I (Max) am trying to practice making quick and easy dinners that don’t take a lot of time, or ingredients, or cooking pans. Even though I still have a couple of years of high school left, I am thinking dorm room specials, that I would only need a microwave or electric cooking plate, so tonight I came up with: Quick & Easy Sloppy Joes.  For this meal you need 4 ingredients: ground turkey (or ground beef), tomato sauce, olive oil and rolls or buns.

These are the steps:  heat the olive oil and then saute the ground turkey until there is no pink.  I like to use a metal spatula to break up the ground beef but don’t use metal if you are cooking in a non stick pan.  If there is a lot of oil in the pan, spoon some of it out and discard. Otherwise your sloppy joes will be sloppy and greasy.

The next step is to pour in a little of the tomato sauce and let it all simmer together for 15-20 minutes.  (It’s ok if you pour in too much, but then its more like a bolognese sauce, and you might need spaghetti instead of buns to eat it.)

Finally, you serve it on your favorite buns. Note if you have more time, you can make the tomato sauce from scratch (but I know I will be busy studying, so sauce in a jar will have to do for me.)

We were upstate for President’s Day weekend and decided to roast a chicken to serve with mashed potatoes.  Unfortunately mom forgot to buy potatoes.  Fortunately we had made baked potatoes the night before and had some left so we decided to turn those into mashed potatoes….slightly unorthodox but pretty delicious.

For the chicken, we removed the liver and neck and washed the chicken in cold water. Then we patted it dry with paper towels and put it in our pan.  (Then we washed our hands).  Normally we would put lemon slices and herbs inside (but again, mom forgot to buy them…to be fair we didn’t tell her, and since we in the country, we couldn’t just run to Trader Joes or Whole Foods to get them).   Anyway, we just decided to do a good salt and pepper of it, and stuck it in the oven.  (note the photo of the liver…we didn’t cook or eat that!).  We cooked the chicken at 350 degrees for about 60 minutes: until it was golden brown and the thigh juices were clear.

About 45 minutes into the cooking time for the chicken, we tackled the potatoes.  First we peeled the already baked potatoes.  Then we chopped them up, added milk and butter and heated in the microwave. And then we mashed them. Pretty simple, right.  If you want mashed potatoes, but don’t have time to boil potatoes for 30 minutes: just bake a potatoe in the microwave and add butter and milk and mash, just like we did.

We also made biscuits (but from a Pillsbury package): They were very good but we can’t really claim credit.  The only skill involved there was NOT burning them