Deviled Eggs are one of my favorite things to eat. I always looked forward to them as a kid and still do (and I’m not a kid anymore). My Mother-in-Law will make them for a Sunday lunch or dinner and I always look forward to them. It’s really just another way to eat eggs and it is really easy to do. They are also fun to serve to people when they come over because it’s just not something you usually get anywhere.
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As you know I like to cook and I don't care if it takes an hour or so because I know that I am eating food that I know where it came from and I can pronounce. Also that a scientist didn't create it works really well for me.
But...there are times where I want it and I want it now or I don't have time to fool with it. I have my own seasoning blends that I try to keep on hand so I can flavor something the way I want without having to measure out a hundred spices. We wanted to make Mexican beef with peppers the other day but I wanted to do it quickly so I got the already made mexican seasoning I had made and just added 3 Tablespoons to 2 lbs of beef and we ate for three meals! Quick and easy. Here's the recipe: What You Will Need: 1 TB Salt 2 TB Chipotle or Ancho Chili Powder 1/2 TB Black Pepper 1/2 TB Ground Cumin 1/2 TB Granulated Garlic 1 tsp Ground Turmeric 1 tsp Oregano 1 tsp Thyme 1/8 tsp Ground Cayenne Pepper What You do: 1. Mix well and store in an airtight container. Man! It was difficult to get lunch (and dinner) together for today. I had lined something up for 7:30 this morning at my house but the person didn't show. But I had spent my time getting ready and didn't get around to making a lunch I could take. Of course, I could buy a lunch but I knew I could come home at lunch and figure something out.
So I had some salad mix and various things in the fridge. I added some black olives, grape tomatoes, and cheese, then heated up some leftover chicken and some leftover bean sprouts and added that. But I didn't have a dressing. I saw the Avocado Cream sauce from fish tacos the other night so I added some Mexican seasoning, thinned it with some water and I had a beautiful salad and a delicious dressing! We had these friends who moved away but when they lived here we would invite them over for dinner and they would make a big deal about the food. What I really think is that he never cooked but I think she liked to cook but it was too big of a deal so she would do the basics and come eat with us.
One night I went to get a recipe out of our cabinet and she saw that my recipe box was a baby wipes container. Perfect size and, at the time, it hadn't been that long that we had been using them for their intended purpose. As I pulled the plastic container filled with all my own (and others) recipes, the wife just stared at me with her eyes wide. Feeling self-conscious I asked her what was wrong and did she need some CPR. She turned to her husband and said, " See, people who just like to cook keep their recipes in just any old thing and don't have a fancy organizer for it. I assured her I had never had one and I was just trying to make do with what was on hand. Right now, with this web site, this is the first time I've tried to really organize them with my main motive being to have them for my children now that they are coming of adult age, but also to have time-proven recipes that are fairly easy that you guys can use to get into cooking for yourselves. The baby wipes container finally got a big rip in it and I had to replace it. I wanted something that I could keep on my counter instead of hidden away and one day when I was in one of my favorite stores, it hit me and here is what I've had for many, many years and it sits on the counter. It's not fancy but it does it's job. Let's talk about Brussel's Sprouts for a minute. First of all, this is the correct spelling because they grow in Belgium and that's where they first became popular. They are from the cabbage family but do NOT grow like a cabbage. Not all people like them and some even hate them but I love them and this post is for the love I have for them.
I have a couple of recipes on here for cooking them but not one for just steaming them which is how I like them best. Here is what you do: 1. Chop the little ends off of them. 2. Remove any leaves that just fall off and cut them in half. 3. Bring a pan of about 2 inches of water to a boil. 4. Put in the Sprouts and let cook for about 5 minutes. 5. Drain them, put copious amounts of butter and some salt and stir. 6. Pounce on them and eat every one of them! We've been on a roll here with new recipes! My wife said she wanted Mongolian Beef so we set about to try and find some recipes that we could simplify and flavor-fy but found that this is a really simple dish to make, the only thing that even seemed hard about it was standing there frying the thin pieces of flat-iron steak (flank steak).
The key to frying mean that has a coating on it is to almost OVER season the coating mix so that it translates into flavor for the meat. I cooked the meat for 4 minutes on the first side then 2 minutes on the next but keep in mind that the oil was hot and the steak was thin. It came out perfectly. I cooked it on medium-low which is about a 4 on an electric but I let the pan come up to heat before I started cooking and I gave it a minute between batches to come back up. Since we are doing Paleo this month I substituted Maple Syrup for the Brown Sugar and we did broccoli slaw for the bed instead of rice. I'd rather have rice but it was good. It was real good. The month of may is going to be a big one. It takes place in Jackson Mississippi, it involves replacing old habits with new ones focusing a lot on physical fitness and so far I'm the only one who knows about it. Here's how it goes:
1. I will do some form of cardio every day. 2. I will do 5 ab exercises every day. 3. I will do upper or lower body every other day. 4. I will eat paleo for the entire month. 5. I will post to this blog every day for the month. 6. I will post AT LEAST 15 new recipes this month. 7. I will spruce up the web site with better writing and some maintenance stuff. I started yesterday and the only thing I didn't do was the blog post (of course). So today I will do two blog posts. I've already done all my exercises and I'm making a list of what we can eat for the month so we don't have days where we might slip. I'll go to the gym tomorrow and weigh myself. I've taken some pictures that would scare Count Dracula and I'll post them before and after at the end of the month. Hopefully they will not look exactly the same. So wish me luck and I'm off! 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. 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. 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. |
AuthorLong-time cook with the goal of making recipes easy to follow and easy to cook. Cooking should be fun not a science. Archives
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Really! Everyone should be able to cook their own food and this is the place to learn how to do just that. All the recipes are easy to make and you can go to the Cooking School to learn about a particular technique.