Edweirdo's Cook Book - Fast And Easy Recipes Online
Learn To Cook Online - Fast And Easy Recipes!
Over the past months, I've published quite a few cooking and recipe hubs, and the time has come to gather them together.
So welcome to Edweirdo's Cook Book!
You'll find recipes here for Fast and Easy Recipes for everything from Simple Chicken with Rice and Beans to Decadent Cheesecake to an All-Out Thanksgiving Dinner Menu plan!
Each recipe contains easy to follow instructions, so even if you aren't a great cook, you just might learn how to cook online with these FREE recipes. I break down everything you need to know and do to ensure great results every time!
These recipes are all family favorites, and they never fail to satisfy the whole gang, from the finicky little kids to the more sophisticated adult palates!
Table Of Contents
Feel free to bookmark this hub and use this Table of Contents to jump to your favorite recipes!
Easy Recipe For The Best New England Clam Chowder
A traditional favorite in the Northeastern U.S., New England Clam Chowder is deceptively easy to make. It's a great comfort food - just the right thing for a chilly autumn evening. I make this recipe even easier by using canned minced clams and their juices. The recipe I give makes a sinfully rich chowder, but I also include some tips for making a lower fat, reduced calorie version that still delicious!
Simple Slow Cooker Vegan Chili Recipe (With Meat-Lover Options)!
Whether your a vegan or a dedicated carnivore, this Slow Cooker Chili Recipe is so easy and tasty that you'll wonder how you ever made it this far in life without it! The ideal Slow Cooker recipe, you can prepare this one the night before and then let it simmer in the slow cooker for a few hours the next day. To make it truly simple, I use canned beans - if you can work a can opener, you can make this hearty family favorite!
Easy 30-Minute Stove-Top Lasagna Recipe
Believe it or not, you can make an amazing homemade Lasagna in one pan on the stove-top! The secret to this recipe is in the layering - you start by sautéing the onions and bell peppers, then add the ground meat, then a layer of regular uncooked lasagna noodles. Top it off with canned tomatoes and cook covered on the stove. As the liquid from the canned tomatoes heats up, the steam it generates cooks the pasta perfectly in just 20 minutes! When it's all done top it with ricotta and mozzarella cheese and serve!
How To Make The Best Penne A La Vodka!
This Italian restaurant favorite is actually not even an Italian dish - it was developed by a vodka company as a sales gimmick to sell more booze! Now you can make a Penne a la Vodka that's better than anything in any restaurant, and it only takes 30 minutes from start to serve! For even better results you can substitute quality pancetta for the sausage, but it's so good with sausage that you don't even need to spend the extra cash for pancetta...
How To Make The Best Roast Turkey
If you've ever tried to cook the perfect thanksgiving turkey and it just wasn't that great, I can fix that! This recipe walks you through the greatest fear of every apprehensive or burgeoning home cook - the Turkey! The secret is in the brine, but the real key is to cook that bird hot and fast. No more waking up before the sun to start that Thanksgiving dinner - with this technique, a 14-16 pound turkey is cooked in about 3 hours...
Fast and Easy Chicken With Rice And Beans
Chicken with Rice and Beans is about as basic a meal as you can find. This recipe uses skinless, boneless chicken breasts and whole grain white rice for a healthy weeknight meal that's ready in about 30 to 40 minutes. The rice is almost like a risotto - the recipe uses 4 parts liquid to 1 part rice for a creamier rice than the traditional equal parts of each method for rice preparation.
How To Make The Best Homemade Macaroni And Cheese
One more great comfort food that is sure to become a family favorite! This one uses a simple bechamel sauce as the base for the cheese sauce - there's even a step-by-step video in case making a bechamel sauce is new to you. There's a crispy breadcrumb topping, and I use two different cheeses - and lots of each - the make a dangerously cheesey Homemade Macaroni and Cheese!
↑ Return to Table of Contents ↑
How To Make The Best Italian Meatballs - Fast And Easy!
These incredible Italian Meatballs are made with three different meats for lots of flavor in a tiny package! A mixture of Beef, Pork and Veal (usually sold as "Meatloaf Mix") is used along with Fresh Parley, grated Parmesan Cheese and Homemade Breadcrumbs to create quick and easy meatballs. They can be made as big or as small as you like. I also show you how to par-cook them and freeze them for later - that way you can make several dozen all at once and have meatballs ready and waiting anytime!
Easy, Healthy Recipes For Fruit Salsa!
Turn traditional salsa on its head and try some of these spicy-sweet Fruit Salsa Recipes at you next barbecue! These easy healthy recipes use a variety of fruits and chili peppers for some amazing sweet-and-spicy flavor combinations. Liven up your summer meals with these easy and healthy fresh fruit salsa recipes!
Make Delicious Sage Sausage And Apple Stuffing
It's just not Thanksgiving without some stuffing! The excellent Sage Sausage and Apple Stuffing recipe is made outside the turkey for best results, so you could even make it in smaller quantities as an everyday addition to any meal. For special occasions, I use homemade bread crumbs, and I even threw in a Zucchini Bread Recipe that you can use for a great twist on this traditional side dish!
