I need a new kitchen faucet. It’s been a long time and after suffering with less than ideal sink situations, I am finally ready to spring for something like these beautiful Delta faucets I keep seeing in magazines. I would love something sleek and simple to adorn my sink and give me hot and cold water. I don’t think that’s too much to ask…now is it?
Sick of winter yet? Is the cold getting to you? Tired of snow and bitter cold…scraping windshields and finding mittens? Yeah…me too.
Except…I love soup! I love throwing a pot of soup on the stove around lunch time and tending it absent-mindedly during the afternoon as the flavors blend and meld.
Add a pan of cornbread or a crusty loaf of french bread and you have a meal!
Here are two of my favorites:
CHEESY TORTILLA SOUP
Tear tortillas into pieces and soak them for ten minutes in the milk. Add egg, half the green chilies and half the taco seasoning mix. Process the mixture in the blender until smooth. Add shredded cheese to mixture and stir.
Heat the oil in a 10-inch skillet. Drop the blended mixture into hot oil by small teaspoons and fry until golden brown. Drain on paper towels.
Melt butter in large Dutch oven; add garlic and onion and fry until tender. Add broth, tomato juice, chopped tomatoes, remaining green chilies and seasoning mix. Boil and cook 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Blend together sour cream, flour and sugar. Stir some of the soup into the sour cream and add the mixture slowly to soup. Drop the cheese and tortillas into soup. Heat through.
BROCCOLI CHOWDER
In a 2-quart saucepan, boil 1/2-cup water and add broccoli and onion. Cover and simmer 5 minutes. Do not drain. Add the soup, milk and cheese. Cook and stir until heated through. Top each serving with peanuts. Serves six.
Do you serve sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving? I am about to share with you…THE.BEST recipe I have ever found for sweet potatoes. It’s all in the spices…so I am also letting you in on my little spice secret. It’s called Penzey’s Spices and I purchase quite a lot of my spices from this store.
Anyway…if you like sweet potatoes, you’re gonna love this!
* 2 lbs. sweet potatoes
* 1/2 c maple syrup
* 1 tsp. SWEET CURRY (from Penzeys)
* 1/2 tsp. GARAM MASALA (from Penzeys)
* 1/2 tsp. salt
* 1/2 C chopped pecans
Peel the sweet potatoes and boil them until tender. Drain and mash the sweet potatoes when they are cooked. Heat the maple syrup, the curry powder, the garam masala and the salt in a small saucepan. Simmer for 1-2 minutes. Add the syrup mixture to the sweet potatoes and mix well. Sprinkle with the pecans and serve.
Seriously…YUM!
We learned an important lesson this week…and it’s a vital one if you own a freezer stocked with expensive food. Allow me to share…
One of my kids left our upright freezer door ajar on Monday afternoon. I did not discover this unfortunate event until approximately 36 hours later on Wednesday. By this time, there was a puddle in front of the freezer, a mess on the bottom of the freezer (thawing meat…blood…ick!). I placed a thermometer into the freezer and found that the temperature was still about 40 degrees. Cold enough that the food was still safe…yet rapidly thawing.
I closed the freezer and said to myself…”WHEW! I’m sure glad I found that near disaster…now we’ll just let it refreeze and all will be fine.” Sound good? I thought so…
Unfortunately…every time I went downstairs to check the freezer, the food was not refreezing as I expected it to. I told myself that the freezer simply needed to catch back up and it might take up to 24 hours. The temp in the freezer by this point was about 30 degrees F.
By the next day, the situation had not changed. Temp still 30 and food still not refreezing. I googled and googled and found nothing about what to expect when a freezer is recovering from being left open. Finally, I called the manufacturer and spoke with a service tech.
What I was told was that we needed to manually switch the freezer into a defrost mode by turning a screw in the back of the freezer. Doing this would turn the freezer off for 30 minutes and during that time any ice that had accumulated would melt and the freezer would then be able to recover from being left open and would be ready to freeze again.
