Cooking investments

It is no secret to anyone who has known me for any length of time that I have not been a meal preparer during our marriage. Dwayne likes to do special meal preparation (those things that you start with marinating days in advance and have 20+ lines of ingredients and lots of steps)... but he didn't do that very frequently. If there had not been frozen meals and ready-to-eat and restaurants and fast food, well... I guess we wouldn't have starved cuz one of us would have figured out how to cook meals, but we survived on those substitutes.

This year, at the end of March, we started a diet. It involved eating "program meals" (pre-packaged 100-110 calorie glycemic balanced "fuelings) 5 times a day, and 1 "lean and green" meal each day. To comply with this diet, I started cooking. Ooooohhhhh did I hate it in the beginning. What a chore it was to have to prepare a meal (only *one* meal, mind you! no 3-meals-a-day requirement) each day!

But... as a result, I started using our kitchen, using our cookware, following recipes, and making my own customizations. I was doing a lot of stir-frying of veggies and our fry pans started showing quite a bit of wear (not only from the use, but also from the vibration against other objects during travel; even though I tried separating them with paper towels, I don't think that was fully successful.

So, about a month ago, I decided it was time to get a new large fry pan. I asked for input from folks on Facebook and got some ideas.

I wanted pans that would not stick and in which I could use less cooking oil, so I got a non-stick ceramic interior, and a T-Fal non-stick.

One of the recipes that we have ended up liking quite a lot is a "Lean and Green Lasagna" - it doesn't have lasagna noodles, so... if you were really wanting lasagna it would probably be disappointing, but we just enjoy it as a beef and tomato and cheese casserole. I have also found that it is much better the second day, so I like to double the recipe so it makes 8 servings. This was really overfilling the larger fry pan, so, when we saw a kitchen store at the outlet mall a couple of weeks ago, we decided to look for a larger pan.

A couple of folks on Facebook had recommended Copper pans - so I was interested in them... and there was a special packaging of an induction cooktop with a large copper induction cooking pan that seemed like a good deal, so we got them both. This was our first use trying out boiling water. It worked!

So, a couple of days later, I made "Lean and Green Lasagna" or (maybe a better title) "Cheesy Beef and Tomato Casserole". The pan was plenty large for browning two pounds of lean ground beef and briefly cooking the tomatoes with the beef.

I could have baked in the copper pan too, but chose to put it into the casserole dish for baking as I thought that the contents might be a bit deep for cooking through well in the square pan.

The recipe has a cheese (mozzarella, ricotta, parmesan) mixture with Egg Beaters in it which gives some "body" to the cheese, and then part skim Mozzarella on top.

All baked and almost ready to eat (it needs to cool a bit before it is cut-able). I turn the dish 180 degrees about halfway through baking since our microwave/convection oven tends to cook a little unevenly, and I cannot use the turntable with the oblong casserole dish.

So... we weren't sure where we were going to store the new pan and induction cooktop (possible solution in the works)... and unfortunately, none of our other pans had a magnetic bottom so they can't been used with the induction cooktop (we've since gotten a saucepan that works on the induction cooktop). One advantage of having the induction cooktop is that it uses electricity which is great when we are on electric hookups - we use the campground's electricity instead of our propane. We still have propane cooktop (built in) available when we're boondocking or not using free electricity (sometimes we pay separately for electricity, for example, when we're staying for a month - sometimes even weekly rates don't include electricity).

I guess you *can* teach old dogs (or humans) new tricks!