Day after dinners

When you make a BIG meal on one day, like Thanksgiving for instance, you get the benefit of guaranteed leftovers the next day. You can always use those leftovers just as is, which is terrific, or you can get creative. I mean, who doesn't love a turkey sandwich the day after Thanksgiving?

For New Year's Day leftovers here are some of my favorite ways to enjoy leftover greens, beans, and pork.

* Chop leftover ham and heat it up in barbecue sauce and make BBQ sandwiches.
* Use leftover black eyed peas to make "Cowboy Caviar" it is a sort of fabulous "pico de gallo" with your leftover black eyed peas. Mix cubed avocado, chopped roma (or other smaller) tomatoes, cilantro, red onion, and kernel corn together. Top with some fresh lime juice, a bit of apple cider vinegar, a splash of good olive oil and plenty of salt and pepper. Stir gently and serve with tortilla chips. Add some tabasco if you think it needs to be a little bit spicy.
* Hopping John stir fry, fry leftover white rice in some peanut oil in a wok or large skillet. Mix in fresh chopped onion, peas, and a moderate amount of well-drained greens. Add a lightly beaten egg and stir fry together. YUM!!!
*Mix leftover, well-drained greens into cheese grits, press into a well-greased baking dish and bake until edges are set. Cut into cubes and serve for any meal, even breakfast. DEEEE-lish.
* Mix creamed corn into a thin batter made from about 1 cup of flour, one beaten egg and maybe 1/4 C of milk. Make thin corn pancakes and pour onto a hot greased griddle. Serve as pancakes with or without syrup.

I really hope the New Year is already treating you well. Here is a brand new recipe for you, another great Southern American dish.

Gramma Tallent's Ambrosia Salad

Take 3 pounds of small Florida oranges, cut off the skin and outer membrane. Pull sections from their membranes and drop into medium mixing bowl, Squeeze leftover bits of orange over the bowl to extract juice, but strain with fingers to keep seeds out. To the sections add 2 small handfuls of chopped coconut. Then add 1/2 C chopped pecans (or more to taste) and the juice of 2 more oranges. Stir together and refrigerate for 3 hours or overnight. Serve chilled. A delicious fresh appetizer, salad or breakfast dish, even a light dessert!

It begins! New Year's Day menu

Hello and Happy New Year!!! Today begins my Dinner 365 challenge and it has already been, um, challenging.** The kids stayed up to ring in the New Year and still woke up early, so they are a little it cranky already. I am in my parent's tiny cabin in North Carolina, super charming, but space is at a premium. There are 5 kids here under the age of 10 and 3 adults. The kitchen doesn't have a garbage disposal or a dishwasher and the counter space could best be described as "miniscule" but we forge ahead. I have a friend in Australia cooking her New Year's dinner over a camp fire today, so things could be a mite more challenging still.

The menu:

Baby Back ribs; the kids' preferred method of eating pork and a catchy jingle of the late 90's, ("I want my baby backs, baby backs, baby backs..." )These are liberally seasoned with my trusty Adobo seasoning blend "con pimienta!" and then squeeze a fresh lime over all. I wrapped them in heavy duty foil and they will sit and "marinate" for awhile before we cook them "low and slow" in the oven. 275-300 for maybe 3 hours should do it.

We also made a picnic butt roast, a small but fatty piece of meat. We rubbed it all over with my father-in-law's super secret dry rub and tented it with foil in a shallow baking pan. Use any good BBQ spice rub or make your own seasoning blend with salt and spices, some people even use brown sugar in their rubs. The roast went in at the same temperature until a meat thermometer reached a minimum of 140 degrees. When you bring the meat out of the oven to rest the temperature will rise by 5-10 degrees.

Collard greens; the greens are best purchased pre-washed in the bag if available. They will still need an extra rinse or two, collards, mustard and turnip greens are notoriously gritty. If you like the frozen ones work well too. Greens are great with a bit of tabasco sauce or peppered vinegar, or my preferred way, just a dash of salt and pepper.

Plain white rice; I usually make brown rice, yellow rice or wild rice, but on New Year's Day it is typical long grain white rice for me. This is one of those recipes I have memorized, 2 cups boiling water, 1 cup of rice and salt to taste (maybe a teaspoon). Boil the water, add the rice, bring back to a boil for 1 minute then turn down, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.

