What I've been cooking

I have homemade veggie chili in the crockpot right now, and boy does it smell good! I'll probably make grilled cheese sammiches or quesadillas to go with it for dinner tonight. I'd been saving up onion skins and cores and old celery leaves and such in the freezer, and I boiled those up and strained off the veggie water to use as a quickie veggie broth base for the chili. It's got pintos, garbanzos, corn, three-colored peppers, Boca burger crumbles, diced canned tomatoes, a can of tomato paste, whole cumin seeds, and assorted powdered spices in it. I'm trying to make it flavorful but mild since we had spicy food twice yesterday.

Other things I've cooked or baked recently included:

-Homemade brownies with pecans AND caramel Hershey's kisses.

-Taco salad. I used some of the boca crumbles for this, too, along with sauteed peppers and corn and pintos, some reduced fat cheese, and of course tortilla chips and reduced fat sour cream. I'm thinking the next time I make this, I may serve it with a half-and-half concoction of ranch dressing and salsa instead of salsa and sour cream for the dressing. I've had this as a dip for a Tex-Mex appetizer before, and it was quite good, so I'd like to try it on taco salad and see how that goes over.

-Homemade oven fries with store-bought veggie burgers. I love making oven fries, and I have to say that while I'm not generally big on kitchen gadgets, I love my fry maker. It processes potatoes into either shoestring or steak cut fries SO much faster than I could by hand. My recipe for making them flavorful and crispy is to put them in a sealable plastic bag, add a little cooking oil (usually canola) and salt and pepper, plus any other spices I might feel like, and a half tsp. of sugar (the sugar is what makes them crisp up), shake it all up, and then dump the fries onto a cooking sheet and put them in the oven at 450 degrees for 12-15 min.

-Not-very-authentic Huevos Rancheros. I have mastered the art of the fried egg, over medium! I fried mine a little more solid, but the one I made for J. was definitely over medium. I slid them into whole wheat tortillas with some pintos that had been cooked in a bit of salsa, and added some shredded cheese and reduced fat sour cream. They were muy yum!

-These biscuit-veggie thingies that I don't have a proper recipe for. J. remembered that I used to make these with store-bought biscuits from a can a long time ago, but I hadn't made them in years. A few months ago, I started experimenting to figure out how I'd made them. So far, all our efforts have been tasty but sloppy. Basically, I put a piece of biscuit dough in the bottom of a muffin cup, top it with mixed veggies and cheese, and then bake it in the oven for whatever length of time and temp the biscuit directions call for. If I could just get them not to stick to the muffin pan (or to the paper muffin liners), we'd be all set!