Category: Recipes

*A close cousin of “Happy, happy joy, joy.” 😉

So, I ran across an easily adaptable waffle recipe (aren’t they all?) and had a go at it. Lucky, lucky me, me. I even recalled we had some waffle plates to go in a little electric grill.

Dry ingredients:

1.75C flour (my modification: amaranth flour with a bit of vanilla flavored protein powder)
1Tsp baking powder
0.25Tsp salt

Wet ingredients:

2 egg yolks
1.75C milk (my modification: cream!)
0.50C oil

Separate:

2 egg whites, whipped to stiff peaks. I added a tablespoon of powdered sucralose and about 0.25Tsp of vanilla extract.

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Mix the two together. Fold in the egg white mixture. Apply to hot waffle iron. Serve topped with butter and syrup of some kind or with berries or whatever. Enjoy.

Other ingredients: I also added a bit of ground flax seed and some chia seeds.

Even with my mods, the waffles came out very light, tasty and toasty, and served as a good “nuncheon” or afternoon tea (without the tea, TYVM :-)).

No, no pictures. The waffles didn’t last long enough to allow picture taking.

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Someone may wonder why the substitutions. Continue reading “Lucky, Lucky Me, Me*”

Had the munchies a few mins ago. Still shedding pounds, so gave in and made a quick “comfort food” snack: “Christmas Grits”.

OK, full disclosure: I didn’t really. I used some instant (A/K/A/ “not real”) cheese grits as my starting point, since I just didn’t want to wait around. It’s why I keep some of it around, after all. *heh*

Instant cheese grits, prepared
Minced red and green seranos
Cream

Yum. Yes, it’s instant (“not real”), but I don’t care; it was still yummy.

Yep.That’s the name of this notarecipe: Notahotpocket. It’s not a grilled cheese “sandwish” either, since it’s not grilled in any way, but when I’m rushed for time, it does OK.

Need:

Bread
Cheese
Toaster
Microwave
Paper towel

Pop a coupla pieces of bread in the toaster.
Slice some cheese (or unwrap a piece of pre-sliced, if that’s the way you roll).
Place toast, buttered if you wish, on paper towel
Place cheese between pieces of toast
Microwave for ~20-30 seconds, more or less depending on your microwave.

Quick, no clean-up. If you have the time and want to clean-up something, pan poach an egg beforehand. Add some precooked bacon (please, the less cooking the better when this shortcut “sandwish” is necessary) and you have a quick breakfast “sandwish”. But better to skip cooking the egg and just slap on some precooked bacon (again: saves cleaning time). It’ll warm up nicely in the microwave oven while the cheese is melting.

Other variations are easy, of course. Cleaning a knife’s not all that time-consuming, so slicing some onion and peppers while the bread is toasting wouldn’t really cost any time. A hair more time in the microwave, maybe.

There: Notahotpocket.

Well, hotter wings. OK, didn’t turn out exactly as I wanted, but worth eating and refining. The one failing? The sauce was too thin. Fixable.

Ingredients

About 2/3 of a pound of chicken wings (from a full pound; 1/3 was reserved for my Wonder Woman’s raspberry barbecue sauced wings).
1/2 cup Frank’s Red Hot Wings Sauce
2 TBS “wild onion” olive oil*
2 TBS mixed peppers**
1 TSP Bhut Jolokia (“ghost pepper”) powder
3 cloves of minced garlic

Process

Salted the wings (covered with sea salt) and let them sit in the fridge for 30 minutes or so, then rinsed. Marinated the wings most of the day. Then in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven (preheated to 400, then backed off to 350 when the wings went in) in an uncovered dish for 40 minutes.

Next time, less oil, more garlic, some finely minced onion. And I think I’ll make more of the sauce, puree the garlic and onion into it in a blender and then reduce it a bit before marinating.

