A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Chicken Chow Mein: Better For You Than Mom's--Sorry Mom!

Chicken Chow Mein (my Mom's) was my childhood favorite.  We each got to request our dinner and cake for our birthday and Chicken Chow Mein was always my menu. 

Now....there's a funny family story about our cake choices as kids.  My "cake" was always my Nannie's banana bread. My brother Kenneth's choice was always Angel Food Cake with NO frosting, dad's choice was pie, and at the moment it escapes me what my other siblings' (Suzanne and Carl) choices were. I'll have get them to comment to remind me.

Nothing funny, right?  Here's the punchline. Our Mom was a cake decorator.  After making cakes for every kid in town (and us getting all the mistakes and leftovers all the time), and even telling us she'd make us any kind/design we wanted no matter how involved, we were so burned out on cake we all denied our Mom the pleasure of making our birthday cakes. Were we brats, or what?  Yes!  (Laughing) What Mom on the planet has to put up with kids who cry "Please, Mom, please! Don't make us eat cake for our birthdays! Please!"  Brats. We were cake-spoiled brats!

My Mom's Chow Mein, was great and I asked for it every year. It was also healthy. Except...when I started making it as an adult I realized that for a dish with lots of vegetables there was very little color:  water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, baby corn, and bean sprouts, are all pretty boring looking.  To dress up the aesthetic and the vitamin content, I've included many more colorful vegetables in my version.

Taste of the Ozarks: Beans & Greens

Even I will admit that maybe that doesn't look all that delcious, but I swear on a stack of Bibles, it's delicious.  Beans & Greens has long been a down-home dish throughout most of the southern U.S. and we're no exception.  We love our "brown" (pinto for the uninitiated) beans and cornbread, which btw, form a complete protein. Couple that with kale, collards, or spinach, and you're really looking at a protein/vitamin powerhouse. To be completely honest, you see the green but you don't really taste it.  Until I told him, Gene thought I'd just gone really nuts with the parsley.

This is my version using country sausage with lots of sage, collard greens, and pinto beans.  It's an easy-peasy workday recipe where you throw everything from the pantry/freezer into the crock-pot and either go to work, or like me, go to sleep. Dinner is ready when you are.  Add crackers or cornbread or dinner rolls and you've got a happy Gene, I mean, whatever your spouse's name is.

Chicken, Rice, & Vegetable Casserole the Old-Fashioned Way (No Campbell's Soup)

 

I've grown up as part of the Campbell's soup generation.  Mom used it a lot for things like "Stroganoff" made with ground beef and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup over egg noodles, "Smothered Chicken" or "Smothered Pork Chops" with any of the "Cream of's":  Cream of Mushroom, Cream of Chicken, or Cream of Celery, "Chicken Enchiladas" or "Chicken Pot Pie" with it's mandatory Cream of Chicken soup as the base sauce/filler. I enjoyed those dishes so  I'm not going to go into a huge anti-Campbells rant here becuase it is a quick and easy fix and it does taste good in that very comforting country creamy Paula Deen way. That's not a slam.  I do like those types of casseroles and homey dinners.  What I am going to say is there is another way, a better way, a healthier and cleaner way to cook/eat that doesn't have as many chemicals and salt and, I promise!, is not labor intensive.  If you have a little flour in your pantry and milk in the fridge you can skip the "Cream of".  Have a can of chicken broth?  Even better!

 

Dexter Dinner: Aunti Miranda's Chicken Vindaloo

Auntie Miranda brought dinner to last week's Dexter Dinner and OMG it was wonderful. The even better part was that it was good for us too!  This is the perfect winter meal:  rich and soothing, deceptively simply looking but with complex flavors from the spices and pureed vegetable base. I'll be making this myself again and again.  Thanks Auntie!

The One Perfect Pancake of my Lifetime of Making Pancakes (And it's Whole Wheat too!)

 

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Isn't it pretty? All perfectly rounded, sitting just inside the inner rim of the place, the perfect golden brown. Okay, that's one perfectly round pancake I've made in 40 years of cooking! Usually, no matter how hard I try to spoon the pancake mix or twirl the pan all chef-like there's always one edge that sort of globs out all retarded and freakish-looking.  One.  Out of 40 years. 

I can live with that. 

This pancake has a hidden secret.  It's actually good for us!  Eating healthy has become a journey for me over the last couple of years. As in so many things in my life where instant gratification is is never realized, I finally realized that pursuing healthier habits in all parts of my life are about baby steps, not about throwing out the old and emerging from my bed a new person on a designated day. (Which is usually how I'd try to do it in the past.) I'd start a new "diet" by saying to myself at bedtime "Tomorrow I will start eating only healthy wholesome perfect foods and exercising for one hour and do it every day for the rest of my life."  Waking up in my new frame of mind, I would be that perfectly perfect wholesome creature up until about 10 seconds after my first breakfast before I had my Hobbit second breakfast of a slice of processed cheese and a Coke.  C'est la vie. Literally, that is my life!

Good & Good For You: Blood Orange & Lavender Olive Oil Muffins

 

My sweet tooth has been acting up a bit lately. No matter how much I try to feed it broccoli, it screams for sugar. I hate it when it gets cranky, but I will persevere. I'm a firm believer that I can eat healthy AND still satisfy my sugar cravings. My sweet tooth demanded orange: Orange martinis?  Orange jelly candies?  Orange Cake?  What we compromised on, my sweet tooth and I, was a batch of these delicious and good-for-you blood orange and lavender olive oil muffins.  Sweet, but not too sweet, and a treat without being empty calories.  With the addition of the whole wheat pastry flour, these muffins are a little heavier, a little more toothsome than so-called muffins that are really fluffly cupcakes masquerading as breakfast food.  More than breakfast, these are a fruity, flower-scented snack, that also contain a serving of good daily fat, for tea time or any time of the day I need a pretty little pick-me-up. 

