Chicken enchiladas are easy to fix for a small dinner party, and they’re packed with flavor.
Often, my chicken enchiladas have actually started with leftover chicken from El Pollo Loco or Costco (usually meat from the less popular pieces in our house like legs and backs), but today I boiled two boneless, skinless chicken breasts (total weight about 1 ½ pounds) for 35 minutes to get the ball rolling.
An advantage of boiling chicken is that most of the fat that might need to be trimmed before frying or baking seems to cook off in the water. By the way, I didn’t preheat the water. I just put enough water in the pot to cover the chickens and then started boiling it on medium heat. When the lid started bouncing around, I took it off and boiled the chicken uncovered.
After 35 minutes, take one of the breasts out of the pot and put it onto a plate. Cut it with the grain, shredding the meat as much as possible as you go. If it doesn’t look quite cooked, put it back in the water for another few minutes. Most likely, it will be done, and after the first one is shredded, take the other breast out of the water and repeat the process.
Pour the water from the pot down the drain with the garbage disposal running, and rinse the pot, using a paper towel to wipe it. You don’t need to use soap, because you’re going to be using it again right away.
Put the pot back on the stove and pour the chicken back in. Add a package of your favorite taco seasoning (I used McCormick’s tonight, because it was 49 cents at Smart & Final) and follow the same directions you’d use for a pound of ground beef, which in this case was stir in ¾ cup of water and simmer for about 7 minutes. There is chicken taco seasoning too, but the standard taco one works fine.
Between occasionally stirring the meat, line a rectangular glass 11” X 14” (or whatever size you have) baking dish with parchment paper and preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Line up six tortillas (Carb Balance will be less fattening but more expensive) with the sides turned up like soft tacos into the lined dish. Put a generous amount of grated Mexican cheese (yes, we’re actually using Mexican cheese for Mexican food!) inside each of the tortillas. This will melt down quite a bit, so add more than you think you need. You can actually use slices of block cheese inside the enchiladas instead, because it will melt down anyway.
When all of the liquid has cooked into the chicken, ladle chicken into the tortilla “soft shells,” dividing it equally. When they’re all pretty full, sparingly sprinkle a few drops of Tapatio inside. Fold over two sides (which two sides should be obvious even to the most unskilled novice) of the tortilla together on one of them and quickly turn it over so that the junction of the two sides of the tortilla is on the bottom. Repeat this until you can’t see the ingredients inside any of the tortillas from the top.
Here is the big secret: don’t use enchilada sauce. I have found that every brand of enchilada sauce has way too much salt. It might be okay if nothing else had any flavor, but the cheese is naturally salty, and the taco seasoning is obviously intentionally very salty.
Canned diced petite tomatoes with jalapenos or peppers and onions are cheap and easy choices. Considering that I use Mexican cheese for Italian dishes, you probably won’t be shocked to learn that I usually use marinara sauce (Ragu or whatever I have on hand), and it seems to work just fine. Don’t ever pour any diced tomatoes or marinara sauce onto the enchiladas. More is not better. A tablespoon per enchilada is about right. If it looks a little dry, add a little more where necessary, but don’t go nuts. Sprinkle the sauce topping lightly with ground cumin seed (if you have that on hand) to make it taste a little more Mexican than Italian, but let’s face it: the basis of enchilada sauce or marinara sauce is pureed tomatoes, and it picks up the flavor of the other ingredients.
If you had a little extra chicken after stuffing the enchiladas, you can throw that on. Then, add a generous coating of grated Mexican cheese on top.
Bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes to a half hour, cool five minutes and then serve.
For what it is worth, using this exact combination of ingredients (boiled chicken, McCormick's Taco Seasoning, trace of Tapatio and cumin, Ragu) earned praise from Julie as the best enchiladas I've ever made.
If you are having friends over, you could have done everything but the baking, then put the enchiladas in the oven a half hour before you are ready to eat.
With this recipe, I can eat about 1 ½ enchiladas, so I would call it four servings, but if you add side dishes of Spanish rice and refried beans, you could easily serve six.
For the Spanish rice, rinse out the chicken pot, and then make Knorr Spanish Rice according to the recipe on the package. It takes less than 10 minutes. Refried beans are even easier. Open a can of Rosarita Spicy Refried Beans, put them into an oven safe dish, and put a generous layer of grated Mexican cheese on top. Loosely cover it with foil, and bake the beans at the same time as the enchiladas.
The Spanish rice just uses the same pot you already had to wash, and whether chicken or Spanish rice, it takes about the same amount of time to wash with dish soap and water. Either way, it’s actually much easier to clean, for some reason, than taco ground beef. The refried beans will at first look like a messy dish, but you can just soak it with water for a minute or two, and it will easily clean right up. The glass enchilada dish, of course, only requires removing the parchment paper to be clean.
There's nothing more to do but party.
Ole!
Friday, March 29, 2013
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Licking Your Plate Clean
Before Bill Bixby played the mild-mannered alter-ego of The Incredible Hulk and after he played the mild-mannered earthling in My Favorite Martian, he played a mild-mannered single dad in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."
Despite the premise that seemed absurd even to a 10 year-old, I watched the first of Bixby's TV series because Martin the Martian was played by Ray Walston, who played the devil in my favorite movie at the time, "Damn Yankees." But I watched the second series because I liked Bixby.
In a long forgotten episode from that long forgotten series, a confirmed bachelor friend of Eddie's Father tells him that now that he's a bachelor, he has to start cooking differently. He proceeds to pull a head of lettuce and some salad dressing from the refrigerator, break off a hunk of leaves and quickly rinse it under the kitchen faucet. Then, he pours salad dressing over the lettuce in his hand and chomps into the drippy mess as he holds it over the sink. "Bachelor salad."
If you eat fast food at every meal, however, you'll most likely pack on some unwanted pounds (although that doesn't have to be the case), but more to the point of this blog, you'll generate a lot of trash, especially if you bring it home. If your trash receptacle is overflowing with take-out containers, you may think you saved yourself the trouble of doing dishes, but you have made a mess nonetheless.
As I've tried to show, cooking at home doesn't have to be messy. I will cop to having eaten the occasional "bachelor salad" or equivalent, but mostly I prefer to use plates and silverware. Paper plates are too flimsy and can make more mess than they're worth, and plastic forks and knives just don't cut it.
We've talked about keeping the cooking dishes and pans down to a minimum, but what do you do about the plates and silverware?
Too many people pile stuff in the sink. If you have roommates, this is a particularly big problem, as roommates may see no point in cleaning someone else's mess just to make way to clean up their own. However, if you are the one who takes the initiative to be clean, everyone will love you and possibly even emulate your habits.
Regardless of whether it is overflowing trashcans or dirty dishes in the sink, they can attract cockroaches, ants and even rats.
The solution in Shakespeare's day was to lick your wooden plate clean, and then turn it over for the next day's meal, or at least that's what our guide told us at Anne Hathaway's Cottage.
While it is true that remnants of neither bacon nor eggs remain on either Julie or my plates after breakfast, I don't consider "licked clean" to be sufficient, even if that is done by humans rather than animal friends who delight in our leftovers.
The easiest way to handle dishes is to clean them as soon as you've used them, and even if you have a dishwasher, do your best to get all traces of food off. I used to use a sponge, but Julie pointed out that a wet sponge seems ripe with bacteria to her, so I mostly use paper towels and a bit of dish soap with warm water, and that is more than sufficent without much scrubbing if I clean them immediately. I still dutifully stick them in the dishwasher, which I run as more or less a disinfectant, I supppose. Some dishwashers have the power to scrub not only dishes and forks but pots and pans, but I don't rely on that, especially if you don't know when you will run the dishwasher. And it really is so easy to get dinnerware clean if you do so right after you finish eating that there is no point in leaving a mess for later. The energy required will be less if done immediately, which is reason enough to skp procrastinating.
Compared to the chore it would have been to clean dishes on a farm without hot and cold running water, as it was in the farmhouse where my mother grew up, where vigorous pump action was required to just get cold well-water running weakly down a spout into the sink, washing dishes is a breeze.
While I'm thinking about it, most kitchens now have garbage disposals, which grind up food wastes that are rinsed off plates, but these are not intended to be a place for dumping big hunks of food. All that stuff must make it through your pipes, and the more junk you throw down there, the more chance you will stop it up, which creates a dirty job for you or an expensive plumber.
Despite the premise that seemed absurd even to a 10 year-old, I watched the first of Bixby's TV series because Martin the Martian was played by Ray Walston, who played the devil in my favorite movie at the time, "Damn Yankees." But I watched the second series because I liked Bixby.
In a long forgotten episode from that long forgotten series, a confirmed bachelor friend of Eddie's Father tells him that now that he's a bachelor, he has to start cooking differently. He proceeds to pull a head of lettuce and some salad dressing from the refrigerator, break off a hunk of leaves and quickly rinse it under the kitchen faucet. Then, he pours salad dressing over the lettuce in his hand and chomps into the drippy mess as he holds it over the sink. "Bachelor salad."
 |
| Not the way to clean your dishes. |
These days, Carl's Jr takes some scantilly clad beauty and lets her drip a luscious burger as she takes a bite to entice bachelors to buy fast food. It's unclear if young women believe they can eat those Six Dollar Burgers regularly and, because we are what we eat, look like Miss Turkey, but the ads must be effective at selling burgers as slop, because they keep running variations of it.
If you eat fast food at every meal, however, you'll most likely pack on some unwanted pounds (although that doesn't have to be the case), but more to the point of this blog, you'll generate a lot of trash, especially if you bring it home. If your trash receptacle is overflowing with take-out containers, you may think you saved yourself the trouble of doing dishes, but you have made a mess nonetheless.
As I've tried to show, cooking at home doesn't have to be messy. I will cop to having eaten the occasional "bachelor salad" or equivalent, but mostly I prefer to use plates and silverware. Paper plates are too flimsy and can make more mess than they're worth, and plastic forks and knives just don't cut it.
We've talked about keeping the cooking dishes and pans down to a minimum, but what do you do about the plates and silverware?
