I was planning to make some sort of pasta with cream sauce, spinach, and mushrooms when I got totally overwhelmed at that thought, realized I needed something quick, and was inspired by a pack of soba noodles in my pantry.  The sauce consisted of three ingredients and it was just perfect.
Soba noodles with spinach and mushrooms

1. I don’t make side dishes when we have tacos for dinner
2. I have serious portion control issues
3. The Omnivore forgets to eat so is often starving by dinner

But I’ve stopped buying taco boxes and have started baking taco shells.  Until I take this endeavor 100% homemade, I’m forced into buying little baggies of 36 corn tortillas.  Even our issues don’t allow us to consume that many tacos in a single night.  That means multiple varieties of tacos are needed in a single week, people!

I got up in the middle of dinner to refill my water glass and began to spontaneously take these pictures.  Super casual, I know.  I wasn’t sure how the meal would turn out nor was I sure about how the pictures would turn out but I’ve decided they’re both good enough to share!  I could have done without the tomatoes in the cabbage salsa and I think that exchanging scallions for the red onion would make these tacos pretty as a picture!  There’s cilantro buried somewhere in there but you’d never guess it based on these pictures.
Thai Chicken Tacos (adapted from Clean Eating Magazine)

And I just feel better about foods in general when they are baked rather than fried.  And I truly believe that these egg rolls are just as satisfyingly crunchy and flavorful when baked as they are when they are fried.

I was inspired to whip these up because of the recent purchase by the Omnivore of a deep fryer (ironic, eh?).  He had one before we got married and some how it disappeared during a move of ours (::whistles innocently::).  He asked that I pick up some premade egg rolls for him to whip up in his spiffy new deep fryer and I obliged.  He was not happy with the results and it had nothing to do with the frying.  Like most things, sometimes homemade is better.  These egg rolls weren’t difficult to make, they didn’t have much hands on time, in fact, the most difficult part was me searching the internet to find the right recipe.

Most had meat in the filling.  Do you really taste the meat amongst all that filling?  To me, it seemed like a great opportunity to go vegetarian.  The Omnivore, in his effort to avoid seafood, always seeks out vegetarian egg rolls at Asian restaurants anyway.  Some recipes called for precooking the vegetables, some didn’t.  Some called for mushrooms, which I would have loved, but my husband would not.  Some recipes called for a ton of seasoning added to the filling, others called for none.  My head was spinning after it all so I winged it.

You’ll find when you read the recipe that I roasted the veggies prior to stuffing the egg rolls.  I love the flavor of roasting and thought that this method would remove a lot of moisture from the vegetable filling – a good thing.  I seasoned the filling and used a combination of flour and water to make a paste to seal the egg roll itself.  Unwrapping wasn’t an issue I faced with baking but it may be one if you choose to fry these babies.  I am happy to say that ones my husband fried stayed together in his deep fryer!

The result was a very crispy egg roll.  Once I allowed it to cool enough (I bolt my food down way too quickly sometimes!), I could tell the flavors of the filling were really quite perfect.  I am so glad that I made a ton of these so that we have some in the freezer waiting for a craving (right next to that box of store bought egg rolls that my husband will probably never finish).

I’d like to give an additional shout out to Jessica for her donation of chopsticks straight from China!

Crispy Baked Eggrolls

And then we started living together and working full time and running in parallel circles that only infrequently overlapped and I made the executive decision that I would no longer like a baby.

And when one person doesn’t want a baby, the other can’t exactly force one upon her.  And luckily, my husband heard me out, and we made the decision that WE would not like a baby.  Sure, we like your baby.  We love your baby.  We’ll babysit your baby.  But we don’t want a baby.

I want to sleep and wake on my terms.
I want to go on vacation with ease.
I want to go on vacations of my choosing, not the baby’s.
I’m too selfish.
I want to drop everything and go get ice cream.

We enjoyed our life with our two aging dogs and two horses.  And the cat.  Sometimes his cries sound like a baby but he’s no baby.

Sometimes we’d look at each other, while we doing barn chores like scooping poop and medicating horses, and mention, “Man.  If we had a baby, this would SUCK.”  I mean, either someone would be in the house, alone, with the baby while the other did the dreaded chores, or all three of us (me, him, the baby) would be out in the barn doing the chores.  Now that’s certainly not sanitary.

