Quesadilla Delights

Good evening! I was feeling like I needed a definite break tonight after spending two hours baking oreo stuffed chocolate chips cookies for tomorrow's company picnic. Those cookies will have to be for another night but today for my attempt at something quick and easy to throw together I chose a cheese quesadilla. I kept it simple for the sake I was pretty beat and didn't want to take more than a minute to prep after the labor intense cookies.

The cheese quesadillas were just so incredibly quick and easy to throw together and given the flexibility of the dish, you can adjust depending on what's in your kitchen pantry. I ended up just using up some leftover burrito wraps from a week ago's burrito night and tossed in some cheese that I bought on sale last night that I had planned on using for making homemade pizza or frittatas this weekend depending on my mood. It doesn't take a lot of cheese either so I know I'll have plenty enough for other dishes. As a side note...you can substitute most types of cheese with your quesadilla but I just happened to have a bag of shredded cheddar and another bag Italian cheese for another project.

Serves 4
4-large burrito wraps
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 shredded Italian cheese mix
1tbs olive oil.

Add a drizzle of olive oil into a frying pan large enough to comfortably hold your quesadilla wrap and cook on medium-high. Roll the olive oil to coat the pan evenly then drop a burrito wrap in laying flat. Cook until air bubbles start to form under the skin of the wrap and flip over. It'll take roughly 10-12 seconds for each side, flipping multiple times until you can see some light browning occur.

Time for the filling. Put about an even 1/4 of your total mixed combo of Italian and cheddar cheese on the wrap being careful not to sprinkle cheese too close to the edge that it spills on to the pan. Fold the wrap over like an omelet. Press your folded wrap down lightly with your spatula and flip over cooking each side every 10 seconds and flipping repeatedly until the outer edge is starting to feel crispy.

Once sufficiently cooked, slip it onto a plate and slice with a pizza cutter. Repeat this process with your remaining 3 wraps.

The finished quesadilla tastes delicious with a dollop of sour cream and salsa on side. If you're feeling like having fun with this dish, consider tossing in with your cheese filler with some diced tomatoes, mushrooms, cooked shredded chicken, or ground beef before folding. You can have a lot of fun and even go for the unconventional. I'm actually curious about what this would taste like with something unconventional like goat cheese and spinach for a filler down the road! It's a nice way to use up some spare ingredients or leftovers you have lying around as it doesn't take an incredible amount to fill your quesadilla. You can add a light salad or a side of rice and beans for a rounded meal.

Cooking Under a Budget-An Exploration

I've been doing a lot of cooking as of late and not much blogging about it. Tonight was a humble attempt at cooking quickly and cheaply on the fly. I ended up making sloppy joes and instant mashed potatoes last minute because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to spend more than 15 minutes in the kitchen but didn't want to just throw something in the oven and forget about it. Thankfully, I had a can of Manwhich Sloppy Joe mix.

Okay, it's not the most glamorous meal in the world but the local grocery store was running a sale this weekend and I had some frozen ground beef in the back of the freezer for a 'lazy day" along with a can of mystery Manwich in the boyfriend's cupboard sitting forever. All I needed was the bread buns on sale for a ridiculous 80-ish cents and I was good to go. Altogether, the whole meal of sloppy joes and mashed potatoes prolly cost about 5-6 bucks with all the necessary components.

The main part of the meal got me thinking after I talked with a friend concerning better frugality and creativity in our everyday spending habits. My buddy works a lot of hours just to make ends meet and so to cut his budget, he buys and cooks in bulk to eat throughout the week but hearing his complaint on the common fallback meal of mushy lentils, beans, and ground beef mixture rationed over a whole week, it caused me to wonder if there was a better way or at least one with more variety? For my cheap meal tonight, I bought the lean beef on sale at 3.12 for a pound and the can was roughly 80 cents as well as the 8-pack of buns so altogether about 59 cents per sandwich. Can I make more meals as cheap as this if not cheaper and still taste delicious and perhaps...even look a touch amazing and without having to resort to instant canned/boxed food?

An even greater challenge to the idea of budget meals is that the easy answer of just making a large quantity of said meal for leftovers is almost out of the question because:

1. It's just my boyfriend and me to eat the meal and its leftovers.
2. The boyfriend has a low tolerance for leftovers past the second day unless I want to be a piglet and I cannot eat ALL the leftovers myself before they go bad. In the least, have an option to make the leftovers less recognizable as leftovers?
3. It must be relatively quick and easy to make because again, I'm making enough for two people with perhaps 1-2 days of leftovers so taking several hours to cook a relatively small amount seems counter-intuitive to the end goal making no matter how cheaply to cook it a moot point if the time invested outweighs the cost of convenience or at least my patience.

I figure the best way to accomplish then these series of requirements is to most definitely cook with foods on sale and in season and given the cheapest foods are bought in bulk and should mostly be main-stay foods that will have multiple uses rather than solo ingredients used only once. Some foods like eggs, milk, butter, dry pasta, and spices are easy to keep on hand with multiple uses but perishable items like fruits and vegetables will take some extra planning to ensure I make the purchase worthwhile and usable over the week. Likewise, specialty foods like feta cheeses or even some types of meats and the like must most definitely require some forethought in having a later purpose if there is more than enough for cooking for one type of meal. An example are vegetables that can be put in one dish today and perhaps a frittata or a stirfry the next?

Some of my favorite vegetables to keep on hand for this reason are actually onions and garlic. They last a long time in the fridge and are pretty quick to cut up and add flavor and substance to most dishes. Even I am inclined to chop up an onion and some cloves of garlic to toss with some dried herbs into a regular grocery-bought jar of spaghetti sauce just to give it an extra special kick.

I'll give this some more thought and think more on how to cook creatively under a set budget.

First Steps

Welcome to Victorious Eats where I'll be exploring and blogging my cooking exploits one dish at a time. My most recent experiment is with Shepherd's Pie or at least some variation of it. I couldn't get my hands on any ground lamb which seems like a traditional main meat in reference to the whole "Shepherd" aspect but alas, my local supermarket didn't carry ground lamb at the time so I substituted with half and half ground pork and beef. I couldn't tell you what my reasoning was in the substitution but I figured I'd give it a whirl. The original recipe is found here and I shan't take credit for it but I will list my alterations below.

Here it is fresh and hot out of the oven with the meaty deliciousness inside bubbling up through any crack through the potato layer it could. I sprinkled over the top a dash of paprika and a few pats of margarine here and there to give it a good color and after a bit in the oven, the dish created an amazing fragrance that filled the whole downstairs with a warm and cozy aroma. I couldn't wait to open it up. It's a meaty and certainly a hearty dish. I will admit I did alter the dish from the original recipe which I will list below.

-Change 1lb lamb to pork.
-Margarine for butter.
-Instant mashed potatoes for the top layer.
-Used 12 oz bag of mixed frozen vegetables (corn, carrots, peas, green beans) and took out the carrots (to accomodate one slightly picky boyfriend)
-"Eyeballed" the amount of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce which may have been a tbs or more of each than the recipe suggested.

The overall dish ended up going very, very well.