Powdered Peanut Butter

Say what?!  That's right, I have discovered powdered peanut butter and I'm not looking back.  I was a little skeptical but holy moly do I love peanut butter and powdered means a whole new world of inclusion when it comes to the yummy goo.  

 

Betty Lou's Just Great Stuff Organic Powdered Peanut Butter is fantastic. So far I've only had it on ice cream but my imagination is limitless. I can incorporate the powder into any kind of baking, I can use it in stir-fries, I could even add it as a salad topping. I could of course always use it as regular peanut butter and put it on a sandwich, but where's the fun in that? I seriously cannot wait to use powdered peanut butter in everything I cook.

And as a bonus, it's 45 calories for 2 tablespoons which is WAY lower than regular peanut butter.

I bought mine at Molly Stone, but I'm sure that any kind of healthy store would have it. I can't truly describe how wonderful powdered peanut butter is, you'll just have to try it yourself!

Practice Thanksgiving

This year for the first time ever Bob and I will be hosting Thanksgiving at our house.  We're only having a small gathering but we decided it would be in everyone's best interest to do a trial run to make sure that a) I could properly cook a turkey, and b) that we approved of the menu.  Good news, Practice Thanksgiving was a HUGE success!  Now we can prepare for the real deal.  

I'm pretty sure that Practice Thanksgiving will now be an annual event because really, why not?  It was awesome and I feel like a Thanksgiving pro now.  To wet your whistle, and get you in the turkey-eating spirit I've collected our foods so you can decide if you too want to dine like we did.

We enjoyed: savory crock pot turkey, spicy crock pot turkey, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes with gravy, green bean casserole, cornmeal stuffing muffins and a nice heirloom tomato salad.  We ended up having a small party of 5 and I managed to not super over cook!  Amazing!  I cooked everything except dessert.  Our awesome friend Staci brought Paula Dean's pumpkin cake, it was really really good.

Okay so here's how I did it:

Turkey! (Savory and Spicy)

What you'll need:

Savory Turkey

1 turkey breast

1 packet of onion soup mix

Chicken broth

Chopped onions

Butter

 

Spicy Turkey

1 turkey breast

habenaro sauce

lemon/herb/pepper spice mixture

Chicken broth

Chopped onions

Butter

We bought two turkey breasts (because that's the best part in our opinion) and decided to cook them in the crock pot so that I could still use the oven for other things.  Each turkey breast (bone in) was about 2.5 lbs.   Each turkey breast was prepared roughly the same way, slap some butter on the sides of our crock pot, put about a half an inch of chicken broth in the bottom of the pot.  Rub the onion soup mix, or habanero spice mix on the turkey great.  Rub it in real good, and under the skin for extra flavorful awesomeness.  Place the turkey breast in the crock pot and toss your chopped onions of the top.  Place the lid on your crock pot and cook for 1 hour on high, and then 7 more hours on low.  I ended up cooking our turkey breast for about 10 hours and the meat pretty much fell right off the bones.

Sweet potato casserole:

I used the Food Network's recipe for the sweet potato casserole.  I followed it loosely, using less brown sugar and more pecans.

Green bean casserole:

Again, not my recipe, I used the Campbell's Green Bean Casserole recipe.  It's a golden standard as far as I'm concerned and goes with just about everything.  I tried using the recipe on the back of French's Fried Onions once, and it wasn't the same, the soy sauce makes all the difference.

Cornmeal Stuffing Muffins:

I read about how you could make stuffing muffins in an issue of the Rachel Ray magazine and figured I could that, and I did.  Her original recipe has you making everything from scratch and I was not up for that.  I like cheating.  To make cornmeal stuffing muffins you'll need:

1 box of cornmeal stuffing (I bought Mrs. Cubbison's)

4 stalks of celery diced

Half and onion chopped finely

3 cloves garlic finely chopped

2 cups -ish vegetable broth

Butter

In a gigantic skillet sauté the onions, garlic, and celery.  Add the cornmeal stuffing, and slowly poor in the vegetable broth to mush it together.  Let cool a little bit, roll in balls and put in a muffin tin.  Bake them for 20 minutes at 350 degrees and then stuff them in your face with or with out gravy.  It's up to you.

