I started this concoction with a craving. I saw bagels sitting on the counter and thought about how appropriate bagels were for breakfast and that, now, it was breakfast time. How auspicious. I needed something more than just a bagel, though. A bagel with grilled onions sounded just divine. Then maybe I should spice it up a bit and use some Tapatio hot sauce. I thought to myself, cheese could really tie together the hot sauce and the grilled onions. While I’m at it, I really like a mix of grilled onions and fresh onions, so I may as well have fresh onions on the sandwich, too.

While grilling the onions, I found some pineapple in the fridge. “Pineapples?”, you ask. Yes, pineapples. Let’s grill those. You know what would go great with pineapple? Green peppers. I sliced them into neat little circles. And you know what else would go great with pineapple? Mole.

That’s right. I made a breakfast sandwich with cheese, grilled onion, fresh onion, green pepper, pineapple and mole with a splash of Tapatio. It was amazingly delicious.

• cheese blend mozzarella, provolone, asiago (italian blend)
• cheddar
• onions
• green pepper
• pineapple
• butter
• mole
• Tapatio hot sauce
• Bagel

16 oz prepared red cabbage with apple bits

Mix everything except the cabbage and paprika in a bowl. Knead until every item is distributed evenly. Place cabbage on bottom of baking dish. Sprinkle paprika. Spread meat mixture on top of cabbage. Cover and cook in oven for one our at 350 degrees. Forty minutes in, feel free to drain. With ten minutes left, cover with sauce.

Sauce for meatloaf

• 4 tablespoons minced onion
• 1/4 cup ketchup
• 4T of brown sugar,
• 4T vinegar,
• 2T Worchestershire Sauce
• 1 teaspoon basil leaves

Simmer everything in a small sauce pan and stir constantly. Serve with meatloaf.

1 can chili con carne with beans

The purpose of this meal is to learn how to make do with little and at the same time learn how to stretch what you do have. I could have very easily used a whole onion or a whole tomato but when you are running low on produce, it can be a good practice to use them in portions so that you have some left over to flavor other foods with in the future.

Every time I cook chili or beans, I always make sure to have some cooked rice with the meal. This technique will stretch one can of chili into four separate meals that aren’t boring even if simple.

The only preparation, really, for this dish was the effort put into presentation. Warm your chili on the stove, at end of cooking time toss in your diced veggies but save about one fourth of the jalapeno for garnishing purposes. Season rice with your cumin and garlic powder, top with chili, then sour cream followed by jalapeno slices. The technique I used for the jalapenos was to cut at an angle in order to provide more surface area to make it look more pretty.

p.s. Canned chili almost never looks pretty or appetizing unless you are quite familiar with it.

Mix all the ingredients up to the eggs, mashing the beans until lumpy. Place onto the baguette slices and garnish with the remaining ingredients.

Slightly spicy

I still don’t have a food photographer but I hope these pictures are better than nothing.

This is just a quick snack that takes more manual dexterity and patience than usual but it’s worth it in the end.

• Triscuit thin crisps quattro formaggio
• fresh jalapeno
• diced tomatoes
• sliced onion
• Tapatío hot sauce
• sour cream

Spread approximately 1/2 to 1 full teaspoon on each triangle and for presentation purposes, only cover a part of the thin crisp leaving the rest exposed. Slice your jalapeno into rings and then slice each of those into half. Since these are fresh jalapenos, there really will be no need to remove the seeds. The bite will not be as strong as a pickled jalapeno.

Place each jalapeno half-slice onto the exposed part of the Triscuit, gluing it in place by pushing one edge into the sour cream. Next, place two or three tomato pieces along the top edge of the jalapeno, also gluing into place with the sour cream. Your onion slices should be about one quarter inch to one half inch long. We will be stabbing these into the remaining edge of sour cream leaning in towards the middle. Finally, top with a drop or two of Tapatio hot sauce and serve.

• 6 cups crumbled cornbread (to be cooked prior to this)
• 4 apples (cooking apples)
• 2 sprigs parsley
• 2 sprigs sage
• 2 sprigs rosemary
• 2 sprigs thyme
• 4 stalks celery
• 1 large yellow onion (2 small onions will work)
• 3/4 cup Half and Half
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 eggs
• 5 links Colosimo’s red wine sausage
• 8 tablespoons butter (this is a whole stick)
• 4 cloves garlic

Melt one stick of butter in a frying pan and soften your peeled cored diced apples and place these aside.

