Autumn Salad

This is a salad I have eaten many times at the Van Giessen residence but have not attempted myself. It is delicious! Perhaps not quite a meal on its own but would be great along with any kind of bbq fare (if you are blessed to have a grill). 

What you need!

Nuts
– 1 cup chopped walnuts
– 3 Tbsp butter
– 1 Tbsp black pepper (make sure you don’t overdo the pepper otherwise you will be crying while eating the salad. This has happened to me. true story.)
– 1/2 cup sugar

Dressing
– 1 tsp sugar
– 1 garlic clove
– 1/2 Tbsp dried oregano
– 1 tsp parsley
– 1/2 medium sized onion
– 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
– 3/4 cup olive oil
– salt and pepper to taste 

Salad
– 2 bunches romaine lettuce, torn
– 1 granny smith apple, sliced thin
– 1 gala apple, sliced thin
– 1/2 cup feta cheese 

What to do!

1. Nuts – Preheat oven to 350F, combine walnuts and butter in a glass baking dish. Bake 15 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. Combine sugar and pepper and toss warm walnuts to coat. Let cool, store in jar in fridge.

2. Dressing – Blend all ingredients except oil in blender. With it running, slowly add oil. May be refrigerated but bring to room temperature to serve.

3. Salad – Assemble and toss with dressing right before serving. Tip! To keep apples from turning brown, place slices in ziplock bag with a little lemon juice and water.

Enjoy! Because this salad seems to be a lot of work! However, trust me it is delish! Also, I realise the recipe calls for 2 heads of romaine. I am assuming you could also just half everything in the recipe if you’re just feeding 1-3 people. Maybe this would be a good one to try for a potluck or bbq.

Emily

philly cheesesteaks

Tony and I tried out Sonya’s recipe a couple of weeks ago. On the plus side the meal is really quick and cheap to make. On the negative side I’m generally not a fan of deli meats so I would have preferred grilled chicken breast or some other kind of ‘real’ meat. Tony, always a fan of spice and bold flavours found that it was missing something to make it really delicious. That being said we both liked it and would probably make it again if we happened to have the ingredients hanging around.

reaching prime meltiosity.

I’m alive and eating fresh philly cheese steak

And holy crap it’s good.

I followed the recipe exactly, except that I used Gluten-free bread that I found in the freezer section at Kroger. When toasted, it actually tastes like real bread!

I really dig this. It’s ridiculously easy to make, cheap, and delicious. I guess decently healthy too if I use less butter next time.

Thanks for the easy meal.

From Sonya’s Collection

Easy Philly Cheesesteak

Dice:
1 green pepper
1 onion

Have on hand a thick pita or flatbread

Sliced roast beef

Saute the green pepper and onion in butter.
Tear up the roast beef and add to sauting veggies.
Once finished, place 2 slices of Swiss cheese on top of the sauteed mix so that the cheese melts without messing up the pan. When it has reached prime melted meltiousity, take a spatula and the idea is that you also prefearbly grill the flatbread and then spatula the mixture onto the bread. Serve.

Curry made (and written) in hurry

Made a 1.5-sized version of the recipe, with chicken breast. It was awesome. Bringing some to work today.

-Steve

Be sure to hurry and make this curry!

Tony and Emily have picked another winner with their Tasty Chicken Curry. This in spite of the fact that I wimped out and used mild curry paste instead of the hot stuff. I was surprised to see the applesauce in the ingredient list, but that worked well. I had bone-in chicken thighs which worked fine – I just removed the skin before cooking. We ate it with basmati rice and some raw veggies on the side. Yummy!

Tasty Chicken Curry

 

I hope everyone will forgive me and Em for passing on the last recipe neither of us were very excited by the ‘it’s bland’ reviews ;).  To make up for it however we have brought a recipe for you guys to try.  This is one we got from one of the cookbooks Emily was given pre-wedding and I’ve made it quite a few times now.  It’s not to difficult and there is some room for experimentation with it so you can make it a bit spicier or add some other veggies.

Chicken Curry

Cooking Oil – 1 tsp

Boneless, Skinless Chicken Thighs – 4

Chopped Onion – 1/2 Cup

Hot Curry Paste – 2 tsp.

Garlic Clove, minced – 1 (or 1/4 tsp. garlic powder)

Ground Ginger – 1/8 tsp.

