(10 seconds each to read and are almost that quick to prepare)
By Lisa Messinger
Food and Cooking at Creators Syndicate
We've all heard about doing a thorough spring cleaning of our home to leave room for plenty of exciting new items. There's no reason to stop after you purge that closet, straighten that drawer or scour that bathtub. Set your sights on your pantry and refrigerator. Buildup there can usually rival any other spot in the house and you could find much more tasty items than lost change in a couch or a stray sock under a bed. Many of us mindlessly purchase and don't realize the buildup we're creating. I'll never forget helping a relative, who is a mother of three young children, move into a new home and unpacking her boxes marked "pantry." There were doubles and triples of identical pastas, sauces, soups, cereals, salad dressings and condiments that she was shocked to see. Lesson One is, of course, keep track of what you have and only buy more as products are running out, or at most have only one backup around at a time.
But if that lesson is long overdue, every season do a thorough inventory and make quick meals from the extras you find. Below are some of the most common items many of us forget we've got piling up as well as some speedy ideas to put them to good use, such as an exotic cooked grain salad that utilizes leftover vinaigrette salad dressing, a double-the-fun pasta that also includes all the best parts of pizza and fruit smoothies that get pumped up by grinding up scraps of your cereals.
Food preparation can be easy, nutritious, inexpensive, fun - and fast - as these split-second sensations prove. They take just
10 seconds each to read and are almost that quick to prepare. The dishes are delicious proof that everyone has time for tasty home cooking and, more importantly, the healthy family time in the kitchen that goes along with it! Another benefit: You effortlessly become a better cook, since there
are no right or wrong amounts. These are virtually-can't-go-wrong combinations, so whatever you - or your kidlet helpers - choose to use can't help but draw "wows" at your next family meal.
SALAD DRESSING
Vavavavoom Vinaigrette Grain Salad
Prepare a grain like wild rice, high-protein crunchy quinoa or buckwheat and let cool. Toss with chunks of gouda or feta cheese, chopped red onion, sliced celery, chunks of Fuji or other apples, chopped pecans, freshly ground black pepper, freshly chopped basil and mint and bottled vinaigrette dressing. Serve at room temperature (but refrigerate at all other times).
Needs-No-Translation French Dressed Chicken
Mix bottled French dressing with cayenne pepper, dried oregano and fresh lime juice. Toss chunks of cooked chicken into a wok that was first sprayed with nonstick cooking spray and then heated. Carefully cover with the French dressing mixture and stir often until sauce starts to caramelize, but does not burn or get overly sticky. Serve over beds of cooked spinach.
PASTA
Double Fun Pizza-Flavored Pasta
Cook pasta according to package instructions. Drain. Toss with bottled pizza sauce, shredded mozzarella and provolone cheeses, diced cooked turkey pepperoni, diced cooked turkey sausage, sliced black olives, sliced green bell pepper and sliced sauteed mushrooms. Sprinkle with crushed red pepper. Serve hot.
Super Spaghetti Tacos
Where have you been if you haven't heard of the spaghetti tacos made famous on the kids' hit TV series "iCarly" and then gone viral on the Internet? They are quite literally just sauced spaghetti stuffed in crispy taco shells.
You can make more innovative, healthful - yet just as fun - versions with the multiple boxes of spaghetti you may come across when tidying up your pantry. For instance, cook spaghetti according to package instructions. Drain. Toss with olive oil, finely crushed peanuts (a good substitution for pine nuts, whose prices have gone through the roof), diced figs or dried apricots, Italian seasoning blend, freshly ground black pepper and browned fully cooked ground chicken breast crumbles. Spoon onto whole-grain tortillas that you've spread very lightly with store-bought pesto and wrap up.
CANNED FOOD
Fiery Fish Stew
Combine canned vegetable broth, canned beans, canned chilies, and flaked canned tuna and/or salmon in a saucepan. Flavor with bottled Cajun seasoning blend. Heat until very hot. Serve with store-bought cornbread that you've topped lightly with additional canned chilies and low-fat shredded Cheddar cheese before heating in oven or microwave for a few seconds, until cheese begins to melt.
Inside-Out Soup 'n' Sandwich
Prepare grilled cheese sandwiches on rye bread with flavorful cheeses, like Gorgonzola and Gruyere. Heat one or a mixture of canned soups according to can directions and flavor with freshly ground black pepper and cayenne pepper. Cut the grilled cheese sandwiches into bite-sized squares and toss into the hot soup as innovative croutons.
CEREAL
Sweet 'n' Sour Cereal
In a sturdy plastic bag, with a rolling pin crush a mixture of all of your almost-used-up cereals and season with garlic and onion powders. Toss into a skillet with honey, fresh lemon juice, vinegar and cooked chicken breast bite-sized chunks and coat and stir continuously until mixed well and hot. This tastes like mee krob, a popular crunchy, sweet-and-sour Thai appetizer.
Cereal Smoothies
Place the remains of your favorite whole-grain cereals, like bran, rolled oats or granola in the blender after you've added your smoothies ingredients, like fresh fruit, juice, soymilk and whey protein powder.
The grain addition - which gets pulverized during blending - will add important fiber and nutrients to the meal replacement beverage. It's often used by trainers and chefs in the know, like those at the exclusive W Hotel chain, which serves travelers granola within its soy-blueberry-banana smoothie on its acclaimed specialized power breakfast menu.
QUICK TIP OF THE WEEK: Teavana, the national chain full of unique tea service gifts and exotic antioxidant-filled loose tea blends, is quick to school us in the glossy literature they give out with every purchase how variable caffeine is in tea and that you don't need to follow the popular myth that a tea must be purposely chemically decaffeinated to tone down your caffeine ingestion. Though black tea and black tea blends have 100 percent the caffeine of coffee, popular white teas and many of the blends that can be made from them with herbal add-ins have just 1 percent the caffeine of coffee. Most eye-opening: "Caffeine is very water soluble," they write, "making it easy to get rid of quickly! You can naturally decaffeinate any leaf tea by steeping it for 20 to 30 seconds and discarding the resulting liquid. Steep the leaves again for a super-low caffeine brew."
Lisa Messinger is a first-place winner in food and nutrition writing from the Association of Food Journalists and the National Council Against Health Fraud and author of seven food books, including the best-selling The Tofu Book: The New American Cuisine with 150 Recipes (Avery/Penguin Putnam) and Turn Your Supermarket into a Health Food Store: The Brand-Name Guide to Shopping for a Better Diet (Pharos/Scripps Howard). She writes two nationally syndicated food and nutrition columns for Creators Syndicate and had been a longtime newspaper food and health section managing editor, as well as managing editor of Gayot/Gault Millau dining review company. Lisa traveled the globe writing about top chefs for Pulitzer Prize-winning Copley News Service and has written about health and nutrition for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Reader's Digest, Woman's World and Prevention Magazine Health Books. Permission granted for use on Dr.Laura.com.
