I’m a pretty unadventurous baker/cook/diner. I like normal dishes with normal-sounding ingredients. (Which doesn’t exclude Chinese, Thai, Mexican and Italian cooking. It’s just that even in those recipes, I like ingredients that I can pronounce and find and identify.) Like today’s recipe – plain and simple ingredients for a nicely baked casserole. I still remember making a salad with Jicama in it (about 15 years ago, before Jicama was considered a normal ingredient). I asked the produce manager where the Jicama might be. (pronounced J, as in jeepers and jingle and Julia.) He politely pointed and said that the Jicama (pronounced H, as in hello, and hanky, and Harold) was over in the corner. Like I said, I like ingredients that I can find and pronounce.
Today’s recipe is a new one that I tried when we were on Spring Break. It received a thumbs up from my family, so I hope you and your family like it, too!
Chicken and Ham Bake
1 pck. cornbread stuffing mix (6 oz)
2 cans cream of chicken soup
2 cups milk
4 chicken breasts, cooked and cubed
1/2 lb. deli ham, sliced into thin strips
1 cup Swiss cheese
2 cups Cheddar Cheese
Layer chicken in the bottom of a greased 9 x 13 pan. Mix one can of soup with 1 cup of milk and pour over the top. Layer on the ham , swiss cheese, and 1 cup of cheddar cheese. Mix the other can of soup with 1 cup of milk and pour over the ham and swiss.
Prepare the stuffing mix according to package directions. Layer this on top and sprinkle 1 cup of Cheddar Cheese on top.
Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake 10 minutes longer (or until cheese melts).
This month’s blog contest question is easy – what’s the most unusual ingredient you have ever eaten or cooked/baked with? (And if it’s not all that unusual, that’s just fine. I can relate.) Leave your answer in the comments below and I’ll draw the winners next week. The prize? A special edition color of Wollmeise.
Note regarding in-person shopping hours next week (4/19-23): While the website is always open, 24/7/365, we will be closed to IN-person shoppers here all next week. We have Spring Flingers coming in and they’re all we can handle at one time! (And our Fire Marshall agrees….)
Sheri headingtoaweddinginIndianathisweekend.Hopetheweathercooperates!
I am a relatively “ordinary” cook — what with 2 teenage boys who will not eat anything that is not readily identifiable. I used Edamame in a salad once. They couln’t understand why anyone would put lima beans in a salad…..
Last year i spent two weeks looking for fresh water chestnuts for a recipe I saw on the Food Channel. I have gone back to the canned ones.
The ingredients aren’t weird but the combination of Cheese Whiz and peanut butter makes me wonder about my husband’s food choices.
Ok, so this is not weird to me, but it might be weird to others. I’ve had “bird nests soup” and it actually tastes good. It’s a Chinese delicacy made from birds that build their nests from saliva. It sounds so gross, but I can assure you that the soup is very delicious. 🙂
More info can be found at wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird%27s_nest_soup
We’ve certainly eaten more interesting things than we’ve cooked with- foie gras, lamb testicles, foams, you name it! The oddest ingredient we’ve cooked with is much tamer- nori, or miso maybe?
I would have to say bear, a friend of mine made chili but wouldn’t tell us what meat was in it, needless to say I never trusted is food after that.
Hmm, I guess maybe eating eel in a sushi roll. I have to try hard not think about what I’m eating otherwise I gross myself out. But rolled up with a little cream cheese,deep fried in tempura batter and drizzled with a yummy sauce it’s pretty good!
The weirdest (and hardest to find) thing I’ve baked with was Palmin, which is solid coconut fat. I used it in German Cold Cake, and it was ok, but I had to special order the Palmin, and it was incredibly messy to make, and in the end, not worth it. I’ll try almost anything once though.
I’ve certainly eaten a lot of things, but I don’t know how weird some of them are. Before I was vegetarian, I ate spam and shark meat, the former is often considered disgusting and the latter wasn’t very good at all.
Once you’re in the plant realm, not a lot is considered “weird,” so I don’t know what I’ve eaten recently that would be odd. Durians? Dragoneyes? Dragonfruit? Tamarinds? A whole bunch of different mushrooms and seaweeds? None of it is really hard to come by, either… Alas, I guess I am more boring than I thought.
Well, I visited Mexico years ago and I remember ordering seafood soup. I was expecting a creamy seafood soup. What I got was a tomato based seafood soup with whole mussels, crab legs and chunks of octopus (with the suckers still on)! I dropped my spoon in the soup when the octopus suckers surfaced! Overall the soup was good and I even tried the octopus.
