I’ve been trying to add more fish to my family’s diet.
Actually about the only fish we ever ate was fish sticks. Raised on mid-western meat and potatoes, fish just wasn’t something that came to mind when I thought about making dinner. But there are a lot of health benefits to eating fish, so I decided we needed to eat more of it.
I’ve been on the hunt for some good fish recipes, and so far I’ve found one that we really like. This Broiled Tilapia Parmesan at All Recipes.
Parmesan, herbs and a touch of mayo make it tasty, and Tilapia has a very mild flavor.
The best thing about this recipe is that I can make it in 20 minutes. Ten minutes to prepare, 10 minutes in the oven and dinner is ready. This is my new go-to meal when I need to get dinner ready fast. I’ve started keeping the ingredients on hand so I can make it at the last minute.
I could use more than one good fish recipe though. My family will probably get tired of this eventually. So do you have any yummy fish dishes to share?
I know there are people who don’t like to cook, but cooking is like therapy for me.
For one thing cooking is creative. Ever produce a perfectly shaped loaf of bread or remove a nicely browned chicken from the oven? They are beautiful. Besides tasting yummy, good food is art. Art that stimulates all the senses — taste, touch, sight, even sound. There’s nothing like the sound of a good steak sizzling on the grill.
With a baby and a preschooler hanging around the house all day, I don’t always have time to blog or airbrush pictures of myself in Photoshop to make my thighs look thinner (Not that I’ve ever done that. A-hem.), but I almost always cook at least once a day. It meets my right-brained need to be creative.
Cooking also presents a mental challenge. Some days after mindlessly changing endless diapers and losing hands of Crazy 8′s on purpose, I need to exercise my brain. At the very least the ability to read and follow instructions is necessary, but often you have to know how to execute certain techniques. If you make up your own recipes, cooking requires knowledge of how flavors mix and compliment each other. It can even take scientific know-how. Baking, for instance, is really a science experiment.
Since I do have to think about what I’m doing while I’m cooking, it’s a fantastic boredom reliever, as well as stress reliever. It takes my mind off other things.
Cooking also has a final and end result. It’s satisfying to have a task that I can complete from beginning to end, and be done with it. The laundry is never all done. The house is never completely clean, but once the cake is baked and frosted, it’s baked and frosted for good. That comforts me deep down to my perfectionist soul.
But perhaps the best benefit of cooking is that it’s a wonderful way to work out my frustrations. Ever knead bread when you were really angry? Oooh, the part where you punch the dough down after the first rise is good for getting out some aggression too. Or how about the food processor? Next time you’re feeling mad at the world pop something in the chute, and grind it up into oblivion. Kids won’t listen to you? Get out your electric mixer, turn it on high and whip some egg whites into submission meringue. It will make you feel better. (I know it’s hard to tell, but I really don’t have an anger problem.)
Try it.
Cooking is cheaper than therapy, and only has one side effect.
Dirty dishes.
I’ve been getting a lot of complaints about my cooking lately.
Not from my husband.
No, from David, my four-year-old.
He informed me recently that pancakes are among one of my many culinary failings. “They’re not perfect like Grandma’s, and they’re too brown.” What he meant was my HOMEMADE pancakes are not perfectly round and evenly golden like the FROZEN ones my mother gives him at her house. (Just for the record, the ones I made were not burned.)
When we went to McDonald’s for breakfast a few days later, David pointed at the pancakes we ordered and said, “Look Mommie. That’s how you’re supposed to make pancakes.”
He told me my hamburgers have the same problem, and said that we need to purchase a burger mold he saw advertised on TV. “Your stove doesn’t make them right Mommie. Buy it.” I guess I should be glad he placed the blame on the stove that time.
Last night when I pulled some drop biscuits out of the oven for dinner he looked at them and asked, “Don’t you ever make flat biscuits?” He wanted the ones that come refrigerated in a cardboard tube.
Sometimes for lunch I make him little pizzas on hamburger buns, and he asks for “real” pizza. “Real” pizza comes from Little Caesars.
If I make homemade Mac&Cheese he tells me it’s the wrong kind. The right kind? Kraft of course.
I make dinner most nights, and most of what we eat I make from scratch. I even made a lot of David’s baby food, and I still ended up with a kid who would rather eat food from a box or a drive-thru.
If we went to Mexico for dinner tonight he’d ask where Taco Bell was so he could get a “real” taco.
Who wants an Enchirito?
I was going to make something really complicated and spectacular this week. Well, actually I did make something really complicated. It just didn’t come out too spectacular. It’s resting at the bottom of the trash bin now. So I give you plan B instead. Easy M&M Blondies. Simple, tasty and not taking up room at the local land fill.
M&M Blondie Recipe
1 cup margarine
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 (12 ounce) package M&M’s plain chocolate candies (optional)
1/2 cup crushed walnuts (optional)
From RecipeZaar
Directions
Cream butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla. Add in flour and soda – it makes a thick dough. Stir in M&Ms. Spread in a 13×9 pan. and bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.
The dough is really thick. It was easier to press it into the pan with my fingers than spread it with a spatula. I’d back down the cooking time. I only left them in for 30 minutes, and my blondies came out a little more brunette.
I found the recipe for these Hamburger Muffins on Kaboose.com. If you’re not familiar with Kaboose, head over and sign up for for their weekly emails. You’ll get all kinds of kid and family friendly food, craft and activity ideas.
These Hamburger Muffins were fun and easy to make with a few simple ingredients, and pretty cost effective too. They also happen to taste like yummy mini-meatloaves. My husband, who claims to not like meat loaf, liked these, and my son even had to grudgingly admit they were good.
