So I am going to keep the dialogue short here and just get to the measurements. After all, it is a beautiful weekend you need to get out and enjoy it!

On to the research. Here is what I got when measuring:

Recipes Using Tomatillos:

• Homemade Salsa Verde
• Mexican Verde Casserole

Your Recipes Using Tomatillos:

ticipating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you! And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . .XX

Raspberries are my go to fruit. They are my substitute for my strawberry allergy. Does a recipe call for strawberries? I use raspberries instead in most cases. I love them. So do my kids. Of course I could do without the seeds stuck in my teeth but that pretty much goes without mentioning, right?

We do occasionally use them in our OAMM cooking so I thought it best to do a Sliced & Diced on them. And if you hadn’t noticed in the grocery store the “pint” size containers for raspberries are actually 6 oz, not the standard 8 oz. And you should note that most fruits come in 16 oz packages, not raspberries, they come in 12 oz. Those little boogers are cheap!

Here are my measuring results:

Recipes Using Raspberries:

• Fruity Breakfast Burritos
• Frozen Fruit Cups
• Lemon Raspberry Delight
• Slow Cooker Raspberry Sauce
• Rice Krispies Raspberry White Chocolate Trifle
• Raspberry Kiwi Smoothie
• Chocolate Raspberry Muffins
• Gluten Free Dairy Free Raspberry Crumb Coffeecake
• Raspberry Rhubarb Muffins

Your Recipes Using Raspberries:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you! And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . .tomatillos.

At any rate, Georgia peaches are about as sweet as the come and absolutely delicious in my opinion. Although, I must admit, the best peach I have ever had in my entire life was last August when I was in Seattle for a conference and visiting Pike Place market. I have absolutely never had a peach that melted in my mouth like that one. It was like candy it was so sweet. Amazing. Hard to believe that it was good for me, that peach. Yum. I am might just have to hop a plane to Seattle after I finish writing that. You simply don’t get peaches that good in Ohio.

Peaches don’t appear on our menus often but they do occasionally. And they are most definitely in season this time of year. So it begs the question. How many diced peaches come from one peach? And what about slices? Good questions! Here are some answers:

Recipes Using Peaches:

Hmm, apparently they are all baby food recipes, maybe we need some adult recipes too?

• Peach, Apple & Strawberry Puree
• Ham, Pineapple, Peach & Apple Puree
• Peach Puree Recipe 2

Your Recipes Using Peaches:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you! And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . .raspberries

Both of my children loved pureed blueberry baby food. I would add it to apples, pears, bananas, just about any other fruit to make a fun combo. I always made sure that I was the one doing the feeding that day though. Blueberries will stain!

Of my two children, Isaac is the blueberry lover. He can spot them from yards away and begins begging. If given the opportunity he can eat the whole pint in one sitting. In fact, as a baby it was common for me to change his diaper and his bottom would be stained blue. No lie. And that is where the diaper talk will end.

At any rate, they are a staple on our grocery list every week and a constant in Once A Month Mom recipes. You will find plenty of blueberry recipes around here. But when you buy a pint, how much are you getting? That is where this week’s Sliced & Diced comes in!

Recipes Using Blueberries:

• Blueberry Baby Food Puree
• Fruity Breakfast Burritos (in Survive Before 5 eCookbook)
• Frozen Fruit Cups
• Raspberry Kiwi Smoothie Recipe
• Vegetarian Blueberry Muffins
• Blueberry Banana Muffins
• Summer Fruity Romaine Salad
• Gluten Free & Dairy Free Blueberry Breakfast Cookies

Your Recipes Using Blueberries:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you! And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . .peaches. Also check out the upcoming month’s schedule:

July

August

I’m never really sure how to start these posts. Especially about fruits/vegetables that aren’t so glamorous. Poor carrots. They just seem so ordinary to me. An orange root. I am sure Bugs Bunny would beg to differ but I just can’t come up with anything funny, witty, clever or intelligent for talking about carrots.

