Chinese Chicken Salad

Who doesn't enjoy a delicious Chinese Chicken Salad as an alternative to a heavy meal now and then?

Most people happily pay $12 or more to enjoy this delicious dish at a business lunch in a nice restaurant instead of a hamburger or sandwich that would be a more messy option.  It's much easier to maintain that refined power look in a business suit when plunging a fork into a salad than leaning over a plate to allow the barbecue sauce to drip between your fingers. It also makes that farewell handshake a bit less awkward.

Preparing a home version fits nicely into Quick-Clean Cuisine.

Because it is a salad, you understand that the primary ingredient is lettuce.  Romaine, green leaf or iceberg will all work.  We tend to keep Romaine in our refrigerator, because that is my wife's favorite, but if you have leftover Shreds from tacos or some fancy organic spring mix you bought to impress your boyfriend's mother, that will work too. 

Wash as much lettuce as you need for either an individual serving or a family style bowl.  Making extra to store in Tupperware will make it easy to repeat this dish or make a side salad for a few days.  Add some shredded cabbage if you like, but basically you just need a bunch of green roughage.  If you have some carrots, broccoli, mushrooms or other favorite veggies in the fridge, feel free to chop some of those into small pieces and add them.  Cubed tomatoes add some nice color and flavor.  Toss it all together, and then add the secret ingredient.

I first noticed the flavor similarity of Lawry's Sesame Ginger Marinade to restaurant Chinese Chicken Salad dressing when substituting for Teriyaki Marinade in making stir fry.  I thought to myself, why not use it as a salad dressing?

It turns out that Smart & Final carries First Street Chinese Chicken Salad Dressing and Marinade, but trust me when I say that marinade works fine as salad dressing.  Just don't drench the salad.  A little goes a long way.

At this point, you really have most of the flavor and texture of the salad.  If you want to be thorough, chop up some boneless, skinless chicken breast and stir fry it in the marinade, but that really isn't necessary, as the marinade/dressing adds plenty of flavor to the chicken when you put the chicken on top of the salad.  By the way, I recommend adding the chicken to the top of each individual bowl rather than stirring it in, as it works easier for portion control, and you can add more chicken as desired as you eat to keep the flavors balanced.

If you happen to have some leftover El Pollo Loco or baked chicken, you can chop that into chunks as your chicken, to save cooking any chicken at all. You can also boil chicken breast and chop it into small pieces. 

My lovely wife and I have found we prefer Tyson's Crispy Chicken, baked to crunchy deliciousness and chopped into bite-sized chunks.  That extra crunch and pseudo-KFC flavor works perfectly in a salad, whether Chinese or occidental. Needless to say, lining a baking dish with parchment paper will make chicken preparation Q-CC compliant.

So, there you have it.  You don't have to spend a lot of time and money to enjoy a delicious, healthy salad, and unless you throw salad ingredients around the kitchen needlessly, wadding up the parchment paper used to line your baking dish and rinsing off the cutting board makes for quick cleanup.

I Want My Maypo

Admittedly, the recipes I offer aren't always particularly groundbreaking, but I can't help noticing consumers happily pay a multiple of the cost of the ingredients to have similar meals in restaurants, whether brought to the table on a real glass plate in a sit down diner or served over the counter in cardboard at a fast food joint.

Many people now eat out once or twice a day, but when I was a little boy, going to a restaurant was a family treat on Sundays.

Our family usually went to either Arnold's Farmhouse or La Fonda.

Driving to Arnold's Farmhouse, located in the country a couple of miles north of Knott's Berry Farm, from Westminster brought us through acres upon acres of green fields on Valley View Road, with lots of strawberry stands in season.  We enjoyed fresh-from-the-farm food cooked with homestyle recipes.

The meals were served buffet style.  My usual order was southern fried chicken, mashed potatoes and corn, with chocolate éclair selected from the rolling dessert tray after I cleaned my plate.  The cooking wasn't quite as good as Mom's, but it was close, and to some extent, these Sunday meals were to give Mom a break from cooking and the big cleanups.  It was a well-deserved treat for her, but Darlene, Dad and I also enjoyed the event. 

