A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Jenn's Birthday Sushi and (Hooray) the REAL Japanese steakhouse "Orange" Seafood Sauce Recipe

 

Saturday night, we were invited over to our good friends', Corbin and Jenn's, house to help celebrate Jenn's (cough)nd birthday where we were told there would be a few people and some finger foods--a total underestimation of the food and fun! We met Janis, a fellow foodie who took on the task of a 3-course sushi meal for nine people and her daughter, Jordan, who along with Jenn's daughter, Chelsea, made dessert for us all of chocolate chip cookies and fudgy brownies.  Good work, ladies! Also invited were another lively couple, Al, and his wife Melissa (can't believe I didn't get a decent picture of them all night)  whom I think (from my investigation on Facebook) might know a bunch of people I know which is even more fun. Melissa also had the dubious job of keeping me ante'd into the poker hands last night since she was sitting next to me instead of Gene.  I think she didn't realize she was going to have to take on his job all night of taking care of me but I thank her!

Happy Birthday, Jenn!  Thanks for the great party!

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: Edamame Succotash with Brown Rice

 

Look at all that great food for work one night last week...and then it was so horribly busy I never got a chance to eat a bite of it all night long. Oh well. I ate the succotash for breakfast the next day so at least I got to enjoy it!

 

I make this dish fairly often because it's great for you and super quick to put together, works perfectly for lunch, dinner, or work lunch, and is a great "getting closer to vegetarian" dish for us meat eaters.  Gene says he really likes it but he'd like it better with a bunch of chicken in it.  I tell him that defeats the purpose of eating a vegetarian dinner once a week for our health. He thinks chicken is vegetarian. :-)

Click below for the recipe.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: "There's Chicken in my Spaghetti"

 

Chicken, a simple substitution that has much less fat in it than beef in spaghetti, still has all the taste of meat and and the healthy goodness of the tomato sauce.  A perfect dish for the crockpot, it's also easy to throw into a roaster to cook it low and slow while leaving it alone for the afternoon.

I first had this at the soon-to-be in-laws of my friend, Shawna, 20-something years ago.  I'd flown to Calgary to attend her wedding and we got snowed in, blizzarded in I should say, at her wonderful in-laws where we were served this for one of the dinners. 

Let's talk the weather in Canada for a second, shall we?  I'm from Missouri, although I have lived in Washington (state) and Utah but that still didn't prepare me for Canadian "spring".  The wedding was in April and I remember Shawna saying about clothes "wear whatever you would normally wear in spring".  Hmmmm...what she meant to say was "wear whatever you'd wear for Missouri winter". Although we get a few snows over the winter, our snow is usually gone within a few days. I wasn't prepared for snow that stayed on the ground until almost summer and the freezing temps that accompany that snow. At the time I freaked out in my light sweaters and khakis but now I look back and smile and am warmed by the memories of spending time with my dear friend and the hospitality of her new family.

This dish is my entry this week in Ruth's, of Once Upon a Feast, wonderful Presto Pasta Nights, hosted this week by Graziana of Erbe in Cucina .  Be sure to drop by her "place" on Friday to see all the wonderful pasta dishes rounded up this week.

St. Pat's Day (comes a couple of days early at the Muse home)

 

I have to work tonight and will sleep tomorrow so our St. Pat's feast was last night, Sunday night, so that I could really enjoy it. I'll confess for Gene that corned beef is not his all time favorite so I only make it once a year even though I love it.  You know how it is.  When you're the only one in the house that like something, it just usually isn't on the hit parade often.  My brother Kenneth come over and shared dinner with us before he went to work last night so I did have a fellow cb fan with me and he and I fought over split the leftovers for work lunches so it worked out well in the end.  I'll still get to take corned beef and colcannon to work to lunch tonight where it will turn into St. Pat's day in the middle of my shift. I could wonder if our crapeteria will be hip enough to serve corned beef tonight but the thought makes me shudder so I'll take my own.

