#and the last of it diced up in salad or to flavor potatoes or something of that kind

[asinglesock]

I very painstakingly selected one single onion to use this week, put off all the meals that might require an onion untill I was sure I could make the best possible use of the onion, and when I finally went into the kitchen to start cooking today H had used my entire onion in her Thanksgiving prep

#a sock speaks #she wouldn't think anything of me using one of her onions but I wouldn't because I overthink things #my onion! my precious onion on which I staked my meal planning for the week #I usually get through about half in some sort of stew with beans or chickpeas or lentils #about a fourth in the broth I use to make egg noodles #and the last of it diced up in salad or to flavor potatoes or something of that kind #I don't plan to mention it to her but I am a little crushed #now I have pre-soaked beans and no onion to flavor them with #I'm being overdramatic as always #food tag

[haydenkyed17]

Stop Throwing Your Money Away On Fast Food - Simple Cooking Tips Anyone Can Use!

Cooking is an art form and like many others, it can always be improved. With new information, or just a few reminders, you can up your game significantly. If you are looking to improve those skills you picked up ages ago in college, or just want to try out something different, these tips will help you to do just that. One of the things that you will need to realize when you are making meats or fish is that you need to spread your seasoning evenly. Adding too much seasoning in one area of your food can reduce the flavor or lead to a tangy taste that will reduce the quality of your meal. When it comes to cooking a good habit to do after preparing garlic is to rub your hands on the stainless steel sink vigorously for about 30 seconds. This will remove the unwanted odor from your hands. Washing them less than 30 seconds will not take all the odor away. It is possible to lower the fat and calorie content of mashed potatoes without impacting the taste or texture by replacing some of the potato content with cauliflower. Their bland flavor blends effortlessly with the potatoes while taking flavor from the other ingredients. Cauliflower is also the same texture and color of potatoes when mashed so it's a great way to add more veggies, while lowering calories from classic mashed potatoes. Basic seasoning of the food you prepare goes a long way in proving your skills in the kitchen. Don't be afraid to taste your food as you work and adjust seasonings accordingly. Typically, some of the most expensive cuts of meat, as well as many many varieties of seafood, are rather dull without some help. gás de cozinha will appreciate a well-seasoned dish that they don't need to shake salt on until their arms goes numb or twist the pepper mill over for an hour to make palatable. Sometimes it can seem like a good idea to pile on all of your ingredients into the pan to save you time from having to cook them all separately. However, this can only prolong the cooking process since most foods need room to breathe in the pan to cook properly while soaking up the spices. Take the extra bit of time to cook them spaced out properly in the pan and you'll have a better tasting dish. You should cook chicken stew if you need to make a quick meal. Take a carton of chicken broth and put it in a large stock pot. Add cooked shredded chicken, diced potatoes, carrots, green beans and onions to the pot. Season to taste and cook for three hours on low. It is a tasty meal that does not take a lot of work. While making sunny side up eggs, try this tip for a new culinary experience. Simply deglaze the pan you prepared the eggs in with a sherry vinegar. Then drizzle the sauce made from the sherry vinegar over the sunny side up eggs. Doing this will make the eggs more rich and flavorful and they will taste better than ever before. If you are stuck trying to figure out what to cook for dinner during the week, consider building your meals around themes. "Mexican Monday" could mean burritos or a nice taco salad. How about "Tuscan Tuesday" featuring spaghetti and meatballs or maybe meatball subs? And "Fish Friday" offers lots of options for shrimp, salmon or even tuna. Bring the whole family into the fun by letting the kids pick a theme and help plan the meal that day. A well-stocked pantry is a cook's best friend! Never is that more true than when you are faced with unexpected company and you have nothing specifically planned to serve. Maintaining a pantry stocked with the basics gives you the flexibility to create easy meals at the last minute. For help in creating a great cook's pantry, think hard about the items you go back to again and again. You can also find great tips on items for the pantry in most good cookbooks and online at cooking sites. Eventually if you practice enough you will get good at it. By following these tips you will have the knowledge that other people have had to acquire the hard way. Following good advice and tips is a must in cooking and thanks to these you will be well on your way. Just remember to enjoy it!

#gás campo grande

[sehestedkure55]

Stop Throwing Your Money Away On Fast Food - Simple Cooking Tips Anyone Can Use!

Cooking is an art form and like many others, it can always be improved. With new information, or just a few reminders, you can up your game significantly. If you are looking to improve those skills you picked up ages ago in college, or just want to try out something different, these tips will help you to do just that. One of the things that you will need to realize when you are making meats or fish is that you need to spread your seasoning evenly. Adding too much seasoning in one area of your food can reduce the flavor or lead to a tangy taste that will reduce the quality of your meal. When it comes to cooking a good habit to do after preparing garlic is to rub your hands on the stainless steel sink vigorously for about 30 seconds. This will remove the unwanted odor from your hands. Washing them less than 30 seconds will not take all the odor away. It is possible to lower the fat and calorie content of mashed potatoes without impacting the taste or texture by replacing some of the potato content with cauliflower. Their bland flavor blends effortlessly with the potatoes while taking flavor from the other ingredients. Cauliflower is also the same texture and color of potatoes when mashed so it's a great way to add more veggies, while lowering calories from classic mashed potatoes. Basic seasoning of the food you prepare goes a long way in proving your skills in the kitchen. Don't be afraid to taste your food as you work and adjust seasonings accordingly. Typically, gas campo grande of the most expensive cuts of meat, as well as many many varieties of seafood, are rather dull without some help. Your guests will appreciate a well-seasoned dish that they don't need to shake salt on until their arms goes numb or twist the pepper mill over for an hour to make palatable. Sometimes it can seem like a good idea to pile on all of your ingredients into the pan to save you time from having to cook them all separately. However, this can only prolong the cooking process since most foods need room to breathe in the pan to cook properly while soaking up the spices. Take the extra bit of time to cook them spaced out properly in the pan and you'll have a better tasting dish. You should cook chicken stew if you need to make a quick meal. Take a carton of chicken broth and put it in a large stock pot. Add cooked shredded chicken, diced potatoes, carrots, green beans and onions to the pot. Season to taste and cook for three hours on low. It is a tasty meal that does not take a lot of work. While making sunny side up eggs, try this tip for a new culinary experience. Simply deglaze the pan you prepared the eggs in with a sherry vinegar. Then drizzle the sauce made from the sherry vinegar over the sunny side up eggs. Doing this will make the eggs more rich and flavorful and they will taste better than ever before. If you are stuck trying to figure out what to cook for dinner during the week, consider building your meals around themes. "Mexican Monday" could mean burritos or a nice taco salad. How about "Tuscan Tuesday" featuring spaghetti and meatballs or maybe meatball subs? And "Fish Friday" offers lots of options for shrimp, salmon or even tuna. Bring the whole family into the fun by letting the kids pick a theme and help plan the meal that day. A well-stocked pantry is a cook's best friend! Never is that more true than when you are faced with unexpected company and you have nothing specifically planned to serve. Maintaining a pantry stocked with the basics gives you the flexibility to create easy meals at the last minute. For help in creating a great cook's pantry, think hard about the items you go back to again and again. You can also find great tips on items for the pantry in most good cookbooks and online at cooking sites. Eventually if you practice enough you will get good at it. By following these tips you will have the knowledge that other people have had to acquire the hard way. Following good advice and tips is a must in cooking and thanks to these you will be well on your way. Just remember to enjoy it!

#gas de cozinha

[notbecauseofvictories]

weird q but do you have any advice on how to grocery shop healthily when you can only do it after work+classes and post-8pm because i always end up wandering around vaguely depressing and more tired than hungry so i just grab easy junk :/

Get yourself some frozen fruits and vegetables!

Fresh fruits and vegetables come with an expiration date, and the promise of work---chopping, storing, being mindful of using them up before they go bad. Frozen fruits and vegetables eliminate all that! A bag of chopped frozen spinach will last forever, and it's easy to stir together with boxed pasta and a light lemon butter sauce. After a long shift, you can put frozen fruit, yogurt, and milk (maybe some kale!) in a blender for a delicious smoothie, rather than peel kiwis.

I don't know if you've been in the frozen aisle lately, but they're getting really creative---riced cauliflower, stir-fry starter packs, mixed vegetables in pre-made sauces. Just avoid anything in a cheese sauce and/or high in sodium.

You can look for similar short cuts for other healthy staples too. If the idea of making rice or beans sounds exhausting after studying for a test---don't. Canned black beans can be a great source of protein; diced, canned tomatoes make for great additions to lasagna or enchiladas. They make single-serving packs of rice you can microwave! There's no need to make something harder on yourself than it needs to be.

(Personally, I like making a big batch of couscous or quinoa---it's shelf stable, and fresh-made it lasts about 2 weeks in a tupperware container. You can use it as a base for just about anything: quinoa and kale power bowl, couscous with tomatoes and basil, couscous with green beans, quinoa broccoli skillet, etc. etc.)

For meat, I highly recommend chicken breasts (cheap in bulk, take them out of the original package and freeze in individual ziplock bags!) or canned tuna.

Store your leftovers in an air-tight container in the fridge. You can use these for an easy crust-less quiche, pasta salad, or casserole. Leftovers are why Midwestern America invented the casserole, tbh---all you need to do is make some potatoes or pasta, and toss with whatever sauce/vegetables you have; cover with a cheese (any cheese) and bake at 350 F until warm through and the cheese is bubbly.

As a final note, canned soup can be a wonderfully easy way to get the nutrition you need! Check for low- or no-sodium options, since (as with all of these options) a lot of salt gets added to canned soup to preserve flavor.

#tw food #no love sincerer than the love of food

[aiweirdness]

A big neural net reviews a smaller neural net's recipes

I’ve used various neural networks to generate recipes, to varying degrees of success. My earliest recipes were generated with char-rnn, which had to learn everything - spelling, punctuation, words - entirely from scratch. Its recipes were terrible (Swamp Peef and Cheese, anyone? Or Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake?). Later when I started using GPT-2, I was using a neural net that had already seen a lot of recipes online during internet pre-training, and its recipes looked a lot more realistic (although not entirely realistic - there was that recipe for Black Forest Cake that suggested pouring the batter into a toaster, or the jello recipe that starts with “remove all internal rinds”).

GPT-3, an even more powerful text-generating neural net, has seen so many recipes during its internet pre-training that its recipes are boringly plausible. Bake its Black Forest Cake recipe and you’d probably actually get cake at the end, even if it’s not the best cake in the world. Its recipes aren’t funny at a glance, which is why I haven’t posted any of them - until internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch suggested that, rather than have GPT-3 generate its own recipes, I have it rate char-rnn’s recipes. Readers, it worked.