Heirloom Tomato Salad:

Spinach leaves (1 cup per person)

Heirloom tomato (about 1/4 per person-ish)

Avocado (1/4 per person)

Parmesan cheese

Balsamic vinegar

Toss everything in a bowl and serve!  Add some pepper for a little kick.

 

Serve your meal with your favorite wines and then enjoy the fruits of your labor.  I high recommend making the casseroles in advance, it makes things sooo much easier.  And whatever you do, don't forget to set your table, this is a classy affair!

:)M

 

Spicy Veggie Scramble - It's What's for Breakfast

I'm growing yellow squash and lettuce in my backyard, in a large barrel.  And my first squash of the season was ready and waiting to be eaten yesterday, so I obliged and cooked it up real good.  Now before anyone thinks I came up with the idea to put squash in my scramble all by myself, I'm sorry but you're mistaken.  I had a delicious omelet at Beretta with zucchini and squash in it, and have been thinking about making one at home for quite a while.  While this is not the same recipe, it's pretty damn delish. (That's me with my squash on the left.)

 

Ingredients:

1/2 cup thinly sliced squash, or zucchini

1/4 cup diced onion

Garlic (as much or as little as you'd like)

1/2 cup sliced mushrooms

1/4 cup diced tomato

1/4 cup shredded cheese

1 large egg

2 eggs worth of egg whites (I use Lucerne 100% liquid egg whites)

1 tbsp half and half (or milk, or whatever you like to make your scramble fluffy)

Habenaro Sauce (or whatever hot sauce you like, as much as you'd like)

Salt and Pepper to taste

1/2 tbsp butter

Okay, so go ahead and get all your veggies sliced up, I recommend starting with the squash, onion and garlic.  Turn your skillet on to low and butter it up with your 1/2 tbsp of butter and toss in your squash, with a little salt and pepper.  After about 5 minutes add the garlic and the onion and stir everything around.

In a bowl mix your egg, egg whites and half and half together.  

Once your garlic and onion start to look a little translucent toss in the mushrooms.  Give the mushrooms a minute or two to get nice and warm and then add the egg mixture.  

Let the scramble start to form and then add the cheese, tomatoes and Habenaro Sauce.  Cook until it's ready to eat and then enjoy your spoils.

I was quite pleased with my scramble.  It was very flavorful and delicious, the only thing I would have changed would have been to add more habenaro sauce.  Oh well, there's always next time.

This breakfast was approximately 368 calories.  And you can of course not use cheese or half and half to make this even healthier, but really then it wouldn't be as good.

:)M

 

Cauliflower Mushroom and Ham Soup

So, I've been trying to use our Blend-tec blender more often, and I've also been cooking with cauliflower more often as well because it's a nice texture/consistency to add flavors to.  My most recent concoction is a pretty hearty soup.  Now typically I am of the mind set that soup is not a meal.  It's more like a side dish or an appetizer, so I wanted to try to make a full meal kind of soup and here's what I came up with...

Ingredients:

Dried Black Eyed Peas

Ham

Cauliflower

Mushrooms

Garlic

Vegetable Stock

Onions

Cayanne Pepper

This recipe requires a bit more preparation than other things I've made, so I recommend that you being the first step of this meal after you eat dinner one night, so that you can get things ready for the next night's meal.

Step 1 - You need to soak your black eyed peas.  I soaked 1 cup of dried black eyed peas in 4 cups of water over night and into the next day.  (You don't have to soak them this long, but really it's not going to hurt them, you really need roughly 8 to 10 hours of soaking.)

 

Step 2 - An hour before you're going to eat drain your blacked eyed peas and add 2 cups of vegetable stock and put them on low/medium heat on the stove top.  Watch and stir every once and a while, making sure that the vegetable stock covers all your black eyed peas.

