These recipies are simple and have agreeable strong tastes.

  1. rice
  2. potatoes
  3. satay chicken
  4. cinnamon chicken
  5. gorgonzola chicken
  6. pizzadillas
  7. molasses cookies
  8. banana and yams
  9. fish with yogurt
  10. granola
  11. banana banana
  12. bread

Rice

Ingredients:

  1. 1 cup rice
  2. Water: 1 1/2 cups or chicken broth if Basmati rice, otherwise 2 cups

Put rice in a sauce pan. Add water. Turn it on medium-high. Cover. Once it starts to boil, turn it down to low and keep it covered. Lift lid for a few seconds if it starts bubbling over. Wait until no water is showing above the rice (about 20 minutes for white rice, 50 for brown rice). Turn off heat.

Potatoes (about 50 minutes)

Put potatoes on plate. Put them in microwave, press "potato" button 3 times (about 11 minutes). At the same time, preheat oven to 500 degrees.

Line rimmed tray with aluminum foil, add oil spread about

When the microwave finishes, cut each potato in half then further slice into about 1/3 inch slices, dump on tray

Try to spread potatoes out in a single layer, or at least cover the tray as well as you can. Try not to let slices of potato stick together, we're aiming at lots of surface area. Try to get some oil on all the potatoes. Sprinkle salt, paprika, thyme over the potatoes.

About this time the over will finish preheating. Put the potatoes in for 23 minutes at 500 degrees. I like to have the oven light on so I can see how well they are browning. You want the edges to look a little burnt.

When done, use a spatula and potholders to get the potatoes off the aluminum foil and into bowls. Don't burn yourself on the cookie tray.

Satay Chicken

Ingredients:

  1. 2 pounds chicken breasts (frozen is OK)
  2. 1 little thing plain yogurt
  3. peanut butter
  4. (optional) pepper, or chopped red pepper

Cut up chicken in slices 1 centimeter thick. Put in frying pan. Fry until all the liquid is gone, pretty quick.

Put yogurt in a different frying pan. Add hot red pepper. Add peanut butter. Heat so peanut butter mixes, but avoid boiling.

Serve chicken and peanut sauce with rice. (Source: simplified internet)

Cinnamon Chicken

Ingredients:

  1. 1 cup basmati rice
  2. 1 can of chicken broth (1 3/4 cup)
  3. 4 chicken thighs (frozen, boneless & skinless)
  4. 1 onion
  5. 1 slice white bread
  6. 2 tablespoons butter
  7. 3 tablespoons flour
  8. 1/4 cup milk
  9. 1/2 cup water
  10. 1/2 cup frozen corn
  11. 1/2 cup frozen peas
  12. 1 teaspoon salt
  13. 1/8 teaspoon ginger
  14. 1/4 teaspoon ground cinammon

This takes about 45 minutes total, starting with most ingredients frozen. All three of my kids will eat it.

Put the frozen chicken thighs in a saucepan in the sink filled with hot tap water.

Put the chicken broth in another saucepan at medium-high heat. Add the 1 cup rice, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/8 teaspoon cinammon. Once it comes to a boil, cover it and turn the heat down to just above low. Turn the heat off 15 minutes later.

Meanwhile put a big frying pan on medium, put in the butter, chop up an onion, and put it in the butter. Stir it occasionally, to make sure all the onion gets sauteed and as little onion as you can gets burnt.

By this time (unless you're a really fast onion chopper) the chicken should be semi-thawed. Chop it up into bitesize pieces, like you see in cashew chicken at Chinese restaurants.

Add the chicken to the onions. Add the milk and flour and water too. Stir fairly often. (The goal of the water is to boil the chicken so it all gets cooked, even the parts not on the pan.)

Now chop up the bread into the tiniest pieces you can (I usually get 1/8 inch squares) and throw that in too. Keep it cooking, stirring, until the water has mostly boiled off. (About this time the rice is done so turn off its heat.)

Once you're sure all the chicken is cooked, dump in some frozen corn and peas. Wait until the mix is well-bubbling again. Then turn off the heat and throw in the rice. Mix well. Serve.

Banana and Yams

Ingredients:

  1. 1 yam
  2. 1 banana
  3. a little olive oil
  4. (optional) peanuts
  5. (optional) maple syrup

Cook sweet potato beforehand. (You can cook a bunch of them in a microwave by pressing the "bake potato" button.) Remove skin, chop into 1 centimeter thick slices. Cut banana in half, then cut it in half lengthwise.

