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!
Not necessarily unusual, but a challenge to find at the time–instant espresso powder. In one of my favorite “fancy” grocery store lines ever, I was told they carried “no instant anything”. Can you imagine?
The most adventurous cooking I’ve done was to use puff pastry in a baklava recipe. I didn’t care for my version; I think the honey I used was the wrong kind. I tried baklava later that was made by a man from Greece, it was great!
I grew up eating a lot of unusual stuff here in the South, (hog maws, pigs feet, chitlings, hogshead cheese and other stuff like that), but the one thing I tried that I really didn’t care for was grilled shark that had been marinated in lime juice. I’ll pass on that particular meal if it ever comes around again. I, like you, prefer stuff I recognize.
I’m not much of a cook. Can I tell you the most memorable ingredient? Red food coloring for red velvet cake. I was finding smudges of it for weeks…between the counter and the fridge, in the oven, on the underside of the freezer door….
Capers, I didn’t know if they were alive or dead!
the weirdest thing i have probably eaten was the quail egg at sushi restaurants. and the weirdest thing i cooked was octopus
Rabbit – it had been skinned and the entrails were out, but I still had to take out the lungs and heart, and cut it into pieces. Eek!
It not all that unusual, but probably the strangest thing I have cooked with is Spaghetti Squash, you bake it and then scrape out the strands which look like Spaghetti.
A couple of years ago for me it was cilantro – doesn’t sound that different to me now, but ut was a stumper awhile back.
I think the oddest thing we have cooked for a while was buffalo liver. It was a mite bit tough.
We are pretty adventurous with our food choices. But at the same time I love what could be considered “poverty food”. There is nothing like a casserole with ground beef, canned soup and a veggie.
I went to make curry the other day- called for peeled and chopped galangal. still not 100% sure what that is…
I’m pretty open minded about food so I’ll go with most ironic food I ever ate:
Ant brittle served at the Butterfly Conservancy in Niagara Falls. Afterwards it seemed a bit odd to be eating a near relative of the animals we were just enjoying. Kind of like having chicken barbeque outside the ostrich enclosure at a zoo. (The brittle sounded more exotic than it actually was…just kind of crunchy and sweet.)
Other thoughts:
It really is all a matter of perspective. When my DH and I were first married, he thought white rice was exotic because his mom never made anything except potatoes and bread. My DH is now open to just about any cuisine now and we have fun trying new dishes together. (He’s a good guy:-)
I like quinoa cooked with vanilla rice milk for breakfast topped with cinnamin sugar. Although I always have a hard time rinsing it as the grain is very tiny and floats — hard to do first thing in the morning when I’m not terribly awake.
A guy at my office brought in antelope jerky for us to try once.
Well, i have never cooked with it but we had a great squid curry at a Vietnamese restaurant several years ago. It was wonderful!
The strangest thing I’ve ever eaten was Turtle. At a family picnic my cousin asked everyone to try the fried chicken he brought. After we tried it, he told us it was turtle.
Pumpkin flowers….grandma taught us to dip them in batter and fry them.!!
I’m now vegetarian so my days of eating anything too strange are over. I’ve had eel in sushi, some people think British black pudding is a bit strange (my dears did not tell me what was in it before I ate it), now I just cook with different veggies and eat them at restaurants when given the chance: garlic scapes, yucca, hmm…not too exotic. 🙂
Tripe and sweetbreads. Ofal is not awful.
The strangest thing I use in cooking is dried, salted, fermented black beans. They smell disgusting and taste awful on thier own but used sparingly make delcious asian sauces. Also, cooking with Tamarind is a very involved process. It has to be hydrated and strained before you can even start and it tastes incredibly sour.
The oddest thing I have tried is pig’s blood. It’s something I could only get one bite of and don’t think I can ever try again. As far as cooking ingredients, that would have to be fish balls.
I’m vegetarian, so I avoid crazy meats, but I use seitan sometimes. It’s a vegetarian protein that is a really good chicken substitute, made out of wheat gluten. Supposedly it can be made by kneading flour in water, and rinsing off all of the starch until only the gluten is left (I haven’t tried making my own yet), and then boiling it in vegetable stock and soy sauce. And in addition to soy milk, I’ve had almond milk, rice milk, and hemp milk.
Weirdest things I’ve ever eaten were Japanese: natto (fermented soybeans that get all sticky and smell really gross), sea cucumber (which is an anemone kind of thing and not a plant and looks like a giant slug), scallop innards, fried fish skeletons, and other odd things.
Crawfish would be weird to most people because down here we don’t just eat the tails – we suck the marrow out of the heads.
As far as cooking with odd things, black pudding and haggis are probably the oddest things I’ve ever helped to prepare.
I’ve discovered that, while I’ll eat pretty much anything (and I do mean ANYTHING), I don’t necessarily want to cook it!!!
Honestly, my husband is so picky that chicken would be considered exotic in my house. He is a pure bred farm boy raised on steak and potatoes, haha!
Most unusual food I’ve ever eaten was some sort of pickled (sheep’s milk, I think) cheese I ate in Spain one summer. My husband hunts, so I’ve eaten all kinds of wild game: bear, elk, pronghorn antelope, caribou, wild turkey, grouse, etc. along with the usuals venison, duck, pheasant.
I have eaten alligator before. My kids absolutely love it. I have also eaten conch, bison, crawfish, squash blossoms (loved them all) oysters, terrapin (turtle)octopus and squid (not so much). There are probably more, but I can’t think of any. We try almost anything in our family…usually a good thing, but sometimes, yuck!