Step 3 - While the peas are cooking go ahead and wash and chop up a head of cauliflower and throw it in

your steamer.  Do the same with about 2 cups of sliced mushrooms.  STEAM!!!! This takes about 20 minutes.

Step 4 - While your veggies are steaming, and your peas are cooking go ahead and get out a frying pan.  Chop up about 1/4 cup onions, a couple of cloves of garlic, and about 1 lb of ham into big chunks.  Add everything to your frying pan with a tiny bit of butter or olive oil and season with cayenne, salt and pepper.  Kind of push things around constantly so the ham doesn't stick and so that everything gets covered and cooked nicely.

Step 5 - Place your steamed veggies in the blender.  Drain the peas and pour the chicken stock they've been cooking in, in the blender as well.  BLEND!!!  AFter it's blended to the consistency you like pour the mixture back in the pot with the peas.   Stir in the ham, onions and garlic.  BAM, you're done!

When I made this I didn't have any really good ham in the house, so we just used sandwich meat, which was okay but big chunks of ham would have been so much better.

We had a bag o' salad with our soup, just to add more greens.  As another idea I think you could cook the ham with the peas if you really wanted to, rather than using a frying pan.  But who knows!

Enjoy!!!

 

 

 

Pork, it's what's for dinner...tonight anyway!

In an effort to use our ridiculously expensive blender more I've decided we are now a soup eating house hold.  So tonight we are having home made Tomato Cheese Soup.  I'm quite pleased.  I found a recipe online and then adjusted per usual, for instance the original receipt didn't call for garlic or jalapenos.  Who has a recipe for tomato soup with out garlic of jalapenos, that's just wrong!   Now, I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, "wait a moment, I've been misled, the title of this post was about pork, this isn't pork!"  And right you are, but don't worry meat eaters, we're also having stuffed pork chops with our soup, as well as a delish salad that I'm whipping together as we, errr, I type.

Tonights pork chops come to us courtesy of Mollie Stone's Market in the Castro.  According to the gentleman working in the butcher shop tonight, these are pork chops stuffed with spicy italian sausage with spices and parmesan.  I'm quite excited about this, who knew you could stuff meat with other meat?  Okay, i knew you could do that because I've had turducken, but this is completely different.  There's also a nice layer of parmesan on the outside of the pork chop.  Okay, on to the recipes and cooking directions....

(Cheesy) Tomato Cheese Soup

Ingredients: The ingredients with parenthesis around them are the original recipe ingredients and portion suggestions.

tomatos ( 1 large)

onion (1/4 cup)

cheese (1/4 cup)

vegetable bouillon (1 tsp)

tomato paste (1 1/2 tsp)

salt and pepper (to taste)

water (1 cup)

cayenne pepper - shake it, you know what you like

jalapenos - I threw in half of one, seeds and all

garlic - about 4 little cloves

I only used the recipe as a basic guideline for my creation.  I used two medium-ish tomatoes.  Who really knows what a "large" tomato looks like anyway?  Anyway, I used 2 medium tomatoes, a handful of diced onions, two handfuls of cheese (a blended mix of something or another that's also good for quesadillas), a couple scoops of tomato paste, and a scoop of vegetable bouillon - which by the way I'd never seen before.  I then threw in the half a jalapeno, and the garlic along with a few shakes from the salt and pepper shakers and a little cayenne pepper to top it off.  I threw all these ingredients into my blender and smoothed it out nicely.  The original recipe then tells you to add a cup of hot water to the mix and then eat it.  That's silly, why would I do that when I've made such delicious soup?  I halved the amount of water (okay I just eyed it) and then put the mixture on the stove top to heat up slowly and deliciously.  I've been taste testing ever since, and damn is it good.  Mmmmmm.  I highly recommend this if you like tomato soup, you will never eat campbell's or another canned tomato soup again.

