Recipe #7: Sloppy Joes

Hey! I’m still around. Last week was a little crazy and that meant that dinners were leftovers, sandwiches, and takeout.

The semester started this week and Spring is notorious for being my bad semester. I have applications and admissions, plus graduations, on top of my other standard responsibilities. In other words, this is where this really does become a “challenge”. Not helping is that Matt and I came down with some virus. Matt has it worse than I do, I’m not sure if that is because I got a flu shot or not, or maybe it’s just holding off long enough so that Matt can recover before taking care of me. Either way right now I am counting my blessings. Although, despite all the business, I have been trying to stick to my meal planning.

Before I could make dinner Tuesday night though, we had a bit of excitement . We came home, and did our normal routine; threw lunch dishes into the sink, hung up our jackets, and headed back into the bedroom to take off shoes. While in the back we hear the familiar “Ding, ding, ding” of our refrigerator door begin ajar.
“Tell me you put something in the fridge just now.”
“No, did you?”
“No.”
Our fridge had been left ajar all day. It’s a french door, and if you open the left side and don’t push hard enough, it doesn’t quiet close. The thermometer inside read “65”. Well, crap. And so began the game of “it’s probably okay?”. The French do not refrigerate hard cheeses and they are aged so those are fine, the cream cheese not so much. Things like that.  Most of what got throw out was dairy based, leftovers, or was in the door. I used my various cooking thermometers to take temperatures. Thankfully, the ground beef I was planning to use for dinner was in the bottom drawer, I checked with my probe thermometer and it was still within safe temperatures. Our favorite carnitas, sadly did not pass the test. After a trip to Trader Joes to replace the lunch items we lost, I finally could start dinner was about a hour later than I intended. Thankfully, it was worth it

Sloppy Joes

This was another Mario Batali recipe and I LOVED this one. First of all, it had a sweet story behind it in that it is not entirely Mario Batali’s recipe. It was originally his son’s, he came up with to surprise his dad. Smart kid. His dad did adapt it slightly though for this version. Secondly, it was insanely simple and delicious, and it had just the right amount of heat. The filling is just onion, jalapeno, ground beef, tomato paste, and beer. Outside of maybe the beer, it’s not bad for you at all, and beer has it’s own health benefits, so I’m just going to go with “it’s not bad for you at all.” Just choose your bun wisely. I bet using ground turkey would be just as good too. The filling is yummy enough, but then you add the pico de gallo on top of it? Perfect! As Matt is not a fan of fresh tomatoes, he did not top his with the pico. Instead he went for cheddar cheese, which was delicious too (but how could it not be? Cheddar? Beef? Beer? C’mon.) I preferred the pico though, the cool crispness of the pico was the perfect complement to the filling.

This is going to be my go-to sloppy joe for now on…