Heat oil. Add sweet potato, banana, and peanuts. Cover for about 5 minutes. Banana bottoms should brown. Eat with maple syrup. (Source: the allergy self-help cookbook)

Parmesan Fish

Ingredients:

  1. 4 salmon steaks or fillets
  2. (optional) 1 little thing plain yogurt or sour cream
  3. (optional) 1/2 tsp salt
  4. 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
  5. 2 tsp lemon juice
  6. 1 tsp dill, 1 tsp tarragon, maybe some basil
  7. paprika, for coloring

Put everything except the fish in a bowl. Stir, should be the color of thousand island dressing. Pour over fish. Cook until fish is done. (Source: third cousin of Betty Crocker)

Fish

Ingredients:

  1. Fillet of rainbow trout

Put trout in pan. Turn on a little below medium, cover. Cook until edges start to look cooked. Flip. Cook until done (it flakes rather than sticking together at the thickest point when you try to cut it with spatula). Good with potatoes or rice.

Granola

Ingredients:

  1. 2 cups rolled oats (optionally, add other flours, seeds and nuts)
  2. 1 cup shredded coconut
  3. 1 stick butter
  4. 1/2 cup honey
  5. raisins (optionally, add chopped dried pineapple and dates)

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Mix oats, seeds, nuts, and coconut. Put stick of butter in saucepan, add equal amount of honey as butter, melt butter. Pour honey & butter over oats & nuts, mix so all the oats are wet. Cook until it starts to brown, about 20 minutes. Mix in dried fruit. (Source: second cousin of Betty Crocker)

Banana Banana

Ba. Banana. Ba Ba Banana.
Peel. Banana. Peel Peel Banana.
Eat. Banana. Eat Eat Banana.
Go. Bananas. Go Go Bananas!

Gorgonzola Chicken (about 30 minutes)

Put the chicken in a frying pan on medium or a little above medium, covered. Wait until it is partially cooked, then cut it up in the pan with the flipper into bite-sized pieces.

Meanwhile, dice the tomato into about 1/2-inch sections.

Add noodles, water to partially-cooked chicken. Cover. Stir occasionally. Once it starts boiling, watch it until the noodles are cooked and most of the water is gone (but the noodles aren't sticking to the pan).

Turn off the heat. Add gorgonzola cheese, walnuts, raisins. Mix with flipper, try to let the gorgonzola melt. Gorgonzola cheese loses its flavor rapidly with heating, so I aim at it being mostly melted. Add tomato and mix a little more.

Eat.

When cleaning the pan flipper and dishes afterward, use cold water when scrubbing so the gorgonzola doesn't melt into your cleaning utensils.

I can cut this to 20 minutes, at the expense of cleaning an extra pot and a strainer, by boiling the noodles in a pot of water at the same time as cooking the chicken in the pan. In that case the chicken finishes first, drain noodles and add the to the chicken when done, turn off burner, then add raisins and nuts and gorgonzola and tomato.

Pizzadillas

This is a decent approximation of a thin-crust open-faced pizza.

Have two plates and prepare two quesadilla shells at a time. Spread tomato paste over them as thin as possible with the back of a spoon.

Head the frying pan to a little below medium. Add a little butter, spread out the butter. Keep heat adjusted so butter does not smoke.

Grate parmesan and cheddar (three swipes of the grater each) onto a cutting board, the dump the cutting board on one of the shells and spread it out. Add a shake of Italian seasoning, and any other toppings.

Put one quesadilla shell at a time in the frying pan and cover. Move it around to spread the butter over the bottom. Cover.

Once a plate is clear start preparing another shell. On average I can prepare one full shell in the time it takes for a shell to cook.

It takes about 3 minutes for the cheese to melt and the quesadilla shell to start to brown. Remove pizzadilla to another plate, add butter to the pan if needed, and quickly add another prepared shell to the pan and cover again.

Cut up pizzadilla into quarters on plate with sharp spatula. Eat.

One teenager will eat 4 such pizzadilla shells. I usually feed my son and myself and make 7 shells between us, and we eat them standing up as I make them. I always add diced salami.

Bread

This needs sourdough starter in a quart mason jar, a little rubber spatula, a kitchen scale that can be zeroed and measures in grams, a big glass bowl, a damp rag, warm water, bread flour (not all-purpose or whole-wheat or rye), salt, an oven with an oven light, three bread loaf pans, oven mitts, and maybe dried rosemary. You have to be home at certain times of the day (8am then 6pm-8pm the first day, then 8am and 2pm the next day), but only about two hours total is really spent tending the bread.

The bread has a noticably sourdough taste. The sourdough taste isn't an ingredient, it's due to a type of bacteria that grows more the longer you let it rise. I use a lot more starter than most recipes, so the starter is a significant amount of the final bread, which effectively means the dough spent longer rising. Salt is essential to making it taste good and slowing down the rising. More water makes bigger crumb: bigger bubbles, bigger flakes. Using wet hands to keep the dough from sticking lets me use very wet dough.