I will say that we eat carrots around here regularly. They appear in our main dishes, as side dishes and even as snacks. We love them! If you are having trouble getting your kids to eat carrots you an even try pureeing them and adding them to other dishes to sneak in some vegetables. Go ahead, no one’s looking (and will likely not notice for that matter).

So since I lack cleverness, let’s just get to the point here:

Before I get on to the research, I should probably clarify my methodology a bit on this one. I counted several bags of carrots and arrived at an average. When I was choosing the carrots I was going to use for determining 1 cup, I chose the carrots that seemed “medium” to me so that we would have the best average. I KNOW that carrots and packaging differ, but I am trying to determine some hard numbers for us to go by in our cooking. So. I take the middle of the road. Know that your results may be a little more or a little less depending.

Recipes Using Carrots:

• Lentil and Wild Rice Soup
• Slow Cooker Pineapple Pepper Chicken Stew
• Healthy Mushroom Barley Soup
• Slow Cooker Buffalo Chicken Chili
• Buffalo Chicken Shepherd’s Pie
• Apple Cider Beef Stew
• OAMM’s Favorite Beef Pot Roast
• Toddler Mini Meatloaf
• Veggie Pizza
• Vegetable Soup
• Baby Food Carrot Recipe

Your Recipes Using Carrots:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you! And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . .blueberries.

Proceed with Caution

Dangerous. Small but mighty. Penetrating. HOT.

These are the words that come to mind when I think jalapenos. Up until this post, I can’t say that I had ever worked that much with jalapenos. As would be evidenced in the list of Once A Month Mom recipes containing jalapenos. None.

We just aren’t a hot and spicy family (well, not in the kitchen at least – wink, wink). It hasn’t been until recently that I have started expanding my palette to more spicy foods. So jalapenos? Not on our regular grocery list. So I took heed when readers indicated it was important to wear gloves. And I dug a pair out of the closet.

Small/Medium Jalapenos

I have here a small and a medium jalapeno. I couldn’t find any that I would deem large and we typically just use the medium measurements around these parts so I just included the measurements for those two sizes. I hope this will help in our once a month cooking. I do know that there are plenty of jalapenos in recipes on our OAMM menus.

What do you think of jalapenos? Do you use them often? Do you wear gloves? Any horror stories from jalapeno prep?

On to the research. Here is what I got when measuring:

Recipes Using Jalapenos:

• Oops! There don’t appear to be any, I suppose we are going to have to work on that!

Your Recipes Using Jalapenos:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you! And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . .Carrots.

At any rate, I know bacon isn’t a produce item but we do use it quite frequently on our OAMM menus. So I felt like a good bacon post was in order. I am willing to wager that you use quite a few recipes with bacon too. So here are the results of my bacon research. It was painstaking, but someone has to do it.

Bacon Hashbrown Breakfast Wraps

Recipes Using Bacon:

• Baked Beans
• OAMM’s Mom’s Spaghetti Sauce
• Bacon & Bleu Burgers
• Spicy BLTA Manwich
• Not So Naughty Bacon Cheeseburger Egg Roll
• Breakfast Bagel Egg Sandwiches
• Bacon Hashbrown Breakfast Wraps

Your Recipes Using Bacon:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you! And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . . Jalapenos.

Honestly, prior to the integration of the Whole Foods and Vegetarian menus I had rarely used black beans in our past menus. But the more menus I add the more I see black beans making a regular appearance on our menus.

Additionally, Katie of a Kitchen Stewardships Everything Beans Book was an added encouragement to do some comparison and contrasting of black beans. And from what I can tell, black beans will be a regular part of monthly menus from here on out. So I haven’t had the chance to do all the beans yet, but for black beans here are the equivalents and yields:

Black Bean Avocado Dip

Recipes Using Black Beans:

• Black Bean Salsa Quesadillas
• Chicken Burritos
• Homemade Black Refried Beans
• Healthy Grilled Pizza
• Black Bean Avocado Dip

Your Recipes Using Black Beans:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you!

And start preparing for next week’s Sliced & Diced. . .Bacon.