I prompted GPT-3 with two example recipes from allrecipes, each followed by 3 of their human-written reviews. Then, for the third recipe I inserted one of char-rnn’s recipes:

Chocolate Chocolate Cake

1 cup sugar 1/4 cup butter 1 cup margarine 1 cup cocoa 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup margarine 1/2 cup pecans, chopped 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 egg yolk 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 cup chopped pecans 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup cocoa 1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, salt, and salt in a large bowl. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture boils and stiff peaks form. Add milk and cook until mixture is completely melted. Remove from heat and stir in sugar and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat until smooth. Spread in batter. Sprinkle with pecans.

Yield: 1 servings

And then I let GPT-3 add reviews. Would it mention the excessive lakes of vanilla? The complete lack of flour? The foolhardy reliance on the heroic efforts of a single egg yolk to hold things together?

oxtailsandturnovers Rating: 5 stars 03/04/2007 delicious chocolate recipe!!! and the perfect balance between cocoa and chocolate. and they sure were LONGNECKS! big time rave here. lazy w birthdays w friends and family, try this recipe for something chocolate sweet the ppl will talk about over and over.

AKEMIYUNA Rating: 5 stars appraisal 12/03/2008 Excellent for the kids Halloween party. Everyone got so thrilled by seeing something new on Chocolate in sponge. He even likes nuts separately but it will taste good..

BYOMFYABF Rating: 2 stars 10/01/2008 I could only give it a 2 as I had to make changes to it due to ingredients I had. First, I used Dove Dark Chocolate cocoa instead of Hershey's, no nuts, and the mashed bananas and caramel topping were a must. I did use coffee instead of the hot water, and dark margarine instead of regular, therefore I could not use light whipped cream, but I made homemade whipped cream. It had WAY too much flour in it, but i guess it could have been me measuring heavier than I should have. I also only used 2 cups of flour. it was my first bundt cake, so it was huge!!!

Here’s another batch of reviews, this time of a more chaotic char-rnn recipe:

Simple Soup Alaborate Soup Pie

6 each chopped white perserves; ** (optional but ring) 1/2 cup chopped fresh marjoram 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme 1/3 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup thinly sliced onion 1/4 cup onion (chopped) 1/2 teaspoon garlic; minced 2 small carrots 6 can dry white wine 1 tabasco sauce 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 cup flour, whipped topping 2 tablespoon chili powder

Marinate: Serves 4. Whip and short under boiling. Add the sliced mushrooms and peppers and stir to coat. Stir the sugar and carrots. In large bowl, beat the egg to make a 1 1/2 tablespoons of the flour. Add shanks and stir it well. Spoon into a frying pan before serving.

Recipe By : DonajehLi Koubmanda

Yield: 8 servings

JEFFREY97389 Rating: 2 stars 03/03/2006 Even though everyone said this was great, I thought it was just 'OK!' The perserves gave a strange flavor to the sauce.

MATTJANDTRACER Rating: 2 stars 01/02/2009 This recipe sounded good. When it came out it tasted a bit like a casserole and not a stew. I used venison instead of deer and pork. I liked the way it turned out, but it wasnt very French.

Hammy Rating: 5 stars The g iving this as a gift as it takes about 10 less minutes but using American cheese and not blended with parsley flakes, lime-flavored gelatin, which is my husband's favorite dish from SuperValu. Just happens to be the creamy sauce. Don't worry about a pie crust.

In fact, the more chaotic the char-rnn recipe, the more chaotic the reviews tend to be, as if GPT-3 has picked up on the chaos and is trying to somehow produce reviews that could plausibly be written by whatever weird humans are visiting this mangled recipe website.

Geilded Peanuts & Crabmeat Basil

3 beef, boneless chops, or thyme, 1 lamber and flince of fresh diced in diagonal 1 parsley 2 large leeks (for garnish) 3/4 teaspoon sesame oil, seeded and peeled 1 any jeans'l-tortilla 1 pepper or cinnamon 1/4 cup baesly pinto beans. (Crushed and thawed; minced fine you recipe) 1 tomato base 1 fat in the last 5 inch plates 1 garlic clove; crushed 1/4 cup dijon mustard

In a large bowl set aside. Remove the sides from the heat and saute with a fork and cover and cook on Low for 6 to 6 hours.

Yield: 6 servings

Morales Rating: 0 stars 03/30/2008 I had high expectations for this recipe, but it was an outright flop. I don't know if the measurements were somehow incorrect or what, but I ended up with a watery mess that certainly wasn't crab salad. My girlfriend, who is a new chef liked it fine, but I really wish that the recipe didn't claim that it made six servings when it really made enough for one, if that's what we were going to call it.

Carole Rating: 5 stars Glorious sobs! This recipe will be delicious for a minumum of 1½ Hours to maximum 2½ hours Time to bring lots of fresh sized potatoes in the house or grow in the age may become quite famous

Amanda Rating: 3 stars 11/13/2009 My friend is having a birthday party and will celebrate with Camping. She's in charge of the dishes and wanted to serve food at the campfire. I'll 10th grade, my easy information for her party. It will not sound strange anyway test this task with a note to work rationally.What to take trees, portable tables for chairs, the main meal, food. I personally love the taste of it but has anyone seen a shepherd (wasn't any spices), oysters. It is sufficient

It does kind of make sense that GPT-3’s recipe reviews aren’t directly complaining about the utter weirdness of char-rnn’s recipes. Probably very few of the recipe reviews in GPT-3’s training data involved baffled complaints about nonexistent or repeated ingredients, or apocalyptic levels of recipe failure. So GPT-3 has learned that even the critical reviews tend to fall within a certain sentiment range. It’s interesting that it tries to emulate char-rnn’s primitive neural net glitchiness - I’ve noticed before that GPT-3 seems to be capable of pretending to be a much simpler neural net.

Subscribers get bonus content: After generating a few reviews, GPT-3 would sometimes go on to generate new recipes (such as “BBQ Cheeseburger Salad” which contains lime jello, whipped topping, and sliced black beans). It may have been deliberately trying to make them terrible to fit in with char-rnn’s recipes.

Speaking of AI-generated recipes: there are some absolute disasters in my book on AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

#neural networks #gpt-3 #char-rnn #recipes

[the-blind-assassin-12]

How do the boys like their French fries??

This time, someone DID ask! 

Round Three: Fried Taters. 

I had fun thinking about this one, so thanks for asking! I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t like fries, and I for one have never met a potato that I didn’t want to consume immediately. So here we go: 

Billy Russo: Boardwalk fries. 

...Though they don’t have to come from the boardwalk. Billy refers to all food truck/ stall fries as “boardwalk fries”. He doesn’t have a ton of happy memories from his childhood, but the few times a year that he and the others got to join the rest of the city’s kids at Coney Island belong in that category. While most of the kids used their spending money for sweet treats like funnel cakes and cotton candy, Billy preferred the crispy, salty hand cut fries that could be found at virtually every booth and stall that lined the boards. As far as dipping goes, Billy’s stance is firm: ketchup or nothing at all, and he doesn’t drown them in it, only dipping the ends before shoving them in his mouth. And sharing? Ha! Ask Billy Russo how many people he’s shared his fries with, I dare you. 

Logan Delos: Sweet Potato Fries

Surprise, surprise: Logan Delos likes to be different. Regular fries are fine and all, but he prefers the sweeter, more luscious, and slightly more exclusive variety of fried potato. Fries of any kind aren’t his normal fare- he does a lot of juices and smoothies in the morning, salads or grilled chicken or fish for lunch. Business dinners are generally held at high brow establishments; Michelin Star restaurants, private yachts, places where if your last name isn’t Delos, you’re going to wait months for a reservation...not the type of places where one typically orders French fries. 

But Logan likes what he likes and when he’s able to relax and indulge in simpler pleasures, sweet potato fries are on the list. He likes them with over easy eggs, soaking up the runny yolks, or dipped in maple butter cream sauce if he’s craving something more on the dessert end of things. If you’re close enough to Logan that he’s eating sweet potato fries around you, he’s more than willing to share. Especially when it means helping you clean the sticky maple sauce from your lips.

Nick Tortano: Steak fries. 

Big, thick solid wedges of skin-on potatoes are what Nick thinks of when he thinks of fries. He gets a sausage, peppers and onions sandwich to go from the same place once a week, and he’ll always eat the sandwich first, letting the grease from the sausages and the juices from the peppers drip all over the fries. Once they’ve soaked up all that flavor, he’ll dig into the fries, salty and greasy and messy as can be. Not one to let the little things in life slip by, Nick won’t think twice about licking his fingers clean in favor of using a napkin. 

He doesn’t need anything to dip his fries in, but sometimes he’ll put mustard on his sandwich, so sometimes when he gets to the fries there’s some spicy Golden’s in the mix. There are three people in the world Nick would share his fries with: Vito, George, and you. Das it. 

Ryan Brenner: Waffle fries. 

Ryan is far from a picky eater- unless we’re talking about shrimp and grits, in which case he’ll only eat his Aunt Holly’s recipe… and eventually Taylor’s. But we’re not, we’re talking about French fried potatoes, and while the shape and specifications of the fry aren’t important to Ryan, he does have a favorite. Waffle fries. He first tried them at a diner outside of Pittsburgh with Cowboy and a few local musicians. One of the guys- Ryan only knew him as Lefty- asked their waitress for a side of ranch dressing, and proceeded to dunk his waffle fries in it. Ryan thought it was odd because he’d only ever had ranch dressing on salads, and at 19 he didn’t eat many salads, but he already knew better than to form an uneducated opinion on things. So he tried it and liked it (though he drew the line at mozzarella sticks in ranch. That was all Lefty and Cowboy.) “The shape’s what makes’m good for dunkin in stuff,” Lefty explained, and Ryan found he was right, prompting him to try other sauces and dressings. Tomatillo salsa, BBQ sauce and Cajun Chef hot sauce are his favorites. 

Will Ryan Brenner share his waffle fries? Is the sky blue? Of course he will. And he’ll try whatever sauce or topping you suggest. 

Benjamin Greene: Belgian Frites

Yes, he hails from the land of chip shops and happily douses them in malt vinegarYes, he’s ended many a young, dumb, drunken night with a chip butty. But if we’re talking just chips, no fish… He’d prefer the Belgian style frites that he found at a stall in Camden Market. Unlike chips in pubs and shops, Belgian frites are hand cut to order, and fried twice giving them a crisp outside and a creamy, mashed potato like inside. A true blue Frite stall will have a menu of sauces and topping combinations the length of your arm, but Benjamin’s go to is Joppie Sauce- a curry mayo with diced onions. 

