Category: Cooking

Recipes and chitchat

MJ Monday-Meal: My New Sandwich

Here’s my new favorite sandwich.

It’s made with turkey (good deli turkey, not the slimy, fat free stuff that you buy in plastic tubs), pesto (my supermarket sells small jars of premade basil pesto), roasted red peppers, and provolone on a sandwich thin (I prefer sandwich thins to bread because they’re not so . . . bready).

Spread pesto sauce (stirred well to incorporate the olive oil) thinly onto each side of the sandwich thin, as if it were mayo or mustard (I’m not a fan of either condiment).

Add a slice of turkey (doubled over) to each side of the then, then top with strips of roasted red pepper.

Add a slice of provolone. Personally, I prefer smoked provolone, but my husband doesn’t, and he buys the cheese at a local warehouse store, so that’s what I use.

Slap the two sides together and voila, a sandwich.

MJ Monday-Meals: Pasta Salad Redo.

In an attempt to de-carb our meals, I experimented with my standard pasta salad recipe, substituting Quinoa for pasta.

The first thing I did was cook two envelops of Quinoa and let them cool overnight.

I dumped them into a large bowl and started adding my standard pasta salad ingredients:

  • black olives
  • artichoke hearts
  • peas
  • carrots
  • red onion
  • roasted red pepper
  • chopped yellow bell pepper

and for something a little different: sliced radishes.

Then I made my standard dressing, doctored up with additional garlic powder, dried basil, and dried parsley.

All the flavors and most of the textures of pasta salad without its heaviness. A keeper.

MJ Monday-Meals: Leftover Salt Potatoes for Breakfast

I learned this trick when I was in high school, when I would spend weeks at a friend’s camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

The first ingredient is leftover salt potatoes. Salt potatoes are a Central New York favorite. No summer event is complete without them.

I am not a fan of eggs. When I was younger, I would eat them scrambled only if they were well done. That holds true with this recipe.

Chop the leftover potatoes and add them to a frying pan with melted butter. Add chopped onion and heat through. Then add eggs. Scramble the eggs around the potatoes and onions. You end up with a delicious savory not-an-omelet breakfast dish that also doesn’t require turning on the oven.

Simply thinking about this breakfast brings back wonderful memories of cooking on the wood stove at camp, of cool mornings with mist clinging to the surface of the lake, of freshly picked wild blueberries (where I first learned to like them) polka-dotting the muffins and pancakes we made.

MJ Monday-Meals: Cilantro Lime Quinoa

I had some leftover ingredients hanging out in my fridge and decided to combine them to see what I could come up with as a side dish for quesadilla night.

That’s about a cup of cooked quinoa, half a jalapeno, a lime and what I could salvage from a bunch of decaying cilantro.

First, I diced the jalapeno into tiny pieces.

Then I squeezed the room-temperature lime into the bowl. (I use a small tea strainer to keep out the pulp and seeds.)

After I’d wrung all the juice I could from the lime, I grated a little zest into the bowl.

And chopped the cilantro.

Voila! A simple side dish using ingredients about to rot in the refrigerator.

We ate it the next night with chicken quesadillas and it was surprisingly good.

Thursday Thought-Things I Don’t Get: Food Art

Social Media brings some interesting things into our lives. Take food as art for example.

I’ve seen stunning creations. Like a peacock wedding cake. Or this face. Or this cake. Or this truly awesome Halloween concoction?

I understand that presentation is important. But when presentation becomes the thing instead of flavor, I’m gone. Who wants to destroy something that must have taken hours to create? I respect the artistry. But food is made to eat.