**This post contains affiliate links.

I absolutely love strawberries, or rather, I did. Until I realized that they caused me to go into anaphylactic shock. Yes, I (Tricia) appear to be allergic to strawberries. Funny enough I don’t respond to strawberries in allergy testing BUT no doubt about the fact that eating them would require an accompanying epi-pen. So we steer clear. I haven’t always been this way with strawberries but looking back over my life I can definitely recall warning signs of increased intolerance. And I was shocked to find out how common strawberry allergies really are.

Photo Credit: Geir Halvorsen Flickr Creative Commons

Needless to say, despite the fact that I am allergic, I have a deep appreciation and dormant love of strawberries. They are great in a baked good, in a pie, as a topping or spread, in a salsa, you name it, they are pretty much good in it. Okay, not hamburgers. Not good in hamburgers.

Anyway, it was time to do a little slicing and dicing of strawberries to figure out their yields and equivalents. After all, they do make quite a few appearances on our menus, especially in the Spring and early Summer months when they are in season.

Here is what I got when measuring:

Now onto the tasty treats that grace our menus and your tables that include strawberries. They are in season so make sure that you try some of these (that is if you aren’t allergic like me).

Recipes Using Strawberries:

• Strawberry Banana Breakfast Popsicles
• Perfect Pound Cake with Fresh Strawberries
• Gluten and Dairy Free Strawberry Scones
• Strawberry Chocolate Chip Scones
• Strawberry Orange Smoothie
• Baby Food: Strawberry, Peach & Apple Puree
  

Your Recipes Using Strawberries:

When participating please consider following these guidelines. Thank you!

Notice, I didn’t say I loved it. I tried it, it didn’t make me sick, and I could even imagine eating it again. And then my friend Jamie gave me some helpful hints for how she roasted it. And I was in love.

I love the Spring and Fall seasons when it is in season. It especially like it roasted but still crispy. Mmm. I can eat them almost as I eat french fries, I love them that much.

And the restroom afterwards? Well, that is just all sorts of weird and mysterious after-wards isn’t it? Don’t know what I am talking about? Guess you will have to try some asparagus to find out!

The real point of this post is to point you in the direction of how much to purchase to yield the amount you need in once a month cooking recipes. So without further ado, here is what my research yielded:

Recipes Using Asparagus:

• Sauteed Vegetable Medley
• Parmesan Linguine with Asparagus, Zucchini & Snap Peas
• Fire Roasted Vegetable Pasta

Now it is your turn to share YOUR asparagus recipes. Just be kind and remember the Sliced & Diced rules:

True, there are sites like Gourmet Sleuth and About.com that have some equivalents and yields but I find that they aren’t always complete data needed for our menus. So I am reintroducing Sliced & Diced in hopes that we can dig into some new products we commonly use.

And as always, I would love for you to link up your recipes that correspond to that week’s Sliced & Diced item. So there will be a linky (a bit of a carnival) for you to relate relevant recipes. And for those of you that don’t have blogs, I will be introducing unique ways for you to share your recipes as well! So stay tuned.

In the meantime, I thought I would give you a heads up as to what items we would be tackling in the coming weeks so you can get your recipe posts ready. As always, we ask that you follow these guidelines for linking up:

1. Link up to http://onceamonthmom.com and/or this series on your blog post including the indicated ingredient. (Yes, you can go back and add a link to already posted relevant posts that you would like to link.)
2. On Saturdays, come on over and link up that recipe in the weekly linky. (Be sure to link directly to the post, not your blog home page.)
3. Be kind and visit at least one other link on the list!

Okay, so here is the upcoming schedule for you to ready yourself:

May

15 – Asparagus

21 – Strawberries

28 – Black Beans

June

4 – Bacon

11 – Jalapenos

18 – Carrots

July

August

Honestly, I don’t know why broccoli has such a bad wrap. Do you? Perhaps it is the offensive odor that it gives off when cooked? You know, like dirty socks on a wet rainy day? Yea, I guess that isn’t so tasty sounding. But really, when cooked well, not overcooked it is a magnificent vegetable.

