Spanish-Style Lentils & Chorizo

Bacon AND chorizo?  And with enough veggies to plausibly be healthy?  Another worthwhile one crowdsourced from here...

Recipe

4 slices bacon, chopped
5-6 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
4 oz chorizo
1 c rice
1 c lentils
4 c water
1 c tomato sauce
cumin, paprika
oil, salt & pepper

Start with your bacon in some oil and crisp it up; you can take it out or not and add the onion, carrot, garlic, and spices, then green pepper, then the chorizo.  Once the meat is cooked through, add the rice, lentils, and water and simmer until soft.  Stir in the tomato sauce and let the flavors meld.

Notes

Don't know how necessary the bacon really was, but can't complain.  I used the end of my packages of lentils and rice - more like 3/4 c - and a whole pack of chorizo - 4x the recommended amount?!  So mine was much meatier than the original version.  Very tasty, and awesome left over!

Roast Chicken with Garlic & Shallot Marinade

Having trouble coming up with a less generic name for this recipe; the original was simply Easy Roast Chicken...

Recipe

~8 pieces of chicken, one whole bird broken down or your choice, skin-on/bone-in

3 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp red wine vinegar (or my standby apple cider vinegar)

1 tbsp brown sugar

4 shallots, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

Mix everything into the marinade, and toss in the chicken.  Place chicken in a baking dish skin side up (spooning over extra sauce) and bake at 425 for 30 minutes.  Baste the chicken and flip, and cook another 10 minutes or more until done.

Notes

That sauce is pretty awesome.  I turned up the garlic (to the above amount) and probably the shallot too (what actually counts as one shallot?), and kept spooning sauce over and scooping it up with every bite.  Yeah, pretty awesome.

Slow Cooker Peach Salsa Pork

New job, so time to experiment with crockpot options for meals ready to eat back at home.  I was hesitant to try this one, since pre-made peach salsa seems like a bit of a shortcut.  But it does make it so simple and easy - just three ingredients!  To wit:

Recipe

2+ lb boneless pork roast
1+ lbs sweet potatoes
2 c peach salsa
vegetable oil, salt & pepper

Chop your sweet potato into 1" chunks - no need to go too small! - and place in the bottom of the crockpot.  Heat a tbsp oil in a heavy skillet.  Season your roast with salt & pepper.  Brown on all sides, then place on top of sweet potatoes.  Pour over the salsa.  Heat on high 4-5 hours, or low 7-9.

Serve with rice, spicy sesame oil, cilantro, parsley, chopped green onion, anything else.

Notes

It took a while to get to this since it's not quite as simple as putting everything in the crockpot and setting it to go for a while.  But it came out well in the end!  The original recipe tells you to neatly slice your pork into chops, but as soon as I tried to do that it shredded.  Not a problem though!  The way my day went, it cooked on the higher end of the time range so maybe dried out a little; a little extra salsa can address that.  The sweet potatoes came out amazing...

Lentil Bolognese

A cheap, healthy, and plentiful Meatless Monday (plus a few extra days) recipe courtesy of reddit...

Recipe

1 onion, chopped
1 rib celery, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
7 cloves garlic, minced
1 can (6 oz) tomato paste
1 can (15 oz) tomato sauce
2 cans (15 oz each) diced tomatoes
2 tbsp dried basil
1 tsp dried oregano
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 c red lentils
2 c water
olive oil, salt & pepper

Chop everything.  Start some oil in a large skillet and cook the vegetables until tender.  Next stir in the garlic, then the tomato paste, then the rest of the tomatoes and the herbs, baking soda, and some salt and pepper.  Then add the lentils and water, and simmer 20-30 minutes.  Serve over pasta.

Notes

I've struggled with this in a few recent recipes, and realized that you need plenty of liquid to cook through things like lentils (or sweet potatoes).  I let everything simmer longer than a half hour, and the lentils were still a bit underdone.

Overall, though, a tasty recipe to make in a big batch and have for leftovers (good with some sausage for non-veggie days)!

Honey Coconut Salmon

A combination of a free evening, a packet of frozen salmon, and a recently-purchased bag of shredded coconut (a possibility for an upcoming CS-ORS bake-off) led me to this recipe:

Recipe

1 1/2 c butter
3/4 c honey
1/4 c brown sugar
3/4 c flaked coconut
4 salmon fillets (~4 oz each)

Melt your butter, then stir in the honey, brown sugar, and coconut.  Pour over your salmon and turn to coat, then marinate in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Preheat your oven to 375, spread some marinade over the bottom of your baking dish, place your salmon in there, and coat with more marinade.  Bake about 25 minutes, basting with marinade a few times.

Notes

A good recipe for a lot of flavor from not a lot of ingredients.  I was worried it would be overly sweet what with the honey and brown sugar etc., but the butter and (unsweetened!) coconut balances it out a bit.  It worked well for some freezer salmon fillets - if you have a high-quality piece you're probably better off doing something more discreet...  It's also a pretty large amount of marinade - you're fine scaling it back significantly.