Dog food, anyone?

Both my husband, Rick, and I work full time. And even though we don’t have any kids yet, it’s still a challenge to figure out what’s for dinner. Generally, that seems to be mostly my responsiblity. Big surprise, right? And tonight was no different.

Rick called me around 4 p.m. asking me the usual – what’s for dinner? I like to respond with a flip, ‘I don’t know; what are you planning on?’ But the fact is, if we want to eat, I’m pretty much our best bet.

Now, before Rick gets all upset, I want to clarify that he does plan and cook occasionally. Over the weekend, he prepared one of our favorite chili recipes from allrecipes.com (one of my favorite places to troll for ideas) called Award Winning Chili. (Until I figure out how to create a live link on a Mac, please copy and paste this URL if you’d like to try it:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Award-Winning-Chili/Detail.aspx)

Energized by his success, he decided he also wanted to make a pot roast this week. Unfortunately, we never did get around to going to the grocery store to pick up the meat. Long story long, we had limited items to work with in the homestead for this evening’s meal.

In an effort to cut down on wasted food (as my mom would say, it’s a sin what we throw away in this house), I decided to get creative and make something out of the leftover browned meat Rick didn’t use in his chili.

I combined it with a can of refried beans, a can of semi-drained black beans and a can of semi-drained diced tomatoes. The result? Something that looked like a cross between dog food and a newborn’s diaper. But that didn’t stop me from warming a tortilla in a fry pan and making a quesadilla out of it, smothered in some shredded cheddar.

In an ideal world, I would have whipped up a side of Spanish rice, but I didn’t get home from work until about 6:30 and I had to leave by 7:30 in order to make it to my volleyball match. So I just plopped it on a paper plate, put some of the ‘loose’ concoction on top with a sprinkling of cheese and some salsa. And I threw a few jalapeno slices on mine.

The verdict? Not bad. But next time I’d probably drain the canned stuff a little better; it was a little watery, which made the flipping of the quesadillas somewhat messy. All in all, though, not too shabby for just throwing a bunch of odds and ends together. And it feels good to experiment once in a while.