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Warm Winter Soup: Navy Bean and Ham

 

I've been trying to keep homemade soups in the fridge this winter for something nutritious to snack on or grab for work lunches and bean soups are my favorite.  Even though I happily eat them all year round, they embody winter cooking for me. I love how meaty and hearty they are, while knowing that they're absolutely good for me on every level from the fiber to the vitamins to the protein.  One of the ways I've changed my cooking style of bean soups, though, is to pump up the vegetable volume. I used to use veggies as seasoning and now I usually have as many onions, peppers, carrots mixed in as beans.  I love the way they fill out the taste and cook down along with the bean starch for that porridge consistency, sort of thick bowls of warmth on a gray day.

Eating for Anemia: Crockpot War Eagle Mill 7-Grain Hot Cereal & Berries

 

After a recent lab test, I was informed that I am slightly anemic.  While I will be taking iron and B vitamin supplments, I can also help restore my body's levels through practicing good nutrition.  This is great motivation to follow through on one of my goals this year (and always) of eating more natural foods and less processed junk.

When we hear the term "anemia" most people automatically think iron supplements, and while those often are the treatment, there are actually two kinds of anemia: iron deficiency and red blood cell deficiency.

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Food Goals 2011

Rather than listing out a bunch of goals this year, I think I just want to put out there in print so I can remind myself later that my goals are much the same as everyone else's.  More and more I want to continue to find time exercise and to create and cook delicious, filling recipes that taste good and are good for the body.  While I have dabbled in "diets" such as Meditteranean, Nordic, and Eat-Clean, and adhere to many of the principles, I don't consider myself to be "on" any one of them in particular. My husband has heart disease and I am overweight. To cook for those conditions, I've learned that in the most simple terms I need to rely on fresh, wholesome ingredients and to stay away from processed foods that contain a lot of chemicals, or any kind of fad or "diet-endorsed" foods.  To hell with Slim-Fast this and Weight Watchers that and Nutri-System this and Adkins that, edible substances that come wrapped in plastic inside cardboard boxes.  My food life is about real food, real recipes, because we're real people, not rats in a cage who didn't die when they were fed the eight syllable chemicals that give Twinkies the shelf life of Methuselah.

So all I really have to say about food goals this year is:  Who's with me?!

 

Happy 50th Birthday, Gene! Nannie's Banana Pudding Just For Gene

 
  
Happy 50th Birthday to my wonderful hubby, Gene! 

On the other hand, I can't believe I'm married to an official old man, AARP candidate, self-proclaimed "cranky old bastard".  How do these things happen in life?  They just sneak up on you with a baseball bat in the night.  :-)

Had a great party for old bastard (hey, his words!) last night with a few old friends to help usher him along into this over the hillishness and of course I have a few stories to tell.

Let's start with Friday, the day I was prepping food for this little shindig but in the middle of the afternoon I needed to go get my allergy and asthma shots. I'd just put on a pot of water to hardboil eggs for deviled eggs and, standing in the kitchen, told Gene "Just let them boil hard for 10 minutes and then turn them off and let them be."  His response was to scowl and bang his hand on the counter, yelling at me "I'm so damn tired of you starting crap and leaving me to finish it and take care of everything!"  My eyebrows were somewhere in the fifth dimension, I believe. While THINKING "You. Are. A. Dead Man." I SAID quietly "Are you kidding me?"  He immediately laughed and said "Yes! I am! You should see the look on your face. That was hilarious."  Yeah. Hilarious.  He almost didn't make it to that Big Five Oh.

But of course it was funny and I've been telling everyone.

He's been so ornery the last few days--it's been really fun and funny around our house. He also bacame his own birthday chronicler from time to time as he photographed the birthday prep.  After uploading this one, I asked "Why did you take a picture of me picking egg shell pieces out of the eggs?" He said "You were doing something with your hands?" 

Cute little dirty old man! :-)

 

I put up the fall and part of the Halloween decorations for last night and then added a few spiffy old man party things including this caution tape across the door and wound some of it around the pillars on the porch. We also made him wear a ribbon/button that said "OH NO THE BIG 5-0" and he stuck a little caution sign I'd bought for the dessert table into his shirt pocket that said "Caution: 50 year old having a senior moment" so I guess he was as decorated as the house.  He also had a baseball hat that read "50:  Been there, done that, can't remember it."

 
The Motley Bday Crue--Front Row:  Dee McKeel and Birthday Boy, Middle Row:  Debbie Henderson, Barb Schurke, Tammy Jahnke, and Jenn Garrison (Campbell).  Back row:  Jeff McKeel, John Henderson, John Schurke, Corbin Campbell, and Dave Jahnke. And not in the photo,  Darrel and Leigh Hasty, friends through Corbin and Jenn.

The connections are:  Jeff and Gene grew up together in Marshfield...John H. and Corbin and Gene were all in the radio game together for the last two and a half decades...Barb and John work with me but Gene loves them too... and Dave and Tammy have been neighbors and friends for over 15 years. 

We ate tons, told lots of fun stories, played a little poker... 

What a wonderful evening--thank you all for joining us and celebrating Geno's transition officially into old-man-hood!

And now for the recipe.  Gene's favorite dessert is my Nannie's (grandmother's) old-fashioned banana pudding, the truly southern version using 'Nilla Wafers.  She used to make a big bowl of it for him every year for his birthday and as a special treat whenever she thought he needed a little Nannie pick me up or whenever he did something extra special nice for her which was often. They were pretty tight. I love that they loved each other so much. The bittersweet part of that is that Nannie is no longer with us. So in memory of her and her love for Gene I get to make the banana pudding for him.