Recipe PSA

Just in case any of you were planning to make the Orange Peel Chicken recipe I linked to a few days ago… do not get lazy and just microplane grate the orange peel onto the chicken.  I didn’t want to take the time to julienne the orange peel so I just grated a bit on top of the chicken.  All you could taste was orange.  Blech.  I tried to compensate with more chili-garlic and soy sauce, but then it just tasted like spicy, salty oranges.  Chris is still trying to get the orange taste out of his mouth.  He he.

Summer Eats

About three times a year I get completely sick of our normal menus and start looking for new recipes to try. Usually it works out to January (when we are burned out on heavy holiday food), March (when we switch on the A/C) and November (when it gets cool enough to bake again). I’m really weird about turning on my oven. If it’s hot out and the A/C is on, I just don’t want the additional heat in my small kitchen. So we grill out on the back deck and I use my stove top and little toaster oven. Sometimes I’ll pull out my portable roaster oven if we want a ham or something. That way I can set it outside, or in the utility room. In the summer we eat a lot of grilled chicken, salmon, shrimp, tilapia, pork tenderloin, kabobs. After eating salmon every week for 2 years I’m so burned out. Just thinking of salmon makes me ill. We need a change.

So, this past weekend I tried out a few new recipes:

A PF Chang’s knock-off recipe, Mongolian Beef. Tasty, but there was too much cornstarch on the beef, which made the sauce kinda gloppy.

Italian flank steak with rosemary mashed cannellini beans. This recipe came from one of Chris’ Men’s Health magazines. I really liked the mashed cannellini beans. We took a can of Progresso beans, a little bit of olive oil, rosemary, salt, pepper, minced garlic, heated for a few minutes and mashed it up.

Rosemary bread. This recipe was perfect and super easy since it was from the bread machine.

Here are a few more I want to try in the next week or so:  Orange Peel Chicken, Baja Fish Tacos,  and probably chicken or pork tacos using Penzey’s Rojo seasoning.   If you have any great summer recipes, send them my way.

Gnocchi

When Chris was at Costco a few weeks ago I asked him to pick up a bag of potatoes. My family was coming to town and I wanted a good size bag. I was thinking 10 lbs. Chris brought home a 20 lb bag. Ack!

I feel a little bit like Bubba Blue from Forrest Gump trying to figure out how to use up the bag… mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, fried potatoes, potato casserole, potato soup, potato bread. I realized a few days ago they were starting to go bad and I needed to cook them up asap. So I peeled, boiled and mashed them, stored them in the fridge and waited for inspiration to hit. Last night I decided to make gnocchi.

Why have I not made gnocchi before? Tasty and ridiculously easy. After reviewing several recipes I just decided to wing it. I took a very Close Encounters style mountain of cold mashed potatoes (mine were already seasoned with salt and pepper), made a well in the center, threw in an egg, some flour and mixed it up, adding flour until it was no longer sticky. I portioned the dough into 6 parts, rolled little snakes and cut them into bite size pieces. On the first batch I rolled them against the tines of a fork to get the distinctive ridges, on the following batches I just said, “screw it” and threw them straight into boiling, salted water. As soon as they started to float I pulled them out and tossed them with a little butter, Parmesan cheese and Penzey’s Tuscan Sunset seasoning (I didn’t have any fresh herbs). Yum! Chris actually liked them so much he stole the bowl and even took the rest as leftovers to work today. That never happens. When I make them again I might try an actual sauce, maybe like Trader Joe’s Gnocchi with Gorgonzola sauce.

Today, if I feel up to it, I might try to make potato rolls. We had a friend in Missouri who made amazing potato rolls, but since I am incapable of not killing yeast I’ve never been able to get the recipe to turn out. Wish me luck!

Peanut Butter Balls for Easter

When you don’t have kids, Easter really isn’t that big of a deal. Well, excluding the religious aspect of the day, I’m talking about Easter activities, egg hunts and gifts. Before Daphne, my favorite part of Easter were the Reese’s Eggs. You know the ones I’m talking about… the thicker peanut butter cups in a flat egg shape. Yum. Reese’s should sell these year-round. But since they don’t, why not make your own?

Since we always have graham crackers and peanut butter around (thanks to Publix BOGOs) I decided to try Cast Sugar’s Peanut Butter Balls recipe. These could easily be made into an egg shape and are very similar in taste to Reese’s. Some tips- I was too lazy to pull out my food processor to crush the graham crackers and I didn’t get them crushed finely enough so mine were a bit crunchy. Not bad, just not the same texture as a Reese’s. Also, line a cookie sheet with wax paper for the dipped balls then pop the whole thing into the freezer for a few minutes. The balls will be set and ready to store.

Masri Sweets

Thought I’d pass this Masri Sweets Easter deal along:  10% off (reflected in web prices) off masrisweets.com.  The cashew baklava fingers are to die for.  Seriously, they are my all time favorite dessert item.  Even if you don’t think you like baklava, you will love the cashew fingers.  And the pistachio baklava is pretty good too.  Since we are trying to eat better I’m passing on this year’s sale, but for my birthday I’m ordering an entire tray.  All for me.  Diet be damned.  Unless I’m pregnant in August.  Hmm.. maybe I should order now?