On nice days when he doesn’t have anything to do, he wanders through the different shops and stalls, with a paper cone of frites and just watch people interacting- buying and selling and laughing and it always lifts his spirits. That area is so full of life; color and music and spellbinding smells. He’s never had a bad time there. In fact, he’s thinking he should take you there soon, get your mind off your work for a few hours, stroll the street, share some frites, and not take you back to the hotel until he’s heard you laugh. 

#thanks for asking!! #french fries are serious business #french fries #billy russo #logan delos #ryan brenner #nick tortano #benjamin greene #ask me anything #no really anything #what are your favoite fry toppings or dips? #what are your thoughts on sweet potato fries? #are you team logan?

[themiscyra1983]

Cassandra’s Half-Assed Cuisine in Quarantine: Low and Slow Beef Stew Over Noodles

Good evening, cats and kittens, and welcome to the last of my recipes, at least for the time being. This one will perhaps be judged less harshly by the esteemed @docholligay, your friend and mine, as it does involve some actual proper cooking. I’m not saying no judgment. I am saying less.

As with my Hot and Horrific Chili Queso, I don’t have a specific provenance for this dish. It’s based on something my parents would make for me and my sister since our childhood, well before I can remember. The Lease family has roots all over the place, if by ‘the place’ you mean Europe. Most immediately, we are Swedish (via my grandmother, an immigrant), Scottish (via my great-grandmother, through whom I am linked to Clan MacGillivray, if only unofficially, as that was her maiden name), and Irish (via my grandfather; the less said about him the better, but I like Ireland even as I loathe that no-account bastard through the mists of time). Any part of our heritage could have inspired this simple, hearty meal, though more likely my parents found it on the back of a gravy packet or something and added it to our repertoire. Truth be told, a lot of our family recipes were things my parents initially found on a package, which then mutated over the years when they lost the original recipe; such is the case with our Chili Ole, an amalgam of ground beef, tomato paste, macaroni, beans and various spices. No idea what that dish was originally. No idea how to actually make it.

And, though I do know how to make this, I similarly have no idea where this actually came from.

But this was a special meal for us. Simple but time consuming, it was a bit infrequent in our family meal rotation, making it special for us. Today I make it strictly on special occasions, when I have a whole day to myself, as it involves the slow cooker and while I know the point is to just let the thing run, I don’t like leaving it completely unattended. So this is a Christmas and birthday kind of meal for me. And it was my dad’s specialty; since he now lives a thousand miles away, it’s not like he can make it for me.

Now, my dad doesn’t cook very much, and even less these days, it seems. His girlfriend was shocked to learn I thought highly of his gravy, but I do have fond memories of him making gravy for our Thanksgiving dinners and for this dish. He gave me the best instructions he could recall, but the truth is, I’ve never been able to make the stuff thicken the way I like - the way he could. So, because I can’t actually advise you on making gravy, and in the spirit of this being half-assed, I’m going to tell you to add premade gravy. But in the course of this recipe you’re going to end up with a by-product that could certainly be the basis of a gravy or a broth, so I’ll tell you how my dad said to make the gravy at the end, even though it doesn’t work for me.

But let’s start with the half-assed version. As I said: this is a time-consuming recipe, but also a simple one. It involves a few ingredients, a bunch of waiting, and then tasting and adjusting to taste as you finish it off. The most expensive part will be the steak. You can use stew beef if you prefer, but I actually found my experience using small, tender steaks much more satisfying. It was necessity inspiring invention when I couldn’t get stew beef but now I actually prefer it. You can also use onion powder instead of diced onion (in fact this is what my dad does), but I find the latter makes things more flavorful. If you want to use onion powder, I’d say add a couple tablespoons.

Here’s what you’ll need.

The Stew:

About 24 ounces worth of tender angus steaks

One small or about half a medium onion, freshly diced

Two tablespoons of garlic powder

Salt

Pepper

About 24 ounces of premade gravy (Heinz Savory Beef Gravy works for me)

The Noodles:

One 12-ounce package of egg noodles

One stick of butter or margarine (or four ounces for those of you who don’t get the stuff in quarter-pound sticks)

Cut the steaks into bite-sized chunks and place into your slow cooker or Instant Pot. Add the diced onion and garlic powder, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover this mixture with water - about 4 cups, enough to cover everything. Stir until you feel the ingredients have been distributed evenly. Put your slow cooker on low and leave to cook for eight hours.

After eight hours of cooking, remove the mixture from the slow cooker and drain, saving the water for other uses if desired. Put the drained mixture in a large saucepan and heat over low heat on your stovetop, adding the gravy and stirring often. Taste occasionally and add more garlic powder, onion powder, pepper and/or salt to taste.

In another pot, prepare the egg noodles as directed on the package, bringing enough water to cook them to a boil, adding the noodles, and stirring occasionally until tender. Once they’re ready, drain the noodles. Cut up the margarine or butter and add it to the pan, then return the noodles and stir thoroughly. Add a little olive oil as well if desired.

When the noodles are done and the beef stew is sufficiently hot, you’re ready to serve. I like to put the noodles in a bowl first, add some grated mozzarella on top, and then ladle the beef stew on top of that, adding salt and pepper if needed and to taste. You can also mix it all thoroughly and in fact this is sometimes what I do with leftovers (leaving out the cheese, which I add after reheating). The stew also goes well over potatoes as prepared in a variety of ways - mashed, boiled, those little red potatoes perfectly cooked, you name it.

This can easily make six servings or so, or four very hearty servings. I beg you to have a salad as well - I make a point of eating my greens. This is a lot of starch and protein and you should get some more veggies in there.

So What About the Gravy?

Again, I’ve never been able to make this work. Perhaps it’s the corn starch that’s giving me problems - my dad was diagnosed with celiac several years ago and stopped using flour. We could have noodles made from wheat (made in a separate pot, and tasted by the non-celiac folks in the house), but he had to taste the gravy to make it properly, so: gluten-free gravy. If you already know how to make gravy, you should use your process.

But this is what my dad told me.

You will need:

About two cups of water

About 3-4 heaping spoonfuls (my dad was not specific, I went with tablespoons) of corn starch (my family always used Argo brand)

Some Gravy Master, mainly for coloring - maybe about a teaspoon at most

When the stew mixture is done in the slow cooker, do NOT drain it off - add everything to the saucepan. In a separate vessel, mix the water, starch, and Gravy Master into a slurry, then add this to the pan as well. Stir everything together, heating over low heat, tasting occasionally. Add additional water if you find the gravy is getting too thick (spectacularly not a problem for me). As in the above process, add additional spices while cooking to taste.

Last Notes

To be honest, the “or margarine” up there is about my personal taste - it’s what I grew up with, as my family was often poor. We had butter, but used it sparingly, sticking with margarine for a lot of our cooking, including pasta. Butter tastes too...’buttery’ to me on pasta now. I use margarine (and I’m specific about the brands I like; I used to use Promise but after I started having trouble finding it I switched to Land O’ Lakes); you may very well prefer butter. I wouldn’t call either option exactly healthy.

In my dad’s version of the recipe - which uses stew beef and onion powder and involves his own gravy, as described above - he also browns the beef before adding it to the slow cooker, no more than about five or ten minutes in a frying pan over fairly low heat. I’ve never found this step necessary in my version of the recipe but you may like the effect.

...now I’m thinking about that Chili Ole my family used to make, whatever the hell that actually was before we got our grubby little hands on it. I’ll have to see if my dad remembers how we made that. But that’s all the ‘recipes’ I have for now; a LOT of what I eat otherwise boils down to ‘follow the directions on the package’ or ‘make a goddamned sandwich’ or ‘okay it’s a burger, cook a burger and slap it on a bun and top it with stuff’. If I think of anything else, well, my keyboard’s always ready to go.

For now, stay safe, stay healthy, and try to eat better than I do.

#cooking #cassandra's half-assed cuisine in quarantine #food #not actually sure this qualifies as a proper stew #but you know aside from using premade gravy i think this isn't the worst #anyway it's veggies beef and gravy #what else would make it a stew

[hecallsmehischild]

On Losing Weight

Recently I was asked a question that prompted me to pull together all the information I could remember about how my husband, Sergey, and I have been eating over the last few years. We both struggle very much with food and have been trying to do better by our bodies for a long time, but are wary of all the diets and fads. This post has details about what we’ve tried to date and what has worked for us. Most of it is written by me. At the end, Sergey wrote a few paragraphs also. Very long post under the cut.

Disclaimers and a few generalities

One thing about eating and weight loss is that accountability really helps. However, I’ve found personally that even if everyone in your family means well, accountability partners should not be within the family. The main reason I've found is that there's too much baggage with any family member (with the potential exception of your marriage partner) for accountability to ever go well and function as it should. Resentment, triggers, irritation, even accidental shaming crops up because of old baggage and derails everything. You need accountability with someone who you don’t carry a lot of baggage with, because there’s often a huge emotional component to eating.

It takes a LONG time to lose large amounts of weight. You can lose five to ten pounds relatively quickly, but often your body will stabilize on the new number and then you may find it very hard to get lower for months, so continuing to try new things is helpful.

You will yo-yo between 3 and 5 pounds all the time. That is standard. So think in five pound increments in any direction, because your bodyweight is constantly in flux over a few pounds. For this reason, weighing once a week is a lot more accurate than weighing every day and will cause a lot less despair and frustration.

We are not vegetarians at all. We cannot offer any thoughts on a vegetarian diet.

Whatever you do, food-wise, has to be part of your ordinary life. Short term diets set you up to fail. Changing your lifestyle is what will produce long-lasting changes.

Also, some of the things my husband and I try, in some ways, appears to walk the line of eating disorder. I’m watching it very closely with that in mind, and I still don’t think it falls into the trap. Sergey and I do not have enough activity to burn off all the food with take in, so we’re trying things to decrease our food intake AND increase our activity, so that we reach a reasonable balance. But people who have (or are tempted by) eating disorders need to take care, and I would recommend not reading this post or else proceeding with utmost caution.

Obviously not all of the things we do are feasible for everyone, but maybe even hearing some of our ideas might spark a different way of thinking about food and being active for you.

