the strawberries along with the oil and applesauce. Mix it all together, add the nuts and pour into the pans. Cook 45 to 50 minutes. Cool in the pans for 10 minutes (or more) and then cool on a rack until completely cool.

 

The original recipe called for 1 ¼ cup of oil. I changed that to the applesauce supplement. The next time I make this recipe I will try it with all applesauce and no oil. Applesauce does make for dense, moist bread. Try it and see what works best for you. Some people like to add more strawberries and some people like to crush a portion of the berries before adding them to the mix. That just sounds like extra work to me!

This really is a yummy dessert or breakfast bread. Serve warm or cold, with whip cream, cream cheese or vanilla ice cream. It freezes well too.

Lazy Mama Lasagna

Man, we a had busy weekend! We went t o a local theme park on Friday, I shoe shopped with my 3 oldest kids most of the afternoon on Saturday, Easter was fantastic, and Monday was “oh my gosh we are behind in all the yard work” day. I’ll tell you more about my weekend in another post because I want to share with you what I made for supper on Saturday night.

I’ve already said that the kids and I had been out for most of the day on Saturday; I made a quick pit stop to unload shoes and kids then headed out to the grocery store. I so did not want to go but I knew we’d pay for it later if I didn’t go then. So about an hour late,r I was back home and it was 5 o’clock and the critters were hungry. I have really been trying to use my stocked up items and just shop for the fill in stuff soooooo… we had Lazy Mama Lasagna. Oh yeah baby.

If whole fryer chickens are priced right, like 78 cents a pound, I will buy 2 or 3 of them to stock up. I roast one and have that for dinner one night and then I like to cook one in the crock pot all day and do different things with it. I usually have lots of leftover chicken and I freeze some for later use.  Where am I going with this? Leftovers rock. Well they do, but my point was I had leftover chicken so  that was my meat for the lasagna. It was very tender crock pot chicken so yum.

I have had tons of spaghetti sauce and pasta noodles because I bought them on sale and stocked up. We are kind of tired of spaghetti and that is where the inspiration came from for the lasagna. I knew I had the sauce, pasta and chicken, so I bought a big container of cottage cheese and extra mozzarella and dinner was on baby!

First, I boiled the noodles and drained them. Then after spraying my pan I lined the bottom with half of the noodles and left the rest in the colander. I added half the container of cottage cheese in dollops on top of the noodles.

In the same pot I had boiled the pasta in (less dishes makes Lazy Mama a Happy Mama) I heated the pasta sauce and the diced up chicken together. I added some Italian seasoning and salt, because I can’t leave anything alone, and scooped half of that over the noodles and then a layer of mozzarella cheese.

I repeated that pattern one more time and topped it with extra mozzarella and some Parmesan cheese I had left over. I baked it at 350 for 20 minutes and broiled it for a couple more to brown the cheese.

I was disappointed that I let the cheese get too brown. I like it a little less solid, but hey, when you are trying to cook and cool eggs for after-dinner-Easter-egg dying that’s what you get!

It was yummy though, and we are going to have the leftovers tonight with some other leftovers from last night. Holler for leftovers!!