The Three Hour Salad

The kitchen's been like an OVEN lately so I'm not real excited about serving anything hot so I thought, "Hey!  Salad is cool and quick!  I'll do that!"  I have this list of 25 main dish salads so I started at the very begining with Salad Nicoise.  That's right, it's French.  Be impressed.  I actually had to go to Wikipedia to figure out how to pronounce it.  It's "NI-swaz" in case you're wondering.  This salad is one of Julia Child's trademark recipes, apparently.  My recipe did not duplicate hers exactly, but it's a rough approximation I think. 

Here's a picture:

The ingredients for my simplified version are as follows:

Romaine lettuce
Grape tomatoes
Tiny red potatoes
Fresh green beans
Black olives
Hard boiled eggs
Tuna
Balsamic vinaigrette dressing

So, I read the recipe and it approximated 1-30 minutes for prep time.  That woman is a LIAR.  This sucker took 3 hours from start to finish!  (Now granted, I got distracted now and again, but still...)  Here's the lowdown on the flowdown:

So you scrub the potatoes and green beans, then you boil the eggs till hard and chill them.  You boil the potatoes until cooked but still firm and chill them.  You blanch the green beans (which means boil for 3 minutes then immerse in ice water), and wait a long time.   After everything is good and chilly, you wash and chop the lettuce, slice the tomatoes, peel the eggs, slice the eggs, slice the potatoes, cut up the green beans, drain the tuna, drain the olives, and make the dressing (yeah, I make my own...)

At this point, I was like, "This was more work than a full hot meal!!  What was I thinking?!?!"  I mean SERIOUSLY!  The kids kept coming up to me:  "Is it time to eat yet?"  "Can I have a piece of cheese?" 

Definitely a yummy salad that I would enjoy eating, but not so sure I'll make again...I just don't have three house to dedicate to making a salad.

Delicious Dill Dip

Here's a recipe for a nummy all natural dill dip:

1 c sour cream

1 tsp dried dill weed

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp onion powder

1 tsp salt

Stir together. 

Devour.

If you try it and like it, consider making a batch of the dip powder at once.

Here's the quantities for a little jar of dip powder:

6 Tbsp dried dill weed

3 Tbsp garlic powder

3 Tbsp onion powder

6 Tbsp salt

Add up to 1 Tbsp of dip to 1 cup of sour cream and....devour.

Num Num Black Bean Dip

Another slam dunk recipe from "Honest Pretzels":

2-15 oz cans black beans, drained and rinsed (or 3 cups)
Juice of 2 limes
1 tsp minced garlic
1/2 tsp cumin
1 Tbsp salt
1/2 c tomato juice/V8
chopped cilantro

Put beans, tomato juice, garlic, cumin, salt, and lime juice into food processor and blend until smooth. 

Serve with corn chips/pita wedges/tortillas/veggies and sprinkle cilantro on top for flavor.

Honest Pretzels

I'm trying to feed my family better.  My goal is organic meats and veggies, pastured milk, no artificial anything.  That makes for expensive eating...especially compared to what we were paying for food before.  We ate the processed foods that were cheap:  hot dogs, mac n cheese, frozen pizza.  We have a tight budget so every dollar counts. 

One idea I had to increase health while keeping spending down was to cook some meals vegetarian.  One of the most famous vegetarian cookbook authors is Mollie Katzen.  She authored the Moosewood Cookbook.  If you want to cook vegetarian, she's the one to go to I guess.  Anyhow, never having been a vegetarian cook I decided to go to her for some recipe ideas.  Easy recipe ideas.  Easy and cheap recipe ideas.  What I discovered was a cookbook she's written for kids called "Honest Pretzels".  Kid cooking I can do.

So far every recipe I've tried from there has been a home run.  It's all delicious! (Except maybe the tomato soup recipe...it seemed curdled and not smooth.  Blech.  But that may have been my fault because I may have let it cook too long with the milk in there.)  She does use white flour and sugar, but that's easy enough to sub out.  The kids love the food and so do us parents.

I do have a certain degree of guilt using this cookbook because I'm standing there alone doing the recipes instead of having quality time with one of my 4 daughters cooking together like the author intended.  I really stink at involving them in the cooking.  I'm working on improving in that area.

Here are some of our favorites from her cookbook:

-Yogurt Pancakes
-Grilled Cheese and Broccoli Sandwich
-Cream Cheese and Apricot Sandwich
-Apple Yogurt Salad
-Guacamole
-Creamy Corn Soup

Homemade Hashbrowns

Store-bought hashbrowns have artificial ingredients added so we make our own.  Making hashbrowns is a great way to use up leftover cooked potatoes.  How often have you tossed leftover potatoes because they're too much of a pain to reheat and aren't as good the second time anyhow.  When you turn them into hashbrowns, it's like eating for free!

What you'll need:

-leftover baked or boiled potatoes
-onion
-olive oil/butter/bacon drippings
-salt and pepper

 Here's the basic rundown: take leftover baked or boiled potatoes and grate them.  Grate an onion and get your griddle nice and hot.  Generously coat the griddle with the fat of your choice (if olive oil, don't heat the griddle as high), sprinkle on the potatoes, then the onions, then salt and pepper.  Seperate them into squares that will be easy to flip with your spatula.  Let 'em sit and sizzle for a while until nice and brown on one side, then flip them and fry the other.

As you can see, I left a gap for eggs.  I'll throw eggs on the griddle close to when the hashbrowns are done.

One little thing, if you want to prepare potatoes exclusively for hashbrowns the next morning, here's what I've found works the best...but I'm not a cook, so take this with a grain of salt:  cut up and put the potatoes in a pot of water and heat to boiling.  Once it begins to boil, shut off the burner and go to bed.  In the morning, drain them and pat them dry and you'll have nice hashbrown-ready potatoes.

Yummy Healthy Chili

We made some yummy chili tonight and wanted to pass on the recipe. This will make a nice, big pot and served the 6 of us with some to spare. We would have had more to spare but we were famished since I couldn't get dinner on the table until 8 pm and there was no butter for making cornbread so all we had to go with it was the blop of sour cream you see in the picture and some corn chips I had on hand....so, we really snarfed up the chili.
2 Tbsp olive oil
3 c onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
2 c celery, diced
4 cloves garlic
1 lb ground beef
2-28 oz cans diced tomateos
4-6 Tbsp chili powder
2 1/2 c water
1 tsp cumin
2 tsp salt
4 tsp honey
3 cans undrained kidney beans (or other beans)

Saute onions, green pepper, celery, and garlic in olive oil. Brown beef. Stir it all together and simmer on low for two hours, stirring occasionally.