Too many people pile stuff in the sink. If you have roommates, this is a particularly big problem, as roommates may see no point in cleaning someone else's mess just to make way to clean up their own. However, if you are the one who takes the initiative to be clean, everyone will love you and possibly even emulate your habits.
Regardless of whether it is overflowing trashcans or dirty dishes in the sink, they can attract cockroaches, ants and even rats.
 |
| Anne Hathaway's Cottage near Stratford Upon Avon. |
While it is true that remnants of neither bacon nor eggs remain on either Julie or my plates after breakfast, I don't consider "licked clean" to be sufficient, even if that is done by humans rather than animal friends who delight in our leftovers.
The easiest way to handle dishes is to clean them as soon as you've used them, and even if you have a dishwasher, do your best to get all traces of food off. I used to use a sponge, but Julie pointed out that a wet sponge seems ripe with bacteria to her, so I mostly use paper towels and a bit of dish soap with warm water, and that is more than sufficent without much scrubbing if I clean them immediately. I still dutifully stick them in the dishwasher, which I run as more or less a disinfectant, I supppose. Some dishwashers have the power to scrub not only dishes and forks but pots and pans, but I don't rely on that, especially if you don't know when you will run the dishwasher. And it really is so easy to get dinnerware clean if you do so right after you finish eating that there is no point in leaving a mess for later. The energy required will be less if done immediately, which is reason enough to skp procrastinating.
 |
| The old family farmhouse. |
While I'm thinking about it, most kitchens now have garbage disposals, which grind up food wastes that are rinsed off plates, but these are not intended to be a place for dumping big hunks of food. All that stuff must make it through your pipes, and the more junk you throw down there, the more chance you will stop it up, which creates a dirty job for you or an expensive plumber.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
My Name Is Chicken McLicken
"Popcorn popcorn for the ducks.
Duck duck duck will bring me luck.
All the ducks come say hello,
Cuz we bring popcorn, not Jell-O."
Obviously, that wasn't written by Bernie Taupin or Ira Gershwin. I made it up while walking with my first child, Gina, to feed some ducks floating on a pond across from Knott's Berry Farm. Little Gina looked up at me and said, "Because they don't like Jell-O, right Daddy?" And that became part of our tradition.
We didn't always have popcorn, often bringing leftover bread or tearing some from our picnic sandwiches, and we often went to other ponds in other parks, but we always repeated that silly singsong on our way there, which led to a family tradition of similar chants that made us smile.
By the time my children were born, Knott's had already evolved to a full-fledged amusement park from little more than a small carnival with shops built in the area of what originally was nothing more than a berry stand like many others that popped up on Orange County's rural street corners. I remember when my cousin Donald brought his family out to California for a visit, he said they found Knott's preferable to Disneyland. I guess it was natural that they would eventually turn a free park with ducks into a profit center.
Wow, is that ever off the subject? Okay, at least I did mention that Mom's fried chicken dinner was better than the world famous recipe of Mrs. Knott's, and last night, with memories of Mom's chicken on my mind, I planned to make fried chicken for dinner. Once again, however, I realized I didn't have her recipe. Eating food fried in Crisco had grown out of fashion, and so even though it was my favorite as a child, I don't remember her making fried chicken too often after I grew up.
I mentioned to Julie that I might attempt to make fried chicken using some boneless, skinless chicken breasts I just bought, which would right there be different from my mother's recipe, which would fry the pieces with bones and skin. Julie said that her grandmother Opal McQuillen, a 4'11" firecracker who she called Gramma Popo, used pancake batter instead of flour as her secret fried chicken ingredient.
In addition to the fact that I don't know Mom's recipe or how substituting olive oil for Crisco would work out, two other lightning bolts flashed into my head. First, I have some pancake mix in the refrigerator that Amy bought a while back. Second, this would be the perfect chance to create a recipe called El Pollo Popo. I decided that Chicken McLicken was a bit more appropo than Popo, especially if the end result or a typo made people change the order of the last two letters. Besides, that would allow me to bring up the subject of singsongs.
"My name is Chicken McLicken,
And I'm a hardy lass..."
You can probably imagine the types of boisterous boasting of prowess that followed, although any kicking was never of something that rhymed with lass.
I used to use that same singsong with Amy before she was a year old, swinging her arms back and forth in a manner similar to the photo of her as a toddler in the engineer outfit my sister bought initially for Jay that was passed on to her.
Jay, of course, was a hardy lad instead, but when he was an infant, I more often spoke with a gruff voice in a poor immitation of Miami Vice's Don Johnson and said, "I'm Crockett, and this is my partner Tubbs."
With all these images rushing through my head, I pulled out a pot in which to fry chicken. My mom used to use a deep, cast iron skillet, one that I inadvertantly ruined as a teenager trying to clean it, which was in retrospect one of the worst good deeds of my life, but I wanted the higher edges of a pot to limit splatter onto the stove.
Weighing the situation further, I decided to follow Q-CC protocol, creating minimum mess, by backing it in a glass dish lined with parchment paper.
As you'll see, this recipe is similar to Q-CC Chicken Parmesan, although obviously without the marinara sauce and cheese, and as such it is even easier.
You'll need two or three boneless, skinless chicken breasts, about cup and a half of pancake mix, a cup of milk, seasoned salt, pepper and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Spray.
Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.
Pour some pancake mix at one end of the parchment paper-lined dish.
Put about a cup of milk in a shallow, wide bowl.
After trimming off any undesireable parts of the chicken (fat and veins) that escaped the butcher, split the thicker part of the breast and butterfly it to increase the surface area that will be breaded.
Soak the breasts one at a time in the milk, and then put them in the pancake mix, flipping them over to coat both sides, and then place them in the other part of the dish. If you measured about right, the final piece of chicken will fill the dish and use up the rest of the pancake mix perfectly so that you place that last piece where the mix was piled for coating. Most likely, that won't happen, but it shouldn't be too far off, and the extra just ends up staying in the parchment paper when you serve the chicken.
Sprinkle liberally with pepper and seasoned salt, and then bake for 45 minutes.
Wash the knife and milk bowl in anticbacterial soap before putting in the dishwasher.
Julie came home just about the time I was taking the chicken out of the oven. It looked sort of like a mountain range, with brown peaks and powdery crevices. I told Julie I was making Popo's chicken, and she asked if I had made pancake batter and dipped the chicken in it. A lightbulb came on. That would make sense.
However, the recipe I had used actually looked great, except the powdery parts, which had actually been caused by me sprinkling some of the "extra" pancake mix over the top of the already dipped and breaded chicken. Our brainstorming led to the idea of spraying it with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, which Julie normally uses on her microwaved Orville Redenbacher Smart Pop.
Cooking the chicken for 15 minutes more resulted in delicious chicken that was crispy and tasty on the top and tender throughout. If you like juicier chicken, cook it for less time, but be sure to thoroughly cook the chicken.
Cleanup? What cleanup? Wad up the parchment paper to toss it out, and quickly rinse the baking dish after it cools down.
For a side dish, we had steamed asparagus, which is an easy recipe. Rinse a handful of fresh asparagus, trim the bases from the stalks, put in a glass bread dish with a tablespoon of water and two pats of Smart Balance or butter, cover with wax paper and microwave for two minutes. This dish cleans very easily without using any kind of pan liner.
Duck duck duck will bring me luck.
All the ducks come say hello,
Cuz we bring popcorn, not Jell-O."
Obviously, that wasn't written by Bernie Taupin or Ira Gershwin. I made it up while walking with my first child, Gina, to feed some ducks floating on a pond across from Knott's Berry Farm. Little Gina looked up at me and said, "Because they don't like Jell-O, right Daddy?" And that became part of our tradition.
We didn't always have popcorn, often bringing leftover bread or tearing some from our picnic sandwiches, and we often went to other ponds in other parks, but we always repeated that silly singsong on our way there, which led to a family tradition of similar chants that made us smile.
 |
| Daddy (Wes) and Gina |
The free-admission, parklike grounds near Knott's replica of Independence Hall have since been supplanted by Knott's Soak City, a fun water park that suited our family when we visited it, but I hold fond memories for that park that is no more. It seems in California that maximizing highest and best use on valuable real estate will push us onward and upward, whether we like it or not. My earliest memories of Knott's Berry Farm itself are of a place where we would pan for gold and drive the old go-carts designed to look like Model-Ts, where Dad would buy some shirts at Bob's Men's Shop, and he and Mom would buy some beautiful ash trays and swirled glass objets d' arte at Virginia's Gift Shop. We went to Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant only once, because it wasn't as good as Mom's.
Years later, Julie and I found common ground in the fact that her parents also took her on similar trips to Bob's and Virginia's. While we didn't meet as children, we probably saw each other a few times, because we definitely seemed to share common childhoods.
By the time my children were born, Knott's had already evolved to a full-fledged amusement park from little more than a small carnival with shops built in the area of what originally was nothing more than a berry stand like many others that popped up on Orange County's rural street corners. I remember when my cousin Donald brought his family out to California for a visit, he said they found Knott's preferable to Disneyland. I guess it was natural that they would eventually turn a free park with ducks into a profit center.
 |
| Alvin and tartan-clad sister Darlene, a few years ago. |
I mentioned to Julie that I might attempt to make fried chicken using some boneless, skinless chicken breasts I just bought, which would right there be different from my mother's recipe, which would fry the pieces with bones and skin. Julie said that her grandmother Opal McQuillen, a 4'11" firecracker who she called Gramma Popo, used pancake batter instead of flour as her secret fried chicken ingredient.
In addition to the fact that I don't know Mom's recipe or how substituting olive oil for Crisco would work out, two other lightning bolts flashed into my head. First, I have some pancake mix in the refrigerator that Amy bought a while back. Second, this would be the perfect chance to create a recipe called El Pollo Popo. I decided that Chicken McLicken was a bit more appropo than Popo, especially if the end result or a typo made people change the order of the last two letters. Besides, that would allow me to bring up the subject of singsongs.
 |
| Jay, pre-Universal Music Group |
My sister Darlene gave Gina a cute Scottish outfit, complete with a tartan scarf and matching tam. As you can see in the photo above, she was adorable in that outfit (and all the time, for that matter). She especially liked her boots, with a penchant for shoes that her daughter Emma shares with her mom, Amy, Julie, Julie's mother, my mother and Darlene. Come to think of it, I don't know any woman who doesn't like shoes.