Myyyyyyyyyyyyyy but I'm a little bit bitchy today. Maybe I need to go back to bed for a nap before work!  Or not. Hehehehe

Back to the good stuff...

Halushki

 

Gene and I were watching Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives a few days ago on Food Network and we were both struck by this dish served at a diner owned by a Polish family.  We both kept trying to get the name of it so I could Google it but the best we could come up with was that it rhymed with "push-key".  So instead I Googled "egg noodle and cabbage recipe" and Halushki popped up. Damn, I love the internet!

I ran to the store to get the ingredients, popped out an email to Auntie Miranda inviting her over for an "experiment" supper on her way from work, and it's now become a regular addition to our dinner repertoire.

I researched several versions of the recipe and found that the four common ingredients in all of the recipes are:  butter, onion, cabbage, and egg noodles.  You can make it from that simple vegetarian one pot meal (vegan if you sub out the butter), or you can add a few simple things to jazz it up a bit, like potatoes and/or bacon, thin-sliced cooked pork loin, chop, or ham.  I happened to have some proscuitto that needed to be used so that's what I picked and it was lovely.  Gene's comment was "Wow! I can't even taste the cabbage! I was a little worried about that!"  Okay, that made me laugh but he was right. It doesn't have an overwhelmingly cabbage-y taste.  The cabbage mixed nicely with the onions to create a simple sweetness to the noodles. Very comforting and homey.

It's also the perfect dish for my new quest for simplicity:  it's easy, quick, yummy, healthy, and cheap.  It doesn't get much cheaper than a $ .59 in cabbage, $ .25 egg noodles, $ .10 onion, and a few strips of bacon or in my case, some leftover proscuitto and the entire cooking time was maybe a half hour and most of that was cooking down the onion and cabbage.  The finished one pot meal fed the three of us and Gene and I had leftovers for lunch the next day.

The Comforts of Sher's Home: File' Gumbo & Sharp Cheddar Mac & Cheese

This post and all the links contained in it are dedicated to Sherry Cermak, author of the What Did You Eat blog who died of a sudden heart attack a week ago today.  Sher was my friend, my confidante, and my personal cheerleader for the last decade.  I loved her, I miss her, and I cherish every memory of the friendship we shared.  I am a better person for having had the good fortune of having her in my life and I will always be grateful to Heavenly Father for allowing our paths to cross.  The fact that we met on a Robert Redford fan site is the ultimate proof that God does, indeed, have a sense of humor as twisted and perverse as our own.

All over the food blogging community today, you will find Sher's friends cooking her recipes in her honor as our way to say "Good bye and We love you, Sherry."

Personally, I couldn't decide which one dish to make from Sher's blog to honor her by so I picked the two dishes we probably talked about the most over the years.  The first is Sher's family's File'  Gumbo.  I love this dish not only for it's deeply comforting taste but for the stories Sher would tell about it and how hilariously offended she would get when her family's file gumbo was confused with regular gumbo.  She told me many times, proudly, that her family's gumbo was a thing of purity and should be touched by no Andouille, no chicken, and certainly no okra, not that they had anything against okra per se, it just didn't belong in their gumbo pot. According to Sher who was passionate on this subject, to say the least, it was actually close to heresy to even mention the words "okra", "sausage", and/or "chicken" in the same breath with Gumbo.  Shrimp and crab only, please.

As for the second dish, if you asked Sherry her favorite food she would say "Cheese", or at least that's what she always told me.  Her all time favorite was Cowgirl Creamery's Triple Cream.  She said it was heavenly.  I keep intending to mail order some but haven't gotten around to it yet.  When I do, you'll be the first to hear about it.

Sher's mac & cheese dish from Martha Stewart has no Triple Cream Cowgirl Creamery cheese in it but it was damn good anyway.  Sher and I used to laugh about how we both loved mac & cheese so much even the Kraft blue box was a treat now and then.  Yeah, except the blue box has no actual cheese in it, ahem. But it's the taste of childhood so it's still worth a splurge now and then.