Black-eyed peas; these can be taken dry from the bag, rinsed and then placed in a large stock pot with salted water. You can also add a bit of onion and garlic to the water. Usually mine are boiled up with a piece of ham, ham hock, or bacon, but I also make them vegetarian by adding chopped carrot, onion, celery and garlic and maybe a bay leaf for flavor and then adding a few tablespoons of olive oil when they are almost done. They take about 45 minutes. Today, due to space and time constraints we made frozen field peas with snap beans (aka black eyes peas with green beans). They were my first attempt at using frozen beans and they were great actually. If I had more freezer space I'd probably make them that way more often.

Cornbread, use any mix or recipe you like for the cornbread, but my tip to you is to get the pan hot in the oven with some oil or grease in the pan. When the oven is preheated, the pan will also be hot and ready. Pour your batter directly and quickly into the pan and let it bake according to your recipe or package directions.

Creamed corn; again, a frozen food I was not aware even existed. When I make creamed corn usually I am cutting corn off the cob and then "milking" the cob by scraping it with a spoon. Then I cook the corn for 25 minutes in the microwave with an entire stick of butter and some salt and pepper. Here my mom just took a frozen package of creamed corn, mixed it with a package of kernel corn and microwaved it all in about 10 minutes. It is not as good as fresh corn off the cob, but it is winter time and not the season for fresh ears of corn and it makes a fine winter substitute.

Our garnishes were home-made salsa and chow-chow from a local farm store. Chow-chow is a sweet relish and terrific with the beans and rice.

If you wanted to make this meal vegetarian, it would still be delicious. Skip the pork, use extra spices in the greens and beans and rice, for instance, using vegetable broth to make the rice (super flavorful!). Mixed black eyed peas and rice is it's own special dish called Hopping John, round out the plate with the hot cornbread and that is a wonderful meatless meal.

** Right after I wrote this post, we put the meat in the oven, set the temperature to 275 and left to take the kids swimming at the Y since the weather was so miserable today. We returned from the Y prepared to make rice and cornbread, heat up the greens and eat only to discover the oven had never turned on!!! We quickly cranked the heat in the oven to 350 degrees and cooked everything for an hour less than planned. We staved off hunger with a big platter of cheese, crackers, sliced meats, and grapes. The kids were remarkably calm after ingesting the entire platter in about 5 minutes and then ate a good dinner when it was finally ready. The cabin was quite cold so the meat had stayed fresh and probably the extra time "marinating" in the spices made them even better, so alls well that ends well!

In which I launch an audacious plan

So here's the thing. I make dinner for my family a lot. I make dinner almost every single night. I make entrees, side dishes, salads, soups, sometimes even breads and desserts. Sure, we have the occasional pizza or once in a while a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, I mean those are staples. However we almost never go out to dinner unless we are on vacation or something. This as not always the case mind you. When I was working full time and my husband was in law school we were "regulars" at our local Mexican place. We kept stacks of what we called "emergency back up pizzas" in the freezer. We routinely cadged meals from my in-laws after work/school and ate at more fast food restaurants than you could probably even easily name.

Since then I have had the time to really teach myself how to cook and even though there are still those nights that I want to wave a magic whisk and have dinner appear magically on the table, (or you know, call out for some Chinese food) I have come to really (mostly) enjoy the process. I am a Stay at Home Mom, which helps FOR SURE, but I too have to have dinner on the table quickly. Those hours from 5 to bedtime go by awfully fast for everyone, and with dance classes and after school activities and PTO meetings and church and homework it is essential for everyone to be on their GAME in maximizing that time. In fact some of my best dinners have been inspired by having "something come up" and I suddenly have only 20 minutes.

Of course you can make a meal with all day to cook and a full refrigerator. What do you make when the cupboard is bare and you have literally no time (or often) no money to run to the store? That's my inspiration right there! A moment of grace as life teeters on the edge of catastrophe...

So for the next year, starting January 1st, I plan on cooking dinner for my family every night. In fact, if you stay with me on this journey of culinary self discovery, we can learn together the answers to the questions, "What makes a good weeknight meal?'" "How long does it take to make pot roast?" "Leftovers, again?" and "Who put the ram in the ramma lamma ding dong?". I have a lot of fun ideas!