Pork Chops

I'm not going to list the ingredients because I didn't make it.  And I already told you what was in the stuffed pork chops at the beginning of this post.  I will tell you how I chose to cook them.  My favorite way, wrapped in tin foil in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour.  Yum, moist and perfect.

Apple Salad

Ingredients:

spinach

pine nuts

cayenne pepper

apple/s

feta

My fav olive oil dressing concoction

So you don't have to use the pine nuts, you can also use almond slivers or walnuts if you want it to be easier.  I just happened to have pine nuts in my fridge that I needed to use.  I used red apple slices from the Chiquita snack pack because I didn't want them to go to waste.  I used the equivilant of probably 1 and a half apples and we had more than enough salad for two of us.  Four people could have enjoyed the salad, it was spicy, but sweet and I'm quite pleased with my decision to use some cayenne pepper while browning the pine nuts.

Overall it was a very yummy and pretty healthy dinner.  Look at me cooking at home!

:)M

The Other Place and Juicy Berry (Salt Lake City)

Once upon a time my grandparents discovered this restaurant they now frequent once a week, it's called "The Other Place."That's seriously the name of the restaurant.  The Other Place is a Greek/American restaurant and my grandparents go there every Thursday for the navy bean soup, which is pretty good.  My grandmother likes to add lemon juice and pepper to hers, but I think it's pretty good as is.  Anyway, I joined the Thursday night bean soup crowd to catch up on what was going on in the family and hear all the good gossip, and because I too like the bean soup.

I had a side greek salad, a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of navy bean soup.  The Other Place is very generous with it's feta cheese when it comes to the greek salad, which I love because I <3 (Did you know the Oxford Dictionary now recognizes that symbol as a word?  It does, I'm not making this up.)feta cheese.  If you order a regular sized greek salad it's the best because there isn't any lettuce, it's a real greek salad with only cucumber, tomatoes, onions and kalamata olives and feta.  The side salad has lettuce but I couldn't handle ordering a real greek salad this time around, because I really wanted grilled cheese, mostly to work as a vehicle to get my bean soup into my mouth.  Just like tomato soup goes great with grilled cheese, so does bean soup.  The grilled cheese is nothing fancy, but it's still good.

The other place is nice because the portions are just the right size and the prices aren't crazy, plus my family seems to know everyone who works there so they always have a table waiting.  Yes, we're those people.

After dinner I met up with my friend Jill at this new Frozen Yogurt place at the local mall, the Gateway.  The place is called

Juicy Berry and it's a chain, but it's a wonderful chain.  There are about 10 different flavors of frozen yogurt and everything is self serve, so you get a gigantic cup and fill it up as much as you want, and then head over to the toppings bar.  In the end they charge you based on the weight of your cup.  I tried the pomegranate/wild berry fro yo and the cookies and cream fro yo all covered in sprinkles and oreo pieces.  I give this place a huge thumbs up.  Eat this, it's delicious, and you can have just about anything you could imagine.

:)M

A Wadsworth Fantasy aka Hire's Big H (Salt Lake City)

My Dad calls some of the places the family always eats at in Salt Lake "Wadsworth Fantasies" because we like the places we've always gone to for years, even though sometimes they're not as good as they should be.  Yet we go back time and time again.  One of these places is "Hire's Big H."

It's just a locally owned burger place, but I can remember eating here every summer when my mom would pack up myself and my sisters to live with my grandparents.  We all almost order exactly the same thing when we go, a double cheeseburger with only mustard and pickles on it.  It's delicious and washed down with a made by hand cherry coke it's exactly the way I always remember it tasting.  It's tradition to go to Hire's, it's just something we do.  Plus, there's fry sauce and I don't know why I like fry sauce, I just do and it doesn't taste as good anywhere else.  It's not better than In-N-Out or even Five Guys but I love it, and will continue to want to visit Hire's ever time I visit Salt Lake.

The prices are average for a burger place, and the staff is really friendly.  Be warned if you go during a peak hour the place is covered in children, this is after all, Zion.

:)M