Still, very, very tasty. The Bhut Jolokia adds a nice punchup to the Frank’s cayenne pepper-based sauce and a little smokiness, almost chipotle flavor. Oh, heck, I might (propably will!) use more Bhut Jolokia next time as well. After all, I didn’t even get int Son&Heir’s kilogram bag of the stuff. *heh*

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* EVOlive oil with wild onions infused
**white, black, green, various reds, some coriander, just some interesting flavors ground and lumped together, different almost every time I mix some

I really, really like chiles rellenos, but I don’t much like making them, what with the pre-roasting and peeling of the peppers, the batter and frying and all that. What I really like is the roasted peppers with cheese part. So,

• Poblano peppers, slit and sorta, mostly de-seeded. (I like the seeds, but poblanos are just barely “hot” enough to do without them, and I save ’em to plant. :-))
• Fill ’em with shredded cheese. I like a monterey jack and cheddar mix.
• Bake on a greased pan in a 350°F oven for about 30 minutes.

That’s it. I don’t find the skins to be an issue for me, and I don’t really miss the batter at all.

One can (and many do) use green anaheim peppers, but I find then to be a bit too mild for my taste.

These can be a part of a Mex-Tex meal or, as I have been eating them, the main dish with little else. Yum stuff.

…and a bonus tip or three.

Use a stick of cinnamon (it’s just a lil dried roll of cinnamon bark) as a coffee stirrer. Nah, you don’t have to add cream and/or sweetener (sugar or other). Just use a stick to stir your coffee for a subtle cinnamon kick.

Update: forgot to mention that if you don’t just use the cinnamon stick as a stirer but leave it in the cup as you sip (you do sip, not gulp, right? hmmm? ;-)), it’ll continue to add cinnamon flavor and it’ll soften enough as it soaks up some of the coffee that you can actually nibble on it. Chewing a wee nibble of cinnamon stick along with a sip of coffee is… nice. And cinnamon is good for both weight control and boosting brain functions, particularly recall.

Bonus hot weather drink: Do add some cream (the real stuff) and some sort of sweetener to some hot coffee in a thermos. Add a stick of cinnamon and leave it in the fridge overnight with the lid cracked open on the thermos. Or, instead of the cinnamon stick, grate some nutmeg into the coffee (I’ve done that into the brew basket when I was making some for just my own consumption). I normally do not like cold coffee, but this lil tip makes it drinkable, even enjoyable, for me. While it’s not “coffee-coffee” in my mind, it’s still tasty.

Try other “bright” spices that come to mind, or add some cocoa powder or whatever for your own unique cold coffee-based drink.

Beats the snot out of buying some refrigerated coffee drink crap from Starbucks or whatever.

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BTW, do make sure you buy “food grade” cinnamon sticks/bark. Apparently some is available that’s some sort of manufactured crap for “decorative” purposes (whatever that means). I generally get six-ounce bags for a buck. YMMV.

Oh, and when you think you’ve sucked all the flavor out of your cinnamon stick, think again. Let it dry, then put it through your coffee grinder (we have three: a burr mill for coffee and two blade grinders, one for “sweet” spices and herbs and one for “hot” spices”). Even with the flavor pulled from it by several cupsa coffee (or the equivalent), ground up it’ll probably be more flavorful than the pre-ground crap that’s been sitting, losing flavor, on some grocer’s shelf for who knows how long. Ditto for just about any spice. Buy whole and store well, then grind however much you need a bit at a time.

And (tightwad tip!) always buy bunches of whole spices whenever they go on a blowout sale. If you’re really concerned about preserving them, use a vacuum sealer and mylar bags and store ’em in your freezer (or, with the mylar bags and O₂ and H₂O absorption packs, just store ’em on a pantry shelf–most folks say the O₂ absorption packs are unnecessary with vacuum sealed mylar bags, as in the linked video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU8W92U37PU

Mostly ingredients and process, no amounts; you decide those.

