Last week was both a low and a high for me in the kitchen. My daughter will be six months old soon and since before she was born I wanted to be able to make baby food for her when the time came. My request of a steam basket for Christmas was primarily for eventually making baby food.
Last week, I decided to try to steam some frozen green beans and nearly set the pan on fire. Later that day, I, for some reason, decided to try to make some brown rice cereal on a whim. I didn’t burn anything on that one, just couldn’t grind the rice fine enough and then I’m pretty sure I used the wrong amount of water. Needless to say, two failures in a 24 hour period had me pretty down in my confidence level in the kitchen. (Trying to figure out why I’m so determined to make baby food can be another post.)
My husband usually does the cooking and because of his work schedule we usually have our dinner type meal for lunch. At the last minute, my husband had to go in to a meeting the day before we were heading out-of-town to visit relatives. We had planned to use ingredients we had on hand and, primarily, to try to use up some produce we had around. Since he was out and I didn’t want the food to go to waste, it would be up to me to cook the meal.
When my little one went down for a nap just before lunch I was able to prep all the ingredients. When she woke up I put her in her exerciser on the far end of the kitchen and started making lunch. I had a moment when the pasta was cooking, the tomato mix was simmering, and the pear crumble I looked at my little girl playing and the food cooking and felt really proud of myself. I felt like a housewife. I made a “creation” as we call them in our house for dinner and a dessert that tasted good and I didn’t burn the kitchen down while doing it!
Wish I had thought to take a picture, it looked good. Here’s the “recipe”:
Going-Out-of-Town-So-Let’s-Clean-Out-the-Fridge Pasta
Ingredients:
- 1/2 box of spaghetti noodles
- 1/2 pound of peeled, deveined, tails off shrimp
- 1/2 green bell pepper, diced
- 1 can of no salt diced tomatoes
- 2 cups spinach
- greek spice mix
- grated Parmesan cheese
Instructions:
- Cook noodles according to package instructions. Rinse shrimp under cold water. Add shrimp to pasta water towards end of the noodle cooking time.
- Saute green bell pepper in olive oil until soft. Add can of diced tomatoes and greek spice mix to taste (can substitute with other mixes, salt and pepper, etc to personal preference). Bring to a boil.
- By the point, noodles should be almost done and shrimp pink. Turn down tomato mix and add spinach, stir until wilted.
- Strain noodles and shrimp, return to pot. Add tomato mix to pot, stir together. Serve with grated Parmesan on top.
Pear Crumble
Pear Crumble recipe at allrecipes.com. Here were my changes based on what we had and from reader comments:
- 2 pears instead of 3
- Used brown sugar
- Used quick oats
- Doubled the amounts of oats, flour, nuts, and butter
- Used 1/8 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice instead of ginger and nutmeg
- Used walnuts