One Meal a Day

Three meals a day makes a lot of sense if you’re doing hard labor all the time. It doesn’t make as much sense if you have a desk job or take care of a house as your main occupation. So the first thing we did a few years back is cut down to one meal a day. It could be anything at all, but it had to be just one meal. That alone dropped us both about 10 pounds down. We’d have one meal around lunch, and later in the evening we would share a large bowl of some sort of fruit (like tangerines or cherries). The aim was to eat things that were both good and filling. Variation keeps you from getting bored and abandoning the lifestyle.

Meals were often grilled salmon or home-warmed burgers (lean, when we could) or a soup from Trader Joe’s. Some of our meals now:

Two burgers with lean beef patties, pickles, and some mayo on bakery fresh onion rolls

Lox (with is VERY low cal, if expensive) on onion rolls with tomato and onion, a little oil and pepper and salt

Sharing a whole roast chicken from the store, plus a roll each

Large can of tuna mixed with a little mayo on two onion rolls

Shredded chicken and mashed potatoes from the store’s fresh packaged food section

Pot roast and mashed potatoes from the store’s fresh packaged food section

Meatballs. Just meatballs.

A spicy beans/rice/sausage/mushroom dish we brainstormed that we make in a pressure cooker

Home-made chicken mushroom fettuccine alfredo. Not super healthy, but hot and homemade. (this is a “maintenance” meal, see what I mean by that later)

A bag of chicken fried rice from Trader Joe’s

Soup from the grocery store (not the canned kind, but the fresher ones sold by the store)

Two larger sized tamales

One frozen pizza (inspect the full calorie count, you’re shooting for something between 600 and 1000 calories total, which does exist but it takes some looking and experimenting with types) whose flavor can always be spiced up with extra mushrooms or garlic powder. Not the Tostino’s or Party pizzas. I promise there are healthier, tastier, and more varied pizzas to be had in this calorie range.

Chicken breast or chicken thigh meat is sold frozen. Cook that and make that into sandwiches for very lean, filling meals. Use of various spices encouraged.

A tray of baked “catfish nuggets” which are chunks of catfish cooked in the oven

A tray of baked white meat chicken nuggets

Cocktail shrimp (thawed from frozen) with cocktail sauce

I have just broken into the frontier of omelettes, also low-cal and filling in conjunction with onion rolls.

Sergey would often go to a salad bar and load up on the salad, then also load up on the chicken noodle soup which is very filling and very low cal.

Sergey eats his meal closer to noon or one. I try to eat my meal around 3 or 4 if I can hold out, because then I’m not groaning about how hungry I am in the evening or being kept up by hunger pangs. For me, that’s the mid-point of the day and the one that helps me deal with hunger best.

Snacks and Sweets

Snacks are always tricky, and large bags of anything salty are automatic failures in this house; we are incapable of portioning them. So we stopped getting them unless we acknowledged the truth to ourselves, which is that one bag is one serving size no matter what the back says (i.e. we embraced that we’re being bad and got it anyway).

For a while Sergey and I had an occasional bowl of non-buttered popcorn with powdered salt. This worked for a bit because it was pretty filling, but Sergey found himself making multiple bowls so we had to stop because that defeated the purpose.

Some stores sell very small snacks individually portioned, like a tiny foil pack of variously flavored olives, or banana bites coated in cacao, etc. Those are great. Rice cakes can be good, though I get tired of them after a while. I like the cinnamon apple and chocolate ones best. Speaking of cinnamon apple, individual oatmeal cups are good too. I aim for around 140 cal for a snack.

Sometimes I will snack on a lean burger patty or chicken thigh-meat piece, each of which is about 70 cal.

By himself, Sergey often would (and still does) fill a large bowl full of small quartered tomatoes mixed with pepper, oil, and onion. He can put away two of these tomato salads a day as “snacks.” He says they’re very filling, good for you, and low-cal. He’s leaning more on bowls of baby carrots and sugar snap peas these days. Sometimes he will make a large bowl of Golden Apple slices to chow down on.

I keep NO ice cream in the house. I may get a larger quantity for a birthday celebratory binge, or use individual containers as a reward system, but I never “stock up” on ice cream. Birthday? Maybe 4 of the personal containers of various flavors, and that’s it for my birthday treat. Reward system? Once I get to a certain weight, I allow myself to have one small personal container of ice cream (or my other favorite, a jar of honey pecans) a week. The incentive to get to a certain weight balances out the slow-down on the weight loss the treat causes, because this can’t be all about deprivation or I couldn’t sustain it. Being able to sustain a way of eating into a lifestyle is a huge deal.

I keep dried cranberries in the cabinet. Sometimes if I’m hungry and need to hold out, I’ll grab one handful of those to eat. I keep larger quantities of oatmeal too, but I’m not sure if that’s working against me or not, because I dump high quantities of honey in to bring it up to my sweet tooth standards so it might end up being a bad thing for me. I haven’t sat down to figure that out yet.

I make a mean chunky cinnamon applesauce that is a delicious and pretty healthy snack, too, when I have the energy to make it.

I would like to make sweets all the ding dong day, but it works against us, so I have to reserve my sweets making for when there’s a large group to share them with. Otherwise we would eat all of that ourselves.

Tools that help

Making your own food at home becomes a lot more enjoyable and feasible for low-energy people like us when there are tools that cut back on the effort it takes. To that end

A good 6 qt pressure cooker does everything a crockpot does, but it has more options and is faster.

A good food processor can do almost anything, from applesauce to milling oats to slicing veggies to finely dicing the onions you don’t want to deal with, to making ice cream out of frozen bananas and cocoa powder. We have an older one and it still does wonders, even though some of the latches don’t work right.

A good indoor grill machine.

Electric mixer/beater. The effort of making cookies goes down by a third to a half the personal energy cost when you use this, plus the process goes faster and the texture is so much better.

A dishwasher. A good dishwasher means you aren’t spending a ton of energy cleaning up all the dishes you soiled just making food. Did you know there are portable dishwashers that hook up to your sink if you don’t have one in the home? I just learned this...

This one heavily depends on how much you’d use it, but it can be very inexpensive to get an electric citrus juicer. I can go through about 40 lemons for a party-sized quantity of lemonade and it wracks out my wrist to do that manually, so I got a good one for about $20.

This website is one Sergey uses to see what products are legitimately good, because Amazon is starting to have major issues with fake reviews PLUS Chinese knock-offs getting passed off as the good product. This site user-tests a ton of different brands of the same product and tells you which one they found to be best and why, then gives a few runners up in other categories like price or different type. I used this to find a good set of salt/pepper grinders, a good knife sharpener, and an individual serving coffee maker. I also found my electric mixer and citrus juicer on here.

Also, pickling things is fun and very cheap and easy.

A few radical things

This is our lifestyle, not a diet. We go crazy with our eating when we’re on a trip, but normal, everyday eating is the one-meal-a-day plan for us. Going to a friend’s place for a meal is a balancing act that we often fail (because it’s often all-you-can-eat), but we’re already brainstorming ways to compensate.

Here’s for something radical sounding, to be handled with care. While Sergey aims for around 1300 calories a day, approximately, I aim for under or close to 800. I’ve found that if I eat the same things as him, I maintain my current weight but do not lose any. It’s when I, the smaller and less active person, undershoot him, that I start gaining ground. When I reach the weight I’m aiming for, I will allow myself more leeway to get to his calorie intake level, because that’s “maintenance” level for me.

Here’s the current thing we are testing, so the results are not in yet. We’re doing this because neither of us has been able to budge our weight for a while. It’s a combination of factors so track with me. We like a place called Star Cinema Grill which is a movie theater that serves you a meal and/or drinks while you watch the movie. But even for one meal this is a very high calorie day if we go there. We swore off going for a long time, until their marketing department sent out a wave of “Two free tickets!” in the mail. Sergey figured that he would go, and then he would not eat for 48 hours to make up for it. I was a little concerned by the idea, but after thinking it over for a while (with the concern about eating disorders in mind) it didn’t actually seem that unreasonable. So I joined him in this. So now we’ve worked out that we can go to Star Cinema Grill on occasion as long as it’s followed by a 48 hour fast.

We had previously tried 48 hour fasts (which consist of, for example, eating lunch around noon on Sunday and stopping food until lunch on Tuesday, so that you sleep through much of the 48 hour period) but we first did the fast on ONLY water. By the second day we were both so lethargic and unfocused that we could hardly function. This time we allowed ourselves to have several rounds of tea or mocha throughout the day. That time, we experienced very negligible energy drops and made it through the period of no-eating with a lot less suffering.

NOW. I was reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the expanded and revised edition, and at the end they included several articles they had written as bonus material. Please read this article to understand where I’m going next.

Excited, I rushed over to Sergey to make him read this bit. This is already sort of what we had been doing. Though this guy had distilled it down to sugar water, tea with a cube of sugar isn’t much different. My mocha had about three times the sugar, but was still on the very low end of calories for a day. So this idea (that sugar-water helps trick your body past hunger) was being confirmed for us by someone else. So we’ve decided to test out doing this 48-hour fast once a week, which may also allow for re-inclusion of things we tend to forgo more often (like weekly ice cream? Or a fresh batch of cookies?). Stay tuned...

Going out

We built a list of places and categories of how good or bad they are for us to go to. We divided them into Healthy and Healthy Cheat. Bad ones don’t make it on the list so we’re not tempted when we’re thinking of where to go out.

Healthy Restaurants are places where, if you’re reasonable with your choices, you can eat pretty much any one meal on their menu. (Lemon Shark is our Poke place in the area. Poke is unreasonably good and healthy and filling for you, and most will have vegetarian or cooked options on the menu if you don’t like raw fish. Jinya is a ramen place, though you have to be a little more selective about because some dishes are two meals’ worth, and Sweet Tomatoes is a salad bar also known as Souplantation in some regions)

Healthy Cheat Restaurants are places where we know we’ll probably eat more than we should, but the food is still relatively healthy. Tokyo Grill and Dimassi’s are both buffet places with relatively healthy options near us. Fukuda Sushi is our sushi go-to for now (though we’re looking to replace it as the fish quality went down).

Avoid most all-you-can-eat places like the plague, unless it’s a salad bar. Even then, if you gravitate toward the breads and creamy soups like I do, just say no.

Places we love that are also pretty bad for us on any kind of regular basis: Rudy’s BBQ, Star Cinema Grill, Wine Tasting Room (large meat and cheese platters), anywhere Italian.

Being Active

We took up Krav Maga, which had us doing off and on rigorous exercise for an hour twice a week. That went on for about a year. After I broke my toe, we switched to a home exercise regimen.