  1. Have a quart jar of sourdough starter in the refrigerator. If you don't already have sourdough starter, you can make it yourself in a mason jar from water and flour by repeated feedings for a week, but I recommend getting it from someone else who makes good sourdough bread. The strain of yeast really does make a difference and wild yeast typically just isn't as good.
  2. Decide how many loaves you are making.
  3. Take out the starter first thing in the morning, between 6am and noon. Add 25g bread flour (per loaf) and an equal amount water.
  4. About 6pm, the starter will have about doubled in size. 8pm works too if you're not home at 6pm.
  5. Put a big glass bowl on the kitchen scale and zero it.
  6. Dump most of the starter in the bowl. Leave a little in the jar. I usually get about 100g (per loaf).
  7. Take off the bowl, put on the jar of starter with the spatula, zero the scale again.
  8. Add 25 of bread flour (per loaf) to starter and an equal amount water.
  9. Mix starter with the spatula, make sure there's no dough sticking to the rim, put the lid back on loosely, put it back in the refrigerator. It can stay there up to a month, but it's better if you use it again within a week.
  10. Put the bowl back on the scale, zero it again
  11. Add 200g water (per loaf).
  12. Zero scale again. Add 10g salt (per loaf). Mix with spatula. (Salt improves the taste, up to a point, and makes it rise slower but better.)
  13. Optionally add a dash of dried rosemary (fresh rosemary would hang together but dried mostly disintegrates while cooking)
  14. Zero scale again. Add 300g bread flour (per loaf).
  15. Mix together with spatula.
  16. Wash the spatula (I wash things before putting the bread away so I remember to do it)
  17. Cover bowl with wet rag
  18. Put it in the oven with the oven off and oven light on (the oven light keeps the oven warm but not hot, typically 85 degrees F)
  19. Every 30 minutes after that, usually twice,
    1. Take the bread out
    2. Get your hands wet so the dough won't stick to them
    3. Fold the dough in half, turn it 90 degrees, repeat 4x (or until the bread tries unfolding itself)
    4. Put the rag back on top and put it back in the off oven.
  20. Leave it in the oven overnight with the wet rag over it and the oven light off.
  21. First thing in the morning, about 8am, take it out of the oven.
  22. Push it down or fold it to get the biggest bubbles out (with wet hands so the dough does not stick to them).
  23. Grease the 3 loaf pans with a little butter. Nonstick pans don't really work, and butter lets any pan work whether it is nonstick or not.
  24. Split it into equal-sized loaves and put them in loaf pans. Your hands are better at estimating the weight than your eyeballs are at estimating the size. Use the kitchen scale to redistribute bits of dough, tucked underneath, until they are about equal. Try to have it smooth on top with no huge bubbles.
  25. Wash the bowl.
  26. Put the loaf pans back in the oven with the damp rag over them.
  27. Turn the oven light on. This makes it a little warmer and rise faster.
  28. After about 6 hours (about 2pm) the dough will be ready, it will have risen enough that it is lifting the damp rag. (You can make it ready sooner or later by adjusting the temperature; higher temperatures are ready sooner.) The real test is a "poke test", where you get your finger wet and poke the dough slightly and it should spring back but leaving a slight indentation. But I'm used to my recipe and I know how much it has risen when it is ready so it's enough for me to just look at it.
  29. Take the bread loaf pans out of the oven.
  30. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.
  31. When hot, put the dough in the oven, time it for 23 minutes.
  32. The dough typically rises a lot the first 5 minutes, the no further, sometimes shrinks. The inside of the dough can't get above boiling (it's wet) and it's growing because of water quickly turning to steam. But after a few minutes the crust is firm enough to not allow further growth. The loaf pan allows the bread to spread up but not spread out.
  33. Use oven mitts to take out when it is done. Leave in bread pans. 500-degree bread loaf pans can give you bad burns on contact, and so can any part of the inside of a 500-degree oven.
  34. Let it sit about 5 minutes to further cook bread and for bread pans to cool down.
  35. Eat most of one loaf right away. Fresh hot bread is significantly better than day-old bread. It's good with butter or peanut butter or oil plus balsamic vinegar. Give the dog a crumb.
  36. Wash the bread loaf pans.
  37. Put the remaining loaves in a tupperware for later days, or in the freezer. It lasts about four days unrefrigerated.

Sometimes I made whole wheat bread instead. For that I use 650g water (instead of 600g), 450g whole wheat flour, and 400g bread flour (so 850g flour total instead of 900g, whole wheat flour needs more water). If I use pure whole wheat flour it collapses when cooking far below the rim of the bread pan. Even with half bread flour it shrinks some during cooking, but usually stays a little above the rim. Nobody really liked the whole wheat bread.

Sometimes I add garlic and kalamata olives. It tastes good but it isn't as versatile as white bread (can't make french toast or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with it, but it's good for ham and cheese, or for croutons).

Table of Contents