Elementary Chef

My family hates leftovers and is one of the reasons I don’t cook as often since I can’t stand to throw out food. I can’t eat all the leftovers by myself and the same meal gets old the third time around in a week.

My husband doesn’t mind leftovers as long as they look different than from the first meal. I have learned that when I have leftover chicken to make chicken salad. When I have leftover roast beef that I need to make barbecue roast beef. My mother-in-law always took leftover mashed potatoes and would fry them in butter - making a potato cake for breakfast. So he will eat leftovers but they just need to be served differently.

Vegetables can be thrown together in a soup. Those are the best soups anyway that contain all the favorites of the family.

There are many dishes that can be made with leftovers. So when you are meal planning, consider which foods you may have plenty of after dinnertime. Then you can use it to make something to serve later.

So how do you serve leftovers? Do you have to dress them up or does your crew willingly eat whatever is put in front of them?

Here’s one of my favorite chicken recipes. It’s super easy and a big hit with the entire family!

Chicken Oregano
2 ½-3 pounds chicken (I use breasts)
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup olive or vegetable oil
½ teaspoon pepper
¼ cup lemon juice
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 teaspoons dried oregano
Lemon slices

Place chicken in an ungreased 9×13-inch baking dish. Mix remaining ingredients, except lemon slices. Pour over chicken. Cook, uncovered, at 375 for 30 minutes, spooning oil mixture over chicken occasionally. Turn chicken. Bake 30 minutes more. Garnish with lemon slices.

I really do love pumpkin seeds. There’s something amazingly salty about them, and they’re just terribly wonderful to crunch. You feel like you’re eating something “bad”, but they’re actually good for you!

Since pumpkin carving time is upon us, it stands to reason that we have also reached that wonderful night of the year when there are seeds to roast! I learned today that pumpkin “guts” can actually do a number on your plumbing system. (Read the article here.) So why create waste? Roast those glorious guts!

This is a great recipe to do with the kids!

ROASTED PUMPKIN SEEDS

Seeds from one pumpkin
2 tb Vegetable oil
Salt to taste (I like a lot!)

Scoop out the seeds and pulp from a pumpkin, and separate the pulp from the seeds, discarding the pulp. (Do NOT throw the pulp down your garbage disposal! Pumpkin pulp is not plumbing friendly!)

Rinse the seeds in a large colander under cold running water, removing any remaining clinging strings. Seeds will feel slippery to the touch under the water.

Dump the seeds, a small amount at a time, onto a stack of paper towels and pat dry.

Spread the seeds onto a large baking sheet and allow to finish air-drying for an hour or so. When seeds are dry, toss them with the vegetable oil to coat well and sprinkle liberally with salt. Spread into a thin layer on the baking sheet and place in a 350 F oven for 30 minutes, or until golden brown, stirring every few minutes to prevent burning.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool before serving.

Here’s an easy and quick way to prepare your corn on the cob. Remember how I advised to turn off half your grill when you’re grilling chicken? Use that same trick for grilling corn with your entree.

First, peel back the green husk around the ear of corn, but don’t pull it off. Then, remove the silks from the corn. (These are the strings that are between the green husk and the ear itself.) Lightly salt and/or butter the ear. Carefully re-cover the ear with the green husk leaves. And place on the grill. If you’re putting it directly over the flame, you should wrap the corn in aluminum foil first.

Check the corn after about 5 minutes. It’s hard to time right, since grill heat tends to be variable.

Enjoy with butter, grilled chicken, and home-made icecream for dessert!

corn on the cob, grill, recipes

There really is nothing better than sweet tea. But I often hear people bemoaning how they just can’t get it right. I’m sure there are 100 methods for brewing sweet tea, but here’s how we do it at my house! And when you’re done brewing your tea, check out Tips Around the House for ways to use those teabags!

Southern Style Sweet Tea

8 regular-sized tea bags (or 2 family sized tea bags)
8 C water (plus some)
3/4 C sugar
Lots of ice

Pour 8 cups of water into a medium sized sauce pan. Add teabags. Boil the water (with the teabags in the water!) Once the water starts to boil, turn off the heat. Add sugar and stir. Allow the tea to steep for 3-5 additional minutes.

