Cheesy Root Vegetable Bake

What do you get when you take 2 pounds of potatoes, 3 turnips, 3 parsnips, 3 red onions and a mound of cheese? A delicious cheesy root vegetable bake.

Ingredients:
2 14.5 oz cans chickpeas (or 3-4 cups home soaked and cooked)
2 lbs. small red potatoes, quartered
3 turnips, cut into chunks
3 parsnips, cut into chunks
3 red onions, quartered
2 carrots, diced
salt and pepper to taste
2 tsp dried  rosemary
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried parsley
2 tsp garlic n herb (I'd just add 1-2 cloves minced garlic if I didn't have this)
3 T canola oil, or enough to lightly coat your vegetables
1.5 cups shredded cheese of choice (I used Monterrey jack and Cheddar)
* little bit of milk, added to the bottom of pan to keep things moist (note: I did think only with the casserole veggies, but I wish I did it with the baking sheet veggies too, just to keep the chickpeas from getting too crunchy)

Preheat over to 400 degrees F. Then start dicing dicing all your fix ins, and toss chickpeas and all vegetables (aside from the onion) into a large bowl. Coat vegetable with your canola oil or oil of choice. Add your spices and toss until spices are well mixed. Add to either 2 large casserole dishes or 2 large metal baking sheet (interestingly enough, I had one of each). Bake for 45 minutes to an hour (my baking sheet veggies were good after 45, my casserole dish veggies took close to an hour, which isn't much of a surprise since it was deeper and had more to cook). Drizzle your cheese on top and bake another 3-5 minutes.

Here is half the result of my efforts:

Ralph devoured 2/3 of this and I took the other 1/3.

As for the casserole dish, I forgot to take a pic before the hungry boy took a small bit to finish up his meal (New blogger note to self: Encourage loved ones to wait until after you take pictures of delicious meals, no matter how hungry they are, haha!). Not too much to see there except that it received a majority of the cheese, and contained a slight bit more food than the tray displayed above.

So far, we have made this last two meals for me and him. The second meal for him included a bowl of soup, in addition to two platefuls of veggies. Despite that, I still have enough left for two me sized meals (about two plates full).

Up next: Granola for surprise visits by the hungry boy and an introduction to Ralph's fun loving, personalized system for rating the meals (just to give an idea of how much food is involved from meal to meal and perhaps the heaviness of the meal.) I'll keep you posted. It'll be interesting, no worries.

-Emma

Semi Homemade to the Max

Hello all! Welcome to my first post on How to Feed a Hungry Boy!

 The reason why I chose this name is that my boyfriend, Ralph, and I have very different appetites (and sometimes tastes, but we both enjoy good food, home cooked or not). See, he's a moderately to vigorously active male in his twenties, and has a much larger caloric requirement than I.

As an example, he can easily consume two bagels well smeared with cream cheese for breakfast; two average homemade sandwiches for lunch (average being maybe 4-5 slices of meat plus one slice of cheese); and 3/4 of a pound of pasta for dinner with a hearty tomato sauce. In comparison, I eat about 2 standard servings of bread for breakfast, a sandwich and a piece of fruit for lunch, and I could definitely make a pound of pasta and a jar of sauce last at least 4 meals. I admit that I also snack more than he does in a day, but either way, we have very different views on how much food is necessary for our meals together.

This is my attempt to chronicle the meals I make for when he visits me. I hope you enjoy!

For my first meal, I decided to use a canned sauce. I'm usually not a huge fan of canned sauces, but they are certainly convenient and I'm not afraid to try a sauce at least once to see how I like it. I chose to use this curry sauce with some chicken to see how far I could stretch it:

To this sauce I added about 2 pounds of chicken drumsticks and thighs on the bone:

Last night's chicken was with the skin, but that's very much optional. Part of me wanted to try it because it's out of my usual cooking comfort zone.

After browning the chicken and adding the sauce to simmer for roughly 20 minutes, I started working on my grain component. I had about a cup and a half of buckwheat groats that I wanted to use up. I browned the groats with a little bit of canola oil for a minute at most. Then, I added roughly 2.5-3 cups of water and half a bouillon cube, brought it to a boil, then reduced to a simmer until all the water boiled off (roughly 15 minutes):

The end result? Here's my plate:

And here's the boy's, ahem, first serving:

We were both satiated after these portions, but Ralph went back for another plate after digesting a bit. All in all, I think this recipe was a success: there was enough food for bother of us, and even enough for leftovers for me for the remainder of the week (one meal tonight, and another for this weekend!).

So that was my meal for this week. I'm thinking about making a large pot of split pea soup for this weekend. Any other recipe suggestions? Let me know!

-Emma