We ate at Mrs. Knott's Chicken Restaurant once, but we found it disappointing by comparison.  Nonetheless, after only 50 years of not eating there, when my friend Pete asked yesterday if I wanted to go for lunch at Knott's, I quickly responded affirmatively, and the Famous Chicken Dinner was hot, delicious and filling, served by waitresses who might have worked there on my last visit.  I don't think they've remodeled in 50 years either, so that keeps in line with the site's authenticity. 

 

At the risk of digressing too far, which as you know is something I avoid at all possible costs, always staying exactly on point, focused like a laser beam on furnishing you the finest recipes in a concise form with exact instructions for blending elements together perfectly....wait....what was I talking about?  Oh yeah.  I will add that after lunch, Pete and  I ventured through a tunnel to visit Knott's full-sized model of Philadelphia's famed Independence Hall and enjoyed, as the only patrons, the presentation about the birth of our country, always presented free by the patriotic farmer, Walter Knott, the husband of his wife, Mrs. Knott, who got to put her own name on her restaurant.

The restaurant we frequented when we didn't go to Arnold's was La Fonda, which I believe was on Highway 39 before it became Beach Boulevard. La Fonda was the first Mexican restaurant I remember, although I didn't pay much attention to restaurants along the road when out and about. The bullfighting posters on the wall of La Fonda stick in my memory more than anything else about the place. At La Fonda, I always ordered side dishes of beans and rice along with fresh tortillas that were furnished free like tortilla chips.  I didn't order an entrée, while my sister would choose the best combo on the menu and then leave half of it on her plate, spreading the leftovers around so no one would notice she hadn't finished, but I didn't want any of that fancy stuff she ate.  Just beans and rice.  An early vegetarian tendency, I guess.  Maybe I had empathy for the bulls in the posters.

The concept of eating Mexican food was quite foreign to my relatives in Alabama at the time, but it was part of the Western culture of Orange County.  I still remember vacationing at Granddaddy's farm in Alabama when cousin Reba, in response to Darlene asking if there was a Taco Bell around, asking with a strong southern twang, "Taco.  What's a taco?"  And by then, it must have been about 1969 or so.  We've come a long way since then.

As foreshadowed, we did have one of the original Taco Bells on Westminster Boulevard, but we rarely ate there.  I can only remember having Taco Bell food at annual "fairs" at Boos School.  These fairs were really just a few poorly constructed booths decorated with crepe paper ribbons, but they were always quite an event for me when I was under the age of 9.  I liked the fishing booth, where kids would dangle a string with a clothes pen at the end from a bamboo pole over a sheet, and some mom would clip a prize on the end.  I think the prizes must have been worth a nickel and the game cost a dime, but it was great fun.  At those fairs, Taco Bell sometimes participated with a booth, and I'd get refried beans that I'd eat with Fritos.  Years later, when Julie and I took our kids to the pumpkin patch at Bell Gardens to find the centerpiece of our Halloween porch decorating, we learned that farmer Bell was the same guy who started Taco Bell, which obviously is where the chain name originated. 

On the rare occasions when we did have fast food, it was A & W Root Beer, also on Westminster Boulevard, and we would bring home a cone-shaped, milk-carton-material carryout container full of Root Beer to drink later.  After the root beer was gone, the fun began.  We'd take the bottom off to convert the jug into a megaphone, which had no particular value after yelling through it once or twice and ended up crushed in the back of the closet within a week, only to be found the next time we cleaned the closet to great gaiety (that's right, I'm reclaiming that word for use by heterosexuals, not that there's anything wrong with that).

As a general rule, however, Mom was too wise for the lure of fast food that she could cook at home cheaper and better.  When Der Wienerschnitzel arrived offering 6 chili dogs for a 99 cents, we were a bit more tempted, but really that was prompted by me after I had my driver's license years later.