It’s not the most unusual thing in the sense you meant, but as an American living in the UK, I had to make “fairy cakes” (cupcakes) at preschool with my daughter and they handed me a scale to weigh the ingredients. I never missed my cups and tablespoons as much as I did then!
I attended a traditional Chinese wedding dinner. Two of the items were Sea Cucumber and 1000 year old eggs. Let me just say that I will never try either again:)
I attended a Chinese/Korean wedding dinner, too (like the person posting ahead of me). they served jellyfish. That was the most unusual thing I’ve never eaten. 🙂
I’m not a very adventurous eater. I also keep vaguely kosher, so it’s hard to find something in the gross variety. I guess I would answer this in the vein of “non-standard american food” and say paneer (pressed Indian goat cheese) or gefilte fish (three types of white fish ground together).
I have been fairly adventurous in eating, but I will admit that I did not like alligator nor did I care for octopus. A nice fried calamari on the other hand…… yummy! That being said, my favorite food is grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup!
Having lived in Florida all my life, gator is about the most unusual thing I’ve eaten. I’ve also had buffalo and elk, but I know those aren’t really that odd to some people.
It has to be cow’s brain. I have never eaten it since.
Lynn
Last week I ate a pickled octopus! Very spicy, very pickely…
Sharon
Probably elk – we ate at an inn some where near Estes Park that served “wild” meats – I did not like it – BLEEEEEGGGGG
Hope I’m not too late to enter !
Mel
I’ve cooked with some weird combinations but not really weird ingredients per se. One of my favorite offbeat things to add is a nice high-quality cinnamon to a grilling rub. I make awesome grilled wings with garlic, cinnamon, pink peppercorn, kosher salt, and fresh garden sage.
My mom was over for dinner a few weeks ago and we had grilled chicken tenders that I marinated in orange juice, orange zest, fresh ground ginger, garam masala, and cinnamon. It was the bomb diggity.
I have a chicken chili recipe that has hot chocolate mix in it!
Uh, make that turkey chili!
I have used cardamom. Not too common a spice. Love it in cookies!
A squeeze of lemon juice in scrambled eggs with fresh herbs. It was wonderful!
Grains of Paradise and cassia buds. Hubs and I are in the SCA, so we do a lot of medieval cooking and eating. I think I’ve cooked with just about every herb and spice available at this point!
Eating-wise – well, between growing up in the US and Eastern Europe, then living with Cantonese roommates for years in high school and marrying someone who’d lived in South Africa and living in London, there’s not a lot out there I haven’t tried.
Yak Butter Tea. In Tibet, at someone’s house, because one of us had to be polite. Don’t do it.
Truffle Salt…on olive oil covered roasted fingerling potatoes. It’s very good and available at Whole Foods. Buy just a very tiny amount, that’s all you need.
Not brave enough to eat really weird food, but I did order a brain sandwich with a friend once. We both looked at it and needless to say were to scared to eat it!
Once made something with Sweetbreads… sort of different. The casserole looks
great, thanks for sharing!
I’m willing to try eating most things. I think “unusual” is just a cultural thing. The summer I did archeology in France I was the only American willing to eat tongue. I’ve also eaten reindeer.
As far as cooking, I don’t think I’ve made anything I’d call unusual — I’ve made sushi, so maybe seaweed is my unusual ingredient.
celeriac – it is really just a fancy name for celery root, and that is exactly what it tastes like, but somehow calling “celeriac” makes it sound so exotic.
The most unusual thing I have ever eaten or cooked with has got to be chia seeds. Yes, the same thing that is in every single Chia pet:-) Apparently it has digestive benefits as well. And no, I did not find grass growing out of my head the next day:-)
Squirrel. My dad shot one when I was a child and my mom prepared it. Can’t say that there is much meat to be had on one 🙂
Never really cooked any crazy things but I have eaten a few. Racoon was one of the weirdest things to ever enter my mouth 🙂 “tastes like chicken” but a little greasier.
I haven’t cooked many adventurous things, but I once tried octopus without realizing what I was eating. It wasn’t half bad until I started to overthink it… 🙂
Checking back in to read over things and see what else I want to try!! hehe.
I’d forgotten to mention reindeer sausage (from alaska), bear, elk, venison (from my brother’s hunting expeditions), llama (don’t ask), goat, etc. My favorite meat is probably rabbit, though.
The grossest thing ever has to be lutefisk (but I’ve never actually eaten it. although we did grow up with a ton of norwegian and swedish food… lefse on the other hand is looove. lutefisk? not so much.)