Hamburger Muffin Recipe
3 tablespoons butter, softened
12 slices white bread
1-1/4 pounds ground beef
1 egg
1 small onion, chopped1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of mushroom soup
salt and pepper to taste
3/4 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
Cooking Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Butter one side of each slice of bread, and press each slice butter-side down into the cups of a muffin tin.
2. In a medium bowl, mix together the ground beef, egg, onion, cream of mushroom soup, salt and pepper until well blended. Fill each bread cup with the mixture. Sprinkle shredded Cheddar cheese over the tops.
3. Bake for 30 minutes in the preheated oven, or until meat is cooked through.
Well there was no Cookie of the Week post last week, because I tried a new recipe and it was a complete disaster.
This week, at my husband’s request, I made old tried and true Chocolate Chip cookies. Now I know everyone probably already has a favorite Chocolate Chip cookie recipe. The one I use is the one my mom always used, and I think from the back of the chocolate chip bag.
Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
1/2 cup margarine
1/2 cup shortening
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp soda
1/2 tsp water
1 tsp vanilla
1 bag chocolate chips
Cream together sugar, margarine, shortening and eggs. Add the rest of the ingredients. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 375 degrees on an ungreased cookie sheet for 10 to 12 minutes.
I’ve learned two tricks to making these cookies over the years that improved them.
First, I started replacing all the butter and shortening with Butter Flavor Crisco.
Ever make cookies with butter or margarine, and find that they can really spread and come out flat? That happens because the butter or margarine melts too fast during the baking process.
Butter, margarine and Crisco or shortening are all fats. When the fat in a cookie melts in the oven, it releases moisture that the heat turns into steam. The steam helps the cookie rise. But it also pushes the cookie outward if there’s too much steam released before the dough has set. When you use Crisco the steam starts to release at about the same time the cookie starts to set. That gives you a nicely raised cookie that holds together.
For flavor it does have to be Butter Flavor Crisco. Plain shortening would affect the taste of the cookies. You can substitute Butter Flavor Crisco for butter or margarine in almost any cookie recipe. I use it to make biscuits too.
The other thing I’ve learned about Chocolate Chips cookies is that the type of cookie sheet you bake them on is important. I’ve used coated non-stick, Air-Bake and baking stones, but the sheet that gets the job done best is a thick aluminum baking sheet like professional bakers use. Nordic Ware make a great half-size professional grade aluminum baking sheet you can pick up for around nine dollars at discount department stores. It’s worth investing in a couple.
Aluminum heats up quickly and distributes heats evenly so that all the cookies bake at the same rate. A thicker sheet allows the cookies to cook through, and brown on tops and bottom at the same time. Dark, coated sheets brown the bottoms too fast. Usually you either end up with burned bottoms or raw middles. Air-Bake sheets are supposed to not burn the bottoms of cookie by using an insulating pocket of air. But I find they they can take to long to brown the cookies on bottom, or never even brown then at all. If you leave the cookies in the oven waiting for the tell-tale brown edges you can end up over-baking them. I don’t like the stones because they take too long to warm up. They can double the baking time in some cases.
Baking is really just a bunch of chemical reactions triggered by heat. If you learn a little bit about the science behind it, you can use it to make some of your favorite recipes even better. Or even make up your own.
One of my favorite fall traditions is visiting a local apple orchard that serves up fresh, hot doughnuts and cider. But you don’t have to leave home to enjoy this autumn snack. It’s easy and fun to make doughnuts at home. If you have older kids, it’s something the whole family can do together.
The ingredients you need for your doughnuts are:
2 eggs
2 tbs shortening
3/4 cup milk
3 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon
2 – 3 cups vegetable oil
Additional white sugar or powdered sugar to coat the doughnuts
To start, you need a deep, heavy-bottomed pot and a candy thermometer that clips on the side of your pot.
Fill the pot with two to three cups of vegetable oil. You want to bring the temperature of the oil up to 375 degrees over medium heat, and maintain it there. Too hot and your doughnuts will burn. Too cool and your doughnuts will soak up the oil while they cook and be soggy.
While the oil heats stir up the batter. It should be mixed by hand, not with an electric mixer. Start by beating the eggs slightly with a fork in a large bowl. Add sugar, shortening and milk. Stir. Mix in flour, baking powder, soda and salt. Stir the nutmeg and cinnamon together in a separate bowl then add to the rest of the mixture. Dough will be slightly sticky and moist. I think it resembles biscuit dough.
Now you can turn the dough out on to a floured surface, roll and cut into rounds with a doughnut cutter. But it’s faster to just make doughnut holes by dropping rounded teaspoonfuls of dough into the oil. I like to use a small scoop.
So when the oil hits 375 degrees go ahead and drop your batter in. You can do three or four doughnut holes at a time depending on the size of your pot. Watch the temperature and adjust your burner as needed to maintain 375 degrees.
While your first doughnuts are cooking you can get two plates and fill one with white sugar and one with powdered sugar for rolling the finished doughnuts in.
The doughnut will float to the top when it’s ready to be turned. Flip and cook an additional 2-3 minutes on the other side. The doughnut should be a deep golden brown. Watch that they don’t start to burn.
Use a slotted spoon to remove the cooked doughnuts to paper towel to drain.
When the doughnuts are cool enough to handle, roll them in the white sugar or powdered sugar. Personally, I prefer the white sugar or no sugar at all.
Then enjoy while still fresh and warm!