So we may or may not have elevated the 9 year old pooches to baby status.  I think we can all agree that they didn’t mind.

They became known as the ‘granddogs’ to my parents and the family felt complete.

But sometimes you can’t predict where life takes you.  And you might end up with a baby despite your precautions preventing it.

Meet Vinny: our baby.  Oh, you thought I was talking about a human baby?  No.  I was talking about a puppy.  They are serious business – a business I never wanted to be a part of.  But like I said earlier, sometimes you don’t have a choice.  And we welcome this baby into our family with open arms.

We began teaching our old dogs about the concept of a baby and being gentle to the baby.  The family began getting up in the middle of the night to take care of the baby.  We all began running out of the door when we heard the trademark piddle of the baby indoors.  We began taking the baby to the barn, just like we always said we wouldn’t, and snatching horse poop out of the baby’s mouth.  But somehow, we loved the baby.  Despite all the trouble.  We loved this baby.

And having this baby means that dinner time preparation just got cut even shorter.  This recipe for Asian beef bowls is certainly baby friendly – quick to whip up!

The Omnivore commented that the flavors were subtle and I found that to be true and untrue at the same time.  The thin ribbons of carrots were sweet and flavorful.  The bites of cilantro were bright.  The beef was tangy and tender.  It was healthy and cheap – using only about 3/4 pound of beef for 4 servings and cups and cups of vegetables.

Asian beef bowl (adapted from a recipe seen on Adventures in Home Cooking)

I know, only a few of you have been with me for that long but surely someone out there reading remembers!  Raise your hand.  Leave a comment if you’re feeling generous. 

Anyway.  Even though I didn’t eat boneless skinless chicken breasts for many years, I cooked them quite often for the Omnivore.  I got giddily excited when they went on sale for $0.99/lb and stocked the freezer.  They seemed so versatile and were easily added to my vegetarian meals to satiate a request from my meat loving husband.

And because they seem fairly benign I also chose boneless skinless chicken breasts as my first meal for my reintroduction to meat.

The meal was veggie fried rice with some sparse chicken chunks.  I was going to ease in.  I wish my first bite of meat after many years had been a glorified experience in which the heavens opened, angels sang, and light shone upon my fork.

It was not.  I gagged.  Rubbery.  Dry-ish.  Bland-ish.  Boneless chicken breast.

Had I been serving that to my husband for years?  No wonder he never made a comment about it…there was nothing to say.  It was worse than eating tofu.  It was, in short, horrible.

I rarely buy boneless skinless breasts now.  I usually buy a whole chicken and break it down myself.  Or I roast a whole chicken, pull the meat from it, and continue as directed by recipes.  But sometimes I get excited about chicken breast sales and I stock up.  And then I get flashbacks of that horrible gag worthy experience.

But I’m here to tell you that this recipe will not induce gags.  It was wonderful.  My husband and I fought over the leftovers.  I won.  Soba noodles are so great and tender.  They are much healthier than enriched white flour noodles but don’t have the stiffness and grittiness that my husband hates about whole wheat spaghetti.   If you can’t find them, however, in sort of pasta can substitute.

Orange chicken with sesame soba noodles and green beans
Ingredients

I really did not expect this meal to be as delicious as it actually was.  The blog from which I plucked the recipe had zero credit with me – meaning I’d never read it before nor did I know anyone who ever read it.  Yes, blogger friends, I know what other blogs you read.

And in addition to the blog have little more credit beyond its ability to make it onto FoodGawker or TasteSpotting or whichever site led me there, the recipe itself sounded a little oddball.  Asian Bolognese.

What does that even mean?  Asian bolognese?  What do you even do with that?

A brief Q&A:

Do you put it on pasta? Sure.
Does it have to be rice pasta? Nah.

Can you put it on other stuff? Yep.
Like what? I put it on spaghetti squash.  That’s pasta for people who’ve freaked themselves out by eating too much junk.  The original blogger topped freshly steamed green beans with it; that looks great.

Does it takes like soy sauce? Not at all.  It tastes like a complex, flavorful, subtly spicy tomato sauce.  In fact, let’s just take the word Asian right out of the equation because that’s the sole reason I stumbled upon this recipe and then kept the window open in my browser for 8 days before I decided I could make it.