Some of people’s things like Fish Sauce, Cardamom, Grains of Paradise, Tamarind, different types of salt, cassia buds, etc. are pretty common place in my group of friends and not too hard to find around here — I guess weird food is all in perspective!!! (but yes, I also have friends in the restaurant business (chinese, indian, thai, american, medieval) and some who are very active in the culinary portion of the SCA, etc. hmm.)
Now if only there were more Ethiopian restaurants around here. They have some seriously nommable vegetarian food.
Now I really want to make some …
Fenberry Pie:
http://recipes.wuzzle.org/index.php/36/382
Erbowle
(these people renamed it to “spiced plum mousse” but pretty much the same thing):
http://www.keskiaika.org/kirjasto/kokkipiiri/Plum%20Mousse142.htm
Custard Lombarde: http://earthtotable.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/custard-lombarde-circa-1376/
hungry now, yes.
Clam Juice. And I didn’t like the “fishy” flavor it added to the dish. Yuck!
I guess it would be the alligator I ate in Florida while visiting my sister…
I tried to make my Grandmother’s chocolate cake. The cake and the frosting both have marshmallows in them. I found that really strange. I don’t think that the cake will ever be made well. I think that marshmallows are smaller than they used to be when Grandma made the cake. hmmmm………not the strangest, but interseting none-the-less.
I’m Thai, so I guess I’d say all the various spices that go into curries. It’s more fun (and tastier) to make them fresh with a mortar and pestle than buying a pre-made paste!
Hing. I needed it for a couple of Indian recipes I’d been wanting to make. I looked for literally two years and never found it. I just saw it somewhere recently but since I know it’s not safe during pregnancy I had to leave it on the shelf. One day I will try this ingredient…even though it scares me a little.
While probably not usual to some, I found the combination of sweet potatoes and garlic to be a curious duo in one recipe I tried. And, in case the mood ever strikes, I strongly discourage cooking pork chops with salsa. Eww, what a waste of good meat. 🙂
I love an Italian dish known as Putenesca and that was my intro to capers and sardines.
Kangaroo Metwurst on my Pizza .
The strangest thing I’ve eaten was Black Pudding in England.
Black pudding is a sausage made from blood & fat from a pig and grains like oatmeat. Crazy.
The strangest ingredients I cook with have to be pad thai ingredients like tamerind paste, fish sauce and palm sugar. Tamerind kinda tastes like a sweet lime, and totally makes the dish.
Bon appite!
i was feeling under the weather and a friend suggest i eat what has become the most unusual thing i have ever eaten: balut, which is a fertilized duck egg in which the fetus is between seventeen and twenty days in gestation. (by the way, yes i felt better, and it was actually quite good.)
I’m not very adventurous either so my ingredients are all pretty normal. The weirdest thing I’ve done is use canned whipping cream as the base for a steak sauce I made. It turned out well!
I’m Norweagian and we love to eat rotting fisch 🙂
food. i love that about as much as i love yarn and knitting!
strangest: shish-kabob cow hearts … skewered and grilled, with a delicious spicy mustard. (in bolivia).
unusual: (my daily breakfast) oatmeal with onion powder, garlic powder, cumin, salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, one egg over medium mixed in.
Let’s see…rat meat saté in Indonesia. Spicy monkey stew in the Congo. Guinea pig and sea spider in South America. A dish of what I thought was very bad pasta and bacon which turned out to be boiled slugs with fried caterpillars…Africa (truly ghastly). Sheep’s eyes in Saudi. Durian is high on my list of fruits to avoid, but did manage to gag some down covered with salt. Smells like rotting corpses.
A lovely dish called Drunken Shrimp in Hong Kong. Live shrimp in a dish, pour in whiskey and hold a cover over the dish while the shrimp go through death throws. Entertainment?
There was more, but I’m afraid I might make someone sick. I promise, I ate all of that.
Quinoa is the most unusual I’ve cooked with, makes a good substitute for oatmeal in Anzac biscuits if you’re gluten free.
Weidesst ingredient: Hmmmmmmm. Back in the late 60’s we tried lots of different foods and textures. When I was in High School I wanted to go to the Fannie Farmer Cooking School. My mother had already decided I was going to a teachers college and that was that. I never lost the desire for cooking though.
I think the first unusual inredient for a girl in New England to use would have to be “gumbo file”. I have always loved soups and decided to try my hand at gumbo. It gave me the creeps. It came frozen and when thawed was kind of a slimy substance. To this day, I still don’t like it. But I do consider myself an adventurous cook. My middle son is an executive chef – went to Johnson & Whales. Third son did too, but not for cooking.