Mexican Spring Vegetable Casserole

random ingredients

I hope this is what summer grad school is.  I got in 3 hours of microscope time today, got trained on a new instrument, put together the rest of the rough draft, sent a few emails, organized my inbox, and then came home and made aammaazzing dinner.

I finished off so many leftovers today that when Becca came home she thought I had organized the refrigerator.  My meal consisted of: 1 leftover egg, ~1/4 cup of salsa, 6 corn tortillas that got left out in the fridge so they were hard/crunchy/kinda gross, 6 radishes and 6 green onions that needed to be used because they were from last week’s CSA, 1/2 cup black beans, and gross leftover chives from my very first CSA.

When I was laying out all the ingredients I realized I could make something that resembled lasagna with the tortillas and salsa, so I rolled with it.  It turned out surprisingly good!

Mexican Spring Veggie Casserole

-layer a pan with corn tortillas

-next, add black beans and salsa

-thinly slice 6 radishes and layer on top of salsa

-chop radish greens and green onions, layer on top

 -season with crushed red pepper, salt, and taco seasoning
-tear up remaining tortillas to cover vegetables
-crack an egg on top and spread egg evenly over tortillas; add chives

-bake for 20 minutes at 400 degrees

This tasted really good, although in the future I would probably just discard the really crunchy/dried out portions of the tortilla or make sure they are on the bottom where they can soak up all the good salsa/black bean juices.  The egg really pulled everything together…I would maybe add another next time.  I wasn’t exactly sure radishes would go well in this dish, but their tangy horseradish-ness worked well with the black beans and salsa.  Definitely glad I tried this instead of letting my gross tortillas go to waste!

I’m not going to try and calculate a total cost here because I think it would be impossible with all the CSA ingredients…the tortillas were ~$0.40, the egg was $0.17, salsa was free from my mom, the black beans were crazy cheap because I bought them dried…I would definitely say this meal was less than $4.00 🙂

Pumpkin Pasta with Roasted Veggies and Brown Sugar Sauce

This is one of my favorite meals I’ve made in a long time.  I’m really happy that I made a full recipe because I ended up being able to have dinner last night, lunch today, and a reworked version tonight for dinner.

I still had a lot of pumpkin leftover last night and pretty much all I have in the pantry is various flours, so I thought pasta sounded good.

I also had a ton of potatoes, onions, and half a sweet potato which seemed like it would go well with the pasta.

I didn’t have anything for a sauce, so I just used olive oil and brown sugar (soooo good)

One of my favorite things to do with leftover homemade noodles is saute’ them the next day in olive oil because they never seem to taste as good as they did the first night.  What made this even more amazing was that I added some brown sugar into the frying pan and let it carmelize on the vegetables and pasta.

yummm

The recipe I used is the same one I used a few weeks ago when I had people over, but I made a couple adjustments:

Pumpkin Pasta

–combine 2 cups white flour, 2 tablespoons semolina, 3/4 tsp salt, and a dash of nutmeg in a food processor
-in a seperate bowl, whisk together 1/3 cup pumpkin and 1 medium egg
-briefly  mix together in the food processor
-add one more medium egg and continue to mix until a ball of dough forms
-let dough rest for 30 minutes

While this was resting, I made my roasted veggies.  I chopped 1 onion, 1 potato, and half a sweet potato, tossed them in olive oil and salt, and roasted them at 400 degrees C for 30 minutes.

After letting the dough sit, roll the dough through a medium thickness setting on your pasta machine and then use the fettuccine die.  If you don’t have a pasta machine, just simply roll out the dough and use a knife or a pizza cutter to cut thin strips.

Boil pasta for 5 minutes, then toss with olive oil, brown sugar, and the roasted veggies

pure deliciousness

All this was more than enough for 3 meals, probably more for a pereson who isn’t ravenously hungry by the time they come home at night.

I’m not going to attempt to figure out the price, mainly because I bought the flours before I started keeping track of costs.