The outfit led to a new singsong, of course.
 |
| Amy in singsong mode |
And I'm a hardy lass..."
You can probably imagine the types of boisterous boasting of prowess that followed, although any kicking was never of something that rhymed with lass.
I used to use that same singsong with Amy before she was a year old, swinging her arms back and forth in a manner similar to the photo of her as a toddler in the engineer outfit my sister bought initially for Jay that was passed on to her.
Jay, of course, was a hardy lad instead, but when he was an infant, I more often spoke with a gruff voice in a poor immitation of Miami Vice's Don Johnson and said, "I'm Crockett, and this is my partner Tubbs."
With all these images rushing through my head, I pulled out a pot in which to fry chicken. My mom used to use a deep, cast iron skillet, one that I inadvertantly ruined as a teenager trying to clean it, which was in retrospect one of the worst good deeds of my life, but I wanted the higher edges of a pot to limit splatter onto the stove.
Weighing the situation further, I decided to follow Q-CC protocol, creating minimum mess, by backing it in a glass dish lined with parchment paper.
As you'll see, this recipe is similar to Q-CC Chicken Parmesan, although obviously without the marinara sauce and cheese, and as such it is even easier.
You'll need two or three boneless, skinless chicken breasts, about cup and a half of pancake mix, a cup of milk, seasoned salt, pepper and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Spray.
Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.
Pour some pancake mix at one end of the parchment paper-lined dish.
Put about a cup of milk in a shallow, wide bowl.
After trimming off any undesireable parts of the chicken (fat and veins) that escaped the butcher, split the thicker part of the breast and butterfly it to increase the surface area that will be breaded.
Soak the breasts one at a time in the milk, and then put them in the pancake mix, flipping them over to coat both sides, and then place them in the other part of the dish. If you measured about right, the final piece of chicken will fill the dish and use up the rest of the pancake mix perfectly so that you place that last piece where the mix was piled for coating. Most likely, that won't happen, but it shouldn't be too far off, and the extra just ends up staying in the parchment paper when you serve the chicken.
Sprinkle liberally with pepper and seasoned salt, and then bake for 45 minutes.
Wash the knife and milk bowl in anticbacterial soap before putting in the dishwasher.
Julie came home just about the time I was taking the chicken out of the oven. It looked sort of like a mountain range, with brown peaks and powdery crevices. I told Julie I was making Popo's chicken, and she asked if I had made pancake batter and dipped the chicken in it. A lightbulb came on. That would make sense.
However, the recipe I had used actually looked great, except the powdery parts, which had actually been caused by me sprinkling some of the "extra" pancake mix over the top of the already dipped and breaded chicken. Our brainstorming led to the idea of spraying it with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, which Julie normally uses on her microwaved Orville Redenbacher Smart Pop.
Cooking the chicken for 15 minutes more resulted in delicious chicken that was crispy and tasty on the top and tender throughout. If you like juicier chicken, cook it for less time, but be sure to thoroughly cook the chicken.
Cleanup? What cleanup? Wad up the parchment paper to toss it out, and quickly rinse the baking dish after it cools down.
For a side dish, we had steamed asparagus, which is an easy recipe. Rinse a handful of fresh asparagus, trim the bases from the stalks, put in a glass bread dish with a tablespoon of water and two pats of Smart Balance or butter, cover with wax paper and microwave for two minutes. This dish cleans very easily without using any kind of pan liner.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Corned Beef and Cabbage (A day late and a dollar short)
On St. Patrick's Day, we traditionally have corned beef and cabbage, which for most of us is the signature Irish dish.
When Julie and I visited Ireland, I looked forward to enjoying this dish in its native land to see if it would compare favorably with my mother's cooking. It turned out that I never found a restaurant serving corned beef.
What we did find were lots of restaurants serving potatoes. In fact, potatoes came on the side of every dish. If we had stir fry with brown rice, it would come with a side of french fries.
I came away realizing that potatoes were the real food of Ireland, and my mom used to include potatoes with her corned beef and cabbage. She didn't just throw red potatoes into an Irish stew of cabbage and carrots. She would separately boil potatoes and then make mashed potatoes, which were really good with cabbage over the top of them. Mmmmm!
Well, I thought, potatoes for Ireland makes sense. After all, there was the famous potato famine that brought such hard conditions there.
The potato, then, has been the foundation of the Irish diet from time immemorial, I thought. But this morning, I discovered something new. It turns out that while Europeans introduced, among other things, livestock to the new world, which eventually led to the images we have of Native Americans skillfully riding horses bareback across the plains despite the fact that they didn't have horses until the Europeans arrived. The humble potato was an American product that was brought back to the Old World by Spanish explorers, which of course resulted in the famed french fries of the Irish named American company McDonald's becoming ubiquitous throughout the world during my generation.
Once again, I seem to have gotten pretty far off the topic, but it is really pretty easy to make corned beef and cabbage, or at least it is if you have a large supermarket like Ralph's nearby. Because I am one of those antiquated folks who subscribes to a printed newspaper, I am able to peruse ads for grocery stores on Tuesday mornings for sales that start on Wednesday. I actually find that I save far more money perusing Daily Breeze ads on this one day than the newspaper costs for a month of delivery. Factor in the weekend ads for department stores like Kohl's, and I can't understand why everyone doesn't get daily newspapers.I know, too many words saying too little about cooking corned beef. In any case, among the different stores, Ralph's had the lowest priced corned beef, Shannon's "point cut." Point cut means it will have more fat, usually hidden behind white plastic on the bottom, than flat cut, which some consider the better value, definitely requires less fat-trimming and is what my mother used to buy. In this case, the flat cut next to the point cut at Ralph's was three times the price, and because my wife doesn't even like the smell of it cooking, I figured I'd go with the cheaper point cut.
The point cut has a deeper profile, so covering it with water would have required filling the pot to the brim, which would have eventually overflowed onto the stovetop. I simply turned it over a couple of times while cooking. Basically, all you do is put the corned beef in the pot, pour in the seasoning mix (Shannon's includes in the package), add water and bring to a boil. I actually keep the cover on most of the time, and while not at a full boil, the water definitely still bubbles, meaning that you have to add water periodically, a lesson I could have used to avert my recent noodles fiasco.While 2 1/2 hours should do it, I cooked it more like 3 hours, because of needing to turn the meat. Before going on a walk along the beach with Julie, I took the corned beef out of the water and threw in some carrots. Cooking "stinky" corned beef was marginally acceptable, but cooking cabbage is something I only do when Julie is out of town on a business trip, because she finds that smell totally disgusting....although of course it is quite healthy and delicious. To add cabbage, just cut a head into quarters and put it in the water to boil for 15 minutes, along with carrots and other root vegetables. If you're making potatoes in the stew, you probably should cook them longer, maybe adding them to the last half hour of the corned beef cooking. To be perfectly honest, the carrots weren't that good, possibly because I turned off the water and just let them sit in it as it cooled rather than actually boiling them.
The great news is that with one pot, this is a very easy to clean meal. Just wash the pot with hot water and soap.
An important part of making a corned beef sandwich is the condiments. I recommend following Mom's recipe: spread mayonaise on the bread (she always used seedless Jewish rye, but low carb wheat bread tastes good too), and then spread an equal amount of mustard on, so that the two mix togehter. It is delicious. Serve the cabbage, potatoes and any other vegetables on the side.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Homemade German Egg Noodles....or the Case for Q-CC!
As children, we all have our favorite meals, and usually the recipes used by our mothers top the food charts. As a young boy, I loved southern fried chicken, not unlike that which made the Kentucky Colonel famous, but of course Mom's was better. Served with mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet peas and corn on the cob, that meal couldn't be beat.
When I became a teenager, however, a new favorite emerged. Homemade German egg noodles. I've since learned they are called spatzle or spaetzle, but we just called them noodles most of the time. Single batches soon became insufficient, and she bagan making double batches so that I could enjoy leftovers the next day.
These days, as my wife and I try to avoid further midsection sprawl with a low-carb approach to eating, I seldom cook any intentionally high carb dish like noodles, but back then, the delicious homemade chicken soup that included sweet peas along with chopped celery and onions was an afterthought in the dish, simply a delivery mechanism for those delicious noodles. In fact, I often avoided eating the chicken to save room for noodles. How times have changed.
Today is a cool, foggy day in Redondo Beach, and the idea of some hot comfort food sounds quite enticing, so I decided to throw Dr. Atkins to the wind today. Hopefully Julie will forgive the residual flour in the soup.
As a nod to the low carb life, however, I will cut back to a half batch of noodles.
I wrote that introduction yesterday in the morning. Contrary to my usual approach of telling you about some Q-CC meal I recently prepared, I was obviously consciously deciding to not only start with a recipe, but for that recipe to be neither low carb nor, more significantly, Quick-Clean Cuisine.
The reason for starting with the recipe was...well... I actually don't have a recipe. When I would tell Mom how much I enjoyed her noodles, she would laugh and say it is really the easiest thing: just flour and eggs. I thought I had written down Mom's recipe, which she had learned from my Dad's Mother, but I couldn't remember seeing it in years, so I decided I better do a little online research. That's where I learned about the German name spaetzle, although I'm not sure that was even the right kind of noodle. I will share my plan for what I prepared yesterday, and give you some results in bold italics, just to be clear when I wrote what.
The soup takes longer than the noodles themselves, so we'll start there.
Boil 8 cups of water in a big pot. Chop a quarter of an onion and stir into the pot of water.