I plan on making Lent (the 40 days leading up to Easter) into a vegetarian period for my family, excepting the fish on Fridays tradition I was raised with. And of course kicking that time off with a real New Orleans style crab boil on Fat Tuesday! Cinco De Mayo will bring us an entire week of Mexican food; favorites from my family, as well as recipes that I have never tried. St. Patty's day we will travel beyond the realms of Corned Beef and Cabbage and try some authentic Irish cuisine; sweets for Valentine's Day, a simple anniversary dinner, and of course what to feed your little ghouls and goblins before they go out to Trick or Treat! I'll bake bread, I'll toss salads, I'll flambé a dessert or two. Perhaps even some intentionally! And along the way I am hoping you guys chime in with your favorite recipes, trick and techniques to getting the food on the table.

Disclaimer: **Some restrictions apply, offer not good in the District of Columbia** I am reserving a total of 14 days to not cook dinner. There will be one (glorious) 5 day period where I am going to be in a hotel room in Washington D.C on vacation with my family. We will be making simple breakfasts that week since we will have access to a refrigerator and a microwave oven. The rest of the days I am reserving in case I come down with Bird Flu or Swine Flu or One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest or something. There will be pictures, there will be recipes, there will be jokes made at the expense of myself and others. Join me, won't you? Please? Pretty please? I'll make you dinner!

In which I write a post for wikiHow

I recently wrote an article for wikiHow, a wiki that I end up on a lot when I am searching for clear, concise How-To instructions on just about anything! Here is the article in its entirety.

How to Sterilize a Kitchen Brush

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

If your kitchen brush is dirty, how can you be "cleaning" anything with it? A brush's bristles are the perfect place for bacteria and germs to hide and multiply, so let's make sure it is clean and safe to use!

Steps

1. If your brush is a firm, solid heavy plastic brush you can simply place the brush in the top rack of the dishwasher and run it through on a sterilizing cycle with the rest of your dishes.
   
2. If your brush has a wooden handle or is made of thin plastic that is inappropriate for washing in the dishwasher, run the brush (handle and bristles) under hot running water to remove any large particles of dirt, food or debris. Then use some dish soap to thoroughly remove any grease or sticky substances. Rinse brush under more hot running water.
   
3. To sterilize the brush simply make a bleach and water solution to soak your brush. 3/4 of a cup of household bleach to 1 gallon of water is a good solution for sterilizing hard, non-porous surfaces and everyday items like brushes or even countertops or cutting boards. You can soak your brush for 10 minutes and be confident that it is sterile and ready to use.
   

Warnings

• Chlorine bleach should only be used in a well-ventilated area. Use caution when working with chlorine bleach as it can irritate skin, lungs and eyes. Bleach (obviously) can remove color from clothes so make sure you do not accidentally splatter yourself with your sanitizing solution. Wear old clothes for housekeeping just to be on the safe side.
  

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Sterilize a Kitchen Brush. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Dinner: Hit it!

Tonight's dinner is : Sauteed chicken with onion and zucchini, brown rice with tomatoes. Side dish of either mandarin ornages or slice apples, your choice.

Take boneless, skinless chicken breasts and season on all sides with adobo and extra pepper or favorite peppery spice blend. Place in a hot iron skillet with olive oil and onion slices. Brown meat on all sides. Slice zucchini with a mandolin and place all over and around chicken (you can also use a mixture od zucchini and summer squash or just summer squash). Cover with a lid and reduce heat. Let it all steam while you prepare rice.

Add to your pressure cooker, 1 can of diced tomatoes, 1 C of brown rice, 2 1/4 C of water, 1 bay leaf, salt, 1 thread of saffron (if desired) 1 smashed clove of garlic. Put on lid and cook according to manufacturer instructions. In my Cuisinart pressure cooker brown rice cooks for 10 minutes under pressure, and another 10 minutes under natural pressure release, before you manually release the steam, stir and serve! Brown rice in 20 minutes y'all! Everything will be ready at once, hearty and satisfying and QUICK this is on your table in 30 minutes.

Today! WE MAKE SOUP!

I have a cold. I hate having a cold. I sneeze and sniffle, my head feels like it is full of buzzing bees, my eyes get teary. It's a whole thing. Lucky for me I only get sick about once every three years or so. Anyhow, while cleaning out our refrigerator (AKA leftovers for lunch) my husband found half of a rotisserie chicken. We set it aside to take the meat off the bones and while I was warming up leftover pasta and chicken for the kids lunches, my awesome hubby cracked open the Emeril's New Orleans Cooking Cookbook and started making chicken stock.

