Cooking in Quarantine

                                                                      I love to make soup! Soup may be my favorite food group actually, if that's a thing. I have made soup for so many years that I rarely follow a recipe but instead just use what I have available or what sounds good at the time. Occasionally, I go online and look at recipes others have created and use them as a guide or I use a recipe a friend or family member suggests but invariably what is created is unique in some way. Maybe creating soup is fun to me is because you don't need to follow a recipe and make it exactly the same each time. It can be wonderful even if the same variety tastes slightly different ( or incredibly different) every time you make it! Almost every soup I make begins with the same basic ingredients: Onions and garlic ( the more the merrier) sautéed in 2-3 tablespoons of the oil ( I prefer Extra Virgin Olive Oil ), broth, and seasonings. Most of my soups also have diced celery and carrots

I love it when I can buy a few key ingredients and know that they will cover multiple meals. One reason our family loves pork shoulder so much is exactly that. My hubby and I love it for the ease and we all love it for the taste! We live in the Midwest where pork is king. Under normal circumstances, we wait for sales and stock up, so we usually have 2 or 3 big (7-8 pound) pork shoulders in the deep freeze. We can get it here for as low as $.98 per pound, so it's incredibly economical.  I'll share three different styles of preparation for the pork shoulder over the next three posts. We do all three of these with one large pork shoulder. This time around, we cut the shoulder in half. The bone side was smoked by my amazing hubby in our PitBoss smoker--low and slow overnight. Delicious. Today's recipe is for Carolina Pork Wraps . This mix of flavors is really yummy and appeals to crowds of all ages in our house. Ingredients Smoked pork shoulder, warm an

In my last post I mentioned that we cut it in half and smoked the bone-in portion. With the other half, we love to use a recipe from the sweet and lovely Rachel and Polly at Thriving Home . These ladies are amazing and I want to be like them when I grow up. ;) I had the privilege of being on the recipe test team for their latest cookbook, From Freezer to Cooker , which released in January 2020. The cook book offers delicious recipes in numerous categories and with each one teaches how you can cook it from fresh, freeze it for later, and cook from frozen. Cooking instructions include both slow cooker and Instant Pot, so however you roll, you can figure out how to put their recipes on your table. As soon as this recipe came across my email, I ran to the store to get all the ingredients. We have been making this at least once a month ever since. Now, I did promise them that I wouldn't share those recipes as part of the testing team, but since then their cook book has been rele

In 2013, I went to Sierra Leone, West Africa. It was an amazingly humbling trip where I got to see awe-inspiring landscapes and witness how God provides abundantly. It was also an incredibly difficult trip physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It sounds ridiculous but one of the most difficult things for me while I was there was eating rice for almost every meal. Rice has never been my favorite food, and after five weeks of eating rice, I swore I would never touch it again. However, there was one food that we ate there that I remember loving, and every now and then, I crave it like crazy. In Sierra Leone, it is called Ground Nut Soup. A few weeks ago, I  started craving it, so I started googling. I am a total hypocrite for admitting this, but one of my pet-peeves is when I have to scroll through pages and pages of someone's blog just to get to a recipe. Every time a recipe blog has. "jump straight to recipe" button, I click it. However, I found myself reading ab

If you are someone who is used to using premade mixes, I get that. It often feels simpler and faster. But, let me give you a little confidence and say that if you have a decently stocked spice rack, you probably have everything you need to create those mixes from scratch! An added benefit of making mixes like the below taco seasoning is that you start to get to know what flavors go well together and you can adjust specific elements to make it perfectly to your taste. Taco Seasoning Mix A recipe from my mom. Here are her directions. 1 Tbsp Chili Powder 1 tsp onion powder 1 tsp Ground Cumin 1 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp paprika 1 tsp oregano 1 tsp sugar 1/2 tsp salt 1 tsp cornstarch Combine all ingredients. Use as you would a package of taco seasoning, to season 1 pound of browned, drained ground beef: Add 3/4 cup water and simmer 5 minutes. OR use less water (1/4 cup) and heat in the microwave for 4 minutes. Elizabeth's notes: I actually don't like highly seaso

One of the things I've been most thankful for in this time, is the skill of meal planning. Meal planning, like any other skill is something that is practiced. For some people it is easier, and for some people it's more difficult, but we can all always be getting better at it. I wanted to share what meal planning looks like for me, especially right now. 1) Find recipes. I do this in a variety of ways, through cookbooks, past recipes, magazines, but mostly through pinterest.  If you have not tried pinterest, it is worth it-just for the recipes it is worth it. But, hopefully you'll be able to find some recipes on here too! Look for recipes that sound good! Try to find some that have the same ingredients. Try to find variety, not just all pastas or all rice bowls or all pizza, pay attention to how much time each one takes and try to add some variety in there too. Try to find recipes that stretch-these often are things like rice bowls, pasta, quinoa, gnocchi, lentils, or tons o