My mom used to use a whole chicken, but Julie and I prefer the white meat, and since I bought a packet of boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $1.97 a pound at Smart and Final the day before (having used the other half of the package for stir fry the previous evening), there was no reason not to use them. Split chicken breasts, by the way, can also be used, if you get enough of a price break to compensate for the weight of the bones, but yesterday they were $1.79 per pound. If you do use the split chicken breasts, I recommend boiling them for 45 minutes and then taking them out of the water to get rid of the bones and skin, which are easily removed once cooked. Either way, at 45 minutes in, take the chicken out of the pot and cut it into into bite sized strips.
Stir in a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken Condensed Soup and cook a little more.
After about 15 minutes, see if it needs some salt, and then sprinkle in whatever you think it needs. Definitely sprinkle in some pepper.
Stir in a half bag of C & W Early Harvest Petite Peas, or more if you want a lot of peas.
Chop up two or three stalks of celery into small pieces, and then stir those in.
Actually, what I described above is a good chicken soup recipe. Sweet peas are not considered Atkins-friendly, because of their high sugar count, but you can really put about any vegetables in the pot and they taste really good. This is one of my granddaughter Emma's favorite dishes, although she certainly enjoys having rice, noodles, potatoes, bread or anything else, because she burns off a lot of calories growing, doing ballet and running up and down ramps. I've found that since turning 30, I simply don't perform Swan Lake often enough to not pack on pounds when I eat starches. Had I stopped at this point, that would be basically a great Q-CC recipe.
Now comes the noodles, and for this we need to take the unusual Q-CC step of getting out a separate medium-sized mixing bowl.
Microwave about a quarter cup of water in a clean cup for about 30 seconds to get it warm and then put it aside to use later.
Also, cover your cutting board with a piece of Reynolds Cut Rite Wax Paper, because even though we're going outside the Q-CC paradigm, we want to make it a controllable mess. Sprinkle the surface of the wax paper with flour to create a working surfact to be used later for making noodles.
As usual with me, the recipe varies depending on the exact way the ingredients look to me on any given day, but separate the egg whites from the yolks for two or three eggs. You can use the egg whites to make an omelette the next morning, but let's go crazy, violating all rules of Quick-Clean Cuisine, and make a meringue dessert with them instead, messing up another cooking dish.
When I say I usually don't have an exact recipe any time I cook, that's true. However, at least I know basically how the recipe goes. I was going on memory. I remembered seeing a clear custard dish in the refrigerator with egg whites in it after my mom while my mom made noodles, and I figured she must be using the egg yolks, since several of the spatzle recipes I saw online used mostly egg yolks. Notice that the dish count is adding up already, which means more dishwashing, which is a Q-CC no no.
To separate the eggs, put the meringue cooking dish next to your noodle mixing bowl. Crack open an egg over the top of the meringue dish and slowly tip the egg back and forth, allowing the clear portion to trickle into the dish. Once there is nothing but yolk left, pour that into the noodle mixing bowl.
If you accidentally drop the yolk into the egg white bowl, you can actually scoop it back up and move it over without too much trouble. This is what happened, and by scoop it up, I mean I put my hand in the egg white bowl and picked up the yolk in my fingers. It was a gooey mess.
Repeat separating for another egg. If you find one of these eggs has a kind of clumpy piece of clear gel that won't separate, just put that into the mixing bowl along with the yolks. Of the three eggs, you want about one egg's worth of "white" anyway.
Actually, I wrote that paragraph after separating the eggs and finding one had a bunch of clear gel attached to it. I did wash my hands before keyboarding that in. Essentially, I was just reporting what I saw, and I had begun to question using only egg yolks anyway.
Once you have all of the egg yolks and about one egg white in the mixing bowl and have washed the egg residue from your fingers with antibiotic soap, add 1/4 teaspoon of salt and gradually stir in a cup of flour. You'll probably need about 2 or 3 tablespoons of the water you microwaved to get the mixture moist enough. When it is thoroughly mixed, transfer it to the wax paper-covered cutting board. Put another piece of wax paper on top of it and press it down.
At this point, I have to say it looked more yellow than I remembered Mom's noodles, but I nonetheless followed the directions I had written earlier. That was a mistake. The dough was way too wet, and despite the flour on the bottom paper, it stuck to it, and the unfloured wax paper on top became one with the dough like Luke Skywalker with the Force. Well, I thought, maybe if I let it sit there a while, it will dry out. Wrong. Finally, I threw it out, looked back at the internet recipes, retraced the stops up to transfering it to the cutting board and changed the directions to this, which is much closer to the truth:
Once it is all mixed to a point where it is too thick to stir, begin kneading it with your hands, gradually adding in more flour until it is no longer sticky. Let it rest for about 15 minutes to a half hour, then move the ball of dough onto the flour-dusted wax paper-covered cutting board.
Of course, by this time, I had already wasted so much time that I was in too much of a hurry to wait a half hour, so a short 15 minutes and I was onto the next step.
Dust the dough with more flour and flatten the dough as much as you can by hand. Dust it again, and then turn it over. Keep dusting it with flour, flattening it and flipping it until it gets thin. I don't have a rolling pin, but if you have a one, you can break out that bad boy right now. Or, if you don't have one and your hands aren't strong enough to flatten it by hand just find a relatively symmetrical drinking glass and use that to roll it flat, never applying so much pressure that you might break the glass. A thick Guinness glass would be a good choice. And I had a glass of Guinness in it later which was an even better choice.
Once it is about a quarter inch thick or thinner, cut it into strips about a half inch to an inch wide. Note that these don't need to be perfectly uniform, and they won't look anything like those thin flat noodles you buy at the store. That's part of the charm of homemade noodles.
I would actually say they should rest about a half hour before cutting them too, but by now I was really behind on adding the noodles to the pot.
At this point, you "let them rest," or basically just sit there for a half hour or so before adding them to the soup to boil for 15 minutes. I think they rested maybe 5 minutes before I threw them in the soup pot. Once they're cooking, you can throw away the wax paper, being sure to avoid incidentally dusting your kitchen with flour.
In the mean time, let's make that meringue dessert. What the hell was I thinking? Whip the egg whites thoroughly. Then, add two tablespoons of Splenda Granulated for Baking for each egg. Four tablespoons equals a quarter cup, if you have two eggs and prefer a more exact measurement for your Splenda. Whip that up thoroughly, and just before putting it in the oven, spray on a little Pam so that it browns like meringue made with sugar. Bake at 325 degrees for 20 minutes.
Perhaps you're thinking I forgot to put a lemon pie under that.
This is where my morning directions ended, and the recipe on the Jello box I read at Target looked like even more of a mess for a pie that I don't particularly like, so I thought I would try the meringue alone, and possibly serve it with sugar free dark chocolate. I had one problem. Despite the fact that the meringue directions said that if I whipped the egg whites and sugar, the concoction would grow to twice the volume and form ridges, it just looked like some soapy bath water. "Mademoiselle, ees zat how you make zee soup?" Nonetheless, I put it in the oven, spraying it with Pam cooking spray, as Splenda says is necessary for a natural baked brown look.
However, while taking so long to make this light dessert, I ignored the noodles, and the next thing I knew they had cooked for a half hour or more. When I took the lid off the soup I couldn't help but notice that the pot was almost completely dry. The noodles weren't at all wet and fluffy-soft but rather dry and hard. Worse, the soup had no liquid left in it, and the bottom was burning. Plus with all the water cooked away, I could see that my previous little mistake of pouring closer to 3/4 of a bag of petite peas had resulted in a LOT of big peas, and Julie doesn't like peas.
On cue, Julie arrived home and asked, "What's that smell?" She looked at me and laughed.
Three days ago, I had been up in Canoga Park painting a popcorn ceiling using spray cans of special popcorn touch up paint, as requested by the buyers of our rental condo that's in escrow. The ceiling "paint" is a light, powder-like substance that adheres to the popcorn ceiling without weighting it down so that it doesn't break away, and I have to say it works great, but residue also falls on the person spraying, and when I returned home that night my hair was thick with goop, my face was a much whiter shade of pale, my nostrils were filled with white nose hairs and the graphic of Tony Gwynn getting his 3000th hit for the Padres on my belly was about as white as the rest of my white tee shirt. As I stood in the kitchen three days later making noodles, I looked down at my black sweatshirt and jeans and realized I had created almost as much of a mess. "It's a noodle haulocost!" I exclaimed.
While Julie went upstairs to change clothes, still laughing at me, I put all the noodles into one bowl and began sorting the chicken into a bowl for her dinner, feverishly eating peas with a spoon to bring them down to a halfway acceptable level. The chicken was good. And so were the peas for that matter. Sure, there a lot of dry soup was burned to the bottom of the pan, but as the family joke still goes, "Wes likes the burned parts."
The noodles, however, just weren't very good, although I was surprised to see Julie going back to have a few more, picking them up with her fingers, after she finished her chicken. That's why we don't have many starches in the house. We can't resist them, even when they aren't particularly good.
Unfortunately, as you may have surmised, this is not a good recipe for making noodles. Julie said my mom used to use a separate pot of water like spaghetti just for the noodles, and then added them to the soup, and I think when our family came over with all my noodle-loving kids, she would have had to do that, because we ate so much at one sitting. In any case, at the least I should have added a lot more water at some point before I cooked them. I'll try again another day.
But as I cleaned up the spilled flour, eggs and granulated Splenda, all of which had hardened with all the water splashed around in the process of getting dishes and pots cleaned, I realized at least it was a good lesson as to why Quick-Clean Cuisine has become my way.
Oh, and the meringue turned out to be a thin layer of cooked foam over a tub of a flan-like crap that tasted like eggs sweetened with sugar. I don't recommend it.
When I became a teenager, however, a new favorite emerged. Homemade German egg noodles. I've since learned they are called spatzle or spaetzle, but we just called them noodles most of the time. Single batches soon became insufficient, and she bagan making double batches so that I could enjoy leftovers the next day.
These days, as my wife and I try to avoid further midsection sprawl with a low-carb approach to eating, I seldom cook any intentionally high carb dish like noodles, but back then, the delicious homemade chicken soup that included sweet peas along with chopped celery and onions was an afterthought in the dish, simply a delivery mechanism for those delicious noodles. In fact, I often avoided eating the chicken to save room for noodles. How times have changed.