I can’t tell you how elated I was when my husband finally came around to broccoli. Our whole relationship changed! Okay, I am exaggerating. But our menu options sure did open up!

At any rate, it is broccoli season so I thought we should talk equivalents and yields for heads of broccoli. Keep in mind that head sizes vary but this is a rough estimate of what to expect from broccoli.

Recipes Using Broccoli:

• Chicken Broccoli Casserole
• Homemade Cheesy Rice
• Mango Chicken Vegetable Bake
• Sauteed Vegetable Medley
• Veggie Pizza

You may have noticed there was quite a bit of sausage on the September 2010 menu. It just seems like such a “fall” type food to me. And the more I taste of it and explore, the more I like it. Not sure it is great for my heart to eat in large quantities but it sure is tasty.

Honestly, we have eaten more of it now that I am married then before. My husband likes sausage in just about any way it comes. Perhaps it is the fact that it is a close kin to bacon that makes him love it so, who knows?

No matter what, when it is on a once a month menu in large quantities it is helpful to know the equivalents and yields for cooked and uncooked amounts. Here is what my research yielded:

Recipes Using Sausage:

• Pizza Soup with Croutons
• Down Home Spaghetti Sauce
• Down Home Meatball (Subs)
• Spaghetti Sauce

Your Recipes Using Sausage:

If you are wanting to use less processed foods in your diet and more of your own homemade goods, making your own breadcrumbs is most definitely an option as well. But how many cups of breadcrumbs can you expect to yield from the average size loaf of bread, hamburger buns, or hot dog buns? Good question!

I went to work on my bread to come up with some answers for you. Here are my results:

So next time you go to the pantry and are without the needed breadcrumbs or you have some bread a little past its prime, you know what to do and how much you are going to need!

Recipes Using Breadcrumbs:

• Chicken Parmigiana
• Eggplant Parmesan
• Mini-Meatloaf
• Down Home Meatball (Subs)
• Sicilian Meatloaf
• Baked Chicken Nuggets
• Chicken Macaroni Bake
• Chicken Ziti

Your Recipes Using Breadcrumbs:

Lemons. A beautiful fruit. So tart but oh so refreshing. We use them periodically in our once a month cooking days. If I don’t have fresh on hand I usually settled for bottled lemon juice as it is usually the juice we are after. But there really is nothing like fresh squeezed lemon juice! It is so refreshing. Oh. Wait. I said that already!

At any rate, we will be using lemons in our upcoming cooking days so I wanted to take an opportunity while they were plentiful, and of varying sizes at the grocer, to do this weeks Sliced & Diced on them.

Here are my results:

I love green peppers. They are great straight from the garden, cut up and dipped in ranch dressing. Mmm. I also liked them cooked in many dishes. I have recently experimented with a variation on stuffed peppers because I am not such a fan of the traditional kind. These were a much healthier version to me and were much tastier than the traditional variety.

As for equivalents and yields, here are my measuring results:

Recipes Using Green Peppers:

• Baked Spaghetti
• Johnny Marzetti with Cheese Noodles
• Italian Stuffed Peppers

Your Recipes Using Green Peppers:

There isn’t an abundance of opportunities for us to use green beans in our Once A Month Mom menus, but there are on occasion. And I was attempting to make Tessa some green bean baby food so I thought it would be a perfect time to do a sliced and diced edition on them. That and they are on the  August 2010 menu.

Here are my results:

Recipes Using Green Beans:

• Crockpot Ham and Green Beans
• Baby Food: Beef & Veggies
• Baby Food: Chicken & Veggies
• Baby Food: Green Beans

There are like a million and one types of mushrooms out there so don’t expect some big expansive list here on Sliced & Diced. We mostly use your standard white mushroom around these parts. So that is what I am have created a chart for. Hopefully you find this helpful in your cooking. If you have suggestions on other types of mushrooms I should feature because you use them often in your once a month cooking, please let me know.

