Taking the ‘Tasty’ Challenge

#1: I’ve been trying to cook a variety of meals lately. Tacos every Tuesday is certainly not a bad thing, but it does occasionally get old. Okay, no it doesn’t, but diversity is a good thing.

#2: For awhile, LG and I were watching gymnastics videos online. Once we exhausted all the women’s all around competition videos from the last four Olympics games, we turned to watching Tasty videos on Facebook. You know the ones–one minute-long hyperlapsed videos of Buzzfeed staff making stuff.

The combination of Nos. 1 and 2 got me thinking. While I have been cooking from new cookbooks (Ottolenghi, for example), not all meals can be fancy pants and use every pot and pan in the kitchen. Sometimes you need something really low-brow that uses one pan and looks, well, tasty.

And so a challenge was born! Make Tasty recipes for dinner all week! And drag house Theme Chef, Erica, along with me!

When deciding on meals, I thought I’d go with two fatty, bad-for-you recipes and two healthy-ish recipes. I also knew I needed to pick something that included dough in a can, the hallmark of Tasty recipes. I landed on Pizza Rolls (bad-for-you), Thai-Style Lettuce Cups (healthy-ish), Black bean Burgers (healthy-ish), and One-Pan Lasagna (bad-for-you). Here’s how the first two shook out:

Recipe 1: These sausage, onion, and pepper pizza rolls were easy to put together, but I call complete bullshit on the amounts of ingredients they used. I halved the sausage, used two bell peppers instead of three, and didn’t add ham to my rolls (heh) and the dough still broke.

Now I’m not going to admit to user error, but it might have been user error. I didn’t have parchment paper, as the recipe called for, and since I didn’t want the pizza roll to stick to my ratchet baking sheets/foil, I made this on my pizza stone. I still cooked it at 375, though, when I probably should have increased the heat because of the stone. Anyway, we are still eating leftovers of this, so no real complaints.

Recipe 2: The name Thai-Style Larb Lettuce Cups sounded funny (larb!) and looked like they’d fit the healthy-ish bill. These were in fact tasty, but…I do not think I like fish sauce, which is featured twice in this recipe. I’ve used fish sauce before and didn’t have a bad reaction, so maybe it’s the brand I used this time? Either way…

Chris will be eating the leftovers from this.

Alright! Tune in later in the week to see how the other two recipes shook out!

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