That same reticence by Mom to spend more for less applied to quick-prepare foods generally, although keep in mind that this was before microwaves, when a TV dinner packed in foil that took 45 minutes to cook was considered quick.  My mom saw through all the gimmicks, including Maypo.  As a little cowboy, I loved the commercials, and I told Mom I wanted to go, just as my son Jay, tempted by Happy Meals toys, wanted us to go to McDonalds decades later.  My mom said, "It's just oatmeal."
 

She was indifferent to the claim of "maple-flavored goodness," and in fact, she used to make homemade hot syrup that was much better than bottled maple syrup when we had pancakes.  Still, I might play with my spoon when  eating any cereal, like in the Maypo commercial, chanting the mantra "maple-flavored goodness" even if it had nothing to do with what I was eating.  I probably said it while eating mashed potatoes at Arnold's or beans and rice at La Fonda.

Years later, however, as a grown man, I'm over such foolishness.  I am not tempted to buy Maypo any more than my mother was.  I have developed a taste for it, though, prompting this Quick-Clean Cuisine recipe!

Make instant oatmeal the way you normally do.  Pour some 1-minute oatmeal in your favorite microwave safe cereal bowl (don't use one of that plastic one with a built-in straw for sipping the milk out), add enough water to cover the oats and then microwave it for a minute or so. 

Sprinkle in cinnamon to taste.  I use quite a bit, because I hear it is supposed to be healthy for you, but it isn't essential.

Now for the money part.  Instead of using Splenda to sweeten your oatmeal, pour in maple syrup.  Actually, I use sugar free imitation maple syrup, but you get the point.  I put a swirl around the top and then mix it in with my spoon at the same time I'm mixing the oatmeal to blend the hot water and oats.

When you've finished, take that spoon, dip it in to get a decent glop of oatmeal, making sure it is thick enough not to fall on the floor, and then pretend to fly your spoon full of oatmeal around making airplane sounds until you land it in the hangar...I mean, your mouth.

Clean-up should be obvious, unless you tricked yourself by closing your mouth when the airplane headed into the hanger. 

For the price of one bowl of oatmeal at Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Denny's, McDonalds or the Ritz Carlton, you can buy enough oatmeal and syrup for a week or two.

When your friends ask if you'd like to go out for a Sunday Brunch, you can fold your arms and insist, "I want my Maypo."

Egg Salad Sandwich

The noble egg has been given as unjustifiably bad rap over the past few decades.

Medical experts, including the Mayo Clinic, have pointed to the fact that eggs are high in cholesterol and concluded that they must cause high cholesterol in the blood stream. As best I can recall, this egg-hating started about the time the Egg McMuffin gained popularity in the 1970s.



Anything associated McDonalds, of course, immediately finds disdain among vocal anti-capitalists who somehow manage to disguise themselves as concerned citizens seeking the public well-being under different banners from Save the Stink Bug to Occupy Chick-fil-A.  Perhaps if McDonalds had not entered the breakfast market, people would have left the egg alone rather than putting it in the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List next to revolutionary Bill Ayers.

While the Egg McMuffin did not blow up any government buildings like Ayers, it did, like its brother Big Mac, come in a Styrofoam container, which by the mid-seventies was considered tantamount to treason from an environmental point of view.  Yes, it probably was good that McDonalds bowed to pressure to wrap them in paper instead of Styrofoam packaging that wasn't bio-degradable.

When I took Ecology classes in the 1970s, I don't think the teacher was a violent Weatherman like Ayers or a non-violent communist, since most Americans still had a modicum of economic awareness, but he definitely marched in lock step with the call to stop McDonalds using Styrofoam containers or confront a new Ice Age by the mid-1980s that would lead to crops throughout the world freezing and most people starving. 

We all pulled together, started recycling everything we could and convinced McDonalds to serve their sandwiches in containers that required them to be consumed a little faster (the sandwiches, not the containers).  Yes, it disappointed some guy working on a car who sent his buddy to grab him a sandwich when his Big Mac wasn't hot by the time his friend returned and put it in the mechanic's greasy hands to eat, but it was a small price to pay to save the world.