You guys? I could have cried. I love that after 10 years together, now when he sees bones, he thinks SOUP! I mean as opposed to, "I need to throw these away!" I really make broth; just throw various vegetables and bones into a pot, add herbs, salt and pepper and call it a day. However DH has a different style; he wants a recipe to follow, and that is cool too. This is how he did it, inspired by Emeril's basic chicken *stock*.

He browned the vegetables in oil first, (onion, garlic, celery; and since we were out of carrots, a diced parsnip). He also added 2 bay leaves (Emeril calls for 4!) We used 1/2 teaspoon of italian herbs (Emeril calls for dried basil), we skipped the thyme (we were out), 1/2 tsp of dried leaf tarragon and 1/2 tsp dried oregano. We used 1 cooked chicken carcass, Emeril's calls for 2 pounds of raw chicken bones, necks and entrails. We lacked whole black peppercorns, we used ground black pepper to taste, we added salt to taste and just filled up a good sized sauce pan with water, enough to cover everything by at least an inch.

Bring it all to a boil, then reduce and simmer for -- oh, about as long as you want. As it boils sometimes this weird, foamy scum will rise to the top, simply skim it off and keep going. This really only happens to me if I am for some reason using raw chicken bones (as Emeril suggests) but I almost always just have some carcass from a rotisserie chicken that needs using up, so there ya go. When the stock is ready, you can strain it through a colander or a wide strainer into another container for refrigeration. I suggest cooling the liquid down before you put it in the fridge to avoid warming the other foods already being stored. Emeril suggests (and this is so good I wish I had thought if it) strain the stock into a storage container that is nestled in a sink filled with ice and then store it. I have been known to put broth in wide shallow pans to cool down quickly on the counter-top before being placed in the fridge. I think E's way will work beautifully though.

Darling husband of mine just kept on trucking and made his version of Emeril's famous chicken soup since I have the aforementioned COLD FROM HELL. He actually let the stock simmer while he went to the store for supplies. Write this down, because you will LOVE it.

2 Tb of Olive Oil
Some chicken cut up into chunks (we used leftover cooked chicken and 2 raw chicken breasts)
salt
pepper
1 C chopped onion (or in our case 1/2 of a big onion chopped)
1/2 C chopped celery
1/2 C chopped carrots
1/2 C chopped green onion (4 green onion stalks, white parts and some green)
2 TB of minced garlic (for me 3 cloves or so)
1/4 C fresh parsley leaves (Chopped a goodly amount, parsley is cheap!)
1 TB fresh chopped basil (smells AMAZING)
4 bay leaves (EW! 2 bay leaves)
1 TB Emeril's Creole seasoning (We had some Emeril's Southwest seasoning on hand, used that, but any nice spicy blend will do.)
2 C assorted chopped veggies (examples given were beans, zucchini, yellow squash, cabbage or whatever is in season.) We used a bag of frozen Gumbo veggie mix blend that had been lurking in the freezer waiting for a chance to get out!
1 C. firmly packed, rinsed and torn, spinach leaves (We did 2 C of spinach leaves, moderately well packed.)
1/4 tsp of crushed red pepper, (we didn't have any, just used David's BBQ spice rub in the same amount. You could also sub in some tabasco sauce.)
2 C cooked noodles
3 quarts of chicken stock

We chopped up the raw chicken breasts and added them to the stock pot, already heated and waiting with the olive oil. We added the salt and pepper, and sauteed the heck out of it all. Then we added the cooked chopped chicken meat, leftover from our rotisserie chicken. Next we added the chopped celery, carrots, green onions and garlic. Then the basil, bay leaves, and southwest blend seasoning. After this all had a chance to sautée we added the bag of frozen veggies, the torn spinach and the spice rub and let that all come together. Then we added the strained stock and let it all go to a boil, brought it back down to a simmer and let it shmoozle together for 20 minutes or so. We cooked the noodles (about half a bag of egg noodles) separately about 5 minutes before the soup was done. Then we added a small amount of cooked noodles to each soup bowl before ladling the soup on top. I prefer to cook the noodles separately because the noodles do not over cook, nor when you store the leftover soup (and a family of 2 adults and 2 small kids will have leftovers) the noodles swell in the broth and get horribly overdone.