Instead of home exercise equipment, we opted for DDR pads, and have been doing hour-long DDR sessions most mornings. After an hour long workout (25 songs on easy-to-medium levels) we each do 20 crunches and then Sergey does extra burpees or push-ups. As the crunches get easier for me, I will be adding five at a time. I’m up to 30 now. Crunches were initially added to help me maintain the muscles that hold up a weak place in my spine, however now it’s also a good end-workout routine. I cannot get through all this without frequent water breaks because I drip sweat, and Sergey turns into a waterfall.

Sergey has added about 3-5 extra mini-workouts (a set of pushups or burpees) sprinkled throughout the day.

Some days we go to a park in the morning and walk for 30-50 minutes instead of DDR. It’s less strenuous, but a nice change of pace and scenery.

Some days we go kayaking in a nearby waterway, which REALLY works the arm muscles that day, but it’s a fantastic workout. We keep saying we need to go more often, but often forget.

Failing

It’s going to happen. It’s going to feel miserable. Sometimes I have found myself up at three AM, unable to sleep, making myself another whole frozen pizza or eating all the spaghetti leftovers. Sometimes I can talk myself into something slightly better, like a bowl of oatmeal, but not often. Sometimes I’ll just mix white and brown sugar, butter, and raw oatmeal and eat this lump-of-barely-cookie-dough as is. Sometimes I come home from the grocery store with an entire round loaf of bakery bread and eat it, much to Sergey’s fascination and surprise. One time I scooped one out and filled it with clam chowder and ate my own homemade bread bowl. It was great. It was also way over my limit.

Sometimes “failing” is known and expected, like around the holidays or birthdays. It’s okay to celebrate. Food is a very social and emotional experience as well as a sustenance deal. Keep picking yourself back up and trying again.

Sergey, who is SUPER good at distilling core concepts, adds his own TLDR:

On Losing Weight

Dusty and I have both struggled with overeating. For me, there have been sad times when plowing through a huge meal may have been the happiest 20 minutes of my day, and it’s no surprise that I would resist any attempts to eliminate that. However, I’ve found that losing weight and getting healthier leads to better moods and reduces the frequency and severity of impulses to binge.

Whatever you do must be incorporated into your lifestyle—if you are “going on a diet,” then you are setting yourself up to fail. If certain behaviors become part of your ordinary day, and you maintain that for months at a time, it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to keep going.

The most important change I’ve made is limiting myself to 1 meal a day. After a short adjustment period, I feel only a little bit hungrier than I did with 2 meals a day while consuming half the calories. That meal should be a reasonably-sized meal (typically 800-1200 calories for men, 600-900 for women), not an extra-large one. If I get hungry again, I only allow myself some very low-calorie snacks like carrots, sugar snap peas, or tomatoes.

The second thing I did was institute a daily exercise program. Dusty and I start each morning with an hour of DDR when we can, and I stop what I’m doing every 3-5 hours to do a set of 20 burpees. As I gain strength, I plan to increase this number. We also go for walks or go kayaking when the weather and our moods allow. What’s most important is that you do something to get your heart racing and get sweaty, and that you do it every day.

The last thing I did was institute occasional 48-hour fasts. For example, I would have lunch on Monday and not eat again until lunch on Wednesday. If I have tea with light sugar during a fast, I only feel moderately hungrier than I would otherwise. It’s much more tolerable than I thought it would be. There is considerable research suggesting that intermittent fasting is good for you, and it can be a reasonable way to offset the binge you couldn’t resist having. It’s definitely a healthier approach than purging, which hurts both your body and your soul.

#food #eating #rlchild #exercise #if you struggle with eating disorders this post is not good for you #not vegetarian

[wearejapanese]

By Cody Uyeda

Japanese New Years was one of the few traditions that made the jump when my great grandparents, like many others, left Japan for a better future on American soil. My grandmother, the designated New Year’s host for as long as I can remember, always began her preparations several days in advance, so every year my parents, my brother, and I would drive from our Orange County home up to my grandmother’s Los Angeles residence to help her prepare.

For as long as I can remember, New Years was exciting not just because of the delicious food I’d get to eat, but because it was one of the only times I truly felt Japanese. As a fourth generation Japanese American who grew up in a predominantly non-Asian community, I rarely had the opportunity to eat Japanese food, much less experience the culture. However, New Years was one of the few times my family and I could grow closer to our heritage, if only for a moment.

My grandmother’s preparations always began with a trip to our local Japanese market, as she made it a point to cook as many of the traditional foods as possible, rather than settling for a pre-made sushi or bento set. Walking up and down the aisles, I became acquainted with a host of Japanese ingredients that I would rarely if ever see otherwise. Bags of dried shiitake mushrooms, furry sato imo potatoes, and long stalks of gobo went into the cart, along with fish roe, kamaboko, and pale, oblong lotus roots, to name a few.

Step two was always the sashimi. Though not technically a traditional New Years ingredient, sashimi had somehow made its way into the workings of my grandmother’s New Years, and was now an indispensable part of the feast to come. I distinctly remember early mornings in her car, still half asleep, heading downtown to Pacific Fresh Fish on 6th street to pick up cuts of tuna, hamachi (yellowtail), and tako (octopus) for sashimi. Once back home, the fish went into the fridge while the rest of the preparations got underway.

In true Asian fashion, we cleaned the house from top to bottom, swiffering the floor until it shone, replacing all the bathroom towels, and washing down a year’s collection of dust and dirt from the front and back patios. Meanwhile, in the kitchen my grandmother would have several pots boiling while she chopped, skinned, and diced on an assembly line of cutting boards set up along the countertop. Growing up, I probably got in the way more times than I was useful, but as I grew older, my grandmother began delegating tasks to me one by one, slowly pulling me further and further into the measured chaos that was the kitchen the day before New Years.

There was one dish in particular that always stood out - my grandmother’s saba(mackerel) zushi. A family recipe passed down from her mother, it was a star attraction of the New Years feast. It was one of the first dishes I learned to make, but also one of the most time intensive and difficult to get right. Hunched over the sabafillets, I’d pick out bones with a tweezer until I was sure my fingers would fall off. Peeling off the skin was a whole other challenge, as the trick was to get it off without removing the saba’s distinctive silver and blue coloring. I almost always got it wrong, and the ones I prepared could always be distinguished by the awkward nicks and gashes along the saba’ssilver and blue shine.

New Years day we’d always start with ozoni soup and grilled mochi, with the Rose Parade playing on the living room tv. There was little time to rest though, as there was still cooking to be done. Contrary to traditional notions of osechi ryori (Japanese New Years food), which state that such dishes should be prepared prior to New Years day, we always did at least half our cooking the day of. There would be two fryers going outside for shrimp tempura, while in the kitchen, my grandmother would have trays of rice cooling for the saba and inari zushi still waiting to be made. My mother would be at the counter slicing sashimi, and there would usually be another dish cooking on the stove, perhaps the kinpira or kombu tsukudani, that we’d somehow forgotten the day before. An annual adrenaline kick, we never had everything ready until the first relatives were walking through the door. Hectic as it was though, the rush was always worth it.

Bolder and more gregarious than any osechi ryori set, my grandmother’s New Years was truly a sight to behold. Down the length of her extended dining room table, the traditional dishes we had spent the last few days making were plated on fancy Japanese platters and joined by a multitude of other dishes brought by relatives. Wontons, potato salad, and seven layer jello mingled alongside kazunoko, kuri kinton, and renkon sunomono in a tantalizingly delicious display. In many ways, it was an accurate reflection of our Japanese American identity, supplementing traditional Japanese elements with Americanized flavor and personality.

Fast forward to the present, and New Years is once again only a few months away. However, with the passing of time comes inevitable change. My grandmother is no longer here, having departed this world just a few years ago, but still many years too soon. Gone too is the home that decades of New Years celebrations were held in. My mother has since assumed the tradition, but each year, the question of whether there will be another New Years floats uneasily in the background, as though without my grandmother, it had lost the anchor that gave it purpose. Though my mother has not yet missed a year, there is a stark contrast between her view of New Years as an expense of time, effort, and money, and my grandmother, who saw it as something necessary and integral; something that was simply part of what it meant to be Japanese American.

New Years is when we feel my grandmother’s absence most strongly, and each year that she is gone, I wish for nothing more than to hear the sound of her voice, loud and inviting, calling me to join her in the kitchen again. However, in her absence, I have also realized what New Years meant to her. It was not just about new starts, or wishing for good luck, though that is the purpose of many of the foods we cook. To my grandmother, Japanese New Years was more than a tradition; it was a way to bring our family together, to bridge the distance and obligations that pulled us apart, and if nothing else, to use the humble warmth of food and family to preserve our cultural identity in an increasingly busy world.

#New Years #Japanese American #Identity #Culture #Food

[bootbudget80]

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And how do you make sure it also caters to dietary restrictions and COVID-19 guidelines? Here are crucial issues you want to contemplate when planning the right fall menu with Caviar & Banana Catering and Events. The first step to designing the final word wedding menu is consulting your finances. There's some familiar ties and is just comfort food for us. Everyone liked the meals and each element that you simply all so meticulously managed. We couldn't be more grateful on your nice food and friendship. Choosing the proper caterer can be very tense, but selecting one that can make your event needs come true is even tougher. You want to make sure your caterer understands your price range, but you should also talk about your desires and plans for the event. This will give your caterer a clear understanding of the path you want to head in. 200 Occasion Catering Ideas 2019 Edition Chic Little Honey began out as a blog to showcase Mary Kate’s style sense while she was in college. 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#外燴

[funkadelicchef]

2/27/2021

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchen/grilled-lamb-chops-with-mint-recipe-1973595

I have never cooked lamb. In fact, I never ate lamb until I married Chef. He has prepared delectable leg of lamb for Christmas dinner for two years running. Wow is all I can say.

Whether or not I could cook lamb correctly was yet to be seen. While searching for Mediterranean Diet recipes, I came across Grilled Lamb Chops with Mint on Foodnetwork.com (link above). I went to a local meat market to purchase the lamb chops – whew were they expensive! Despite the high price, I wasn’t going to let that deter my adventurous nature.

Lamb chops alone do not constitute a meal, well I suppose for lamb lovers it may be sufficient. I wanted this meal to have the ambiance of one you might eat at a restaurant. The flavors had to be funkadelic and scrumptious. I selected a curious recipe for a salad, Arugula Salad with Pear, Almonds, Goat Cheese, and Apricots, from the book The Complete Mediterranean Cookbook, by America’s Test Kitchen. Last but not least decided on, an easily prepared, oven roasted sweet potatoes with olive oil and sea salt.