-Eggs
-Butter (no, not margarine)
-Cream
-Cooked bacon, chopped into ~1′ pieces
-Onions, minced and either sautéed or “microwave sautéed”*
-Jalapeños–sliced, canned works best for this one, IMO, and/or
-Other diced peppers
-Shredded cheese
-S&P to taste

Baking dish
Oven at 350 °F

Melt some butter for the bottom of the baking dish–however much will cover it when melted; whisk together eggs and cream; bacon in bottom of dish, onions on top of bacon; pour in egg-cream mixture; slide jalapeños on top and then sprinkle with shredded cheese. About 25 minutes more or less in 350 °F oven. Remove and let it set up for a bit. You could turn th oven to broil for the last few minutes if you want to get a lil more top browning. Eat it up.

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*”Microwave sautéed”=some olive oil and/or butter in appropriate-sized (for amount of onions) microwavable dish, uncovered. Microwave for a minute, first, then 30 seconds at a time until the onions are nicely translucent and, when sampled, have sweetened a bit.

Also, if you want to go ahead and make a “piperade” sauce, then fine. Peppers, chopped; onions, minced; sauté in butter or olive oil and then add some diced, canned tomatoes. Let it simmer a while to come together. Heck, a little garlic wouldn’t hurt.

Chicken salad.

Since I throw this together by eye and by taste, I’m just listing ingredients, so it’s “Not Quite a Recipe” ‘K?

Chicken, cooked, deboned and chunked. You can use canned chicken if you want–I have at times–but it’ll lack flavor. I like some nice juicy dark meat in mine, but I’ve noticed most folks seem to prefer the less flavorful white meat for some reason. Whatever.

Onion, minced.

One or two garlic cloves, minced. More if you’re making more than a couple of cups of salad or just want more garlic. You can rehydrate dried garlic chips if you want, but they lack flavor, IMO.

Lemon pepper

More black pepper

Celery seeds

Celery stalk(s), de-stringed and diced

Mayo. No, the real stuff.

Either some sweet pickle relish, the finely diced kind, or some diced jalapeño or other fav capsaicin-laden pepper. (I can hardly wait for my habaneros to come in… and hopefully the “ghost pepper”–Bhut Jolokia–seeds I’ve planted will bear fruit as well ;-))

Balance the ingredients according to your taste and refrigerate. Serve on lettuce or in a sandwich (with lettuce and tomato).

Just good eats, folks.

Microwave pressure cooker
1.5 cups pinto beans
3 cups water (or a wee tad more)
dehydrated garlic chips and
onion powder (or flakes) to taste
~20 minutes on high

Nicely cooked pot of beans. Could’ve added some bacon or a ham hock if I’d had it handy, but this is good. (Maybe next time I’ll add some “white” pepper… )

*sigh* The lil microwave pressure cooker that I picked up several years ago for $3 at a flea market is starting to show some wear around the ring where the gasket is installed. Still works, but I can see having to replace it down the road, so I went looking for it. Exact match: ~$52 at Amazon. *gag* I just have to find it for less. Oh, it’s worth the price and can afford it, but… nah, I’m just too much of a tightwad to pay that for one. (Update: OK, have found it for $45. That’s 25% less than the manufacturer–Nordic Ware–sells it for, direct, but I’d still rather find it for less… *heh*)

I confess to a longtime addiction to Frito-Lays’ bean dip–“regular” and spicy versions both, it really doesn’t matter. But I hate paying their price for the stuff, so a while back I found this recipe:

1 (15 ounce) can refried beans
5 slices bottled jalapenos (nacho slices)
1 tablespoon brine, from bottled jalapeno slices
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

The usual instructions for such things: Place ingredients in food processor, etc.

Nice enough, I suppose, but I like what I do to it better even than I like the original Frito-Lays product. I use a can of (San Marcos brand) chipotle-seasoned refried beans (way, way over-priced here), cut the paprika, regular salt (I use bacon-flavored salt instead), the pickled jalapeños and sugar and instead use a ripe (red) jalapeño and a clove (at least :-)) of garlic and no sugar.

Better. And oh, so good! 🙂