Today is a cool, foggy day in Redondo Beach, and the idea of some hot comfort food sounds quite enticing, so I decided to throw Dr. Atkins to the wind today. Hopefully Julie will forgive the residual flour in the soup.
As a nod to the low carb life, however, I will cut back to a half batch of noodles.
I wrote that introduction yesterday in the morning. Contrary to my usual approach of telling you about some Q-CC meal I recently prepared, I was obviously consciously deciding to not only start with a recipe, but for that recipe to be neither low carb nor, more significantly, Quick-Clean Cuisine.
The reason for starting with the recipe was...well... I actually don't have a recipe. When I would tell Mom how much I enjoyed her noodles, she would laugh and say it is really the easiest thing: just flour and eggs. I thought I had written down Mom's recipe, which she had learned from my Dad's Mother, but I couldn't remember seeing it in years, so I decided I better do a little online research. That's where I learned about the German name spaetzle, although I'm not sure that was even the right kind of noodle. I will share my plan for what I prepared yesterday, and give you some results in bold italics, just to be clear when I wrote what.
The soup takes longer than the noodles themselves, so we'll start there.
Boil 8 cups of water in a big pot. Chop a quarter of an onion and stir into the pot of water.
My mom used to use a whole chicken, but Julie and I prefer the white meat, and since I bought a packet of boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $1.97 a pound at Smart and Final the day before (having used the other half of the package for stir fry the previous evening), there was no reason not to use them. Split chicken breasts, by the way, can also be used, if you get enough of a price break to compensate for the weight of the bones, but yesterday they were $1.79 per pound. If you do use the split chicken breasts, I recommend boiling them for 45 minutes and then taking them out of the water to get rid of the bones and skin, which are easily removed once cooked. Either way, at 45 minutes in, take the chicken out of the pot and cut it into into bite sized strips.
Stir in a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken Condensed Soup and cook a little more.
After about 15 minutes, see if it needs some salt, and then sprinkle in whatever you think it needs. Definitely sprinkle in some pepper.
Stir in a half bag of C & W Early Harvest Petite Peas, or more if you want a lot of peas.
Chop up two or three stalks of celery into small pieces, and then stir those in.
Actually, what I described above is a good chicken soup recipe. Sweet peas are not considered Atkins-friendly, because of their high sugar count, but you can really put about any vegetables in the pot and they taste really good. This is one of my granddaughter Emma's favorite dishes, although she certainly enjoys having rice, noodles, potatoes, bread or anything else, because she burns off a lot of calories growing, doing ballet and running up and down ramps. I've found that since turning 30, I simply don't perform Swan Lake often enough to not pack on pounds when I eat starches. Had I stopped at this point, that would be basically a great Q-CC recipe.
Now comes the noodles, and for this we need to take the unusual Q-CC step of getting out a separate medium-sized mixing bowl.
Microwave about a quarter cup of water in a clean cup for about 30 seconds to get it warm and then put it aside to use later.
Also, cover your cutting board with a piece of Reynolds Cut Rite Wax Paper, because even though we're going outside the Q-CC paradigm, we want to make it a controllable mess. Sprinkle the surface of the wax paper with flour to create a working surfact to be used later for making noodles.
As usual with me, the recipe varies depending on the exact way the ingredients look to me on any given day, but separate the egg whites from the yolks for two or three eggs. You can use the egg whites to make an omelette the next morning, but let's go crazy, violating all rules of Quick-Clean Cuisine, and make a meringue dessert with them instead, messing up another cooking dish.
When I say I usually don't have an exact recipe any time I cook, that's true. However, at least I know basically how the recipe goes. I was going on memory. I remembered seeing a clear custard dish in the refrigerator with egg whites in it after my mom while my mom made noodles, and I figured she must be using the egg yolks, since several of the spatzle recipes I saw online used mostly egg yolks. Notice that the dish count is adding up already, which means more dishwashing, which is a Q-CC no no.
To separate the eggs, put the meringue cooking dish next to your noodle mixing bowl. Crack open an egg over the top of the meringue dish and slowly tip the egg back and forth, allowing the clear portion to trickle into the dish. Once there is nothing but yolk left, pour that into the noodle mixing bowl.
If you accidentally drop the yolk into the egg white bowl, you can actually scoop it back up and move it over without too much trouble. This is what happened, and by scoop it up, I mean I put my hand in the egg white bowl and picked up the yolk in my fingers. It was a gooey mess.
Repeat separating for another egg. If you find one of these eggs has a kind of clumpy piece of clear gel that won't separate, just put that into the mixing bowl along with the yolks. Of the three eggs, you want about one egg's worth of "white" anyway.
Actually, I wrote that paragraph after separating the eggs and finding one had a bunch of clear gel attached to it. I did wash my hands before keyboarding that in. Essentially, I was just reporting what I saw, and I had begun to question using only egg yolks anyway.
Once you have all of the egg yolks and about one egg white in the mixing bowl and have washed the egg residue from your fingers with antibiotic soap, add 1/4 teaspoon of salt and gradually stir in a cup of flour. You'll probably need about 2 or 3 tablespoons of the water you microwaved to get the mixture moist enough. When it is thoroughly mixed, transfer it to the wax paper-covered cutting board. Put another piece of wax paper on top of it and press it down.
At this point, I have to say it looked more yellow than I remembered Mom's noodles, but I nonetheless followed the directions I had written earlier. That was a mistake. The dough was way too wet, and despite the flour on the bottom paper, it stuck to it, and the unfloured wax paper on top became one with the dough like Luke Skywalker with the Force. Well, I thought, maybe if I let it sit there a while, it will dry out. Wrong. Finally, I threw it out, looked back at the internet recipes, retraced the stops up to transfering it to the cutting board and changed the directions to this, which is much closer to the truth:
Once it is all mixed to a point where it is too thick to stir, begin kneading it with your hands, gradually adding in more flour until it is no longer sticky. Let it rest for about 15 minutes to a half hour, then move the ball of dough onto the flour-dusted wax paper-covered cutting board.
Of course, by this time, I had already wasted so much time that I was in too much of a hurry to wait a half hour, so a short 15 minutes and I was onto the next step.
Dust the dough with more flour and flatten the dough as much as you can by hand. Dust it again, and then turn it over. Keep dusting it with flour, flattening it and flipping it until it gets thin. I don't have a rolling pin, but if you have a one, you can break out that bad boy right now. Or, if you don't have one and your hands aren't strong enough to flatten it by hand just find a relatively symmetrical drinking glass and use that to roll it flat, never applying so much pressure that you might break the glass. A thick Guinness glass would be a good choice. And I had a glass of Guinness in it later which was an even better choice.
Once it is about a quarter inch thick or thinner, cut it into strips about a half inch to an inch wide. Note that these don't need to be perfectly uniform, and they won't look anything like those thin flat noodles you buy at the store. That's part of the charm of homemade noodles.
I would actually say they should rest about a half hour before cutting them too, but by now I was really behind on adding the noodles to the pot.
At this point, you "let them rest," or basically just sit there for a half hour or so before adding them to the soup to boil for 15 minutes. I think they rested maybe 5 minutes before I threw them in the soup pot. Once they're cooking, you can throw away the wax paper, being sure to avoid incidentally dusting your kitchen with flour.
In the mean time, let's make that meringue dessert. What the hell was I thinking? Whip the egg whites thoroughly. Then, add two tablespoons of Splenda Granulated for Baking for each egg. Four tablespoons equals a quarter cup, if you have two eggs and prefer a more exact measurement for your Splenda. Whip that up thoroughly, and just before putting it in the oven, spray on a little Pam so that it browns like meringue made with sugar. Bake at 325 degrees for 20 minutes.
Perhaps you're thinking I forgot to put a lemon pie under that.
This is where my morning directions ended, and the recipe on the Jello box I read at Target looked like even more of a mess for a pie that I don't particularly like, so I thought I would try the meringue alone, and possibly serve it with sugar free dark chocolate. I had one problem. Despite the fact that the meringue directions said that if I whipped the egg whites and sugar, the concoction would grow to twice the volume and form ridges, it just looked like some soapy bath water. "Mademoiselle, ees zat how you make zee soup?" Nonetheless, I put it in the oven, spraying it with Pam cooking spray, as Splenda says is necessary for a natural baked brown look.
However, while taking so long to make this light dessert, I ignored the noodles, and the next thing I knew they had cooked for a half hour or more. When I took the lid off the soup I couldn't help but notice that the pot was almost completely dry. The noodles weren't at all wet and fluffy-soft but rather dry and hard. Worse, the soup had no liquid left in it, and the bottom was burning. Plus with all the water cooked away, I could see that my previous little mistake of pouring closer to 3/4 of a bag of petite peas had resulted in a LOT of big peas, and Julie doesn't like peas.
On cue, Julie arrived home and asked, "What's that smell?" She looked at me and laughed.
Three days ago, I had been up in Canoga Park painting a popcorn ceiling using spray cans of special popcorn touch up paint, as requested by the buyers of our rental condo that's in escrow. The ceiling "paint" is a light, powder-like substance that adheres to the popcorn ceiling without weighting it down so that it doesn't break away, and I have to say it works great, but residue also falls on the person spraying, and when I returned home that night my hair was thick with goop, my face was a much whiter shade of pale, my nostrils were filled with white nose hairs and the graphic of Tony Gwynn getting his 3000th hit for the Padres on my belly was about as white as the rest of my white tee shirt. As I stood in the kitchen three days later making noodles, I looked down at my black sweatshirt and jeans and realized I had created almost as much of a mess. "It's a noodle haulocost!" I exclaimed.
While Julie went upstairs to change clothes, still laughing at me, I put all the noodles into one bowl and began sorting the chicken into a bowl for her dinner, feverishly eating peas with a spoon to bring them down to a halfway acceptable level. The chicken was good. And so were the peas for that matter. Sure, there a lot of dry soup was burned to the bottom of the pan, but as the family joke still goes, "Wes likes the burned parts."