I prepped the lamb chops by lightly sprinkling salt and pepper on each side. I then crushed two cloves of garlic and rubbed it into the lamb chops. A cast iron grille pan was prepared by putting it on low heat. I chopped the mint leaves and some garlic; adding them to olive oil with ¼ teaspoon of red pepper flakes, which I would brush on the chops as they were grilling.

In the meantime, I preheated the oven to 425 degrees for the sweet potatoes. One large sweet potato was washed, cut into chunks, and tossed in a couple tablespoons of virgin olive oil with a pinch of sea salt. These would only take about 8-10 minutes to cook.

The lamb chops were placed in the grille pan and the heat was turned up to medium. I brushed them with the mint/olive oil mixture. These would be cooked 5-8 min on each side. I tested the doneness by pushing the meat with my finger. I cooked them until they were medium rare.

When gathering ingredients for the salad, Chef tasted the dried apricots and gave a thumbs down, so that ingredient was nixed. I modified the salad recipe by utilizing some of the ingredients in a recipe on the same page, Arugula Salad with Figs, Prosciutto, Walnuts, and Parmesan. My finished product included Spring Salad mix, pecans, raspberry jam, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, dried figs, pecorino romano cheese, shallots, garlic, pears, salt and pepper. All the ingredients, except for the spring mix, pecans, pears and cheese, were prepared by chopping, dicing or mincing the ingredients and microwaving about one minute. Once cooled it was tossed with the spring mix and topped with the sliced pears and shaved pecorino romano cheese. It looked just like the photo in the book. (NOTE: The salad topping would have been a great dip for lamb chops had it been pureed in a food processor.)

Alas, I had no photographer this evening – she was too busy cooking something new!! 😉. No doubt, I can assure you the meal was splendid and Chef gave me a “10.” Yay!!! It was so enjoyable, I may make it again sooner than later, despite the expense of the lamb chops. My mother always said you get what you pay for – you want good quality; you pay a little more.

There are no words to describe the pleasure I get from preparing a good meal that lingers in the memory – and taste buds. The best part is, the methods and ingredients used to prepare the meals are heart healthy <3.

I know, I need to get my photographer in sync with my meal preparation time. I’m working on it.

In the meantime, thanks for hanging out with me. If you have any questions, or ideas, please send them my way.

KimC

The Funkadelic Chef

Links:

FoodNetwork Grilled Lamb Chops with Mint: http://bit.ly/3aY8q6O

Amazon:

Cast Iron Grille Pan: https://amzn.to/3r7edN8

The Complete Mediterranean Cookbook: https://amzn.to/2NMbeeu

[hellohackedtechposts]

29 Best Vegetarian Recipes - Cookie and Kate

47 Comments After a big weekend, I’m looking forward to some fresh and healthy, restorative meals. You, too? You’re in the right place. Since we have many new visitors here this year (welcome!), I’ve rounded up 29 of the most popular vegetarian main dishes on Cookie and Kate. Keep in mind that all of my recipes are vegetarian, so it wasn’t easy to narrow down the list to a reasonable number. These recipes are for you if you’re a vegetarian like me, or you’re: Trying to eat less meat this year. Looking for Meatless Monday recipes. Wanting to eat more veggies and whole grains. Interested in trying fun and different recipes. Basically, they’re for everyone! These crowd-pleasing recipes will convince even the most skeptical carnivores that meatless recipes can be delicious and satisfying. You’ll find more popular options in our “Reader Favorites” category in the sidebar. If you’re looking for something particular, try hovering over “All Recipes” in the menu bar and you’ll find many more categories to explore. Or for an overview of our most recipe recipes, click “View All.” For more favorite recipes, check out my cookbook, Love Real Food, which has over 100 recipes (most of which you won’t find on the blog). In no particular order, here are the 29 best vegetarian recipes according to readers. 1) Extra Vegetable Fried Rice Gluten free and easily vegan “I made this last weekend and love love loved it so I’m making it again this weekend! My husband really liked it too, and it’s a tall order to get him to eat a lot of vegetables so this will be entered into our regular rotation for sure. So glad I found this blog, I’ve email subscribed and have just purchased your cookbook! Thanks Kate!!” – Julia 2) Best Lentil Soup Gluten free and vegan “This is one of my favorite recipes ever. I think I could eat it every day. One time when I was eating it while curled up on the couch, I kept saying, “This is sooo good,” after every single bite. The curry powder and lemon juice MAKE IT. Thank you, Kate!” – Lauren 3) Crispy Baked Falafel Gluten free and vegan “Ok, these little babies are literally THE best falafels I have EVER had. I will be keeping this recipe, five out of five!! We had them with whole wheat pita, hummus, vegan pesto mayo, tomatoes, kalamata olives and spring greens. OMG sooo good. Thank You!!! You’re the best! I could cry they are so good!” – Connie 4) Epic Vegetarian Tacos Gluten free and easily vegan “Wow, just served them for dinner. “Epic” is a great description. As you said, Kate, the pickled onions complement the other ingredients perfectly! I offered all the condiments you suggested and favorites were shredded cabbage and feta cheese. Gonna make up burritos for lunch tomorrow, with the left-overs (I doubled the recipe, fortunately)” – Erikb 5) Peanut Slaw with Soba Noodles Easily gluten free and easily vegan “I have made this recipe so many times! Mostly for myself, but I have also brought it to a few potluck-style gatherings and it was a hit every time. Super simple to make and very addicting!” – Diane 6) Pinto Posole Gluten free and vegan “Shortly after making this delicious dish that the whole family enjoyed, I was asking my six year old son about his favorite food. He quickly replied, “That dish you made!” (Pinto Posole). Thank you for this and all of your wonderful recipes!” – Mariah 7) Vegetable Paella Gluten free and vegan “Fellow KC resident here! I love La Bodega’s paella, so my expectations were pretty high. I made this recipe last night (with the socarrat) and it was amazing. Absolutely loved it and will be making it again soon!” – Toni 8) Best Vegetable Lasagna Easily gluten free and easily vegan “I decided to give the recipe a try and I was blown away by the amazing deliciousness. My experience with vegetable lasagnas has been figuring out how to cover up the watery nightmare hiding under the cheese layer. This recipe left me with the best tasting lasagna I’ve ever made. I had some friends over and no one commented that it was missing meat. Everyone was just eating fast to secure a second piece. Also, I bought all the ingredients on a tight budget, so I spent $8.50!” – David 9) Roasted Cauliflower and Lentil Tacos with Creamy Chipotle Sauce Gluten free and easily vegan “Success! My carnivorous husband expressed worry with “We’re going to run out of lentils.” My carnivorous ten-year-old stepson, who was at first disdainful of a meatless meal, soon claimed he was going to eat ten tacos and that “This dish could be at a fancy restaurant.” Finally, our two-year-old son kept clamoring, “More cauliflower!” The only thing I will do differently next time is to double the recipe!” – Brooke 10) Classic Minestrone Soup Easily gluten free and easily vegan “This is THE best minestrone ever! It is so satisfying all around from delicious flavors to ease of prepping all the ingredients to enjoying the hearty soup! (My family thinks it’s a better recipe than the one from the award-winning bakery/cafe near us!) Thank you for creating a true classic!” – Beth 11) Black Bean Sweet Potato Enchiladas Gluten free and easily vegan “This is heavenly! I decided to make dinner for my mom and her boyfriend the night before they left for a vacay to London. Knowing that her boyfriend is vegetarian, I had to turn to google. I came across your page, and I never turned back! The two could not stop raving about this dish. And honestly, either could I! I paired it with Cilantro Lime Rice – perfection. I’m going to be whipping up more of your recipes this coming week. Thank you, Kate!” – Danielle 12) Thai Red Curry with Vegetables Gluten free and vegan “Made this yesterday following the recipe quite faithfully. Hubby said it tastes exactly like the red curry at our favorite Thai restaurant! This is a winner and will be bookmarked and made often! The details provided in the recipe such as time to cook at each step ensure that you can’t go wrong with the recipe. And so I would feel confident making this recipe for company too.” – Poornima 13) Lentil Baked Ziti Easily gluten free “This was absolutely fantastic! Loved the surprise of the lentil texture it was SO satisfying! Can’t wait for the next recipe… thank you!” – Cait 14) Spicy Kale and Coconut Fried Rice Gluten free and easily vegan “I absolutely loved this stir-fry and I’m so happy I stumbled across it! I made it for the first time last week and just made it again today. My husband was not complaining :) I used coconut oil because it was the only oil I had on hand besides olive oil and I used sambal oelek for the chili garlic sauce. This is such a different recipe with unique flavor combinations but it works so well together. Thank you for a fabulous recipe, Kate!” – Moriah 15) Roasted Veggie Enchilada Casserole Gluten free and easily vegan “This was soooo GOOD! Thank you for an awesome recipe that was easy to follow for this newbie cook. I did add some diced green chiles for added flavor but it would have been just as excellent without. I love your website, I am new to cooking vegetarian and your recipes and easy to follow instructions are really helping me build confidence.” – Joseph 16) Roasted Carrots with Farro, Chickpeas & Herbed Creme Fraiche Easily gluten free and easily vegan “Oh my goodness! This recipe is just SPECTACULAR! I substituted regular carrots and added an extra tablespoon of pumpkin seeds just because I love them so much! This may be my favorite dish by her yet! Thank you Kate!” – Madison 17) Spaghetti Squash Burrito Bowls Gluten free and easily vegan. This recipe features my go-to method for cooking spaghetti squash! “I absolutely LOVE this recipe! I made it last night for my family girls night. My 4 year old exclaimed “this is so good mommy!” and “I love this!” once she finally sat still enough to eat more than the purple parts. As for me….just what I needed…fabulous flavor amazing color and pretty fast to prepare for our lenten Friday supper. And my husband was out, so no griping about squash! Wins all the way around.” – Erin 18) Roasted Cauliflower and Farro Salad with Feta and Avocado Easily gluten free and easily vegan “OMG!! I made this salad last night and I do not believe there is a recipe from my vast collection that I enjoyed more. I had never even heard of farro before, but there it was, on the shelf at my favourite grocery store! The soft chewiness of the garlic flavoured farro with the roasted cauliflower, sun dried tomatoes and kalamata olives was divine. The feta and buttery avocado was the perfect finish to a stunning recipe. I can’t wait to make it for my friends!” – Linda 19) Thai Pineapple Fried Rice Gluten free and easily vegan “This was amazing! It came together really quickly and had the perfect balance of flavours and textures. I love how the juicy, caramelized pineapple blends with the sriracha and soy. Kate, your recipes are so detailed and easy to make. My only complaint is that I didn’t stumble upon your site sooner – I can tell that I’m going to be making a lot of your recipes over the coming weeks and that I’m going to find a lot of favourites to put in my rotation.” – Sarah 20) Easy Brown Rice Risotto with Mushrooms and Fresh Oregano Gluten free and easily vegan “This is among the best risotto I have ever eaten. Even my risotto-phobic daughter was sneaking seconds. I’ve made it according to the recipe’s directions, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I have also switched it around and given it a fresh thyme and Sherry flavouring, which was just as delightful. Thank you for such a fabulous recipe. I love when they’re both nutritious and delicious – a common combination on C and K. Thank you again.” – Chelsea 21) Quinoa Vegetable Soup with Kale Gluten free and vegan “Absolutely delicious. Had it at my daughter’s home last night and enjoyed it so much I made it today at my home for dinner tonight. I used about 6 cups of veggies and added a little jalapeno and I used red kale. Will be a “do again” many times recipe.” – Michael 22) Spicy Sweet Potato and Green Rice Burrito Bowls Gluten free and vegan “I made this last night, and my brother-in-law, a devout meat eater, loved it. But more importantly, the vegetarians present loved it. We were all wowed by the combo of textures and flavors: soft, crunchy, hot, cool. The hint of lime in the beans and the seasoned rice were show-stoppers. I am curious to try other flavored rice, but for now, thank you so much for such a wonderful company dish.” – Juli 23) Thai Mango Cabbage Wraps with Crispy Tofu and Peanut Sauce Gluten free and easily vegan “OK, OK, so I’ve always loved this blog and the recipes, but this recipe sent me over the top. It is DELICIOUS. My husband said, “When did you become gourmet?” And then I immediately went and pre-ordered your book. Thanks again for another great recipe.” – Erin 24) Kale, Black Bean & Avocado Burrito Bowl Gluten free and vegan “This was a hit at our house! I have 2 little boys who ate this right up, AND asked for seconds. Even the kale. I was amazed. I’m printing it out to make sure I remember to make it when the busy weeknights start up in the fall. It was so quick to make!” – Brittani 25) Veggie Black Bean Enchiladas Easily vegan “I made this tonight for some vegetarian friends. My husband, who is not a fan of Mexican or vegetarian food LOVED it, and my guests had three helpings! I served it with home made salsa, sour cream, and a simple green salad. Will definitely be making this again!” – Kate 26) Vegetarian Stuffed Acorn Squash Gluten free and easily vegan “I love this! I have made it with chickpeas and without — both are excellent. I made this for the main course of our New Year’s eve dinner and all were impressed. It has a great presentation and hits my check box for comfort food. Thanks, Kate!” – Paul 27) Homemade Vegetarian Chili Gluten free and vegan “I used this recipe (sized up for 50 servings) yesterday for a local Chili Cook-off event and won best vegetarian chili-so you truly can say it is the best vegetarian chili recipe!” – Tess 28) Sweet Potato & Black Bean Veggie Burgers Gluten free and vegan “3 years ago I became a vegetarian and this was one of the first recipes I tried. It was so delicious, it made me happy to be a vegetarian and I’ve never felt the urge to go back to meat-eating. This is still one of my staples, and even my meat-eating parents love them! Thank you for sharing your recipe!” – Emily 29) Fresh Huevos Rancheros Gluten free “The first time making (or even eating) huevos rancheros! This was so delicious and was a great hit with my husband and adult son (who are normally meat lovers!). I’m enjoying discovering new vegetarian recipes on your website.” – Kathy More resources you might appreciate: 23 make-ahead breakfast recipes and 29 vegan dinner recipes. You can shop my essential kitchen equipment here. Don’t forget to follow us on Pinterest for a steady stream of recipe inspiration! Read the full article