We did such a great job that the earth didn't freeze over in the 80's and 90's.  In fact, we did such a great job that the world warmed up, extending growing seasons to feed the world and creating a whole world of investment opportunities in green industries for Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore.

Getting back on topic, the egg yolk contains most of the cholesterol, so even those who refused to give up their omelets often changed the order to Egg Beaters or egg whites only, but the yolk was on them.

It turns out egg yolks are high in lecithin, which naturally reduces not only cholesterol but also triglycerides in the blood stream.  My buddy Bill Bundy told me about lecithin recently, when I told him my blood tests in October showed high levels of those natural enemies of lecithin.  He recommended buying lecithin granules at the health food store and eating a tablespoon twice a day.  I started that regimen, and within two months, my levels of the deadly duo were at acceptable ranges.

Okay, perhaps it is starting to dawn on you that eggs may not be that bad for you, and many dieticians now say the humble egg is the silver bullet for weight control, as egg breakfasts stave off hunger later in the morning that would otherwise lead to snacking. So what's a different way to enjoy eggs?

Confronted with some hard boiled eggs in the refrigerator (we had hard-boiled them to make left over eggs suitable for driving home from a vacation in Montana), I remembered my Mom making delicious egg salad sandwiches when I was a boy.  I don't know exactly how she made them, but I know it involved sweet pickle juice and hard boiled eggs, so I improvised.

I don't buy sweet pickles generally, so I used sweet pickle relish, and it turned out great.  I also remember her egg salad being very creamy, so I added some mayonnaise, too.  It turned out delicious.

The recipe is easy. 

Put two slices of bread in the toaster. 

For two hard boiled eggs, add about one teaspoon of mayonnaise and one tablespoon of sweet pickle relish, plus some pepper if you like.

In a bowl, smash the eggs up with a fork and mix it all together into a somewhat creamy consistency.  I find the egg whites don't get pulverized; they're in small chunks, but I suppose if you dedicate yourself to the effort long enough, you can make it smoother. 

In any case, don't break out a food processor or any other mess-maker.  This is, after all, Quick-Clean Cuisine.  Make it too hard and messy to cook, and you're less likely to eat healthy, inexpensive food at home.

By the time the toast pops up, you should be ready to put the salad on the toast.  I like to eat egg salad on open faced sandwiches, but if you want to pack it in your lunch, you can put a slice of bread on each side of the egg salad, or what we expert chefs like to call "a regular sandwich" as opposed to "Grandma Style."

Clean up is a breeze.  Just wash the bowl, fork and plate.  By the way, you can make up extra, maybe a half dozen eggs or more, to save some for later or share it with your best friends.

By the way, hard boiling eggs is very easy.  Just put some eggs in a pan of water (the eggs should be covered by an inch or two of water) and bring the water to a boil.  If you're like me, you aren't exactly sure when they start boiling thoroughly, but once you notice the water bubbling, boil them for a minute, cover the pan, remove from heat and let them sit for 10 to 15 minutes. 

You'll want to chill the eggs in the refrigerator before making the salad, so you need to boil the eggs before you get hungry, unless you are as lucky as I was and find the hard boiled eggs in the refrigerator.

Alabama Crumpets

In August, after two decades saying she would quit in the following week, my gorgeous wife Julie retired from her career in human resources.  Concern about dealing with the foreseeable problems in the unfolding of Obamacare from a corporate level probably was the final straw, although as it turned out, deferral of the employer mandate for large companies did put off most of the mess for her last employer by a year.  Still, she has never looked back. 

Her retirement led to her taking over many of my household chores, including planning meals.  As you may have noticed, my method of menu preparation usually involved finding something on sale at whatever market I happened to visit on any given day.  Lack of the proper ingredients proved to be the mother of invention.  Julie has continued the quick-clean cuisine impetus on easy clean-up, but she tends to take more of a Santa Claus approach, making a list and checking it twice to prepare exactly what we had on some prior occasion that she enjoyed.