On to the research. Here is what I got when measuring:

And I can’t mention mushrooms without mentioning the Mushroom Channel. Really, they are just about your one stop shop for any and everything mushroom related. Feel free to take a gander. If you are mushroom lover you will have discovered heaven on the internet!

As for Once A Month Mom, despite my lack of desire for mushrooms, I still post and create recipes that use mushrooms, here are a few:

Recipes Using Mushrooms:

• Stuffed Balsamic Portabella Mushrooms
• Carraba’s Polo Rosa Maria
• Spaghetti Sauce

Your Recipes Using Mushrooms:

**Remember to enter the Summer Infant Baby Gate Giveaway going on now until Monday, July 19 at midnight.

Celery. Such an ordinary vegetable don’t you think? If you ask me celery is like the side-kick of vegetables. It is often in recipes but never usually the feature. Well, unless you count ants on a log! But if you are over the age of say, 8 and don’t have children, it isn’t going to be the main feature of your dinner.

No aren’t you feeling sorry for celery. After all, it is not as cool, as say, mushrooms, or artichokes or potatoes even. Just celery. But it is A LOT of the meals we prepare. I personally love the crunch of celery in my dishes. It tends to lose that when it freezes which makes me sad. To avoid that issue we only usually use celery in dishes where it is cooked and mushy anyway. Well, except for the Buffalo Chicken Salad and you HAVE TO have celery in that, in my opinion, crunch or no crunch.

On to the research. Here is what I got when measuring:

So we will be going with these measurements from now on in our cooking day totals. And as for celery, it might not be an exciting ingredient but it is in some of my favorite Once A Month Mom recipes. Here are a few to note:

Recipes Using Celery:

• Buffalo Chicken Wraps
• Hamburger Soup
• Toddler Mini Meatloaf
• Veggie Pizza
• Chicken Ziti
• Baked Chicken Burgers
• Vegetable Soup

We have started getting oodles of summer squash in our Happy Box lately. Is yours bountiful from your garden? I have been freezing it the last few weeks in cubes and slices as we use it for various purposes. From time to time there are recipes that utilize summer squash so I thought it made for a great Sliced & Diced.

Here is what my research yielded:

As is per usual, when making OAMM recipes you can assume the measurements for a medium summer squash. Remember to adjust accordingly if the vegetables you are using are sizes other than medium.

Here are some recipes on this site using Summer Squash:

• Parmesan Summer Squash
• Toddler French Toast Sticks
• 8-10 months SUMMER baby food menu

]]> http://onceamonthmom.com/sliced-diced-summer-squash/feed/ 4 http://onceamonthmom.com/sliced-diced-fresh-herbs-basil/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sliced-diced-fresh-herbs-basil http://onceamonthmom.com/sliced-diced-fresh-herbs-basil/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:00:08 +0000 Tricia http://onceamonthmom.com/?p=7189

Basil is a herb that I always have growing somewhere in one of my flower beds or garden. It is nearly impossible to kill which means that I actually stands a chance of surviving around our place. And it is so great to have fresh basil at  your fingertips for a recipe. Sometimes I just go and pluck off a leaf to smell its aromatic goodness. *sniff* aaaahhhhh.

At any rate. In the winter, or if you aren’t growing any, it is not readily available in the garden so I have to purchase it at the store. For this post I purchased a “bunch” from my local grocer and prepped it. Hopefully this will help you get a feel for how much basil you would need for any given recipe.

Here are the results I came up with:

And my favorite OAMM recipes using basil?

• Tomato & Basil Burgers
• Once A Month Mom Spaghetti Sauce

What about you? Do you have some recipes using basil, fresh or dried, that you would like to share?

We all knew this one was coming didn’t we? Have we ever done a Once A Month Mom menu without chicken on it? I don’t think so! Chicken is a major staple in our diets, so you should be seeing it on menus for a long time to come.

Over the last year I have always had people commenting that when they were cooking chicken, they had too much chicken or not quite enough. Usually it is too much. That isn’t such a bad thing, you can always just freeze the extra for use at another time. However, consistency is important to me, so I thought it would be great to do research of my own.