How To Make Delicious Garlic Mashed Potatoes
The perfect side dish for any meat entrée, these creamy Garlic Mashed Potatoes are sure to be a hit. Ideal for holiday dinners or everyday meals, this recipe uses Yukon Gold Potatoes for great results every time. I even give tips and techniques to ensure that your Mashed Potatoes are never gluey, and also teach you how to make your chunky "homestyle" Mashed Potatoes or smooth and creamy potatoes that will rival any restaurant version...
How To Make The Best Homemade Cookies - Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies!
Once a closely guarded secret, I recently decided to share this Chocolate Chunk Cookie recipe with the world for FREE! Actually, it's a recipe I found on a bag of chips, but with a few tweaks in both ingredients and preparation, I made it my own and improved the results dramatically! The secret to the success of these amazing cookies is the extra butter and letting the dough rest in the fridge before cooking - if you can resist the temptation of cooking them right away, these Chocolate Chunk Cookies will be sinfully delicious!
The Best Cheesecake Recipe Ever!
This one is a family recipe, handed down from the days when no one knew what calories were and it was believed that fatty foods and lots of sugar were good for you! This Cheesecake is so rich and deliciously creamy that you should probably only prepare it once a year - and is you let it sit in the refrigerator for a couple of days before serving, it even better!
How To Make The Most Delicious Key Lime Pie
Traditional Key Lime Pie just might be the simplest pie ever invented! With just 3 ingredients for the filling and a pre-baked graham cracker crust (homemade or store-bought), fabulous desserts don't get any simpler than this. If you want to make it harder on yourself, and a little bit tastier with the addition of fresh lime zest, then you can squeeze your own fresh Key limes. But some high quality authentic Key lime juice gives excellent results, too!
How To Make The Best Delicious Chocolate Brownies Ever!
If you just can't get enough chocolate in your diet, then this Chocolate Brownie Recipe is right up your alley! With three different kinds of chocolate, plus extra chocolate chips, these are some seriously chocolaty Brownies. In not much longer than it takes to make them from a box mix, you can make the fugdiest, most choco-licious brownies EVER!
How To Make Delicious Banana Bread
If your tastes tilt more towards the healthy when it comes to dessert time, you should try making this fantastic banana bread! The trick is to use bananas that are very, very ripe - their naturally occurring sugars mean that you can add less sugar; this recipe uses just 1/2 a cup of brown sugar and some honey for sweetness.
If you want to go that extra mile, calories be damned, then there's also a great Streusel topping recipe included. The recipe can even be used to make Banana Bread Muffins!
Why Should I Make My Own Home Made Vegetable Stock? It's Free Food!
How would you like to make one of the most basic and most useful main ingredients in any well-stocked kitchen for FREE? Well, that's just what I'll teach you how to do in this recipe for Homemade Vegetable Stock, using the vegetable trimmings and scraps that you'd normally throw away. And if you like to compost your veggie scraps, why not make good use of them first by cooking up a batch of stock and then composting! You can use Vegetable Stock in soups and stews, rice, risotto, chili, as a poaching liquid for meat, in gravy... The list goes on and on, and you can make your own for free!
How To Make Quick and Easy Turkey Giblet Gravy
Making homemade gravy is easier than you might think! I tried unsuccessfully to make my own gravy, but it never came out right. Then I discovered the key to making Perfect Gravy every time - all you need is a good flavor base, like turkey giblets, and a roux. In this recipe I'll show you how to prepare those giblets from inside your Thanksgiving turkey to make perfect gravy every time. There's even a video that shows how to make a roux that even a novice cook will be able to follow along!
Are Canned Tomatoes Good For Homemade Pasta Sauce?
For many years I was reluctant to make my own tomato sauce. I had seen my grandmother spend days peeling and seeding and crushing garden-grown tomatoes every summer, and then spending the whole day turning them into sauce. That was just too much effort, and the end result wasn't always good enough to justify all that work! Then I saw a cooking show on TV that said Canned Tomatoes could be just as good - and even better - than fresh. That blew my mind - I had always thought of canned vegetables as inferior to fresh, but if you choose the right ones they can provide as-good-as-fresh results year-round...
Thanksgiving Dinner Menu
If you're looking to prepare the perfect Thanksgiving Dinner Menu, then look no further! Here are some quick links to the components of an easy, no-fail Turkey Dinner!
Cooking Tips!
Here are some videos that cover some of the basic kitchen skills that every good cook should learn...
How To Cook Pasta The Right Way!
How to make a Roux
How to make a Bechamel Sauce
Photo Credits
Lasagna photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/startcooking/ / CC BY 2.0
Chowder photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodista/ / CC BY 2.0
Chili photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/miikkah/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Penne photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/joconnell/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Turkey photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuchodi/ / CC BY 2.0
Mac and cheese photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/benimoto/ / CC BY 2.0
Meatball photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejane/ / CC BY 2.0
Potato photo from Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Cookie photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/clearlyambiguous/ / CC BY 2.0
Cheesecake photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Key lime photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/greencolander/ / CC BY 2.0
Brownie photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dichohecho/ / CC BY 2.0
Veggie photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/11115086@N00/ / CC BY 2.0
Turkey with gravy photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/allthingschill/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Tomato photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/my_world_perspective/ / CC BY 2.0
Watermelon photo in the Public Domain from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Watermelon.jpg