Fill a 2-liter pitcher (non-melting!) half-way to the top with ice. Remove teabags. Pour tea over the ice. I usually add water to the top of the pitcher.

Enjoy with lemon or mint!

recipes, tea, sweet tea

It sounds simple enough. But how many times have been to a cook-out and either grilled yourself, or had grilled for you, chicken that turned out blackened and tough? Grilled chicken, done properly, will stay juicy!

Doing chicken right is easy, but it takes an extra step that few people take. First, pre-heat your gas grill on high to get it to 450-500 degrees. Yes, really! After you’ve gotten the grill thoroughly hot, turn one burner off completely and the other to medium. (I have 3 burners, so I normally turn off 2.) Place your chicken on the side of the grill without live heat. Check on the chiken periodically (every 5 minutes or so.) The initial high heat will seal in the juices, and the lack of direct heat will prevent flare-ups, so no charring!

Most of us will admit that when we think pastries, we think French. In an effort to encourage Americans to bake more, the French Pastry School has issued these universal and elementary tips for baking success:

– It pays to measure. While some ingredients can be added with a pinch here and there, it’s best when baking to always measure accurately.
– Preheat your oven. It makes cookies and cakes rise like they’re intended — something you’ll miss if you place your pan on a cold rack.
– Beware substitutions. Chefs know how important it is to use the right ingredients. Substitutions can completely change an item’s texture and appearance. The school uses only Plugra European-Style Butter (which is now available in the US), for example, because it has 82 percent butterfat, combined with a lower concentration of water. It’s this combination that makes cakes rise higher, cookies crisp more evenly and pie crusts turn out flakier.

I am a fan of cheap dinners. I am also a fan of slow cookers. Combine the two, and you have dinner at my house quite frequently. This post is not for the faint-hearted! Roasting a chicken is a bit, ummm, messy.

Lately, the grocery has been running specials on whole fryer chickens. These end up being as cheap as $.29/pound. Now, if your family will only eat white meat, then pay no attention to this post. I will only eat white meat. But my kids love drumsticks, and my husband loves any dark meat, so this works for me.

Instead of buying a rotisserie chicken at $4.99 or $5.99, pick up on of those sale chickens and try this out. First, if you’ve never worked with a whole bird, well, there is some mess. Before you start cooking, you’re going to have to pull out the giblets from the cavity of the bird. Many times, these are in a nice little baggie that you can choose to simply throw away. Often they are not. Note to pet owners, Fido or Fifi will love you for tossing these her way. And no worry about bones — there are no bones in giblets….

Now that you have that bit of messiness taken care of, you have two options. Option one, leave the skin on. This will provide for a fattier bird, but it’s still chicken, and you aren’t frying it! Option two, remove all the skin from the bird. I remove the skin. Grab a knife and peel/pull away all that you can.

Your bird is now ready for cooking! Grab your salt and pepper, and sprinkle both on the inside and outside of the bird. Now grab whatever seasoning mix you’re in the mood for (more on this later this week, but at this point, even just plain oregano or basil will be nice), and sprinkle liberally on the outside of the bird.

Place the bird in your slow cooker and turn on High. Cook the bird at high for 1 hour, then without opening turn down to low. It’s important to keep the seal going (in my opinion), so don’t open the pot at all until done cooking. The chicken will be perfect in 6-8 hours, depending on the size of the bird.

Theme of the week? Recipes for roast chicken…. Tune back in tomorrow!

[tags] roast chicken, cooking, recipes, slow cooker, crockpot [\tags]

I’m writing to you from spring vacation this week. My family and I are skiing in Colorado, so cooking is understably different this week! My youngest child wanted me to bake muffins while we were skiing, so we grabbed a packet of muffin mix at the grocery out here. Should’ve realized the condo wouldn’t have a muffin pan… SO, we made the mix per the directions (oil, milk, egg, stir), then spread the mixture into a square glass baking dish, and VOILA! A perfect breakfast bread-cake. Small one was pleased, and the rest of the family likes this as a quickie solution. I may try this the next time I need to fix goodies for church… It certainly stretches the muffin mix a lot further!

