Gently stale tostadas...

Monday night. Jeremy and I were in a huge hurry to meet with our wedding planner, Scotty- Jeremy had left work later than usual, we'd rescheduled with Scott a hundred times, our wedding is in less than two weeks, and it was already passed the time we needed to leave. I'd asked Jeremy to stop by the grocery store on the way home to pick up shredded cheese, and maybe some ham, if he wanted, to finish topping the pizzas we were going to eat on the way to meet Scotty. That's all I asked him to get. And when he walked in, he had 4-6 bags on his arms and had to go back out to the car to get more.

"...I got some other stuff..."

It's really hard to get mad at him. He's cute.

Part of what makes this game fun for us is that we look for deals at the grocery store. The grocery store closest to us has an aisle cap that has lots of items marked "Manager's Special," anything the store has that has been dropped or otherwise damaged so it's not as pretty and they can't sell it at normal price. We've learned the truth about these products: they (almost) always taste exactly the same as the food inside a box that hasn't been squished. I will throw in the cautionary disclaimer however: sometimes things are not in peak condition.

Exhibit A:

When Jeremy walked in with bags and bags and bags of stuff, I was excited about all of it. Especially when he pulled out a package of tostadas. I love tostadas. And you can do so many things with them! So that's what we had for dinner last night.

The tostadas, sadly, were stale.

Fortunately, the toppings I put together were really liquidy, so the crunchy tostadas just added texture and not flavor. Or lack thereof.

So the quick recipe to use later, with tostadas (that hopefully aren't stale!) is this:

The rice takes about half an hour. Start the rice first, then start collecting everything else you need. I used beans, shredded cheese, salsa, a variety of vegetables like corn and tomatoes. Throw it all in with the rice to get it all the same temperature, and then serve it warm on the tostadas. Delicious. And really not all that bad even when the tostadas are stale :)

Yet another reason not to regularly go grocery shopping.

We planned to make the 16-hour drive to Texas in the middle of May, but the four days before, we planned to be in Boise, 6 hours in the opposite direction. Grocery shopping the week before, as a result, was limited to "what can I absolutely not survive without" and "what do we want to eat in the car that won't get all over the place if we spill," the latter of the two of which we failed miserably. But hey, we can clean the car.

So Sunday, the in-between day (which here means 12 hours with the sun going down in the middle of it) we still wanted to eat. And we hadn't eaten anything that day, so it needed to be good.

But remember grocery shopping?

I had a lone chicken breast sitting in the bag in my freezer, most likely the result of better-planned meals in which I left... just one? but I had chicken. A little bit. Also in my freezer were the grocery store special of vegetables. Which I bought with the idea of making stir fry, but for whatever reason, the stir fry that result was sub-par. Not worth repeating.

I had half a pepper in my refrigerator drawer, so I chopped it and threw it in with the antioxidant blend and the little bit of chicken. Cayenne pepper for taste. It just didn't look all that appetizing. I had rice cooking at the same time, but this just wasn't going to be very good. What else could I add?

My favorite part of doing this is the surprise on Jeremy's face during the process. He walked into the kitchen at this point, no comment from him beyond that he's hungry, which is normal. He's good at eating everything I make- we evaluate it while we eat, objectively, and we decide how it maybe could be better or different the next time we try it, if it is deemed worth a second try. So he sees what I'm working on, asks what it is, listens to my less-than-optimistic response, assures me it will be fine, he's starving and when is it ever bad? and then returns to whatever he was doing. When he comes in again a couple of minutes later, he exclaims, "How do you do that?!"

It just makes this fun :)

So when I opened my cupboard, I found a couple of tuna-sized cans of shredded chicken and a large can of diced tomatoes. These substantially filled the pan in which I was frying everything, and the mix was a very aesthetically pleasing one. Cayenne pepper was not a bad choice, but chili powder was better, which made it smell a lot more appetizing too.

Unfortunately, I forget to take pictures. This is a close representation of the final product, but it's missing the green from the broccoli. But it was very good. And, as desired in the beginning, none of the food I still had went bad while we were gone :) Success!

nutrisystem fajitas?

I'm not going to lie, every time I see this kind of food, I get a mental picture of a stick figure vomiting in my brain. Because stick figures, logically, would be the only creatures dumb enough to eat this kind of food.

And then of course, I needed to make something edible and tasty really quickly. So I braved it.

And you know, it wasn't all that bad.

Jeremy and I drive up to Logan quite a bit. It's about a two-hour drive, we usually stay with family Friday night and drive back Saturday afternoon after jump rope practice. We take our time on the way back, as we don't always have a reason to just drive up to Salt Lake, and why not? We're making the trip anyway.

But some Saturdays, we take a little too much time, and Jeremy has to work Saturday night. At 6 when we get home at 5 and need to leave at 5:30. So he runs to shower and I'm trying to think of what we can eat so he doesn't starve while he's at work. And I find these packets. The kid who sold Jeremy his contract left in a hurry and left most of his food, with instructions to throw it out or use it, whichever Jeremy preferred. We hadn't thrown it out yet, but while I argued with myself about whether we should chuck everything in the cupboard or be creative. And now I'm making a blog out of it.

I was afraid of some of the ingredients in this stuff- like I prefaced, things made out of plastic to make you think it's healthy makes me queasy- so I added a can of beans to the process with a little taco seasoning for a flavor like real food (again, my skepticism) and starting frying tortillas. Just a little bit of butter on a frying pan, the tortilla, this vegetable fajita stuff, and sprinkled cheese. We really enjoyed them; on another occasion, we repeated the process (we found more packets). While I probably won't add nutrisystem products to my grocery list, it worked for the day and gave me ideas on how to spice up real fajitas with real ingredients. You know, to avoid my distaste for food-flavored tofu :)