Bread and Stuff

Hello, everyone! Being a student-teacher means I am away from home a lot and it is a little hard to make myself cook good food. Recently however, the change in the weather has been somewhat inspiring and I have been using the oven a lot. I baked bread (which is a new hobby of mine since the spring) and made my first apple pie. I also have been doing some cool things with vegetables. I will include my favorite bread recipe in the near future but seeing as it is somewhat detailed and I am at school right now without my bread cookbook, I am going to stick with the veg for the time being:

Impromptu Roasted Vegetables:

1/2 bag pre-chopped mirepoix or equal parts chopped onion, celery, and carrots

A generous amount of fresh cauliflower (how much depends on how much you like it!)

1 zucchini sliced into 1/2" thick chunks or whatever really

1 yellow squash - make it match your zuch

A big handful of cherry or grape tomatoes cut in half

A big pinch of dried thyme

A drizzle of oil (olive or other kind of cooking oil)

Salt

Throw all of your stuff into a glass or ceramic baking dish and chuck your salt and thyme on it. Drizzle the whole mess with some oil and toss it all together with a spoon. Don't stress about this part, just try to get a little flavor and salt on everything. Roast in a 350 degree oven for about half an hour ti 45 min. depending on how dark you want the stuff. Eat. This works really nicely over some rice cooked with bullion or even spaghetti with parm and a bit of garlic. I got a pre-cut bag of mirepoix at wegman's because it was ten thousand percent easier for me than to actually cut the stuff because I am rather crunched for time these days :) Pre-cut or not, it was shocking the amount of flavor the carrots, onions, and celery contributed so don't skip them.

Suffed Peppers:

I made stuffed peppers for the first time about two weeks ago and I liked how they turned out so I thought I'd share what I did. I took them in a tex-mex sort of direction and that was nice.

3 bell peppers cleaned, tops removed, seeds and ribs removed

1.5 cups rice (cooked. I used leftovers)

1 tray ground chicken

1 can diced tomatoes with green chilies

1 generous pinch of chipotle powder

pinch of garlic powder

salt to taste

cilantro - I used the stuff that comes pureed in a tube. I like to keep it on hand.

1 packed Sazon de Goya (i used the kind with saffron: con azafran!)

Brown your chicken with the packet of Goya seasoning. Microwave your rice if it was refrigerated so that it isn't glued together in one big mass because you have to mix it with stuff. Drain your can of tomatoes (this part is sad because the juice is good but it's just too much liquid for this particular recipe) and mix them into your rice. Throw your chicken in there with some salt, some garlic, and however much chipotle you think you can handle, chuck some cilantro in there too. Stir it until you think you have a fairly well integrated mixture and spoon it generously into your pepper shells. I had them sitting in a glass baking dish. If they don't stand up on their own, slice a little off the bottom of eat pepper to make a flat surface. Bake in a 350 degree oven until the tops look nice and brown. The baking is really to your liking since everything is pre-cooked or edible raw. I just went with my gut and took them out after about 45 min. Enjoy :)