Recipes

I was asked by a co-congregant to put out some recipes. These are of course "man" recipes as opposed to "woman" recipes as they're real basic and easy to follow. Both of these particualr recipes involve onions and garlic.


You could do without this device if you're prepared to do lots of detailed chopping, but as I use it at least once or twice a week, it's a good investment. This is a garlic chopper. The onion chopper is bigger, but this is fine for both onions and garlic in personal-sized recipes. I'm a "dash of this and a bit of that" kind of cook as opposed to a "measuring cup" kind of cook, so feel free to play around with the amounts that I suggest.

Yellow onion
Garlic
Half-cup of Snow Peas
Olive oil
Soy sauce

 Fill up the chopper twice with sliced-up yellow onion and about a quarter of the basket should be cloves of peeled garlic. Chop then up together and put them in a bowl. Take about a half-cup of snow peas and cut off both ends of each pea-pod. Use either a pair of scissors or a knife, they'll both do the job.


I like using olive oil, but not the amounts that the bottle pours out. This is a drizzler, it'll reduce the flow of olive oil so you get what you need and no more. Pre-heat the frying pan, drizzle a bit of oil onto the pan and when the pan is good and hot (The oil will become very liquid), toss in the onion, garlic and snow peas. Stir right away to get all the ingredients dampened with the oil, then let it all sit for a minute or so. Stir again, let it sit some more. Repeat until the peas become soft and until the smallest bits of onion and garlic appear burnt. Put a bit of soy sauce over the mixture, this should produce sizzling and steaming, then dump it all on the plate! You're good to go!

Second recipe is for Bruschetta. I tried looking up recipes for this Italian treat once (Pronounced broo-shet-ta)  and there are all SORTS of different variants on it, so this is just my own personal preference.


This is a pan I use at least four or five times a week. It's a toaster oven pan (The toaster oven is long gone), but if you place the bread on the rack and put a pan on the next bottom rack, between the bread and the coils/burners, that should do the job of getting heat to the bread without endangering the coils/burner with dripping/falling ingredients.

Yellow onion
Garlic
Vinegar
can of diced Tomatoes
Bread
Olive oil
grated Cheese


Fill up the chopper four times with the same proportion of onions and garic and place the mixture into a plastic container. Red wine vinegar is my usual favorite. Put the vinegar into the mixture (No need to cover the onion-garlic mixture as osmosis will see to it that all of the mixture is eventually soaked), and let the whole mixture sit in the refrigerator for a day. Then take the can of diced tomatoes and mix that into the onion-garlic-vinegar mixture.

Drizzle some olive oil onto the bread, start up the oven and place the bread on top of the rack. It takes five to ten minutes for the bread to start getting toasted and of course ovens are different, so check it frequently. As soon as the bread shows signs of toasting, place the onion-garlic-tomato mixture onto the bread, top with the grated cheese, place it all back in the oven just long enough for the cheese to melt (Should be less than a minute). bring it out and you've got a piece of bruschetta!

Meals

Decided to expend on this post and cover my four standard breakfasts, a lunch, a dinner and a late dinner.

Breakfast 1


This is a bruschetta toast, as described above, a sausage (kielbasa is the kind of sausage I normally use, but this is a different type) that I slit and then baked along with the toast and then I have some oatmeal. I was told by a nutritionist many years ago that oatmeal was better for my disgestion than regular cereal was and I felt that keeping milk can be a pain, so I've used oatmeal instead of cereal ever since. My sister and her daughter tried to make oatmeal tasty, so they tried different kinds of oatmeal with different toppings and sweeteners and finally concluded that they might as well just eat cereal, but I found that Whole Foods sells a seven-grain brand that includes organic wheat, oats, barley, soybeans, buckwheat, wheat bran, corn and millet. I combine that with Silver Palate oatmeal if I can find it or any other types of similar multi-grain oatmeals. The point is that the seven-grain has a lot of finely-ground pieces and Silver Palate has a lot of heavier, thicker pieces.