I’d have to say my mums tuna casserole.
My mother was a creative cook on occasion and her favourite was this – tuna, sultanas and plum jam with onions and whatever else she chose on the day. All served on rice.
No I didn’t like it and I still cringe at the thought of eating tuna to this day.
Mayonnaise in a chocolate cake was the weirdest receipe I’ve ever made. Must say though it was THE moistest, yummiest chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten.
wax! to make buckeye candies–it went with the chocolate to make the coating for the peanut butter center. i try not to think about it when I make/eat them!
I once ate a whole dish of ravioli ‘osso bucco’..something like that. It was ravioli with bone marrow in it. It was totally from my lack of Italian understanding–I ate it all and thought the texture was kind of weird…turns out I was right.
I just bought some Capers to use in a sauce today! Can’t wait to see how it tastes 😀
Not me, but my ex-husband – was served bear while visiting some friends in Canada. They didn’t tell him what it was until after he had eaten some. He had a very hard time with it, since he was very fond of stuffed bears. (I mentioned that he’s an EX husband, right?)
In college, I dated an Italian whose family made a lot of interesting things. One of which was beef tongue…let’s just say it didn’t taste like chicken!
Juniper berries, but I can’t even think of what the recipe was for now. Must not have been too delicious.
Nettles. Very nutritious but it stings like heck when you go to pick it. Cooked into a thick sauce it tastes pretty good.
I don’t think it’s weird, but some people that I’ve told about it think so – fiddlehead fern shoots. Delicious!
The most unusual thing I ever ate was rattlesnake – it was in nugget form and tasted like tough chicken. The most unusual thing I ever cooked was rabbit- I didn’t tell my family what is was til after they ate it- looked like chicken but not as tasty.
Alpaca, Cormo and BFL…the best!
ooops…wrong post! I was trying to enter Sheep Gals’ contest asking for which fiber was your favorite…was having trouble getting the post to go through and just thought I’d “try again later.” I jumped back on as I was heading to bed, added the comment and clicked “submit comment” before I realized I was on the wrong blog. I guess I really need some sleep!
I’d have to say buffalo but I believe it is much more common now than when I had it.
I can’t recall cooking or baking anything too exotic. However, I have tasted rose water.
This taste experience wasn’t mine, but I was there to see it – in the summer of 2008, my daughter and daughter-in-law tried mini-octopuses (octopi???) at a Chinese buffet on a mission trip in Laredo, TX – the looks on their faces – priceless!!
I don’t cook many unusual things, but then I don’t cook alot in general. Cilantro is something while not exotic I do have trouble cooking with.
i had scorpions while in China. they were kind of nutty.
I grew up in West Virginia, with a mother from Texas, so I ate a lot of chili with “different” meat, usually deer but often times other meats would infiltrate. If my father would skin it, my mom would put nearly anything in her chili or her pot pies. Squirrel chili. Opposum pot pie. Rabbit chili. Ground Hog chili. I can remember on time my dad bringing home the most gorgeous (dead) feathered pheasant. It was hit & he pulled it out of the grill of one of his dump trucks, brought it home and demanded ‘pheasant under glass’. He got pheasant chili.
When I finished college I lived in an apartment building in Maine. The building owner was a Maine Guide and he brought home a lot of MOOSE. I made moose stew, moose chili, moose meatballs…… I am not sure what we didn’t make with moose.
That’s a fun question. Some people think most of what we make here is odd but I’d say the oddest thing was shrimp shells. Hubster wanted some strong stock and went to the grocery fish department to ask if they had any shrimp shells he could buy. They looked at him funny, then gave him a huge bag of the things at no charge. Was the stock good? I don’t know cause I’m allergic to the stuff but he seemed pleased.
One of the most unusual foods that I have ever eaten was fried rattlesnake. It really was not bad, albeit it a little bit tough. The one that I could not stomach was steak tartare that my inlaws served at a reception for us in their hometown, not long after our wedding, 30-something years ago. It was awful, but my MIL thought it was this great delicacy. Well, about 20 years later, I got e Coli and was hospitalized for a week, so the thought of steak tartare is even more repulsive now than it was then, sorry, LOL.
To catspaw: shrimp shells make awesome rose food. When we lived along the Texas Gulf Coast, we used to get fresh shrimp right off the shrimp boats, so both our roses and we were big winners! 🙂
Gosh, my odd ingredient is nothing compared to some of these folks! I guess I would have to say the oddest food I’ve ever eaten was called “monkey brains.” Okay, so it wasn’t REALLY monkey brains (thank God)! But, when we were in Costa Rica, the locals kept calling them monkey brains. It was some sort of fruit that you sucked instead of chewed. It was interesteing! I think it might have actually been passion fruit, but am not 100% sure. The fresh lychees were also interesting.
I’ve used tahini paste as well but not that unusual I guess. I just remember the time when my husband & I used to cook all the time. Now it seems like our meals are tacos, burgers, chicken nuggets, mac & cheese, and busy night Tuesday = take out pizza. I can’t wait until my 5 children will eat food that we all like. They did eat enchiladas last night though! 🙂
the most unusual thing I’ve ever eaten is jellyfish! I was in China and it was cut up into little cubes and seasoned with some variation of brown sauce. It was simple and identifiable but still seemed strange to eat. It was crunchy!