The tomatoes in this recipe are a wonderful addition, roasted with thyme for summery herbiness.  When I first saw this on her blog, I thought "Tomatoes????"  But they really are necessary for the full effect.  No wonder Sherry was drawn to this recipe.  I have a feeling her love for fresh tomato, home-made bread, and real mayo sandwiches from the first sun-warmed tomatoes from her back yard were legendary to more folks than just me.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: The Mediterranean Diet

"One of these things is not like the others...." in that you've already seen it:  the yogurt-creamed gazpacho.  The night Lynn and James came over for dinner was an all-out Mediterranean Diet pleasure and one of the first days in a long time that I actually did get all 8 of my fruit/vegetable servings (with one to spare!) in for that day and all 8 glasses of water we're supposed to get each day.

The water count is fine. I can deal with that.  But the veggie's and fruit servings are, let's be honest, more difficult in our society.  I've been diet diary-ing for a lot of years and there are lots of days when Gene and I only get one or two servings max.  Think about it.  Say you have eggs and toast for breakfast, a hamburger (or other fast food sandwich), fries, and soda at work (which is certainly not unheard of), and then you come home tired, not wanting to cook and have a piece of chicken with some potatoes or rice, maybe some bread, and some quickly heated up corn, peas, or green beans. What's that leave you with?  A barely edible canned veggie at dinner and the ass-berg lettuce and anemic tomato on your burger. That's really not enough vegetables, and taking a multi-vitamin, the panacea of our generation, doesn't cut it either. It's better than nothing but not much unless you're taking pharmaceutical-grade supplements.  You just don't know what you're getting and the body processes them better when they come out of real food.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: Orange Shrimp & Scallops over Rice Pilaf

Eating clean in the neighborhood!  Pardon my rip off of Applebee's slogan about "the neighborhood" but while we were in the mood to eat out, I knew neither Gene nor I really needed the extra fat and calories that seem to come as an automatic side to any restaurant meal.

What to do?

Eat out, only do it at home.

After perusing several recipes online I came up with this seafood dish loaded with veggies, fresh taste, and a little extra oomph for our not so ordinary dinner at home.

Featuring fresh thyme, Orange Broiled Seafood is a natural dish for Weekend Herb Blogging, created by the wonderful Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen, hosted this weekend by Joanna of Joanna's Food.  The round-up of all the wonderful herbaliciousness is usually posted by late Sunday evening or Monday morning.  Please go see Joanna and Kalyn for more great recipes.

Happy (Early) St. Pat's: Corned Beef, Colcannon, & Green Bread

Happy St. Pat's Day  a little early! I'm working most of the weekend including Monday but I wanted to share this meal with you.  Yum! St. Pat's food is one of my favorite go to for celebratory meals. Don't know why I don't prepare it more often.  Actually, the Reuben is my all time favorite sandwich and corned beef hash and eggs is my favorite breakfast. Can't go wrong with corned beef and cabbage in any form!

By the way, the green bread is a joke. It's simply my standard white bread everyday recipe that I added green food paste coloring to for some St. Pat's silliness.

As for the holiday itself, St. Patrick is credited with both driving the snakes and the pagans out of Ireland. As Ireland's patron saint, Patrick is attributed with using the abundant shamrock as a teaching tool to explain the three-in-one nature of the Trinity.

This is my entry for this weeks'  Weekend Herb Blogging, originally created by the lovely Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen.  This week, WHB is hosted by Kel of the fabulously photographed Green Olive Tree.  Check out all the other entries after Sunday evening.

Cardamom is a spice, not technically an herb, but Kalyn's focus is on all herbs, spices, or plants.  Cardamom, my favorite spice, is used quite a bit in northern European and Middle Eastern cuisines.

Healthier Fish & Chips

Gene and I don't eat much fried food but every once in a while you have indulge yourself, right? There's nothing better than good fried fish and home-made fries.  But then getting it from most fast food or chain restaurants is mostly a nightmare of wanting in taste and healthiness.

I think I found a way to make a very decent meal at home while still not breaking the artery bank.