[tags] breakfast, recipes, cooking, bread [ \tags]

Soft pretzels are one of my favorite indulgences. A friend and I were going to try making some, and I found this easier-than-your-average-bread recipe using a bread machine. Try it out!

As usual with bread machines, it’s important to measure everything precisely.

Soft Pretzels

1 1/4 c water
3 1/2 c bread flour
1 t salt
1 egg yolk (save white for later, but don’t add to bread mixture)
1 T oil
1 t lemon juice
2 T sugar
1/8 t white pepper
1 T active dry yeast

Place ingredients in order listed into bread machine “pan.” Use dough setting. Start machine.

Punch down and on a lightly floured surface cut the dough into 16 equal pieces. Roll each piece of dough into a rope about 16″ long. Shape each rope into a pretzel. (Cross the ends of the rope to make a loop; twist the crossed ends once and fold across the loop.)

Place the pretzels on a greased baking sheet 1 1/2″ apart. Brush with combined egg white and 1 T water. Sprinkle with salt or sesame seeds. Bake in preheated 375 degree (F) oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until gold brown.

Makes 16 pretzels. Dip into melted cheese, chocolate sauce, mustard……

recipes, soft pretzels, cooking, snacks

I love spinach. LOVE it. It’s my favorite salad green, and short of buying it in a can (yuck!), I don’t think you can do it wrong. Today, I have extra to celebrate — spinach was buy 1 pack get 1 free at my local grocery! Here are a couple of favorite ways with spinach:

Spinach Salad – this is a variation on my mom’s fantastic salad
1 bag spinach, double-rinsed
2-3 boiled eggs, sliced in rings (slice the egg lengthwise)
5 scallions, chopped
6 slices of crisp bacon, crumbled
4 oz blue cheese, crumbled

Toss together. Add Russian dressing. Yummmmmmm……

Wilted Italian-style Spinach
Heat 2-3 T of olive oil in a saucepan. Add 1 t of jarred or fresh, minced garlic and saute for one minute. Lower temp to medium, and toss in spinach (1/2 to a whole pack.) Turn spinach as it wilts to keep it from burning.

Spinach, garlic, blue cheese, salad, cooking

It took me a long time to master rice — and really, it shouldn’t be a hard task! As with many things in my life, I’m always looking for the shortest route possible. I assumed that the shortest path to cooked rice was through my microwave. Not so! Now, some of you may have a rice cooker. I LOVE those. They’re wonderful! But, in my pared down kitchen, there just isn’t room for a rice cooker. Especially, since I’ve discovered that stove-top rice preparation is just as easy.

To prepare rice on the stove-top, add 1.5 cups water for each cup of rice (white or brown). Add rice and water to pot before turning on heat. Cover pot, and heat to boiling. Turn heat down to medium — hot enough that the rice won’t boil over. Now go do something else! Make your entree! The rice will prepare itself (as long as you don’t let it boil dry!)

The other note I need to add here, is that I recently discovered the glory of organic brown rice. I buy it locally at our Fresh Market, and the taste is well worth the extra price.

Let them eat rice!

Cooking the perfect egg is something EVERY elementary chef should master. Whether you like yours poached, scrambled, or fried, eggs are nowhere near as intimidating as many rookie cooks imagine.

Frying scares many because, well, the timing seems so crucial. You have to get that yolk just runny enough — or not runny at all. While timing the egg will require some trial an error, there are a few easy steps that will at least get you to the timing part more easily.
1) Do not try to fry an egg over high heat. Eggs do best over medium heat (or a low flame on your gas stovetop.)
2) Do use a non-stick skillet and a tablespoon of olive oil or butter/margarine.
3) Use fresh eggs. If those eggs have been in your fridge for 6 months, they’re going to turn rubbery — no matter how perfectly you cook them.
When you’re frying eggs, you need to crack them extra carefully, to avoid scrambling the yolks. Then slide them into the already hot (but not too hot!) oil, and salt and pepper while cooking. Turn the eggs gently with a spatula, unless you’re going for true Sunny Side Up, which are not turned. (Over easy are.)