Am I the only person who struggles to find an Asian recipe that tastes as good as restaurant food? Try as I might, I never seem to get it right. I don't know where to begin when it comes to seasonings and don't necessary want to have a cupboard full of  spices and sauces I will use only once in a blue moon. As a wedding gift a friend of ours gave us a few meals from HelloFresh and we ordered Sesame Beef Tacos. All I can say (or those who know my husband he would say) these are PHENOMENAL! We've already made this recipe more than once and most certainly will keep it as a regular in our household. I hope you'll love it as much as we do! Sesame Beef Tacos P.S. Did you know you can see the ingredients and step by step instructions on HelloFresh website/app for all of the recipes they offer? No subscription needed, though you may need to make an account

In a world where everything is uncertain and change is inevitable one thing remains constant. I have to eat! As people rushed to the grocery store buying everything in site, my family stayed away. Why? We weren’t feeling the necessity of buying toilet paper and stocking up on supplies because we already typically buy a lot of goods in bulk. Our deep freezer is full of frozen good from last Summer (while starting to deplete as Spring begins to roll in) and an early March Costco trip. A local farm we buy our eggs and vegetables from was (and continues to be) open. We have been subscribers to ButcherBox for years—something we’ve known to be amazing and are happy to see others jump on that bandwagon now! So for me, my beautiful sanctuary of cooking and baking hasn’t changed much in the past weeks with my bulk flours and freezer just yearning to be enjoyed. What has changed is my time.  Gluten Free Sourdough Loaf  While I’m lucky in that I’m still working full time from home unlike

*This post is written by my friend Maddie Widmer, I'm just posting it for her* Being a small business owner who is married to someone who works in an office 45 minutes away, meal planning and prep is a constant struggle. We are constantly trying new apps to help us stay on track, but more often than we’d like to admit we would end up on the phone ordering food at 6:30 when we’ve both just gotten home for the day. For SO many reasons we hate this, but we keep telling ourselves that this is just temporary. When we found out we were expecting our first child, we realized we needed to do a much better job of planning and eating healthy meals. We signed up for a meal delivery kit, which provides us with the ingredients for 3 healthy home-cooked meals each week. We would sit down at our dual-monitored home office and look through the recipes and my Pinterest board, and use Google Calendars to plan out our meals. We would even link the recipe to the calendar event – talk about be

Last week I found myself making a triple batch of homemade chocolate chip cookie dough...how is THIS cooking under quarantine? It sounds extravagant, and maybe just wasteful...let me back up and explain.   I live alone in a small town in Iowa where I spend the majority of my time either at work teaching high schoolers or hanging out with friends. As soon as the pandemic starting, I decided to pack up and go stay with family in Michigan so this extrovert wouldn’t completely lose her mind. A little over a week ago, I found out that  three sisters I have taught lost their dad to COVID-19.   I’m a helper...sometimes to a fault. I have been slowly learning when to jump in and when to sit back and not fix things. My first instinct was to jump in my car and drive all the way back to Iowa just so I could be there, so baking cookies was actually a pretty good compromise.  This particular recipe is one of my favorites from childhood and is my go-to for comfort baking. Two of the three gir

Easter. Thanksgiving. Christmas. July 4th. Memorial Day. Labor Day. If your family is similar to mine, these days include lots laughter, memories, and as most of us know... FOOD! Lots of food leaves us with full tummies and fridges of leftovers. I feel blessed to be able to enjoy such delicious home cooked meals during these special days, but even the best meals start to get boring after day 3 or 4 of eating them. I was raised with the mentality of “waste not, want not”, but since getting married in February and creating my own home, I have a new understanding of the phrase. This brings me to a holiday leftover creation I discovered after having more ham than my husband and I could stomach from this past Easter. I was able to make this dish with items I had around the kitchen.  Enjoy! Ham Tetrazzini Recipe

A little over a year ago my husband and I tried to do whole 30. If you are not familiar with what this is, you eliminate a lot of things (sugar, dairy, gluten, etc.) from your diet for 30 days to try and kickstart a healthier overall diet and mindset about food. There are many good things about the whole 30 philosophy, but for a variety of reasons it did not work for us and we ended up quitting early. Even though we didn't survive all 30 days I did pick up a few tricks and new recipes in the process. My favorite new discovery was sweet potatoes for breakfast. Sweet potatoes are incredibly versatile. They are like that dress in your closet that you can dress up or dress down. You know the one, change the shoes and jewelry and all of a sudden you went from work-ready to party-ready. That's how I look at sweet potatoes. Depending on the seasoning they can satisfy your sweet tooth, become a very filling side dish, or add a little variety and excitement to an otherwise bori

Alrighty, so where I live (Long Island) we went through a pretty long phase where getting meat was tricky. By that I mean, everything but steak was not easy to find for a while. However, I had zero problem getting veggies, especially because we are imperfect foods customers (you should look them up, great company! If you want a referral code or have any questions let me know!) Even if you can get meat, it's nice to mix things up every now and then! It's better on your budget, and it has an environmental impact too :) Plus, it helps you plan for longer spans of time with meal planning. We usually try to have at least one vegetarian meal a week anyways, but right now we have one or two vegetarian meals, then a meal with meat, then another couple vegetarian meals etc. just to spread out the meat that we have. So, we've been experimenting with a lot of vegetarian meals. This is one of my favorites we've done. It is an instant pot meal-so if you don't have an instan