One Year Ago: Red Wine Spaghetti

Not Italian Asian Bolognese (4 servings, inspired by this recipe)
1 pound ground turkey (extra lean)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, diced
1 Tbsp Minced Ginger
2 tsp Sesame Oil
3 Tbsp Soy Sauce
2 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 1/4 cup crushed tomatoes
1 T Sriracha sauce
sesame seeds for garnish

Combine ground turkey, onion, minced garlic, ginger, sesame oil, soy sauce, and rice vinegar in a large bowl.  Mix thoroughly with your hands.  Preheat a large skillet stovetop and spray with nonstick cooking spray.  Add ground meat mixture and cook, crumbling large pieces of meat with your spatula as the meat cooks.  Add crushed tomatoes and hot sauce and simmer 10 minutes.  Serve as desired, garnishing with sesame seeds and scallions, if desired.

4 servings, per serving
Calories 222.2
Total Fat 10.5 g
Total Carbohydrate 9.6 g
Protein 23.8 g

I am submitting this recipe to Presto Pasta Night, hosted by Ruth at Recipes from 4EveryKitchen.  This is my first time submitting to this roundup.  Check it out.

My husband, without fail, orders this salad every single time we go out to eat Thai food.  It is always in some incarnation on the menus of every Thai restaurant we try.

He craves the coolness of the vegetables combined with the spiciness of the dressing.  The meal itself is perfect for summer.  You barely fire up your broiler, assemble the salad, and dinner can be on the table in short order.

We were both skeptical about whether or not this meal could be pulled off at home.  But there was no need to be: this is a fantastic stand in for his usual Thai restaurant fare.

I’m especially glad it was such a success: now he’ll be able to venture out and actually try different dishes at Thai restaurants.

Yum Yum Salad adapted from Deborah Hayden

If I asked my local grocery store workers where the moo shu pancakes were located, they’d like respond with “God bless you!”

“Thank you,” I’d say, “but that wasn’t a sneeze.”

It was no big deal, though.  These pancakes seemed easy enough to make at home.  The dough itself had two ingredients, after all.

The results ended up being as light and thin as the picture of moo shu in the Vegetarian Times article where I got my filling recipe.  I’m pretty sure I hit the nail on the head with this one!

The most interesting part of the recipe came when it was time to roll out the pancakes.  The recipe instructs you to take two balls of dough (for two separate pancakes), flatten them with the palm of your hand, smear oil on one side, stack them, and roll out together.

I was skeptical about this.  I mean, after rolling these together, and then cooking them still pressed together, would I truly peel them apart?  Yes!  So, trust the process.

One Year Ago: Shrimp, Olive, and Artichoke Salad
Two Years Ago: Hoppin’ John

Mu Shoo Pancakes (adapted from the All American Chinese Cookbook)

So then how do I respond to the Omnivore when he asks me what’s for dinner?

Asian Tacos.

Yeah.  I took the easy way out.  I could have said ‘moo shu’ and he would have said, “Huh?” and we would have had this dance of defining and questioning that ended in nearly the same place: soy spiced veggies in homemade-sort-of-soft-tacos.

Next time we have it, though, I’ll be sure to say Moo Shu! and he’ll remember exactly what that means, because this dish is so good that it leaves a mark on your mind, and your belly (if you eat too much as we did).

One Year Ago: Tomato Sauce with Basil and Olives
Two Years Ago: Dessert Sushi

Vegetable Moo Shu Wraps (adapted from Vegetarian Times)
* I cooked an extra portion of meat from our Thai Beef Salads and added it to the Omnivore’s portion

So, surely, SURELY, this meal wasn’t made of turkey burgers.  He, after all, liked this hamburger so much that he declared it must be a grilling tradition.  So it can’t be a turkey burger.

But it is.  And the Omnivore says the reason he likes this meal so much, and not other turkey burgers, isn’t that this isn’t fowl masquerading as beef.  This is fowl standing on its own two claws (feet, paws?).  It is so flavorful and so perfect.  Such a nice break from the ordinary.  Just ask the Omnivore.

One Year Ago: Guacamole Salad
Two Years Ago: Black Bean and Corn Creamchiladas

Thai turkey burgers ( as seen on Cara’s Cravings, adapted from A Good Appetite)