Between that lifestyle change, a great vacation in Scotland/Northern Ireland in September and other life events like my brother-in-law's heart failure that brought us to San Diego for extended trips, I managed to go over four months without posting a new recipe. 

If you've been waiting to know what to cook next, you must be starving.

In a trip to New York City recently, our stay at our daughter Gina's still had someone else preparing most of the meals, but on the last morning, as we were leaving to bid adieu to youngest daughter Amy, who lives a few subways station rides away, Julie suggested we pick up breakfast at Dunkin Donuts to bring to Amy's. 

I certainly appreciate a good donut.  When Julie lived in Seal Beach during our dating days, I would stop for an apple fritter and coffee at an independent Electric Avenue donut shop on my way to work, but at that age, a donut didn't immediately impact my pant size as it does now.

In addition, the previous evening I had purchased Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies for a special last night in New York for our granddaughter Emma, and most of the Family Sized pack had gone uneaten.  Is a donut really a more nutritious breakfast than a cookie?  I'd say no.  And as cheap as I am, I didn't want to buy a donut when I could eat a free cookie.

However, I didn't want to be frowned upon by the Manhattan elite who might be spying on Amy's apartment kitchen with binoculars from one of the nearby historic Harlem Hamilton Heights rooftops, so I asked myself what I could do to make eating a cookie acceptable to such highbrow snoops?

I thought back to our trip to London, where we were unable to find a crumpet, which the Brits dismissed as nothing to get excited about.  Why not call a cookie a crumpet?  After all, it is flour and other ingredients in a circular shape, like a crumpet, I presume, although I have never actually seen a real crumpet.

Earlier in the trip, I bought a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter, somewhat intentionally ignoring the fact that Gina's family prefers the "natural" peanut butter where you stir the oil into the peanut putty and then refrigerate it, hoping it will stay mixed and not harden into a form of adobe brick.  Don't hate me because I love beautiful Skippy, so smooth, so creamy (except when it is Super Chunky), so aromatic, so perfect from the first knife blade skimming the top to the final remnants scraped off the inner wall of the plastic jar with a spoon.  I saw that jar of Skippy next to the Chips Ahoy, and Eureka!

Alabama Crumpets.

George Washington Carver, one of the greatest men in history for convincing farmers in the south to grow peanuts and then coming up with dozens of uses for the product, which had formerly been primarily used for lifestock feed, did not invent the peanut or peanut butter (a widely held misconception), but he did love peanuts, and his groundbreaking research brought international acclaim to the Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama.  Who knows if peanut butter would have caught on without him?

The recipe is simple.  Spread peanut butter on a cookie and put another cookie on top like a Cool-A-Coo with a think layer of peanut butter where the ice cream would go.  Would a Cool-A-Coo for breakfast be the equivalent of a donut and milk?  Doubtful, but I digress.

While I used Chips Ahoy and Skippy, you could use all natural peanut butter and granola bars, oatmeal cookies and Jif, or whatever floats your boat.

I have to say that Chips Ahoy and Skippy tastes terrific.  Clean up?  Wash the plate and knife.

By the way, this is a great "to go" meal, but I'd suggest stacking them inside foil rather than using a Baggie, which ended up getting kind of slimy with peanut butter during our subway ride.

Now you have a quick breakfast alternative to pop tarts on your way to after Christmas sales, but lest we get ahead of ourselves, Merry Christmas!

Redondo Chuck Swiss Steak



Granddaughter Emma on the threshold of a new discovery.

What we lack often goads us to serendipitous delights.



I bought a pound and a half of chuck steak on sale at Ralph's yesterday, but I failed to buy beef broth, which I usually use in any pot roast type of dish.

I did find some boxed beef stock in the cupboard, but the date code indicated it should have been used six months earlier, so I tossed it out.  I found some canned diced tomatoes with green peppers, which triggered fond memories of my Mom's Swiss Steak (though I don't know that she used that ingredient), but I knew Julie disdains any trace of peppers.

