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What To Do About Lunch...

4/25/2015

I always make salad for my lunches then I'll take a little something else to snack on. I don't keep any food at work so every week-end I'm making salad and something else. We were out of town both Saturday and Sunday and I didn't have anything for Monday lunch. I never eat out for lunch. Never. I prefer to eat at work then go somewhere for my lunch hour, usually to a park or a coffee shop. I could have decided to eat out but as I was looking in the fridge at leftovers I realized I might be able to pull something tasty and quick off.

We had rice left over from eating at Mr. Chen's, there were onions and carrots and some steamed broccoli and, of course, we always have eggs. So I chopped the onion and carrot and sauteed them, scrambled 4 eggs in a separate pan, then added the broccoli and rice along with some tamari, sesame and red pepper flakes. I ended up with enough fried rice to fill the take-out container and I had a quick homemade meal!

Once you have some of the basics, it's easy to come up with your own stuff.

Here's the link to the Fried Rice Page.

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The Truth Behind Zoodles

4/25/2015

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I don't know if everyone in the world has heard of zoodles but it sure does seem like it. If you have heard of paleo or, god forbid, are doing the paleo diet then you do know what zoodles are and you are going to really like what I'm going to tell you here.

As you can see from the above picture, zoodles are zucchini that have been run through a spiralizer to make "zoodles" for spaghetti substitute. I won't go into it much here but a spiralizer is a type of machine that, well, makes spirals out of fleshy vegetables. I'll do a post on spiralizers later.

The problem with zoodles is that they are watery since zucchinis are full of water so you have to get the water out of there somehow. Some sites tell you to salt them, let them sweat then squeeze them out. This is fine except it's a lot of work and this site is about ease and making cooking fun so we really didn't want to do that. We've done it before and it's just a pain - too, too much. Another way is to boil them. We've done this. Guess what? Add a watery vegetable to water and hope for something non-watery why don't you? It was watery, trust me.

Last night we decided to saute them to see if that would be an easier way. It was! We heated a pan, sauteed the zoodles for about 5 minutes then put them in a colander over a plate and they turned out tremendous. And we could control the amount of crunchiness ourselves. We topped it with some tomato sauce from a jar that I doctored up and we had a delicious, easy, paleo, dinner.

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Green Enchilada Sauce and Stuffed Peppers

4/21/2015

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Over the week-end my wife bought some peppers in a bag together that were normally $6.00 but reduced to $2.00 so we had to use them quickly or at least we thought we did.

I suggested we do stuffed peppers with enchilada sauce then fell asleep for 2 hours. When I woke up she had made the filling and wanted me to do the sauce and figure out what else to do. We had a big can of tomatillos and a small can of green chiles so a green sauce was the most logical choice. I sauteed some onions and garlic then put the tomatillos, chiles, onions, garlic, some cumin, salt and pepper in the food processor. I added a little homemade chicken broth to thin it out and we had our sauce.

We steamed the peppers (banana and pasillo), stuffed them, covered them with enchilada sauce and cheese, popped them in the oven for 45 minutes and we had a tasty meal! I opened a can of Trader Joe's Refried Black Beans, decided they needed something called flavor, put them in a pan to get them hot.

That was it! I'm going to perfect an easy green enchilada sauce and I'll post that when it gets going.

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Brussels Sprouts and Age

4/20/2015

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We love Brussels Sprouts! More specifically, I love Brussels Sprouts and my wife likes them if they are prepared by either method on this site. I like them just with butter and salt or any other way they can possibly be made - I just love Brussels Sprouts.

Last week-end my wife bought some Sprouts. We were going to cook them right away but I think something else came up. Then we were going to cook them Monday night but we didn't - you get where this is going. It's been well over a week and we finally got around to cooking them. We made them according to the Sesame Sprout recipe here on this site

http://www.youcancookthat.com/crispy-sesame-brussells-sprouts.html.

But they didn't cook all the way. We put them in for ten more minutes and they still didn't cook right. Another 20 minutes they were ok but they still didn't have that yummy soft insides that you get usually with fresh Brussels Sprouts. Then my wife made an astute observation that when we had cooked some old Sprouts at Easter they took longer and weren't as good.

They always seemed so hardy and almost indestructible but it looks like maybe these little guys are more fragile than I thought. so just a heads-up if you are going to make Brussels Sprouts from this site or any recipe, make sure they are fresh and they should come out all right.

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What I Had for Dinner

4/17/2015

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This is not a very good picture because I took it very quickly so I could make sure I got in on here even though I'm 4 days late in posting it.

This dinner, as is most stir fry's, an example of not having a plan but not wanting to go out either. At first we were going to do something boring but my wife came up with the idea of using the tofu we had. My usual stir-fry is to just add some soy sauce, sesame oil and maybe a little rice vinegar but she said there was some orange marmalade in the fridge and could I come up with something using that? Always up for a challenge I said yes then started the thinking process. Would and orange-peanut sauce be good? I've made one before using OJ which just slightly flavors it. I thought combining PB and Orange Marmalade might be two strong tastes competing with each other so that option went out the window.

After a few minutes of mental wrangling, I decided to do and orange-ginger sauce with some soy but alas, the ginger was bad! Now what? I didn't have a recipe in mind so I just started putting things together that I thought would be good. The final sauce was soy, orange marmalade, sesame oil, garlic and rice wine with maybe a few other things thrown in. I stirred in some corn starch for thickening then went about making a regular stir-fry.

My point is, sometimes when you just make something up on the fly you end up with a delicious dinner that just kind of "comes together". So be adventurous, be bold, and make something up from just whatever you happen to have on hand.

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You Can Cook That

What To Do About Lunch...

The Truth Behind Zoodles

Green Enchilada Sauce and Stuffed Peppers

Brussels Sprouts and Age

What I Had for Dinner

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