For your info, and in case you’re cooking eggs to order for a crowd, common ways to prepare fried eggs include:

Sunny Side Up — the egg is only cooked on one side, the yolk is 100% runny, and the top white is also runny. Because of salmonella risk, some states will not allow diners to serve eggs this way!
Over Easy — the egg is turned, but the yolk is kept runny. The white should cook all the way through (thereby destroying the salmonella risk.)
Over Medium — the egg is turned, the yolk is relatively firm but still loose, the white is fully cooked.
Over Hard — the egg is fried to a uniform, firm consistency. The yolk is completely cooked.

If you want to be extra fancy, add a little marjoram or chervil — especially if you can find some fresh!

eggs, cooking, sunny side up

I’m not a big fan of eating dinner out on Valentine’s — for the same reason I attempt to do all my Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. I don’t like crowds. So for those of you who are homebodies like me, I’m going to provide a favorite, but slightly more difficult menu for a very memorable Valentine’s dinner.

Many people — particularly elementary chefs? — seem to be intimidated by cooking fish. This recipe may contain a lot of steps, but you really can’t get it wrong.

(Remember! T=tablespoon, t=teaspoon, c=cup)

Tilapia Veracruz
1 lb. tilapia
1 lemon
4 T. olive oil
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1 t. garlic (refrigerated, jarred garlic or fresh)
1 16-oz. can diced tomatoes (drain juice to cup)
3 T. chopped fresh parsley
1 T. apple cider vinegar
1 T. red wine
1 T. salt
1/2 t. oregano
1/4 t. thyme
1 t. sugar
1/4 C. water
15-20 green olives
10-15 jalapeno pepper slices (I use jarred jalapenos)

Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees.

Squeeze lemon juice on fish pieces. In a large skillet, heat 2 T. olive oil over medium-high heat and fry fish 1 minute per side. (The fish should sizzle, but the oil shouldn’t pop.) Remove fish to baking dish.

Add onion, garlic, and tomatoes (but not juice) to oil and saute for 5 minutes. Add parsley, vinegar, wine, salt, oregano, thyme, sugar, and reserved tomato juice to skillet. Continue to simmer for 5 minutes. (You may need to turn the heat down. You don’t want the sauce to boil over.)

Pour sauce over fish in baking dish. Top with olives and jalapeno slices. Sprinkle with olive oil and bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes.

I serve this with Italian style wilted spinach. (Saute some garlic in olive oil. Add fresh spinach and allow to wilt.) It would also be good with a salad. And something chocolate of course!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

tilapia, cooking, recipe

I do love it when I get questions from readers. It makes my job so much easier! I got a question this afternoon about how to properly “zest” citrus fruits. Most commonly, a recipe will call for zest of lemon or lime. Sometimes (like in a recipe I plan to share just in time for Valentine’s Day!), the zest will be from an orange or some other citrus fruit. Regardless, the idea is the same, and you need a tool.

When you have properly zested a piece of fruit, the outer, colorful peeling will be gone, and you’ll be able just barely to see the white of the fruit. I have two favorite tools for this. My VERY favorite tool was a Christmas gift this year from my mother-in-law — the Microplane Zester. It’s INCREDIBLE, but God forbid you get your skin anywhere near it! This booger is SHARP! But it’s worth the danger. It does a fabulous job — just keep it covered and away from the kids. You can find these beauties at http://www.microplane.com, and they are well worth the investment.

My other favorite zester is for a different purpose. While the Microplane is fast, efficient, and oh-so-sharp, Pampered Chef makes a nice little zester for making “curly-cue” zests. These take a little longer, but they’re VERY cute — when you care about cute. This zester is available from Pampered Chef consultants — they do parties in your home — or online at http://www.pamperedchef.com.

Now, assuming you’re in a pinch, or not willing to invest in a good zester yet, you can use your cheese grater for this purpose. Just keep in mind that you want to keep the zest chopped fairly small (for better flavor) and you want to avoid getting the white rindy layers in your zest (it’s bitter.) So, opt with the smallest grater you own, and enjoy the citrusy goodness zest adds to all your dishes.

Can’t find a use for zest? How about these: on cupcakes, on broiled fish, in creams (whipped or other!)

Happy zesting!