Interconnecting Meals: Habanero Pork, Chipotle Mac, and Caesar Wraps

There's no question that we love putting together impressive meals with many delicious ingredients, but unfortunately we also have to balance that with the reality of our bank accounts. To keep having top-notch culinary adventures and not end up spending our entire paychecks at the grocery store, we strike a balance by building several days to a week's worth of food around the same ingredients, as well as planning our meals based on what's on sale that week.

By connecting ingredients together across several lunches or dinners, we ensure the ingredients we buy are completely used and we make the most of our weekly shopping. For a look at our previous methods of interconnecting meals, you can see how we made a variety of meals around one main ingredient, how we kept Easter dinner leftovers going so nothing got thrown out, and check out our article on turning chicken leftovers into delicious chicken salad sandwiches you can't get at any store or restaurant.

This week, we're taking a look at three different meals that all have a major component that was used for more than one dinner: habanero pork chops, a chipotle macaroni and cheese bake, and chicken caesar salad wraps.

Previously we had made an apple habanero sauce to turn cheap seafood into a restaurant-worthy meal, but there was more sauce than we needed, and right around that same time we got lucky and found some great pork on sale for around $2. Combining the two seemed like a perfect fit. Even though the sauce was originally meant for seafood, its hot-yet-sweet flavor would compliment pork just as well.

Before adding in the sauce we seared each side of the pork until they were just changing color, as each chop was fairly thin and didn't need much cooking time.

Here the sauce is going on, which also includes chipotle pepper, onion, garlic, and white wine pulsed together in a food processor.

Meat doesn't make a whole meal though, as there's got to be a hearty side as well. A big salad covered in fruit and vegetables is a regular occurrence on our dinner plates. For this salad, we're using strawberries, tomatoes, green onion, and some shredded colby jack.

Plop a baked potato on the plate - complete with sour cream, cheese, and pepper - and we've got one fantastic dinner with very complementary flavors. Because all of the ingredients were also being used for other meals that week, the whole thing ended up costing very little but still tasted as good as anything you'd eat spending money at a restaurant.

Remember how I mentioned the chipotle peppers? A can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce is fairly cheap, but because of how hot they are there's always more peppers than are needed for any one single meal. To make sure we get our money's worth and don't end up having to throw any away, we also put together a spicy mac and cheese using the chipotles.

After being chopped up, the peppers go into a pan along with heavy cream and as much cheddar cheese as you care to add!

Megan and I frequently make whole chickens, as they are not only beautiful on the presentation front but also cost effective, so we often have left over chicken ready to be used for any number of meals. Here we're chopping up some chicken meat to go into the macaroni and turn this into a complete casserole style meal.

Regular cooked macaroni noodles are the base of the casserole, which are being mixed up with the chicken along with the cheese sauce.

Everything then gets spooned into a casserole dish. If you want to jazz this up even further, or make it even spicier, you could add in sliced jalapenos or any number of vegetables - from zucchini to squash or tomatoes.

A casserole can't be completely soft, and a more firm layer on top really makes the texture much more appealing. For a topping we're using a mixture of melted butter and butter crackers. See that little tube in the background? That's the ghost pepper salt we always talk about, and yeah, we added some of that in too :)

Fresh out of the oven, the casserole's top has baked to a perfect golden brown and the cheese inside is a bubbling, gooey, wonderful mess.

A bowl of this spicy casserole works great as a meal on it's own, or you can throw it on a plate with a side salad or a side veggie, such as broccoli or cauliflower.

For our final look at interconnecting meals this time around, we'll explore another use for leftover chicken. One day at Quiznos I had a wrap filled with caesar salad fixings and chunks of white chicken meat, and I decided I had to make my own at home. For my version of the wrap, I'm using burrito style tortillas, chopped leftover chicken, tomatoes, green onion, and romaine lettuce.  These are also great with flavored wraps, such as spinach or sun-dried tomato.

To create the wrap I spread out a layer of store-bought caesar dressing on my tortillas and layed down a heaping handful of lettuce. Homemade caesar is of course always a treat, but this particular week we didn't have all the right ingredients.  We'll be sure to cover how to make restaurant-worthy caesar dressing in an upcoming blog.

Here's the overstuffed chicken caesar wrap as I'm getting ready to fold it up and dig into a very satisfying lunch.

That's all we've got on interconnecting meals for now, but there's still plenty more coming up at Six-Seven-Eight. Soon we'll be sharing more pictures and recipes on making southwest chipotle potato salad, a grilled south-of-the-border salad, amazing root beer based barbecue sauce, and more!