Same Ingredients, Part 2

The other day, I talked about buying ingredients with the plans to make two meals with the same ingredients. This is meal two. Sure, they are the exact same ingredients and virtually the same meal, but they are different enough to be two meals. Saturday we have Beef Tacos with sauteed peppers and onions. Last night we had Steak and Pepper Quesadillas.

The main reason I think this is a great deal is the shopping and cooking. I had to shop for these ingredients once and cook them once. Here we have the leftover steak. On Saturday, I had it sliced. For the quesadillas, I chopped it up into more manageable pieces. I don't like biting into my food, not grinding all the way through, then pulling away and having the filling flop out. The smaller pieces will prevent that.

The same goes for the peppers and onions. The previous meal, they were sliced. Here, chopped into bite size pieces.

Load your tortilla with some cheese and peppers. If you want, you can use a low-fat cheese of your choice. And since the peppers are sauted in a bit of olive oil, you could stop here and have a nice veggie friendly meal (if you didn't use the same pan as cooking the steak, like I did.) But still, just peppers, onions and cheese would make a lovely meal.

Add the chopped steak and follow that up with a little more cheese, which serves as the glue to bind this all together. I like to cook the quesadillas in a dry skillet. Some restaurants will use everything from butter, oil and cooking spray to speed the cooking and to facilitate more browning. Personally, I don't like to do that and I don't think it's necessary.

See, these have a little color. I will admit that I had bad tortillas, they weren't that good. They were very dry and fragile. Their flavor, what little there is in a store bought tortilla, as also very lacking! Regardless, cook the quesadillas over medium heat in a dry skillet until you have some color, crispness and the filling is warm and the cheese melted. Serve with sour cream, salsa and/or guacomole.

Stay Tuned, I'm going to have another Two from One at the end of this week when I use thin cut pork chops in two, uniquely different meals!