The purpose of the sausage is to help make a base for the stuffing. We can do this by slicing each sausage in half, then scraping the meat from the casing. Discard the case.  Brown the sausage like you would with ground beef. After the sausage is browned, add the sliced celery and onion. Cook until slightly tender.

Using your fingers, scrape the leaves from your sprigs of herbs and chop them finely before adding to the mixture.

Take your crumbled cornbread and mix with the apples. Blend the eggs with half and half then add to the cornbread mixture. Knead gently. Once this is all blended, mix with the sausage mixture by hand.  Make sure that things are moist enough to form into balls.

Roll into balls slightly smaller than your fist. You’ll only get one shot at shaping these correctly. Place into muffin cups in a muffin tin and bake at 375 for 20 – 30 minutes. For extra pizazz you can garnish each serving with a pecan or parsley or whatever you think would be good.

I may or may not edit this post in the near future for better readability.

• 1 can tuna
• 1 c cooked rice
• 2 tsp garlic powder or 1-2 cloves garlic minced
• 3-4 tsp dried chopped onion or 1/2 onion chopped fine
• 1/4 c chopped raisins
• 1/2 c grated parmesan cheese
• 1 tbsp relish
• 1 squirt dijon mustard
• enough mayonnaise to make the whole thing stick together
• juice of 1/2 lemon or 2 tsp wine vinegar
• 3 slices of sharp cheddar cheese
• 3 slices favorite lunchmeat
• 6 slices favorite sandwich bread
• 1-2 tsp butter

Mix all but the last 4 ingredients together. Arrange the cheese and meat on the bread. Top with a generous helping the tuna mixture. Spread the outside of the sandwich with butter and grill on a sandwichmaker, Geroge Forman-like grill, or just sautee in a frying pan. Delish.

Now, I could have just stuffed the mushrooms with feta cheese but then I would no longer have any feta nor would I have any mushrooms left. I would still like to have some throughout the next month. Also, I have some lettuce in the fridge that probably only has a shelf life of a couple weeks at most. Maybe I should use some of that lettuce, I thought to myself.

Looking at the lettuce, I noticed the green onions and figured that green onions would not only add flavor, but help add some body to the salad so that I could get full. Some of the yellow onion I had left over would provide the same purpose.

I rinsed off about three or four leaves of lettuce along with four mushrooms and two stalks of green onion. Remember that all of this food comes out of the ground so it never hurts to give things a quick rinse.

• 3 leaves red leaf lettuce (these are quite large)
• 4 button mushrooms
• 2 stalks green onion
• 1 small palm full of sliced onions
• 3 tablespoons basil and tomato feta cheese
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

All I did after that was tear the lettuce into pieces with my hands, slice the mushrooms to make them go farther, cut the green onion into pieces, add a few slices of yellow onion, top with feta cheese and then splash a little bit of red wine vinegar into the bowl. Not all salads need dressing. The flavor of each piece of food in the salad should be enough to make your mouth water. Heck, my mouth is watering right now just remembering it.

Variations could include replacing the vinegar with juice from one-half of a lemon, sprinkling with fresh ground black pepper, adding 1/4 cup parsley or adding one-half of a diced roma tomato. This recipe can easily be doubled to feed two. Total cost is about one dollar per serving.

I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather and I really only have spices in my pantry so I walked down to the corner store and bought an onion and a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.

• 1 (one) can Chicken Noodle condensed soup
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 dried red Chile peppers
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon basil
• 1 cap-full vermouth
• 1/4th cup diced onion

The only painful step was dicing the garlic and onion and having to use a separate dish to sweat them a little. I like to keep my onions bitter so I only threw them in after the smell of garlic filled the room. After throwing in the onions I immediately turned the heat off and mixed with the rest of the ingredients that were already warming on another burner.

Hope I get better.

p.s. if you have time, soak the dried chiles ahead of time. I got about three bowls of soup out of this. Of course, I ate them all by myself.

• One half a box or bag of spaghetti noodles
• One can of roasted diced tomatoes
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 pearl onion (I ran out of regular onions)
• Thyme
• Butter
• Packet of Crushed Red Pepper left over from Pizza Night
• Packet of Parmesan Cheese left over from Pizza Night

You can probably guess what happened next. The key difference may have been that I started the garlic and the thyme and onion in the butter before dumping in a can of roasted diced tomatoes. Thank goodness I had some leftover ingredients from when my friends bought pizza. Cheap. It’s all about the recycling yo.