Real Food for Real Life

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Another new toy...

Grilled BBQ Chicken, Grilled Veggies,
and Freezer Cheese Mac and Cheese

For the longest time I have been meaning to get a grill basket; we have two grills, shouldn't we have all the accessories too?  I saw one at Aldi an few weeks ago, and at $5.99, I finally had my basket.  The inuagural use was grilled veggies (a mix of zucchini, red onion, yellow bell pepper, and crimini mushrooms) and I don't think I will ever skewer another veggie again.  I have used this basket again several times since and will soon be trying shrimp and scallops in there as well (can't wait).
 Look how nicely this fits on the grill, and cleanup was a snap.

Kitchen Tip...

We like to eat all sorts of different varieties of cheese.  When I get those small bits leftover that aren't worth wrapping up for another meal, or will soon spoil if not used, I drop them into a a quart sized freezer bag and stash them in the freezer.  I keep this bag going, putting in all manner of cheese, and when I get 12 to 16 ounces saved up, it is time to make mac and cheese (this is especially tasty if some bleu cheese has made its way in).  The quality of the cheese does suffer a bit, for the purposes of making mac and cheese, it is just fine. 
The penne and my bag of cheese from the freezer.  If you have any softer cheese in the bag (that is a piece of gorgonzola dolce near the bottom left) you may wish to grate up the cheese while it is partially frozen.  Just substitute the cheese for that called for in your favorite recipe.
I don't normally top my mac and cheese with bread crumbs, but I decided to be different this time and the family loved it.  For this I just mixed some of my dried homemade bread crumbs with some melted butter, so there were two tasty money saving tips in this dish.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks Sandi! I was going to write about the Asian peanut noodles I made the other night, but you beat me to it (great minds think alike :), so I put that one off.

    ReplyDelete
  2. you should put it on your blog anyway...I would love to see what it looks like

    ReplyDelete

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