#Food

[paleorecipecookbook]

How to Turn Salads Into Epic One-Dish Meals

Salads are such a fantastic concept because they can carry such a diverse load of flavors. The trick is in making healthier choices for what you are mixing up in your salad bowl, and realize that you don’t need the cheese, sugary vinaigrettes, ranch dressings, or croutons in order for them to be tasty. Salad building can range from super simple to completely sophisticated. There are so many options, there is something for everybody’s tastes!

14 Ways to Build a Meal-Quality Salad

You can get really wild when it comes to salad building. Between the different greens, nuts, meats, veggies, fruits, and salad dressings, one could never tire of the endless possibilities! Below are some of the best salad tips to ensure that you are getting the most out of your salads during any season or meal.

1. Go for Protein

Be sure to get enough protein into your salads if you are having them as entrees or you’ll be hungry shortly after your meal. Balance is what you must learn when becoming a professional salad builder.

Creating a Paleo entrée salad means building your dish around protein! Adding seeds and nuts are a great way to go, but don’t forget that you can prepare yourself a lovely piece of meat just for your salad, or use leftovers from other meals! Some ideas for your salad protein include, but are definitely not limited to:

Grilled or sous vide steak

Pulled pork or chicken

Coconut fried shrimp, chicken, oysters

Marinated shrimp

Pan fried, baked, or steamed fish

Crab or fish cake

Eggs, soft boiled, hard boiled, poached

Bacon

Meatballs

Sausage

Tenderloins

Roasts

Duck breasts

2. Learn Some Knife Skills

The way your vegetable or protein is pulled, chopped, ribboned, or diced can make a big difference when it comes to salad building. Learning to use the proper knives for the proper ingredients can be as simple as finding a YouTube tutorial, or taking a basic cooking skills class.

3. Spiralize and Shred

Use your veggie peeler or spiralizer to create ribbons of cucumber, summer squash, carrots, or just about anything else!

4. Add Leftovers

Try topping with last night’s leftover protein or starches. Nothing is off limits when it comes to building up your salad to create yummy texture and heartiness! The “salad rules” that exist for what can and can’t go in a bowl should be thrown out the window.

5. Build Your Own Greens Blend

Pair butter lettuces with mache, arugula with spinach, and so on. The pre-made salad mixes are handy, but if you get stuck in salad ruts and aren’t sure why, it may be your salad mix holding you back! Try reaching beyond the spring mixes and experiment with some peppery and spicy additions, sprouts, or tender heads of red leaf or bibb lettuces. You can also try adding some sturdy kale, or throwing in chard with your chopped romaine.

Amping up your leafy base can start you off on the right foot with salad building, and can also introduce a wide variety of different nutrients. Some great salad greens include:

Bibb and butter lettuces

Kale, lacinato, red or curly varieties

Chard

Red leaf

Green leaf

Romaine, red tipped romaine

Arugula

Watercress

Micro greens

Spinach

6. Think Outside the Box

Experiment with mixing cooked and raw veggies and fruits together to create interesting texture and flavor. Here are some ideas for you to get some fun and funky flavors into your entrée salad rotations, not to mention some serious nutrients:

Berries

Marinated vegetables, like eggplant

Herbs, like combining basil, mint, and cilantro

Quick pickled veggies, like sliced cucumbers, fennel, or daikon radish

Ferments, like kraut or kimchi

Roasted veggies, like sweet potatoes, squash, cauliflower, and broccoli

Dates or figs

Apples, pears, mangos, cherries

Sea vegetables, like hijiki or arame

Red, green, and Napa cabbage, shredded thinly

Olives

Grilled romaine or lemon halves for a smoky and charred flavor and texture

7. Get Your Granola On

Most of the following items can be tossed with coconut, sea salt, and raw honey and roasted at 325ºF for 15 minutes to create a savory and sweet grain-free granola to add to your salads. Or use individual items a la carte.

Chia seeds

Flax seeds

Sunflower seeds

Pumpkin seeds

Black sesame seeds

Hemp seeds

Goji berries

Mulberries

Unsweetened dried fruit

Coconut flake

Freeze dried berries

Pecans

Pistachios

Pine nuts

Walnuts

Hazelnuts

Almonds

Chopped Brazil nuts

Macadamia nuts

8. DIY Your Dressing

Making your own dressing can be really fun, and better tasting than most that are store bought! When eating Paleo, sneaky sugars and ingredients can be hard to avoid when buying packaged or bottled convenience foods, like dressings. So try your hand at making your own combos.

Try flipping the classic ratio of 3:1 fat to acid to 3:1 acid to fat. This creates more vibrant and tangy dressings which work best on hearty salads! A little hack to save you time: add all vinaigrette ingredients to a glass jar with a lid and shake to combine. Bonus, now it’s ready to store in the fridge for your next use.

Another trick: the next time you are at the end of your mustard jar, instead of tossing aside, add minced garlic, apple cider vinegar, or red wine vinegar, a dab of honey, sea salt, and some avocado or olive oil. Shake vigorously, and voila!—a mustard vinaigrette, ready to use and ready to store!

For a dairy-free creamy dressing, blend nuts and veggies together, with plenty of sea salt and lemon juice. Some of my favorite innovative creamy dressing combos:

Carrot, ginger root, apple, apple cider vinegar, coconut aminos, sesame oil, sea salt

Green apple, cilantro and some stems, jalapeno, garlic cloves, champagne vinegar, avocado oil, sea salt

Avocado, spinach, basil, garlic clove, lemon, olive oil, avocado oil, sea salt

Walnuts, coconut aminos, lime juice, a little maple syrup, olive oil, avocado oil, sea salt

9. Eat the Rainbow

The pigments which add color to your fruits and vegetables are great for collagen production, providing antioxidants, trace minerals, phytonutrients, and can even contain cancer fighting properties. (1)

Plus, colorful food is just so much fun to eat! Don’t be nervous to blend fruits, berries, seeds, nuts, herbs, and veggies.

10. Choose a Theme

If I am in the mood for richness, I will have a creamy dressing made from homemade aioli or an avocado based dressing, adding buttery olives, and tender deep greens like spinach. Or if I am in the mood for something bright and tangy, I will lean towards lime juice cilantro over red leaf lettuce with lots of spicy microgreens!

Some tips for creating themes and balance within your salads are as follows:

With bitter leaves, try adding sweeter nuts and fruits to balance, like pecans and berries or walnuts and apples.

For inspiration, I focus on foods that I like or that I am craving and try to build around that concept. Lasagna, for example, is what I am craving, so I will try to use ingredients that lend themselves to that flavor profile: spinach, oregano, basil, chili, tomatoes, olives, chicken sausage, or beef and bison meatballs with a creamy cashew-lemon and pine nut dressing!