French Dip

Allrecipes.com doesn’t normally get a lot of foodie blog love, well at least the foodie blogs that I follow. So when Nicole from Baking Bites had a positive review for the Easy Slow Cooker French Dip recipe from allrecipes.com I knew I had to check it out. My luck with allrecipes.com is about 50/50. I have found some great recipes, and some that were very highly rated but in my opinion sucked. This recipe was very simple: 4 lb. roast, can of french onion soup, can of beef consomme and a bottle of beer. Put in crockpot for at least 7 hrs on low. The beer worried me a little. I never acquired the taste for beer and don’t like the flavor. But you really couldn’t taste it. I served it on whole wheat hoagie rolls (next time I will splurge and do white rolls) and smoked provolone. The leftover juices were very tasty. I strained the mixture and reduced it on the stove for 5 or 10 min. to intensify the flavor. Chris liked it too, I think I’ll add it to my rotation.

Healthy Eating

I mentioned a few posts ago that I tried a recipe from The Sneaky Chef. Now that I’m home I really want to make healthy cooking a priority and will try just about anything, even if I have to sneak it in. Chris doesn’t know this yet, but tomorrow I’m going through the pantry and getting rid of all the processed crap. Which means I need to fill it up again with healthy choices or Chris is going to revolt. Let him. He’s blogged before about his health issues and although he’s been doing really well on his high blood pressure meds (and I think his cholesterol is down) it would be ideal to not need them at all. He still eats out WAY too much (I see the Chick-Fil-A receipts) for lunch. I need to do a better job of packing for him. Oddly enough I don’t have any immediate health concerns- no high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol problems, but I think healthier eating will definitely help my depression/anxiety.

I’ve been trying to determine the changes we need to make. We already eat fish twice a week. I couldn’t live without my Costco salmon. We also eat a lot of chicken, whole grain breads, fruit. But we need to add more whole grains and a variety of vegetables (we are stuck in a green beans or corn rut). Portion size is another issue we need to deal with. And Chris has a sweet tooth, so I’ll need to come up with some healthy alternatives.

Anyway, I had Chris pick up a few new cookbooks at the library: Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass & King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking. A lot of really interesting recipes. I’m a little intimidated by the Lorna Sass cookbook, might be hard to find some ingredients, like amaranth, and because I completely suck at cooking rice. If it doesn’t boil in a bag I can’t cook it. Which really makes no sense to me. I can pretty much cook anything I set my mind to, rice shouldn’t be that complicated. I even screw up rice in a rice cooker. Although I did make brown basmati rice with our salmon & tilapia for dinner yesterday and it actually turned out. Of course Chris didn’t like it, said he couldn’t get past the weird popcorn flavor, which is what I liked about it. Oh well. That’s something I’m just going to have to get past. Chris has gotten so much better over the past 5 years, but he’s still ridiculously picky.

I think I’ll try the Whole Wheat, Oat and Cranberry Scones recipe, Steel Cut Oatmeal with Fruit Compote and maybe the Grits recipe (Shrimp & Grits!!) from the Sass cookbook this week. I’ve never actually made grits, but I’ve seen Paula Deen do it. I won’t be doing the 3 sticks of butter (or whatever insane amount she uses) and block of cheese in my grits. This is getting off topic- but did you see Pioneer Woman’s Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes recipe? Two sticks of butter and an 8 oz block of cream cheese for 5 lbs of baking potatoes. Holy mackerel. I can say they are just as good with 1/2 stick of butter and some freshly grated Parmesan (I made them for Valentine’s Day with a peppercorn rubbed filet.  Yummo).

Anyone have any ideas/tips? Send them my way.

Breakfast Cookies

I finally found the wheat germ I needed to try the breakfast cookie recipe from The Sneaky Chef cookbook. It seemed like something we would like and could be an easy breakfast on the go. The ingredients were pretty simple: whole grain cereal, whole wheat flour, wheat germ, ricotta cheese, an egg, oil, cinnamon, baking soda, vanilla and salt. I only have three words- yuck, bad, bland. They are currently in the trash. I was hoping they’d have more of an oatmeal cookie type consistency, but they were very weird and cake-y. Chris wouldn’t eat them. Hopefully we’ll have better luck with other recipes in the cookbook.

Pretzel Buttons

Craft Magazine blog featured this quick and tasty treat today from Enamor

Pretzel buttons:

Very cute and festive for Valentine’s.  I might put mini Reeses peanut butter cups in the center.

You should smell my kitchen right now…

Homemade cinnamon rolls. My husband is going to be the most popular guy in the office tomorrow when he walks in with these:

These are from Pioneer Woman’s recipe. I actually cut the recipe in half and had plenty to make a huge aluminum foil pan of mini rolls for Chris, and these larger rolls for us to keep at home.  It was a very easy recipe, and quite tasty.

I’m shocked I actually got the dough to rise. I guess I never have the temperature right for yeast, because normally my yeast breads never rise.  Excuse me while I finish watching Pride and Prejudice on PBS and have a roll.  That’s a good evening.. Jane Austen, Colin Firth and cinnamon rolls.