Rice Pudding

 

This is a recipe for using it up when you have too much cooked rice.

Ingredients: 

• two bowls of cooked rice
• two cups of whole milk
• 1/2 stick of butter
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• a few handfuls of raisins or craisins
• about a teaspoon of vanilla extract I guess
• 1/3 tsp salt
• some cinnamon to taste

Cook the cooked rice, and most of the milk in a saucepan on medium for about 10 minutes, uncovered. It's okay if the rice has gotten a little dried out, because it will soak up the milk. You don't want high or you'll burn the milk. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook for 5 more minutes.

Peach dump cake (aka peach cobbler)

This is good for if you have too many peaches.

12 small peaches (some not ripe yet, some ripe, some slightly overripe) quartered with pits removed
1 box of Duncan Hines Apple Caramel Decadent Cake Mix (that's what I used)
1 stick butter
1/3 cup water

Preheat oven to 350.
Mix the caramel mixture from the cake mix box with the water.
Throw the peaches in the bottom of the glass pan. I don't mean you have to actually throw it. Just dump it in. That makes it a dump cake.
Pour the cake mix over top of them.
Chop up the butter into slices and place them on top of the cake mix.
Drizzle the caramel mix all over the top. By doing it this way with the butter and caramel you are making some variety in the flavors of each bite which makes it more interesting.
Cook uncovered for 45 minutes. This seems like a long time, but that's just how long it takes for cakes to cook, I guess.

Serve with vanilla ice cream.

It looks kind of like this.

The nice thing about this recipe is that you can substitute whatever is handy. The fruit can be any kind of sweet fruit (apples, pears, peaches, plums, nectarines), fresh or canned, skins on or off. The cake mix can be whatever cake mix you have handy, although I haven't tried chocolate-- that would be a very different kind of dessert. Or you can make your own from flour and sugar, with a little baking powder and salt, maybe a little vanilla extract. Sometimes people like to use dried oats in the topping, too. The cake doesn't have any eggs or water in it, so it is more crunchy than a real cake.

Portuguese Cauliflower Soup

When I visited Lisbon, I had delicious soups of a kind I had never tasted. They had a smooth, creamy consistency and subtle flavors. When I asked my hosts, they explained, in words and gestures, that the white one was cauliflower. It was a lot like potato soup.
When I got home I looked up how to make it, and was pleased to find that it fit my two criteria for cooking dinner: it costs less than five dollars, and it takes less than five minutes to prepare. The only really necessary parts of the recipe are boiling and blending the cauliflower, though you at least need some kind of spice or it's too bland. This is my way of making it.

1 head of cauliflower
1/3 stick of butter (2 or 3 tbsp)
garlic salt
pepper
dried onion bits
1 cube of chicken bullion in gold foil
1 cup milk

Start some water boiling. Chop the cauliflower into half-inch pieces or smaller. Drop it in the water and boil for four minutes. Strain the boiling water and drop all the cauliflower in the blender.
In a glass two-cup measure, mix the rest of the ingredients and microwave for two minutes and stir. Pour this in the blender with the cauliflower. Blend on high until it is all looks like foamy mashed potatoes.

McIntosh Apples

McIntosh is by far the best variety of apple that is widely available. The flavor is tart, almost as sour as a Granny Smith (which would be, perhaps, a less ironic choice for a Scottish moniker), but unlike a Granny Smith the flesh is the tenderest of any variety, and the skin is the thinnest. McIntoshes are juicy: when you bite into one the skin tenses and gives way with a satisfying pop of flavor. They are round but somewhat oblate, with only a shallow impression at the calyx end.
The color is patchy, freckled light-green and red, a natural appearance that brings to mind songbirds or traditional Raku pottery. As the poet-monk Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

 They are in every way the opposite of that most pernicious and ubiquitous breed of apple, the Delicious; whose uniform color, hard or woody texture, thick skin, and flavorlessness are the antithesis of every quality that makes an apple good to eat. In their sourness, irregular coloration, small size, and susceptibility to bruising, McIntoshes are closer to the wild apple than the artificiality of many other breeds.
The very delicacy of the McIntosh makes them difficult to store. The process of bringing them home from the store in a bag is often enough to bruise them. For that reason, you rarely can find good McIntosh in stores out of season (late September). In its peculiar way, this very rarity enhances their appeal; like eggnog, it is a seasonal treat one looks forward to and then longs for, and is all the sweeter for it.
However, the reason I am writing this is that I frequently find that what is marketed as McIntosh is no true Scotsman, as it were. Frequently they tend toward more yellow coloring, a sweeter flavor and a firm texture more reminiscent of a Jonathan or Gala.
I recognize that categories are defined by their members, and not a single ideal (as Plato would have it) of which the members are imperfect copies. Surely the people selling these apples are more expert in the lineage and cultivation of apples than I am, and can say with more authority to which variety their apples belong. On the other hand, there must be strong financial pressures to sell as the authentic McIntosh hardier forgeries. So which is it, dear reader? Am I mistaken in taking a preferred subvariety as defining the variety as a whole, or have I fallen victim to some dark conspiracy of greed and deceit among apple growers? Is the industry, I must ask, rotten to the core?