Here is what I came up with:

As you can see, depending on what you use as your starting point for cooked chicken, you get different results. (See the recent post on making your own rotisserie chicken). For these reason, I have decided that when I write menus that I will list the pounds of chicken needed rather than the number of breasts needed. If an original recipe only lists numbers of breasts, I will make the conversions as I feel necessary so that we are only dealing with pounds, instead of quantity. I think that this will make for a a more consistent menu. And you don’t have to worry as much about the weight of your chicken.

Keep in mind that we will be using these size references from now on for Once A Month Mom menus.

And as we started last week with Cilantro, now is your opportunity to share your favorite recipes that include chicken. Here are a few of my favorites from this site:

• Chicken Parmigiana
• Garlic & Herb Chicken
• Jody’s Chicken & Noodles
• Buffalo Chicken Wraps
• Stuffed Buffalo Chicken

Now it is your turn. Link away!

The last few months we have had several recipes that incorporated cilantro on our OAMM menus. It is such a fragrant herb and packs a flavorful punch when incorporated into recipes. Like other herbs (see parsley post) this one comes in a large bunch. The measurements taken below were done with a bunch from my local grocer.

I also wanted to start a new feature on Sliced & Diced where you can link up to your favorite recipes incorporating the featured item. This week, that would be cilantro. So if you have a cilantro recipe, link to it below! On Once A Month Mom, I most recently used it in the Mango Chicken Vegetable Bake. How about you?

Oh how we Once A Month Mom’s love to cook some ground beef. And by love, I mean, have to. I love to cook mine in the slow cooker to make cooking it quick and easy. The thing is, I get so many questions about how many pounds of raw ground beef equals how many cups of cooked beef. It is a very good question, but one I found very little help answering. I have Swagbuck’ed it many times and never come up with a result that fits what we need.

After all, when you are cooking 10 pounds of ground beef, you really do need to know how many cups it will result in so that you can correctly portion it among your dishes. The thing is, the quantity of cooked meat from raw meat can vary by the fat content of the meat as well. That is why we are doing this Sliced & Diced on ground beef. (Please note that I know many of you use ground turkey and I will include the amounts for raw versus cooked ground turkey in a future post).

Here are my results:

Interesting, huh? Won’t this be a great resource for your next cooking day? I hope so! From now on I will be using the GROUND CHUCK measurements to indicate the amount of cooked beef that will be needed in recipes for our Once A Month Mom menus.

The funny thing about doing this post is that I was with a friend when I went to the grocery store to research the sizes that fresh herbs come in. (When I wrote the April menu I had NO IDEA and made guesses because I couldn’t find the answers in my usual locations. While at the grocery store, I picked up a bunch of parsley and was telling my friend that I was working on a post series where I figure out how many cups of parsley are in a bunch. There were two nosy women lurking about who both looked at me and said, “Oh, about 2 cups.” I smiled kindly (while feeling very annoyed) and let them know that I had a cooking website and I was explaining about an upcoming post. However, upon conducting my research I laughed because they were completely WRONG! There was WAY more than 2 cups!

So I was a bit smitten thinking that I’m not too off course with these posts. It seems that the average cook (or at least the ones lurking in my grocery store) have no idea either.

I also didn’t know (I told you, I’m not a chef or have culinary training) that there are two different kinds of parsley sold in most grocery stores. There is Italian Parsley and Parsley. Parsley is used mostly as a garnish, that is the curly variety but can be used in cooking. However, when recipes refer to fresh parsley for cooking they are most commonly referring to Italian parsley (also known as flat leaf parsley). Ha, even I learn something new when writing this blog. I bought both so that we could compare and in case we ever have recipes that call for either.

Here is what I came up with:

The calculations for the dried equivalents will be coming shortly. I didn’t realize that I might want to try my hand at drying herbs so I got started late. I will let you know when I update this post.

We will use these calculations in any and all menus in the future. In addition, I have made adjustments to the April 2010 Grocery List to accommodate my findings. No need to buy more fresh herbs than you need.