Salt – 1/4 tsp.

Pepper – 1/8 tsp.

Applesauce – 1/2 cup

Plain Yogurt – 1/3 cup

Chopped cilantro or parsley – 1 tsp.

Heat cooking oil in frying pan on medium.  Add Chicken.  Cook for about 3 minutes per side until browned (we usually cook until done at this point, but that’s up to you).  Transfer to plate.

 Add next 6 ingredients to same frying pan.  Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring often, until onion is softened.

 Add applesauce.  Stir.  Add chicken.  Stir until coated.  Reduce heat to medium-low.  Cook, covered, for about 5 minutes until chicken is fully cooked.  Remove from heat.

 Add yogurt and cilantro/parsley.

We’ve found this is best when served with rice (basmati is awesome) and naan and you can control the spice level with how hot your curry paste is and what other veggies you throw in with the onions.  We usually put in a jalapeno with it but I bet 1/2 of green or red pepper would cool it down even more.  Also the recipe above is about perfect for 2 people but me and Em usually 1.5 everything so that we end up with some leftovers at the end.

Hope you guys like it!

Chicken and Rice needs some Spice

It looked pretty good!

Browning the chicken

Served with Champagne Dill Carrots - oo laa laa!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks, Steve and Sonya, for this basic recipe. You’re right – it’s bland – but it has potential as a quick and easy meal. I made a couple changes, but it still needs some tweaking. I like to use basmati rice – because I like the flavour, so therefore that’s what I have in the house. You can soak basmati rice for twenty minutes and then cook it for just 10 minutes, so that’s what I did to bring the cooking time closer to that of minute rice. However, I used the same ratio of rice to water as in the recipe, so the rice at the bottom of my pan ended up too dry. Next time I’d use just 1 cup basmati rice to 1 2/3 cup water. Also, my medium sized frying pan was very full, but it did all fit with no disasters. Finally, I decided to add a teaspoon of curry powder on top of the whole thing during the final cooking process. This was good, but it could have used more curry in the rice mixture below. Fred pulled his default move whenever I serve anything with rice – douse it with soya sauce.

 

I think next time I might try this with Italian herbs – jazz it up with garlic, basil, and oregano and maybe some onion, too. Or, I bet this would be good with some mango chutney mixed in. Or you could try the TexMex approach. Many options. By the way, you could easily substitute cream of mushroom soup for the cream of chicken. Neither of them have a strong enough flavour to make an impact on this dish. 

 

By the way, in addition to Steve’s photo of Sonya’s recipe book, you can find the recipe here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/campbells-15-minute-chicken-and-rice-dinner-2/detail.aspx .

And we’re BACK!

Sonya and I have our next recipe. It comes from the Campbells Cookbook. I have taken a picture of the book to share the recipe. We made the practically-titled: “15-minute Chicken & Rice Dinner”. It was ok.

We browned the chicken (with an extra breast in there… more chicken!). Followed the recipe pretty much exactly, except we ended up keeping the dish on the stove with the lid on quite a bit longer than 5 min. Probably more like 15 minutes. I’m not sure if we had the right kind of rice… we had parboiled – which I looked up and concluded was the same as instant rice… I may have been mistaken. So while the rice cooked longer, it is possible that the chicken got a little overcooked and dried out… but not bad. It was still pretty succulent and satisfying. The other problem we ran into was that our paprika seemed rather tasteless… like literally. We put a pinch of it on our tongues… and tasted nothing. So I dumped a bunch of Sonya’s home-made creole spice on my plate. When in doubt, head to Louisiana.

We cooked a can of corn to go with it. CORN!

All in all, twas a good, straight forward, easy meal that I would recommend again… if you add more spice.

Yes, we have no bananas (in the freezer anymore)

Yesterday I made Sonya’s Banana Bread recipe, and I’d say that’s a keeper. I used three (thoroughly thawed) overripe bananas from my freezer, and I followed the recipe as given, except that I didn’t have walnuts, so I substitued pecans. Oh, and I also used Half-and-half instead of milk because I had extra of that and the extra cream makes extra yummy cakes and muffins. I left out the optional oil at the end of the ingredient list. I baked the loaf in a pan a little longer and narrower than a standard bread pan, and I baked it for somewhat longer than 50 minutes until it tested done.

The result was a very acceptable loaf which is now half gone.