I decided to instead use fresh Roma tomatoes and mushrooms, which I had in the vegetable crisper drawer, and with some seasonings, this became a new favorite recipe.

Start by mixing about a half cup of flour with a tablespoon of seasoned salt and a tablespoon of pepper, and spread the mixture out on a large piece of wax paper.

That Can-Do Attitude demonstrated by Amy.

Most likely your chuck steak will come in a Styrofoam tray, which works well as a disposable area for trimming the chuck steak.  Remove as much fat as you can, including the thin ribbons along the edges. This is time consuming but worth it, because chuck steak fat is inedible as far as most people are concerned. There are veins of fat marbling chuck steak, so this will result in several smaller pieces, and it might not even be a bad idea to cut the larger pieces down to smaller ones, based on how Julie and I preferred the smaller pieces.  By the time it is trimmed, you will have a little over a pound of steak left, which is perfect for two carnivores.

Put the trimmed pieces of steak one at a time into the flour mix to coat both sides. 

With the stovetop burner set to medium, heat two table spoons of olive oil in a deep pan or pot.  Mom used to use one of those seasoned cast-iron pans, which she could stick in the oven, but I just use a Teflon-coated pot that had almost exactly the right surface area for a pound of trimmed chuck steak.

Once all the beef is sizzling, sprinkle the top generously with onion flakes.  Most chefs would cook a couple of diced onions instead of dried flakes, and that would be delicious, but living in a small condo, Julie (and most likely our neighbors) wouldn't appreciate the lingering aroma. 

Also lightly sprinkle on cinnamon, which in addition to adding a sweetness and complexity to meat flavors enhances health.


Jay and Wes fishing for a compliment?

After about five minutes, turn the meat over and repeat sprinkling on onion flakes and cinnamon for that side.

While the meat is braising, line a glass baking dish with pan lining paper and preheat the oven to 225 degrees (or if you use a convection oven, 200 degrees). 

Dice three Roma tomatoes (about 2 cups), and slice six to eight mushrooms (about 1 cup).  I don't actually use a measuring cup, and you will find that dicing tomatoes on a cutting board makes a mess.  Instead, just cut the vegetables up in a bowl big enough to hold them all.  This also saves the tomato juice, which you can pour onto the steak, and cleaning the bowl is easy.

Put the braised steak into the lined baking dish.  Cover the steak with diced tomatoes, and then put sliced mushrooms on top of that.  Sprinkle with garlic salt.  Then, put aluminum foil on top as  a lid so that steam is kept in the dish.

Bake for an hour and a half at 225 degrees (80 minutes at 200 degrees for convection oven).

Wes and Gina ready to welcome guests.

Admittedly, when this came out it didn't look much like Swiss Steak, so I probably should call it Redondo Chuck or something, but it did turn out to be delicious.

 

While cleaning the braising pan could be avoided by simply roasting this dish, braising adds so much flavor that it is worth it.  At least you can wash that pan long before the meal is served, so that after throwing away the wax paper on which you floured the steak your kitchen isn't a mess for the afternoon.  By the way, you can braise the meat and assemble the dish a couple of hours before actually cooking it.

 

You can wrap any leftovers in the foil you used to top the dish, but in any case, final clean up is as simple as throwing away the pan liner and washing your plates.

Arriba, Arriba, Andale, Andouille!

Cajun and Mexican cuisine have each earned reputations for spicy deliciousness, so when my sister combined some leftover refried beans and rice from our Mexican dinner with hot sausage, spinach and some secret ingredients, it's not surprising that it turned out to be fantastic, tasting similar to jambalaya or gumbo.  The next day when I scooped some of Darlene's Cajun fusion stew into a tortilla, it was so good that I contemplated opening a chain of "Cajun Eat Dos" fast food restaurants.

Teddy, Darlene and Emma in Montana.