The noodles, however, just weren't very good, although I was surprised to see Julie going back to have a few more, picking them up with her fingers, after she finished her chicken. That's why we don't have many starches in the house. We can't resist them, even when they aren't particularly good.
Unfortunately, as you may have surmised, this is not a good recipe for making noodles. Julie said my mom used to use a separate pot of water like spaghetti just for the noodles, and then added them to the soup, and I think when our family came over with all my noodle-loving kids, she would have had to do that, because we ate so much at one sitting. In any case, at the least I should have added a lot more water at some point before I cooked them. I'll try again another day.
But as I cleaned up the spilled flour, eggs and granulated Splenda, all of which had hardened with all the water splashed around in the process of getting dishes and pots cleaned, I realized at least it was a good lesson as to why Quick-Clean Cuisine has become my way.
Oh, and the meringue turned out to be a thin layer of cooked foam over a tub of a flan-like crap that tasted like eggs sweetened with sugar. I don't recommend it.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Meatloaf
Meatloaf can be made many ways, but as you may have noticed, I tend to re-combine the same ingredients in different recipes so that I don't have to keep too many different products on hand. You'll notice a lot of repeats, but no grated cheese this time.
You'll need a pound to 20 ounces of ground meat, barbecue sauce, bread crumbs and one egg.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees, and line a glass cake pan with Reynolds Non-Stick Pan Lining Paper, which based on its star rating is something only I find to be fantastic but really is a great Q-CC time saver.
I prefer to use ground meat that is lower than 7% fat content, both because it is healthier and because it doesn't result in a lot of fat draining around the sides, which looks gross when it comes out of the oven and even worse if it is allowed to harden there as it cools. Plus, low fat is always easier to clean. Target had low fat ground beef on sale recently when I was there, so that's what I used recently, but turkey and pork also work fine. I always buy the meat in a styrofoam tray, which is what I use for the mixing bowl, saving cleaning time.
Make an indentation in the middle of the meat, then crack open the egg and empty the contents there. Pour a half cup of Progresso Italian Style Bread Crumbs on top of that, and then squirt on two or three tablespoons of barbecue sauce. While you can use about any barbecue sauce, I usually use Sweet Baby Ray's, because this is my son Jay's favorite. I use a tablespoon to mix all those ingredients, and I have to admit that I don't actually measure anything, but you should be able to see when it looks properly balanced. Once those are all thoroughly mixed, I add more bread crumbs and barbecue sauce, usually about half as much as I put in the first time, and mix that in. It should seem to be of a consistent texture that can be molded into a loaf.
While I know some people take off their rings, wash their hands with antibiotic soap and then squish all the ingredients together by hand, I prefer to just mix it up with a spoon that I can quickly wash afterwards. Get the loaf to the right basic shape, and then just pour the rough loaf into the lined pan. Using the same spoon, press on the meat loaf to smooth it out and create clearance from the sides of the lined pan. Even though it won't stick, it tastes better when the sides of the loaf get a free flow of hot air. Add a squiggle of barbecue sauce on top, and then cook it at 400 degrees for 50 minutes to an hour.
It's that easy. If you finish it, just wad up the pan liner and throw it out. If you've ever cleaned a meatloaf pan, you know how great it is that you don't have to scrape and soak the pan.
A good side dish for meatloaf is steamed broccoli. Fill a microwave safe bowl with broccoli florets, sprinkle on seasoned salt, add a tablespoon of butter, cover with wax paper and microwave for about 3 minutes (depending on how big your bowl is). Baked potato is another easy side dish for meatloaf. Just poke some holes in a potato and microwave it for 7 minutes. Then, cover it with foil, and cook in the oven along with the meatloaf. When done, slice open the potato and add either butter or sour cream.
Leftover meatloaf makes great sandwiches. That's what I had for breakfast yesterday: cold meatloaf and a slice of tomato between two slices of bread.
You'll need a pound to 20 ounces of ground meat, barbecue sauce, bread crumbs and one egg.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees, and line a glass cake pan with Reynolds Non-Stick Pan Lining Paper, which based on its star rating is something only I find to be fantastic but really is a great Q-CC time saver.
I prefer to use ground meat that is lower than 7% fat content, both because it is healthier and because it doesn't result in a lot of fat draining around the sides, which looks gross when it comes out of the oven and even worse if it is allowed to harden there as it cools. Plus, low fat is always easier to clean. Target had low fat ground beef on sale recently when I was there, so that's what I used recently, but turkey and pork also work fine. I always buy the meat in a styrofoam tray, which is what I use for the mixing bowl, saving cleaning time.
Make an indentation in the middle of the meat, then crack open the egg and empty the contents there. Pour a half cup of Progresso Italian Style Bread Crumbs on top of that, and then squirt on two or three tablespoons of barbecue sauce. While you can use about any barbecue sauce, I usually use Sweet Baby Ray's, because this is my son Jay's favorite. I use a tablespoon to mix all those ingredients, and I have to admit that I don't actually measure anything, but you should be able to see when it looks properly balanced. Once those are all thoroughly mixed, I add more bread crumbs and barbecue sauce, usually about half as much as I put in the first time, and mix that in. It should seem to be of a consistent texture that can be molded into a loaf.
While I know some people take off their rings, wash their hands with antibiotic soap and then squish all the ingredients together by hand, I prefer to just mix it up with a spoon that I can quickly wash afterwards. Get the loaf to the right basic shape, and then just pour the rough loaf into the lined pan. Using the same spoon, press on the meat loaf to smooth it out and create clearance from the sides of the lined pan. Even though it won't stick, it tastes better when the sides of the loaf get a free flow of hot air. Add a squiggle of barbecue sauce on top, and then cook it at 400 degrees for 50 minutes to an hour.
It's that easy. If you finish it, just wad up the pan liner and throw it out. If you've ever cleaned a meatloaf pan, you know how great it is that you don't have to scrape and soak the pan.
A good side dish for meatloaf is steamed broccoli. Fill a microwave safe bowl with broccoli florets, sprinkle on seasoned salt, add a tablespoon of butter, cover with wax paper and microwave for about 3 minutes (depending on how big your bowl is). Baked potato is another easy side dish for meatloaf. Just poke some holes in a potato and microwave it for 7 minutes. Then, cover it with foil, and cook in the oven along with the meatloaf. When done, slice open the potato and add either butter or sour cream.
Leftover meatloaf makes great sandwiches. That's what I had for breakfast yesterday: cold meatloaf and a slice of tomato between two slices of bread.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Eggs Over Cheesy
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| Eggs and buttered toast: a healthy start for your day. |
My dad loved soft boiled eggs, so Mom would make them pretty regularly. All I really know is that this involves boiling the eggs to less than hard boiled and then removing them from the shells to put them in a bowl.
As a little boy seeing Daddy eat these, I wanted to try them myself, so I would ask Mommy for "eggs in a bowl." She would not have that usual happy twinkle in her eye but would dutifully make them for me.
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| Who is that masked pan? It's not the Lone Ranger. |
It had never occured to me that it obviously must have burned her fingers to take hot eggs from boiling water and delicately remove the shells.
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| This is not Phil Spector! |
For the next few years, poached became my preferred method of cooking "dunky eggs." My little girl Gina would happily nod when I asked if she wanted "dunky eggs," as did my other children as they grew up. I think I coined that phrase when I was a kid, referring to over easy eggs that I could dunk toast in the yoke to eat, whether they were over easy or sunny side up.
I became adept at cooking all forms of dunky eggs but often broke yokes, which while still pretty tasty and high in protein did not come with the fun of dunking toast into the gooey center.
A few years ago, I had a breakthrough idea that revolutionized egg making, leading to worldwide acclaim and...well, you know, the rest is history.
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| The perfect turning point. |
By the way, if you have a 7 inch frying pan and want to have a perfectly circular presentation for two eggs, then all you have to do is follow the same basic directions and cover the entire bottom of the pan. I acually used to cover the bottom of my standard frying pan, but that became too much of a good thing (crispy cheese) to eat. Or, there is actually plenty of room in a standard frying pan for three eggs, if you're really hungry.
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| About 30 seconds to cook the other side. |
After peppering generously (no salt is necessary because of the cheese), I just wait for the top of the egg to look relatively done.
When they reach that perfect turning point (I included a photo) or close to it, I flip the eggs over, with the big advantage being that the cheese on the bottom of the pan makes the egg yokes unlikely to break in the process. I cook another thirty seconds or so, and serve with buttered toast.
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| Dunky Eggs Over Cheesy! |
Cleaning up the frying pan is easy, as little residue remains. Poached eggs and eggs cooked in butter require far more pan-cleaning effort.
And I have never burned my fingers with this technique.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Coffee Love
My dad called A.A. the only church that was worth a damn. He told me that when he went to church as a boy, he would look around and see nothing but hyporcites, so he swore when he grew up and his mother couldn't tell him what to do, he would never sit in an uncomfortable pew and listen to some hell-and-brimstone preacher on a Sunday morning again.
He didn't seem to have too much trouble keeping that vow over the course of his life, but he was nonetheless a very good man in most areas, a man of great generosity and love. Before I was born, however, he would go out to bars and drink more than he could handle. He had started drinking very young, and as a young adult was an alcoholic.
About the time that I was born, he realized that his drinking was a problem, not only for his marriage but for his job and relationships, so he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of blowing his tips from cutting hair on bars, he saved and opened his own beauty salon. I remember as a toddler sitting on the checkered black and white tile floor as he and my mom put together the opague glass topped dividers between beauty stations.
He remained sober, and he made a go of that beauty salon, buying a house and managing to become what in our blue collar neighborhood was quite prosperous, which is to say buying a new Chrysler every couple of years and having the first colored television on our block. He not only kept his family in new shoes and whatever purses, batons or baseball gloves we might need (to be clear, I was the baseball gloves), but he bought expensive diamond rings for himself to commemorate different milestones of sobriety, like a large horeshoe ring (he loved horse races) to commemorate his tenth year.
He attended A.A. meetings at Siglar Park in Westminster on Sunday nights. My sister and I would play in the park while my mom accompanied my dad to the meetings.