To make the oatmeal:
Boil two cups of water.
Put in three heaping tablespoons of the seven-grain and one heaping tablespoon of the Silver Palate oatmeal.
Reduce the heat. The tic-marks on the dial on my stove go from one to nine. I reduce the heat to six.
Stir immediately. Wait four or five minutes, stir again. Keep stirring every two minutes or so until the oatmeal becomes a thick paste, put it on the plate (Using a bowl is fine, but the plate I use cools the oatmeal down very quickly).

Breakfast 2


The toast here is smoked salmon salad or salmon pate (Salmon cream cheese is a perfectly good substitute, but it doesn't freeze well and doesn't keep all that long in the refrigerator, so if you're going to make this toast for several people, marvelous. But if you're just making it for yourself, you're better off with the salad or pate), topped with grated cheese and then a slice of salmon. Toast the bread in the oven, place on the three ingredients and put it back in until the cheese is melted, then serve.

I used to make iced tea by just using an unsweet iced tea mix
(Northerner call it unsweetened, Southerners say unsweet), but one day the stores simply didn't have that mix in, so I boiled a quart of water, placed in three tea bags (Some people like to let the tea steep for a long time, I prefer letting it steep for 30 seconds to a minute and to then pull the tea right out), allowed the tea to cool for a few hours (If you make it at breakfast-time and get back to it when you return home from work or school, that works fine) and then placed it in a quart jar and then into the refrigerator. I serve it with some ice. My favorite type of tea is Lapsang Souchong, a smoky black tea, but any black or green tea will do and heck, there's nothing wrong with your basic Orange Pekoe.

Breakfast 3


Pancake with ground pork sausage in some marinade. Several types of pancakes are made the same way, with an egg, a tablespoon of vegetable oil, a cup of milk and a cup of pancake mix, all mixed together and poured out onto the pan until the mixture is about an inch deep. Cook it for awhile, place some blueberries on top, wait until you can see the edges turning hard, flip it once and let it brown on the other side, place it onto a plate and slap some butter on before it cools. I then put maple syrup on.

A two-cup mix will make three of the above-pictured pancakes and I find that after they're cooked, buttered, syruped and allowed to cool, they can be stored in quart-size freezer bags and frozen. To reconstitute, just place them on a rack and place that in the oven at 350
o until thoroughly warmed up. I usually put a bit more butter and syrup on before serving.

To make the ground pork dish, place about a tablespoon of chopped onion in the bowl you see above. Marinate by pouring in some vinegar (red wine is good) and let sit out in the open for half an hour or so. Put in a teaspoon of ketchup and mix. Then, put about  a hamburger patty's worth of ground pork into the bowl and microwave the whole thing, mixing it two or three times to make sure it's all evenly cooked.

Breakfast 4



Bacon and scrambled egg. Yeah, I use just one egg and just two slices of bacon. I spoke with a nutritionist back when I had a weight problem and told her what I had for breakfast. She said that what I was eating was perfectly good, I was just eating too much of it. So I consider this to be a good, modest portion that still leaves me reasonably satisfied.

Two slices of bacon
One egg
Grated cheese
Chopped onion
Pepper

I cook the bacon first, flipping it two or three times until the fatty white areas shrink and the red areas get dark. This gets the pan greased up and makes oil unnecessary. Place the bacon onto two folded-over paper towels. Press down so that the towel absorbs a lot of the fat. Pour the excess grease off of the pan onto a folded paper towel that's been placed on a small dish.

Without turning the heat off, put a fair amount of chopped onion onto the hot pan and move it around maybe twice until some of the smaller pieces look burnt. Crack and empty the egg into a bowl, mix it up with the pepper and then place the cooked chopped onion into the bowl with the egg. Mix the chopped onion with the egg and pour the mixture out onto the pan. try to cover the entire pan with the mixture and let it all sit until the mixture is cooked through. Place the grated cheese onto the mixture and as you remove the mixture from the pan, fold it over on itself so that the cheese melts better. Place the bacon onto the plate and you're ready.

When cleaning up, take the towels that you put the bacon in and use those to wrap up the towel that you poured the bacon grease into.

Lunch



Seltzer (Club soda works just as well), potato chips and a sandwich consisting of wheat bread, Miracle Whip (Mayonnaise works just as well), lettuce, two slices of cheese and two of bologna.