Instant Apple Pie

I like pie a la mode. Here's my instant recipe:

Cut up an apple
put a couple spoonfuls of sugar on it
and some cinnamon.
Microwave it for one minute
top with a scoop of ice cream
and Golden Grahams for the crust.

No, it's not a real pie. But is a pie really what you wanted? What you really wanted was to spend time reading about Aztec philosophy, while eating baked apples and ice cream and Golden Grahams.

Pineapple upside-down cake

Pineapple upside-down cake was invented in the U.S. sometime in the 1920s, I think. Basically it was just skillet cake that used the new invention of canned sliced pineapple for a pretty, easy pattern. I kind of associate it with the whole 1950s fascination with Hawaii (not that it is authentic Hawaiian anything, but then, 1950s cooking wasn't really about authenticity anyway. Picture women's home magazines, ward dinners, etc...) Mom used to cook it, and I'm pretty sure La Fawn and Helen did, too, so you can call it an old family recipe.
It's pretty easy to make. Get a glass or aluminum pan, and cover the bottom with a mixture of melted butter and brown sugar. Maybe half a cup? It should be about a quarter inch thick on the bottom of the pan. Lay canned pineapple slices in a symmetric arrangement over the brown sugar. If you have maraschino cherries you can put those in the middle of each ring.
Then make up a yellow cake mix from a box (the kind where you add eggs, oil, and water. Betty Crocker or something like that.) But instead of using water, use the liquid from the pineapple can. Pour the batter over the pineapples and sugar. Then bake it how it says on the cake box. I'm guessing 350 degrees for 25 minutes? I guess it depends whether you made a short fat cake or used the biggest glass pan you have and made it really flat.
It tastes best when you eat it hot, maybe with a little vanilla ice cream or a glass of milk.
The key to the flavor is that the brown sugar becomes caramel in the cooking process, and the flavors of the pineapple, sugar, and butter all kind of soak into the cake.
If you cut half of it off and put it inverted on the other half, you can have pineapple inside-out cake. But this is messy and is really done just so you can say that silly phrase.

Doug's fancy chicken soup for lazy people

Ingredients:
1 package chicken flavored instant ramen
1 scoop Cape Cod Chicken Salad (from Costco)

Put water, noodles, flavor packet, and the scoop of chicken salad in a pot and boil it until the noodles are soft enough. It has chicken, oil, celery, cranberries, and walnuts. All of which are good in chicken soup!
It's kind of similar to the orange chicken soup recipe, but doesn't require any crazy things like putting an entire chicken in a pot and waiting for the flesh to fall of its bones, or peeling carrots or anything at all, really.

Berry Smoothie

Fill the blender 3/4 full of frozen strawberries, slightly thawed. Fill the rest up with fresh raspberries. On the last day of June, there will be so many raspberries that even though you've been picking them every day and having a bowlful with cream, and so has your wife, there will still be two bowls leftover that you need to make into smoothies. There might be a Japanese beetle in there, or a really tiny caterpillar, or a harmless sort of green spider. Bending over to pick that many raspberries can get tiring, so you get someone to bring you a chair. And another bowl, because this one is full. If you work quickly, most of the mosquitos won't have time to find you. Add in a half cup of white sugar, and a tablespoon of vanilla extract. Then blend it up. It's summer, this is summer food.

rice omelet

1 bowl microwave rice
1 can corn (or fresh asparagus or mushrooms would be nice)
2 tbsp butter
5 eggs
sliced cheddar cheese
salt
parsley

Heat up the veggies and butter in the pan. Add the hot microwaved rice bowl. Stir. Add five eggs. stir. Add salt. Cover with cheese slices. Add parsley. Wait for the cheese to melt.
Total preparation time: 5 minutes. Serves two or three people.
Growing up I would have called this quiche, but it's not reaaly much like quiche. It's just an omelet with rice in it. 

anytime American curry

This recipe takes ten minutes to prepare, and you don't have to have gone to the store any time recently.

2 microwave rice bowls (microwave 90 seconds each)
3 blocks of Japanese curry base (about 36 cubic centimeters total)
Here is a picture of what I mean by blocks:

2 cups water or milk
1 apple (or can of pineapple chunks)
1 stick celery (or can of corn)
1 can of chunk chicken breast
it looks like this:

spices (curry powder, coriander, cinnmon, marjoram)

Boil the water. Break up the curry block and drop it in the water. Cut the apple and celery into little chunks. Add the fruit, vegetables and meat to the boiling curry and stir. Let it sit long enough to get warm, but not long enough for the apples to break down. The curry should come out thick, not runny. Spice to taste.

You can add other things like potatoes or carrots but you would have to boil them for a few minutes before you added the curry or they would be too hard. Of course you can make rice in a pot or a rice cooker, but that would take a lot longer.
It will end up looking something like this:

serves 2 or 3 people

Instant smoothie

Mix half and half cinnamon applesauce and peach cranberry juice. (Or whatever fruit juice you  have in the fridge.) It's really hot and humid here in Dayton right now, this was just the thing. Also a lot cheaper than buying a smoothie.