Toast
February 6, 2025 1:22 PM
Some time last week, I bought a sour dough round from Aldi. I don't eat a lot of bread, but I figured it's good to switch up my grains. So here are three different dishes that I made with this bread.
First, a breakfast. There's this really expensive cafe that makes a delicious smoked salmon toast, but it costs over $16 and I'm not about that life anymore. So I'm making my own for an eighth of the price.
I actually really like toast, and I should make more of it. Smoked salmon is a bit bougie, but I also like hummus or an avocado spread on toast!
Next I have a chicken salad. I really just wanted to use up some relish because I bought some to make a hamburger sauce a while back, and now I kind of regret it. The hamburger sauce was just okay, and now I have a jar of relish that I don't know what to do with.
I've put relish in tuna salad a bunch of times in the past, but I had never actually tried making chicken salad before. I tend to like tuna salad better, but for the sake of variety I decided to try to make a chicken salad. What I probably should have done was follow a recipe, but I decided to just wing it and throw stuff together! I added mayonnaise, sweet onions, green onions, dijon mustard, relish, cranberries, poppyseeds, and even some honey roasted peanuts.
The end result was...eh. It wasn't awful, but I didn't really have a desire to keep eating it. I'm really not good at the whole "throwing things together" thing. But I did finish all of it over the course of a few more breakfasts because I am not wasting food.
And finally, I was able to use up the rest of my jar of pizza sauce by making some pizza melts! When I was younger, my dad would sometimes toast some sliced bread with pizza sauce and cheese and give that to me as an after school snack. I liked it at the time, though it didn't really sound quite as appealing to me now. Honestly, a pizza sandwich is the type of thing that barely sounds like a recipe to me.
But oh my god, this sandwich I made last week was SO GOOD. The herb parmesan butter really takes it over the top. The first one I made had mozzarella since that's your typical cheese for a pizza, but I ran out of that and tried taco cheese and pepperjack as well and they both still tasted great. Now I'm never going to have trouble finishing leftover pizza sauce.
Tomatoes and mozzarella
August 21, 2022 4:59 PM
My favorite pizza topping is tomato. Not tomato sauce, fresh slices of tomato. Why did I decide to make pizza in the first place? Maybe it was because I had a small amount of shredded mozzarella cheese that I wanted to use up.
So, I bought a bag of tomatoes from Aldi. Even though I didn't have too much shredded cheese in the bag, I still wasn't able to use it all up, and now I had four more tomatoes to go along with it. And, I'm gonna detour away from the pizza for a moment to show you a couple of other tomato-y things.
One of the things I made with the other tomatoes was tomato rice. This wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. I know I was thinking, "hey, I could use up a tomato in this!" But it actually called for diced tomatoes and tomato paste, so this didn't really help me cut down on my tomatoes.
I was able to use up some tomatoes (and mozzarella!) in my tomato and mozzarella panini. This was probably way too much effort for a workday lunch, but it was pretty good! I actually made it twice, and the second time I added basil and mint because I felt like it needed something leafy inside. It was a little strange, but I thought it was a good addition.
But before I made it, I actually went and bought a log of mozzarella because I was worried that my shredded mozzarella wasn't going to be enough. I used up all of the shredded stuff, and then I still had a lot of the mozzarella log left.
And I know. You're seeing a never ending cycle now, where every time I finish using up one ingredient, I still end up having too much of another. Does it ever end???
I don't know. But I'm gonna make more pizza tonight.
This time I won't buy more tomatoes or mozzarella. Hopefully.
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