This soup was a tonic for the soul. Fragrant, steamy, and lovely it just cut through the cloud of confusion on my head. Emeril's recipe calls for browning the soup bones and using chopped fresh veggies, but honestly I am not sure it could have been THAT much better than what we had tonight. Delicious. Hubby swept and mopped the kitchen floor while it simmered and we all got a very healthy serving of flavorful vegetables and lean protein. All in all this was a perfect Fall weekend dinner. For dessert we had an autumnal spice cake, but I will save that recipe for another time.

Easy Peasy Lunch

I pack my kids lunch every day. And my oldest girl has carried a lunch with her since she started daycare at 14 months old, so its been quite a few lunches now! I have run into several lunch time dilemmas and here is how I solved them. First of all, remember to pack the lunch the night before, make sure you have lunch items on your weekly shopping list, and always look to see what comes back untouched from the kid's lunch box. No sense in packing something your kid won't eat, right?

1. Out of bread

Send in peanut butter crackers as a change from the usual PB and J. These can be made on many types of crackers including graham crackers, saltines, Ritz or even smear a bit of peanut butter on a rice cake! Other "non-sandwich" sandwich options include rolling peanut butter, jelly and banana in a tortilla, sending in a generous slice of banana bread (w/ or w/o a nut butter of some sort). You can always forgo PB and J completely by sending in sandwich meat rolled in lettuce leaves or cheese or both. Simply lay out a slice of sandwich meat, layer a slice of cheese (my kids like provolone) and roll up. I stash these in a reusable sandwich container. One time I started a "trend" at my daughter's school by smearing peanut butter on a hot-dog bun and putting a whole peeled banana on the bun. I called it, "Monkey Hotdog" and all of her little friends quickly followed suit.

2. Can't find the Ice-pack

It is hard to keep the contents of the lunchbox fresh and cold without the little ice packs that many lunch boxes come with, isn't it? I have used double baggied bags of ice, frozen her juice box the night before (it thaws by lunchtime) or even resurected old teethers from the back of the freezer and sent those in as well. Do you have a re-freezable "boo-boo" bunny? He has served as a lunch time ice-pack on more than one occasion here!

3. Out of Juice Boxes

I have packed water bottles, small sippy cups of our own juice (cheaper too) and when she was "too old" for sippy cups, I bought her a sports bottle we could fill at home. I hardly ever buy a true juice box anymore. Refillable containers are cheaper and create less waste. If all else fails your child can usually buy milk or water at school too!

4. What side dishes?

Baby carrots or small broccoli florets, with a separate container for ranch dressing, cheese sticks, small boxes or baggies of raisins, bags of granola, frozen grapes (help keep lunch cold too), a banana, cherry and grape tomatoes, slices of salted cucumber (also great with ranch dressing), whole wheat crackers, small container of cottage cheese. I sometimes send in a small baggie of potato or corn chips, just for fun. Everything in moderation, even moderation!

5. Dessert?!

To be honest, I love, love, love dessert and it is something we have at home quite a bit, but at my daughters' school they often have cookies for an after school snack, so I usually don't pack anything sweet in her lunch. But after Halloween (for several weeks) I put one small candy per day in her lunch box, or sometimes homemade oatmeal or peanut butter cookies (I'd send chocolate chips, but sometimes the chocolate melts). A piece of fruit is usually all my girls need, but sometimes we get them jello or pudding cups too. Don't stress this one!

6. My kid won't eat sandwiches at all!

Well, mine sometimes doesn't either. I have been known to send in greek style vanilla yogurt with some granola as a "main dish" or some cheese sticks and assorted fruits. My kid has taken a green salad with cubed chicken on top, soup in a thermos, trail mix (included cheerios, peanuts, raisins, sunflower seeds, and a few M&M's) cottage cheese and fruit, cold, cut up chicken strips, Babybel cheese and carrot sticks, and even a lunch called "Make your own Lunchable" where I cut up lunch meat and cheeses into little circles and let her eat those with Ritz crackers. Just make sure they get an opportunity to eat some protein, carbs and fat in every meal and that they have plenty to drink and your kid will have the energy to get through the day!