Afterwards, other couples would often come over to our house, and my mom would brew up some coffee. Inevitably, everyone who took their first sip would compliment my mom's coffee.
She didn't have fresh roasted beans flown over from Kona, and she didn't have some expensive German espresso machine that made her coffee special. I still remember her opening the red Folger's can and dumping it into her copper canister almost weekly. I once asked her, when I was an all-knowing teenager, why she didn't buy the bigger cans to get the volume discount, since she just dumped them into the cannister anway. "It just seems like it's fresher this way," she replied. I can't argue with her results, but I think it was the love with which she bought and treated each can that made more of a difference than the smaller can itself. Love was always her secret ingredient.
But she also had a large coffee scoop that she had receive with a can of coffee long ago and kept in the copper coffee canister. I believe it was 3 tablespoons, because she put two heaping scoops into her coffee pot to make that perfect brew. In any case, it was a specific scientific recipe that my nephew Brooks, who has taken to using infrared thermometers to gauge frying pan heat for his gourmet cooking experiments, would appreciate.
When Mr. Coffee drip machines hit the scene to replace percolators, my mom moved on with the technology, and the coffee she poured continued to yield rave reveiws.
I have taken what I consider the essence of her system, love and proper measurement, and carried on her tradition, although I don't use Folgers. My wife loves vanilla coffee, and after years of buying small cans of Don Francisco Vanilla Nut in grocery stores, I started buying and grinding 3 pound bags of Jose's Vanilla Nut beans at Costco. One trick is that I grind them at the strong side of drip rather than to espresso fineness (settings on the grinder dial). I used to transfer it into old Don Francisco cans, but when we moved to our new condo, Julie bought some nice stainless steel canisters, and I now even follow that part of Mom's ritual, transfering the coffee into that nice metal canister.
My scoop is only two tablespoons, but I always add a tad more than three and a half scoops of coffee in a new filter to make one pot of drip coffee. About once or twice a year, we buy a new coffee pot on sale at Target for about $17 to $30, primarily because Julie doesn't like how they look after we've used them a few months. It brews coffee as well as a $300 machine, in my opinion. And grinding the beans at Costco rather than at home doesn't seem to diminish the flavor, at least in the volume we drink it.
Other flavors, whether Starbucks or Yuban (which became my dad's coffee later in life), work equally well with the same recipe.
If I finish one pot and want a few cups more, I add one scoop (two tablespoons) of coffee to the grinds for every additional four cups of water (that's cups as measured by the coffee maker, which I believe are 5 or 6 ounce cups). If I want to make a fresh half a pot (6 cups) rather than a full pot in the morning, I use two full scoops (4 tablespoons) and a fresh filter.
Remember that putting too much coffee will make the brew bitter, just as too little will make it taste weak. Find the Goldilocks solution for you.
Before making a fresh pot of coffee in the morning, discard all the old grounds and filter, and start with a new filter and coffee. Regularly thoroughly wash the decanter and grinds basket.
By the way, this is one area where I don't condone leftovers beyond the same day it is brewed. A can of coffee that lasts a couple of weeks or more costs about the same as a couple of specialty brews at Starbucks. Why not drink it fresh and at maximum flavor? Besides, long ago I heard a doctor on TV (Durk Pearson?) say that leftover coffee contains high levels of free radicals, which are harmful to our bodies, which has led me to avoid it ever since.
He didn't seem to have too much trouble keeping that vow over the course of his life, but he was nonetheless a very good man in most areas, a man of great generosity and love. Before I was born, however, he would go out to bars and drink more than he could handle. He had started drinking very young, and as a young adult was an alcoholic.
About the time that I was born, he realized that his drinking was a problem, not only for his marriage but for his job and relationships, so he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of blowing his tips from cutting hair on bars, he saved and opened his own beauty salon. I remember as a toddler sitting on the checkered black and white tile floor as he and my mom put together the opague glass topped dividers between beauty stations.
He remained sober, and he made a go of that beauty salon, buying a house and managing to become what in our blue collar neighborhood was quite prosperous, which is to say buying a new Chrysler every couple of years and having the first colored television on our block. He not only kept his family in new shoes and whatever purses, batons or baseball gloves we might need (to be clear, I was the baseball gloves), but he bought expensive diamond rings for himself to commemorate different milestones of sobriety, like a large horeshoe ring (he loved horse races) to commemorate his tenth year.
He attended A.A. meetings at Siglar Park in Westminster on Sunday nights. My sister and I would play in the park while my mom accompanied my dad to the meetings.
Afterwards, other couples would often come over to our house, and my mom would brew up some coffee. Inevitably, everyone who took their first sip would compliment my mom's coffee.
She didn't have fresh roasted beans flown over from Kona, and she didn't have some expensive German espresso machine that made her coffee special. I still remember her opening the red Folger's can and dumping it into her copper canister almost weekly. I once asked her, when I was an all-knowing teenager, why she didn't buy the bigger cans to get the volume discount, since she just dumped them into the cannister anway. "It just seems like it's fresher this way," she replied. I can't argue with her results, but I think it was the love with which she bought and treated each can that made more of a difference than the smaller can itself. Love was always her secret ingredient.
But she also had a large coffee scoop that she had receive with a can of coffee long ago and kept in the copper coffee canister. I believe it was 3 tablespoons, because she put two heaping scoops into her coffee pot to make that perfect brew. In any case, it was a specific scientific recipe that my nephew Brooks, who has taken to using infrared thermometers to gauge frying pan heat for his gourmet cooking experiments, would appreciate.
When Mr. Coffee drip machines hit the scene to replace percolators, my mom moved on with the technology, and the coffee she poured continued to yield rave reveiws.
I have taken what I consider the essence of her system, love and proper measurement, and carried on her tradition, although I don't use Folgers. My wife loves vanilla coffee, and after years of buying small cans of Don Francisco Vanilla Nut in grocery stores, I started buying and grinding 3 pound bags of Jose's Vanilla Nut beans at Costco. One trick is that I grind them at the strong side of drip rather than to espresso fineness (settings on the grinder dial). I used to transfer it into old Don Francisco cans, but when we moved to our new condo, Julie bought some nice stainless steel canisters, and I now even follow that part of Mom's ritual, transfering the coffee into that nice metal canister.
My scoop is only two tablespoons, but I always add a tad more than three and a half scoops of coffee in a new filter to make one pot of drip coffee. About once or twice a year, we buy a new coffee pot on sale at Target for about $17 to $30, primarily because Julie doesn't like how they look after we've used them a few months. It brews coffee as well as a $300 machine, in my opinion. And grinding the beans at Costco rather than at home doesn't seem to diminish the flavor, at least in the volume we drink it.
Other flavors, whether Starbucks or Yuban (which became my dad's coffee later in life), work equally well with the same recipe.
If I finish one pot and want a few cups more, I add one scoop (two tablespoons) of coffee to the grinds for every additional four cups of water (that's cups as measured by the coffee maker, which I believe are 5 or 6 ounce cups). If I want to make a fresh half a pot (6 cups) rather than a full pot in the morning, I use two full scoops (4 tablespoons) and a fresh filter.
Remember that putting too much coffee will make the brew bitter, just as too little will make it taste weak. Find the Goldilocks solution for you.
Before making a fresh pot of coffee in the morning, discard all the old grounds and filter, and start with a new filter and coffee. Regularly thoroughly wash the decanter and grinds basket.
By the way, this is one area where I don't condone leftovers beyond the same day it is brewed. A can of coffee that lasts a couple of weeks or more costs about the same as a couple of specialty brews at Starbucks. Why not drink it fresh and at maximum flavor? Besides, long ago I heard a doctor on TV (Durk Pearson?) say that leftover coffee contains high levels of free radicals, which are harmful to our bodies, which has led me to avoid it ever since.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Braised Chuck Roast and Veggies
Just because I haven't posted a new article in a few days doesn't mean I have stopped cooking...or eating. I hope you haven't been fasting until I tell you what to do next.
Here's a one pot recipe for a delicious, nutritious meal. For this one, you need to spend about three hours at home, so get a movie, do the laundry and keep yourself occupied during the gaps between the recipe steps.
Decide how much you want to make. It takes about the same effort no matter how large the chuck roast is, but it does take longer to cook a bigger one. I usually buy a 2 to 3 pound chuck roast when I see one on sale, but the other day I bought a chuck steak that was a little over a pound, and that was plenty for two of us. Then again, leftover chuck roast makes good barbecue beef sandwiches or steak quesadillas.
Turn on your vent fan. Heat one or two tablespoons of olive oil in a large pot at medium to medium high heat. While the oil heats, tear off the covering from the chuck roast and put seasoned salt and pepper on the top side. I add a little cinnamon, which adds subtle sweetness, and if you have any spice you want to add as your personal secret ingrediens that will give the dish your own twist, you can add that too. Garlic powder or onion flakes aren't bad choices for most people. Just notice if you liked how it tastes when you dine, and either leave something out or add more, depending on that.
When the oil is hot, but the chuck roast in the pot, seasoned side down. Season the now-exposed side about the same as the other side.
Let the meat sizzle . This is the only messy part of the recipe, as oil will splatter on the stovetop. Covering it just means the risk of burning and most likely dripping when you take the lid off to turn the meat. After about ten or twelve minutes, check to see if the bottom is seared a nice dark brown that's almost black. If so, turn it over and cook the same amount on the other side. By the way, if it starts sending up a lot of smoke and smells like it is burning, be sure to check and turn it if necessary.
If it is thick roast, I will also season and braise the ends of the roast, if possible, although this creates even more splattering as less of the oil surface is covered by meat.
Once it is braised, add one can or about 14 ounces of beef broth. You could add a similar amount of red wine instead if you like, but it costs more and to me isn't quite as good. Bring the liquid to a boil and then reduce the heat to simmer. Cover the pan and occupy yourself for an hour or so while the simmering juice tenderizes the meat. After an hour (or more frequently if you like), turn over the meat. You could definitely add potatoes to the pot at this point, whether small red potatoes or chunks of russet potatoes, but the low carb way leaves out those starches.