Well…we did that and decided to use that defrosting time to clean it out. We actually ended up switching it back into the manual defrost mode two more times (the freezer was off and melting for 1.5 hours total) and by the time we turned it back on it was completely defrosted and spic and span inside.
We refilled it, turned it back on, crossed our fingers and said a prayer.
Within about two hours the temp was down to about 15 degrees F and it was cranking again. At this writing, everything is rock hard again and we averted disaster.
Lesson? Freezers need help to recover from being left open. You cannot just close the door and expect them to resume freezing without defrosting all of the partially defrosted ice that accumulates when this happens. Nowhere was this information readily available, either online or in the instruction manual. It took calling and speaking with a service tech to learn about this.
File this away in your little mental filing cabinet if this ever happens to you! May save you hundreds of dollars in valuable freezer items!
My daughter was on a mission today. Her goal? Find a recipe for making caramel apples that did not contain processed sugar. After some extensive search, she found one and we tackled it this afternoon. I am happy to tell you that it not only is POSSIBLE to make caramel apples that do not contain sugar, but they are DELICIOUS!
6 small apples
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup honey
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Prepare the apples by washing them and inserting a popsicle stick into each apple through the core. Fill a shallow bowl approximately half-full with ice water and set this aside.
Heat the cream and salt in a 2-quart saucepan over medium heat. Stir constantly and just before the cream simmers, add the honey. Continue stirring constantly and stick an instant read thermometer into the mixture. With the burner set to medium high, stir the mixture for approximately 20 minutes until it is 255 degrees. Remove from the heat and carefully set the pan into the prepared bowl of ice water(this will thicken the caramel). Be careful not to get ice water into the caramel. When the caramel is good and thick, remove the pan from the ice water and twirl each apple in the caramel to coat. If the caramel becomes too thick, return the pan to the heat for several seconds.
Set the apples onto the prepared baking sheet. We added some chopped nuts as well. Chill for several hours and serve.
Have you ever done this? This is a great recipe to keep up your sleeve for those times when time runs short but you still want something substantial and nutritious. Yes, you can actually roast a whole fryer in just over an hour.
Ingredients:
Fryer chicken
1 lemon
2 garlic cloves
Fresh parsley, sage and thyme
Butter
Salt and Pepper
1/2 cup white wine
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Mince the garlic and combine the garlic, equal portions of the fresh herbs and approximately 1/3 cup of butter.
Slice the lemon and place the herbed butter and the sliced lemon into the cavity of the chicken. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the outside of the chicken.
Place the chicken into a covered casserole dish and cover to seal.
Place the covered casserole dish in the oven and bake for one hour. Remove the casserole dish.
Drain the roasting juices and remove the lemon from the chicken. Squeeze the lemons into the juices and add the white wine. Remove the chicken from the dish and place the juices, lemon juice and wine into the dish. Return the covered dish to the oven for 15 minutes.
Carve the chicken and serve with the lemon sauce.
It’s time to share a Public Service Announcement and humble myself a little bit because I made quite a mistake yesterday and paid for it dearly.
I was making salsa out of garden veggies (recipe to follow!) and was cutting up tomatoes, green peppers, onion, serano peppers and jalepeno peppers. After seeding and dicing the peppers, I discarded most of the seeds, threw them in the bowl, and washed my hands. I finished mixing the ingredients, put the salsa in the fridge, and cleaned up the kitchen.
I then sat down to put my little guy down for a nap…my left hand had begun to tingle a bit, but I ignored it. Within about five minutes my left hand felt as though I had plunged it into a pot of boiling water. It felt completely scalded and was on fire. I handled the pain for several minutes before I went to get a bag of ice for my hand and decided to Google it. I read through several websites and tried numerous remedies, including Pepto Bismol, bleach, isopropyl alcohol, baking soda, and milk. Nothing relieved the excruciating pain. I finally decided it was going to hurt for a while and I settled down with my hand soaking in a bowl of ice milk.
An so I sat for the rest of the evening. At bed time I took a bag of ice to bed with me. Finally at about 4 am (12 hours after making the salsa) the pain subsided enough to sleep. Even then, though…I did not fall into dreams about Ferrari parts, I tell you. I was exhausted but had trouble sleeping even then.