Or maybe I have a hankering for Thai food. I would lean towards cilantro, shredded carrot, cabbage, radish, coconut flakes, lime, mango, macadamia nuts, black sesame seeds, kimchi, and shrimp, fish, or chicken.

11. Toss That Salad

I make my salads in a large metal or glass mixing bowl first, so that it is simple to dress and toss, and easier to plate it up in my prettier bowls. It may sound like a small tip, but it changes the game when your salad is evenly dressed, seasoned, and served well.

12. Keep It Simple

I eat leafy green salad with every meal, even on top of my eggs in the morning. Do not underestimate the value of simple. Lemon and olive oil with salt and pepper is just scrumptious, and sometimes just what the doctor ordered! It is always a good idea to sidle up a simple salad alongside your entrée protein.

13. Take It With You

Mason jars for salad packing are fantastic. Always start by putting your dressing on the bottom, so it doesn’t sog out your greens and more delicate toppings. Just layer up all your fixings, screw on the lid, and shake when ready to eat!

14. Reuse

For anyone who likes a bathtub-sized salad, try reusing salad greens containers, like Organic Girl. These are the perfect size for my entrée-style salads. I take it with me on the road, to the airport, into meetings, and more. I just find them so handy to pile up all my favorite salad fixings! You don’t even have to pack dressing. Just add lemon halves along with some avocado, and voila: you’ve got your acid and your fat, perfect to dress your salad and make it delicious down to the last bite.

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The post How to Turn Salads Into Epic One-Dish Meals appeared first on Paleo Plan.

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3 Pitmaster-Approved Recipes That Take You From Breakfast to Dinner

We've partnered with Smithfield Marinated Fresh Pork to highlight simple yet uniquely delicious dishes that'll take your summer grilling to the next level.

During the summer months, you can catch me grilling up pork (albeit in my cramped New York City kitchen using a cast-iron pan) at least once or twice during the week—it's quick, satisfying, and with a ton of different cuts to choose from, as versatile as it gets. But lately, I've been stuck in a bit of a recipe rut, unable to break away from the same crispy pork chops I make over and over again.

So to help me mix up my grilling routine this year, I turned to Tuffy Stone, a bona-fide pitmaster, cookbook author, and this year's Grand Champion at the Memphis in May World Barbecue Championship, one of the most prestigious barbecue competitions in the world. He not only gave me three of his favorite recipes (one each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) that go a step beyond the usual grilled fare, but also shared some of his tried-and-true grilling wisdom, like how to pick the best cut of fresh pork and cook it perfectly every time.

1. Pre-marinated meat makes a weeknight-friendly shortcut.

If you know you're going to have an especially busy week, you can use pork cuts that have been pre-marinated with spices and seasonings (like roasted garlic and herb or hickory-smoked brown sugar) ahead of time. "It's an easy shortcut to have a really delicious meal," says Tuffy. "A lot of times in my house when we're super busy, we'll grill that pre-marinated meat, make a simple salad, and maybe bake some bread in the oven, and that'll be dinner."

2. Start with a clean grill.

You may have heard people say that a dirty grill adds flavor or seasoning, but Tuffy couldn't disagree more. "I don't buy into that," he explains. "I always cook on a super, super clean smoker or grill." He also makes sure to use good fuel that burns as clean as possible. "Whether it be charcoal or wood, I make sure whatever's going to be my heat source will impart good flavor on the meat," he says.

3. Invest in a good thermometer.

"If you're going to spend money on a nice pork chop, the last thing you want to do is either overcook it or undercook it," Tuffy says. That's where a meat thermometer comes in handy. "I think having a good, accurate thermometer is really helpful in making sure that you can cook your meat just right."

For pork, that means the internal temperature should be at about 145°F for the most optimal, tender texture. But don't forget about carryover cooking, which means that the internal temperature of the meat will rise slightly even after you take it off the heat source. With a pork chop, Tuffy might cook it to 138°F and pull it off the heat; it'll continue to cook as it rests for 5 to 10 minutes, and as a result, you'll get a much juicier pork chop.

4. Pick out a quality cut.

When you're buying any type of meat, but especially pork, you want to find the freshest, highest-quality cut you possibly can. How can you tell? "Look for meat that's well marbled and has striations of fat in there," says Tuffy—that's the best indicator.

5. Spritz your meat for better flavor and texture.

While the meat is cooking on the grill, don't be afraid to spray it with some high-quality apple juice or another liquid (like beer or even pineapple juice) Tuffy says. "The moisture applied to these meats during the cooking process can be really nice—and it's a great way to add some flavor."

With these pitmaster-approved tips in your pocket, it's time to start grilling. Here are three of Tuffy's go-to recipes—all of which can be adapted for the stovetop and oven—from a new riff on steak and eggs to fall-apart spareribs that taste like they've been smoking all day long.

1. Grilled Pork Chops with Chile Ketchup & Eggs

This easy grilled pork chop recipe with soft scrambled eggs and spicy homemade ketchup is comfort food at its finest, and it makes an excellent breakfast—or dinner. The best part: It comes together just as well on the stovetop as it does on an actual grill; a well-seasoned cast iron skillet can stand in without skipping a beat.

Because these pork chops are already pre-seasoned, you can throw them right on the grill or in the skillet and they won't take longer than four minutes on each side. Once the pork chops are done, "put them on a plate to rest, and then do your soft egg scramble, and it makes for an easy cleanup," Tuffy says. Drizzle the whole plate in the spicy chile ketchup, which you can actually make ahead of time and keep on hand for breakfast and beyond.

Tuffy Stone's Grilled Pork Chops with Chile Ketchup & Eggs

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Ingredients

For the pork chops & soft scrambled eggs:

6 Smithfield Roasted Garlic & Herb Boneless Center Cut Pork Chops 9 eggs 6 tablespoons half and half 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt 1/2 cup chopped green onions 2 tablespoons chopped chives 3 tablespoons butter

6 Smithfield Roasted Garlic & Herb Boneless Center Cut Pork Chops 9 eggs 6 tablespoons half and half 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

1/2 cup chopped green onions 2 tablespoons chopped chives 3 tablespoons butter

For the chile ketchup:

1 cup ketchup 6 tablespoons distilled white vinegar 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika 1/2 teaspoon chipotle chile powder 1/2 teaspoon pasilla or ancho chile powder 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 1/4 teaspoon granulated onion 1/4 teaspoon granulated garlic

1 cup ketchup 6 tablespoons distilled white vinegar 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika 1/2 teaspoon chipotle chile powder

1/2 teaspoon pasilla or ancho chile powder 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 1/4 teaspoon granulated onion 1/4 teaspoon granulated garlic

2. Grilled & Stuffed Pork Loin Filet

This kale and bacon-stuffed pork loin filet looks fancy enough for a special occasion or Sunday supper, but is simple enough to put together for a hearty lunch (it doesn't hurt that you can prep the stuffing ahead of time).

"It could be something that you butterfly, stuff, roll, and tie, and maybe you just leave it in the refrigerator," Tuffy explains. You can also switch up the stuffing depending on the season and what looks best at the market; spinach or mustard greens would make great substitutes here, he adds.

Tuffy Stone's Grilled & Stuffed Pork Loin Filet

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Ingredients

1 Smithfield Slow Smoked Mesquite Marinated Fresh Pork Loin Filet 1/2 cup apple juice, in a spray bottle 1/4 cup diced Smithfield Hickory Smoked Bacon 2 tablespoons olive oil 1/2 cup julienned yellow onion 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced 2 cups sliced kale 2 teaspoons kosher salt 1 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper 1/2 teaspoon toasted caraway seeds, crushed 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1 Smithfield Slow Smoked Mesquite Marinated Fresh Pork Loin Filet 1/2 cup apple juice, in a spray bottle 1/4 cup diced Smithfield Hickory Smoked Bacon 2 tablespoons olive oil 1/2 cup julienned yellow onion 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

2 cups sliced kale 2 teaspoons kosher salt 1 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper 1/2 teaspoon toasted caraway seeds, crushed 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

3. Spareribs with Mustard Sauce

Spareribs might seem like an intimidating dish to make at home, but Tuffy assures me that this recipe is the most approachable out there. One critical step: Let the ribs soak up the seasoning. "I like the seasoning to sit on both sides of the meat for at least one hour," Tuffy explains.

Another key tip: Wrap the ribs in aluminum foil about halfway through the cooking process. Once wrapped, "I'll let it cook for another two to two and a half hours until the meat is tender," he says. This low and slow method might take a bit more time, but it's a fool-proof way to get fall-off-the-bone results every time. Once they're done, dress the spareribs in the tangy mustard sauce and, per Tuffy's recommendation, serve them alongside a punchy coleslaw of cabbage and granny smith apples tossed in a celery seed mayonnaise with fresh herbs. Other easy side options: grilled veggies, Greek yogurt potato salad, or simple baked beans.

Tuffy Stone's Spareribs with Mustard Sauce

View Recipe

Ingredients

For the fennel garlic rub & spareribs:

2 racks Smithfield Fresh Pork Spareribs 1/2 cup apple juice, in spray bottle 1/2 cup kosher salt 1/4 cup freshly cracked black pepper 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper 1 1/2 teaspoons granulated garlic 2 teaspoons freshly cracked fennel seeds

2 racks Smithfield Fresh Pork Spareribs 1/2 cup apple juice, in spray bottle 1/2 cup kosher salt 1/4 cup freshly cracked black pepper

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper 1 1/2 teaspoons granulated garlic 2 teaspoons freshly cracked fennel seeds

For the mustard sauce:

3/4 cup yellow mustard 1/3 cup whole-grain mustard 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar 3 tablespoons honey 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

3/4 cup yellow mustard 1/3 cup whole-grain mustard 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar 3 tablespoons honey

1 teaspoon kosher salt 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

What's your favorite summer grilling recipe? Share it with us in the comments below!

We've partnered with Smithfield Marinated Fresh Pork to share your new favorite grilling recipes—from quick-cooking pork chops with scrambled eggs to fall-off-the-bone spareribs with tangy mustard sauce—plus expert tips on how to pull them off without a hitch. To make your summer cooking even easier and more convenient, use Smithfield's Marinated Fresh Pork. These fresh pork cuts (think: pork chops, loin filets, tenderloins, roasts, and more) are carefully seasoned and marinated using a variety of different spices and rubs (no artificial ingredients here!) so that all you have to do is throw them on the grill, stovetop, or in the oven.

Source: https://food52.com/blog/24204-tuffy-stone-best-grilling-recipes-summer

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