Once the meat has cooked between two or three hours, start chopping the vegetables of your choice, beginning with the one you believe cooks the slowest. Add them as you finish chopping them. I start with carrots,either cut to the size you like or simply baby carrots. Then zuchini or yellow squash, cut into quarter circles about 1/4 inches thick. Some celery is always a healthy addition. Finally, I add mushrooms. I have sauteed mushrooms in butter before adding them, but other than eating a few of those rather than adding them, I can't see where it makes enough difference to mess up another pan. When I made chuck roast the other night, these are the exact vegetables I used, but in the past I have sometimes added a finely chopped tomato. Chopped onions or a clove of garlic is also great, but my wife doesn't like the cooking aroma or after taste, so I leave them out.
Cook it another half hour or so. If you've cooked it long enough, the meat will be extremely tender. If it isn't, the next time cook the meat longer before adding the vegetables.
Clean up is extremely easy for this recipe. For whatever reason, this doesn't leave you with a messy pot. Put any leftovers in Tupperware and then wash the pot with soap and hot water. Clean the whole stove and surrounding counters space with a spray cleaner and paper towels, so that you have a clean cooking area for breakfast.
Here's a one pot recipe for a delicious, nutritious meal. For this one, you need to spend about three hours at home, so get a movie, do the laundry and keep yourself occupied during the gaps between the recipe steps.
Decide how much you want to make. It takes about the same effort no matter how large the chuck roast is, but it does take longer to cook a bigger one. I usually buy a 2 to 3 pound chuck roast when I see one on sale, but the other day I bought a chuck steak that was a little over a pound, and that was plenty for two of us. Then again, leftover chuck roast makes good barbecue beef sandwiches or steak quesadillas.
Turn on your vent fan. Heat one or two tablespoons of olive oil in a large pot at medium to medium high heat. While the oil heats, tear off the covering from the chuck roast and put seasoned salt and pepper on the top side. I add a little cinnamon, which adds subtle sweetness, and if you have any spice you want to add as your personal secret ingrediens that will give the dish your own twist, you can add that too. Garlic powder or onion flakes aren't bad choices for most people. Just notice if you liked how it tastes when you dine, and either leave something out or add more, depending on that.
When the oil is hot, but the chuck roast in the pot, seasoned side down. Season the now-exposed side about the same as the other side.
Let the meat sizzle . This is the only messy part of the recipe, as oil will splatter on the stovetop. Covering it just means the risk of burning and most likely dripping when you take the lid off to turn the meat. After about ten or twelve minutes, check to see if the bottom is seared a nice dark brown that's almost black. If so, turn it over and cook the same amount on the other side. By the way, if it starts sending up a lot of smoke and smells like it is burning, be sure to check and turn it if necessary.
If it is thick roast, I will also season and braise the ends of the roast, if possible, although this creates even more splattering as less of the oil surface is covered by meat.
Once it is braised, add one can or about 14 ounces of beef broth. You could add a similar amount of red wine instead if you like, but it costs more and to me isn't quite as good. Bring the liquid to a boil and then reduce the heat to simmer. Cover the pan and occupy yourself for an hour or so while the simmering juice tenderizes the meat. After an hour (or more frequently if you like), turn over the meat. You could definitely add potatoes to the pot at this point, whether small red potatoes or chunks of russet potatoes, but the low carb way leaves out those starches.
Once the meat has cooked between two or three hours, start chopping the vegetables of your choice, beginning with the one you believe cooks the slowest. Add them as you finish chopping them. I start with carrots,either cut to the size you like or simply baby carrots. Then zuchini or yellow squash, cut into quarter circles about 1/4 inches thick. Some celery is always a healthy addition. Finally, I add mushrooms. I have sauteed mushrooms in butter before adding them, but other than eating a few of those rather than adding them, I can't see where it makes enough difference to mess up another pan. When I made chuck roast the other night, these are the exact vegetables I used, but in the past I have sometimes added a finely chopped tomato. Chopped onions or a clove of garlic is also great, but my wife doesn't like the cooking aroma or after taste, so I leave them out.
Cook it another half hour or so. If you've cooked it long enough, the meat will be extremely tender. If it isn't, the next time cook the meat longer before adding the vegetables.
Clean up is extremely easy for this recipe. For whatever reason, this doesn't leave you with a messy pot. Put any leftovers in Tupperware and then wash the pot with soap and hot water. Clean the whole stove and surrounding counters space with a spray cleaner and paper towels, so that you have a clean cooking area for breakfast.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
The Source of the Great Gatsby's Wealth? Tupperware
I left out an important step in making tuna salad yesterday: mix the ingredients in a Tupperware bowl so that you can put a lid on the leftovers for storage in the refrigerator. Putting Saran Wrap over a bowl works as a temporary fix, but it doesn't do as well at keeping food fresh and also makes a mess if it gets dropped.
You can buy cheaper immitation storage ware at Target or WalMart perhaps, and there are even some good disposable food storage containers, which I've found can be washed and re-used a few times.
My mom told me a long time ago that Tupperware was worth the price difference, and based on the fact that I have used them for years and rarely had to throw any out until downsizing into our smaller kitchen, I have to agree. And by the way, don't get carried away and buy too many containers.
If you've never heard of any of your friends holding a Tupperware Party, then maybe you should host one of those and earn free Tupperware for yourself. I haven't even heard of a Tupperware Party in the last 30 years, but they probably are quite popular somewhere in the midwest.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in The Great Gatsby, "And I like large parties parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."
I doubt this is much of a money making proposition, but if you enjoy having people over, maybe you should have a large Tupperware Party to give the party a purpose beyond the fun. Then again, you'll want to avoid making a mess that you'll have to clean up, so maybe you should hold it in a park. In any case, get some kind of disposable containers in which to mix your tuna salad and save all kinds of leftovers. Cooking a bit bigger batch means you are prepping a second meal while fixing your curent one, which saves time in the long run.
You can buy cheaper immitation storage ware at Target or WalMart perhaps, and there are even some good disposable food storage containers, which I've found can be washed and re-used a few times.
My mom told me a long time ago that Tupperware was worth the price difference, and based on the fact that I have used them for years and rarely had to throw any out until downsizing into our smaller kitchen, I have to agree. And by the way, don't get carried away and buy too many containers.
If you've never heard of any of your friends holding a Tupperware Party, then maybe you should host one of those and earn free Tupperware for yourself. I haven't even heard of a Tupperware Party in the last 30 years, but they probably are quite popular somewhere in the midwest.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in The Great Gatsby, "And I like large parties parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."
I doubt this is much of a money making proposition, but if you enjoy having people over, maybe you should have a large Tupperware Party to give the party a purpose beyond the fun. Then again, you'll want to avoid making a mess that you'll have to clean up, so maybe you should hold it in a park. In any case, get some kind of disposable containers in which to mix your tuna salad and save all kinds of leftovers. Cooking a bit bigger batch means you are prepping a second meal while fixing your curent one, which saves time in the long run.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Tuna Melt
March just began, so summer is a few weeks away, but we had a foreshadowing of summer in Redondo Beach today. After a sunny morning on the beach, we walked home for lunch. Julie put a couple of cans of tuna in the refrigerator before we left, so they were cool when we returned. That chilling is a nice touch, especially if you are going to melt cheese on it afterwards and don't want to eat hot tuna.
To make tuna salad, you add about one heaping tablespoon of Kraft Mayo with Olive Oil or some other light mayonaise for every 7 ounce can of tuna. This is the size Costco sells in packages of 8 or 12, whereas grocery stores usually sell 5 ounce cans, but you can figure out hot to adjust for that (not quite as much heaping above the unheaped tablespoon). We use one can of Starkist White Albacore and one can of chunk lite in water, but you can decide if you're prepared to pay more for whiter tuna or trust the mayo will turn it lighter and keep it from being too strong. It depends on how sensitive your tastebuds are, and how much you like the taste of tuna. And, of course, you can make one can at a time, although this is a great leftover for a couple of days. Dice one stalk of celery for each can and add that to the mixture.
If your mixture seems a little dry, add a little more mayo until it looks like right for you personally, assuming you aren't totally deranged who likes to eat mayo with a spoon right out of the jar as if it is Greek yogurt. If it has too much mayo, you can add more tuna and celery, but it obviously adds to the size of your batch. Maybe you'll want to start with just one can of tuna, then double it if necessary.
Do you relish the difference?
Here is where we have a split in our household. Julie abhors pickle relish and all that it represents: innocent cucumbers, drowned in some kind of pickling solution of vinegar, salt and sugar, chopped up into little pieces and then subjected to heat for cooking before being crammed into a jar that is put in hot water to ensure sealing. This Frankenstein's cucumber monster mash can be stored for months or even years unopened on your shelf. Actually, she just doesn't like the taste.
On the other hand, I like pickle relish, so I'll tell you how to include it.
Put in about one tablespoon of pickle relish for every one can of tuna.
Now, if any of this seems too complicated, just remember the ratio of 1:1:1:1.
Once you've finished making the tuna salad, you can put it between two slices of Sara Lee Delightful Bread for something we call a royal cardplayer's snack, or something like that.
However, today I took it a step further: a tuna melt. The ways I first saw a tuna melt made were in a frying pan or in a toaster oven. This can be kind of messy, especially in the case of the toaster oven if the cheese drips or the tuna falls out when you burn yourself trying to get it out of the toaster oven. Instead, I usually just make two pieces of toast, put tuna salad on each piece and crown it with a slice of American cheese, foregoing the melting. This is a way to have two sandwiches with only half the bread.
Today, I explored brave new worlds: I microwaved the two open faced sandwiches on a glass plate for 45 seconds. The cheese melted, and the tuna salad didn't get hot. Success!
While not on a par with Frankenstein's cucumber monster mash or the royal cardplayer's snack for innovation, it is an easy cleaning tuna melt.
I sat outside, watching boats going in and out of the harbor, as I enjoyed my tuna melt and Coke Zero.
For dessert, I had two bowls of fresh strawberries, slightly sweetened with Splenda.
Welcome back, summer.
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