So…PSA: NEVER cut hot peppers without gloves. Discard the gloves and wash your hands well.
Fresh Salsa:
2-3 diced tomatoes
1/2 diced red onion
1 jalepeno pepper
1/2 green pepper
1 serano pepper
Juice of one lime
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
Salt and Pepper
Dice everything up finely and combine in a bowl. Chill before serving.
Greetings! I wanted to share the lip balm recipe we used the other day because I am still so excited about this. The lip balm this makes is every bit as nice as any lip balm I have purchased.
1.5 oz beeswax
1 oz cocoa butter
1.5 oz shea butter
2 oz sweet almond oil
1-2 teaspoons flavor oil
1 teaspoon vitamin E liquid
Weigh everything.
In a small saucepan melt the beeswax on low. Add the cocoa butter and shea butter and stir until melted. Add the sweet almond oil and heat through. Add the Vitamin E oil and remove from heat. Pour into a glass measuring cup for pouring into lip balm containers. Add the flavor oil and pour into lip balm containers. If it starts to harden, microwave for a few seconds to re-melt and continue pouring.
Recipe makes 6 ozs
**A reader asked me to add my source for lip balm tubes. The Ponte Vedra Soap Shoppe is where I ordered my tubes. Scroll almost to the bottom of this page – I ordered the clear tubes.**
My garden is starting to gear up into full swing here and I am finding that I am harvesting or picking something nearly every day now. This brings me to an important topic for this time of year when fellow gardeners are dealing with an abundance of fresh produce that must be kept fresh. What is the best way to do this?
Here are some guidelines.
Asparagus - keeps 2 – 3 days in the refrigerator (don’t wash before refrigerating and keep in the crisper)
Broccoli – keeps 3-5 days in the refrigerator (wrap and keep in the crisper)
Celery – keeps 1-2 weeks in the refrigerator (Keep in crisper)
Cauliflower and Snap Beans – keeps 1 week in the refrigerator (wrap and keep in crisper)
Carrots, Parsnips, Beets, Radishes & Turnips – keeps 2 weeks in refrigerator (remove tops, wrap and keep in crisper)
Green Peas – keeps 3-5 days in refrigerator (leave in pods and keep in crisper)
Lettuce and Salad Greens – keeps 1 week in refrigerator (wash, drain well, wrap keep in crisper)
Green onions – keeps 3-5 days in refrigerator (wrap and keep in crisper)
Peppers and Cucumbers – keeps 1 week in refrigerator (wrap and keep in crisper)
Fresh vegetables stay the freshest when in a moist environment. They should usually be stored in vegetable crispers. If there is a crisper setting, set it to the “vegetable” setting. If space in crispers is limited, store them in plastic bags to reduce moisture loss. Store most vegetables in the refrigerator to preserve freshness. Do not refrigerate potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, hard-rind squashes, eggplants and rutabagas. Tomatoes may be refrigerated only after they are ripe and then only for a limited time.
I picked my first zucchini from the garden yesterday. It is a beautiful testimony to hard work and tender loving care. Yes…I love my garden!
In honor of this luscious little veggie…that I am so hoping and praying my family does not tire of any time soon (there are lots more coming!), I wanted to share a recipe for what we had for breakfast this morning.
Zucchini Fry Cakes
2 medium zucchini (shredded)
Kosher salt
Black pepper
1 egg
2 scallions, finely chopped
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oil
Plain yogurt
Salt the zucchini with 1 teaspoon of salt. Remove the excess moisture from the zucchini by squeezing the liquid out with paper towels.
Whisk the egg in a large bowl. Add the zucchini, flour, scallions, and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper. Mix well.
Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Cook the fry cakes in two batches. Drop 2 tablespoon mounds into the skillet. Flatten slightly. Cook, turning once, until browned (approximately 4-6 minutes on each side). Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Sprinkle with salt. Repeat to use all the batter.
Serve immediately, with yogurt on the side.