While that bright idea soon faded, when Julie and I arrived home from Montana, we found son Jay had left some Trader Joe's Smoked Andouille Chicken Sausage in the refrigerator.  He had planned to barbecue it on the 4th of July, when he came over to view the Redondo Beach fireworks from our condo, but the absence of a barbecue forced him to abort that idea.

Cooking over open fire has been instinctive behavior for men since Fred Flintstone was a boy, but as I have lamented in the past, we don't have room for an outdoor grill alongside our reclining veranda seats at our condo in Redondo.

Thus faced with the dilemma of how to eat hot sausages without flames to grill them over, I read the  label, and among the choices was to bake them for 14 minutes.

Recognizing my preference for well-done, I decided to cook them in my convection oven at 375 degrees for 18 minutes, which is about the equivalent of a standard oven at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.  After setting the oven to pre-heat, I lined a small casserole dish with Reynolds Non-Stick Pan Lining Paper, which by now you should've noted is a key for making many recipes into Quick-Clean Cuisine.  I quickly opened the four pack of sausages and put them into the lined dish.

I didn't wait for the oven to finish pre-heating before putting the dish in the oven, so I could immediately go upstairs to work on my computer until I heard the oven chime marking the end of the designated time.  By the way, if you don't use timers for cooking, you are making it unnecessarily difficult.

Soon, I heard the chime and headed down to find the sausages had browned a bit, with a slot opening almost as if they had been grilled.  I ate one with barbecue sauce and one with mustard, and both ways were great, either with or without bread. 

If I had some red beans and rice or leftover Mexican side dishes around, I might have tried to make a variation of Darlene's concoction, but for today, just know that baked sausages taste surprisingly great, if you cook them about a third longer than recommended by the manufacturer.  Clean up is as simple as throwing away the pan liner and quickly rinsing the casserole dish after it has cooled.

Yogurt and Crunchies

Granddaughter Emma came met us for a vacation in Montana, bringing her loving parents Gina and Laszlo in tow.

We enjoyed lots of fun activities, from hiking to Ousel Falls and the Blue Moon Bakery to watching Team Umizoomi, from flying a kite to playing Dominoes, from chasing a Pomeranian she affectionately called Little Teddy to making homemade noodles, dancing on stage or bouncing on a giant frog at the park.  From swimming at the Yellowstone Club to playing croquet out back.

One of my favorite moments was when she asked me to play the guitar so she could dance, but insisting she and her mom first needed to put on a dancing dresses.  Once they were dolled up for a nice meal out (hot dogs at the Bunker), I played Fish and a Whistle on my guitar, and they danced beautifully.  Afterwards, Emma repeated a phrase she said the first time she danced as I played it earlier in the trip: "That's a nice song!"

So much fun had we that I just realized you must be starving, if you've been waiting for a new quick-clean cuisine recipe.

Easy solution?  How about one of Emma's favorite dishes: Yogurt and Crunchies.  For New Yorker Emma, that means scoop some plain, nonfat Greek Yogurt into a bowl and stir in Grape Nuts, because she doesn't like anything too sweet. My son Jay on the other coast in Los Angeles loves Greek yogurt with granola stirred in. Even McDonald's gets into the act with its Fruit and Yogurt Parfait, which is surprisingly tasty, cheap and delicious on the go.

Some might call it ridiculous to have a Q-CC version of this ubiquitous treat, but here is my twist on it.

First, I like low carb foods whenever possible, and I'm very cheap, so I usually get Kroger Carbmaster, which is high in protein and low in carbs without losing flavor. I especially like the Black Forest Cake flavor, but there are all the usual great fruit flavors, too, at a price of around 50 cents each. Then again, you can substitute whichever yogurt you like.

Here's the Quick-Clean tip.  Peel off the foil top and toss it out, then just add some of your favorite crunchies to the small space at the top.  I usually have bran flakes in the house, and they work, but of course Grape Nuts or granola both add a lot more crunch.

After you eat a few spoonfuls, add some more crunchies.  When the little yogurt tub is empty, you can just throw the container away and have only a spoon to wash.

Who says you don't have time for a nutritious breakfast?