Having two relatively small dishes works quite well when one is eating in front of a computer, as I do in all of these meals. When one has someone to chat with, a single large plate is fine.

Dinner


Two sticks of celery broken up, a chicken thigh barbecued on the grill and then frozen.


I reconstituted the chicken thigh by thawing it on the toaster oven pan. I left it out for an hour, then heated it up in the oven for about 10 minutes at 450
o, then put some barbecue sauce on it.

Four tablespoons brown rice
One tablesp
oon chopped garlic
Three tablespoons chopped onions
Salad dressing
Soy Sauce

I cooked the rice by putting it into two cups of boiling water. Stirred it immediately and then every minute or so. When the water had boiled away so that it was just about even with the rice, I put in the onions and garlic and stirred them in. Stirred every 30 seconds or so to make sure that the rice didn't stick to the bottom of the saucepan and served when there was little or no water left. Then put on the salad dressing (Vinaigrette is probably the best type, though creamy dressings aren't bad) and then a bit of Soy Sauce.

Late night dinner


This is for 8:00pm and after, when you want to make sure that your dinner doesn't cause any problems with sleeping. The bowl next to the glass has pistachios and cashews, the soup is Instant Miso and Ramen Noodles and the popcorn was popped in a microwave oven.

Update:

Felt wealthy after Christmas and so went out and got myself a new half-size broiler pan from K-Mart. Here, I'm using it to defrost a half a baked potato. My sister advised to always spray vegetable oil onto the bottom of the pan to keep the pan from building up stuff there.


After it was sufficiently defrosted (An hour, I think), I cut it in half and then into quarters, being careful to not cut all the way through. I then put it in the oven at 350
o. After about 20 minutes or so, I felt the white part and it felt pretty soggy, so I placed the salmon filet in the oven next to it (The filet was Applewood Smoked from Giant) on a flat baking sheet. After about 25 minutes, I saw that the salmon filet had leaked out stuff all around it, which meant it was done. I took a flat spatula to scoop up the filet and all the stuff that had spilled out and placed it all on the plate, scooping the liquid onto the filet. The filet came with a packet, which I then emptied out onto the filet.

I placed butter and pepper onto the potato and put the potato back in (The reason I didn't cut all the way through to break the skin is so that all of the butter remained in the potato and nothing dripped out onto the pan). After about a minute, I had grated some cheese, which I then placed on top of the potato. Another minute and I pulled the potato out and put that onto the plate as well. Then I broke up some celery and I was ready to eat.





Further update:

I got the idea of a Japanese lunchbox from a Rumiko Takahashi comic book, think it was either L'um or Ranma ½.










This contains four containers of roughly equal size. Here's the meal I had yesterday.











Broken-up celery in the bigger container, about a third of a broken-up filet of Applewood Smoked Salmon and a combination of brown rice and navy beans.

Rice & Navy Beans (With onions and garlic)

Boil water.

Put in two tablespoons of beans.

Allow to boil for about a minute.

Cover, turn off heat and allow to soak for an hour.

Dump out water.

Remove beans and set aside in a small dish.

Boil water.

Put in three tablespoons of rice.

Chop about a tablespoon of garlic and three tablespoons of onions and place them in the dish along with the beans.

When the water over the rice is almost even with the rice, place the beans and the garlic and onion into the rice & water. Stir.

Continue cooking until the water is gone, stirring fairly frequently near the end to make sure the rice doesn't stick to the bottom of the saucepan.

To dress, put on salad dressing and soy sauce. A good recipe is equal quantities of oil, vinegar and soy sauce. Stir it all together and put on top of the rice/beans combination.

There will be a good deal more salmon, rice and beans that won't fit into the containers, so you can have all that separately/

Here's the next day's lunch in the process of being made:









That's half a can of Green Giant Corn Niblets and three Italian Bistro Beef Meatballs in the meats'n'starches container. I'm preparing the salad by pulling out two half-used heads of Romaine Lettuce. I placed the cup of salad dressing into the center of the container and then put the lettuce all around it.

Here's the whole set of containers.














The greens container looks completely full of salad here. The other two containers are for dessert, three Fig Newtons, two chocolate cookies and some honey-roasted, salted cashews for having right after lunch and miscellaneous candies and chocolates for during the day.