Orange Chicken

Panda Express sells it's orange chicken sauce at the grocery store.  I don't do much grocery shopping, my husband does, but a few weeks ago I ended u going to the store and happened across the aisle with the sauce and picked up a bottle.  Can I tell you, the sauce is heaven.

The other night I wasn't really sure what to fix for dinner.  I had chicken, a red pepper, some frozen green beans and some onions.  Voila!  Orange chicken in the making.  And if I do say so myself, it was delicious.

What you'll need:

Chicken

Cornstarch

Red pepper

Green beans

Onion, diced

Carrots, if you have them

Rice

Orange sauce

First, cut the chicken up into small chunks or strips.  Put the chicken in a zip lock bag and add a couple table spoons of cornstarch.  Shake the chicken in the cornstarch until it's completely coated and let it sit for 5-10 minutes.

While the chicken is resting in the cornstarch, start prepping your veggies any shape or size you'd like.

Heat up a skillet (or a wok if you've got one) and add enough vegetable oil to coat the bottom of the pan.  When the pan and oil are hot, gently add the chicken and let it cook on one side until it gets golden brown.  Flip the chicken and brown the other side.  When the chicken is finished, remove it from the pan, dump the excess oil and add the vegetables.  Cook the veggies to your liking.

Once the veggies are cooked, add the chicken and the orange sauce back into the pan and let it simmer for about 5 minutes so that the sauce really penetrates the chicken and the veggies.

Serve over rice with a little soy sauce on the side.

Quick Cheese Steaks

Okay, some background. I love cheese steak sandwiches. Really love them. My love for them didn't really develop until the first time I ate a cheese steak at the Dairy Cottage in a suburb of Philadelphia, Penn. At the Dairy Cottage you either ordered a 12 or 24 inch sandwich and they didn't really recommend sharing.

That sandwich, featured in the above picture was divine. I've been to Philly several times and eaten lots of steaks, but this one takes the cake over all others.

(Admittedly not the best picture. Sorry)

We regularly have a homemade version of a cheese steak for dinner.  It's fast and easy to prepare and makes everyone happy.  I've experimented a lot with different meat (deli meat, cube steak, steak thinly sliced) but I think I found the right combination of steak and cheese (we always use provolone but last night I used Swiss) and marinade and they were pretty awesome last night.

Here's what you'll need:

Good rolls - 2 per person if they're small.  We like the Ciabata rolls from Harmon's

Stir Fry beef already cut into strips.  Buy it that way at the grocery store or see if the butcher can do it for you.

1 large sweet onion

1-2 red peppers

For the Marinade:

salt

pepper

garlic or garlic salt (depends on your tastes)

1 tbsp soy sauce

2-4 tbsp worcester sauce

2 tbsp olive oil

First, place your strips of steak in a zip lock and add the marinade ingredients.  Let it stew for 10-20 minutes.  

Slice the onion into rings and the red pepper into very thin strips.  Place the onion and pepper into a hot skillet with a little bit of olive oil.  Cook the veggies to your liking....I like them black and caramelized.

Take the onion and pepper out of the skillet and cook the meat.  Because of the thin strips it will cook fast.  Give it about 3 minutes and toss.  Then add the onion and peppers back into the mix for another 3-5 minutes.  

Once everything is good and juicy and smells like heaven then add your cheese.  Last night, we used Swiss.  Let the cheese melt into the meat and then serve to family and friends.  The whole process takes about 20 minutes and everyone will walk away full and happy.

Stove top potatoes with paprika

Oh, how I love potatoes. My sister once told me that if she were to open a restaurant, it would only serve potatoes.

These potatoes are super yummy and smokey and even though they are cooked on the stove top the taste like they were roasted in the oven.

Here's what you'll need:
2-4 Russet potatoes, washed and cut into 1 inch cubes
olive oil
salt
pepper
1 teaspoon paprika

Heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the cubed potatoes. Cook the potatoes in 5 minute intervals, covered with a lid. Every 5 min shake and flip the potatoes. You'll do this for 20-30 minutes. The potatoes are done when they are soft enough for a knife to go through them. With about 5 minutes left, sprinkle the paprika over the potatoes and shake to mix.

Mini Meatloaves and Smashed Potatoes (with a St. Patty's Day theme)

Tonight I made these turkey mini meat loaves and mashed potatoes from Skinnytaste.com. I changed it a tiny bit, because I cannot help myself. Instead of cooking them in a mini loaf pan, I cooked them in a muffin tin sprayed with PAM. They were then personal meat loaves.

My sister and I have been making a lot of these recipes and I haven't made anything I haven't liked yet.


In fact, a couple days ago I made Pasta with Cauliflower and it was really good as well. I used four strips of bacon instead of anchovies, because I have never cooked with anchovies and I was a bit scared.

Spinach Lasagna Rolls

I made these tonight and they are very good. The recipe is from SkinnyTaste.com.

I added quartered roasted mushrooms because I had some I didn't want to waste and they were very delicious.

I also like this website because it has a lot of nutritional information with the recipes, including Weight Watchers points. Check it out.

Spinach Lasagna Rolls
Gina's Weight Watcher Recipes
Servings: 9 • Serving Size: 1 roll • Old Points: 4 pts • Points+: 6 ww pts
Calories: 224.9 • Fat: 5.1 g • Fiber: 3.4 g • Protein: 13.0 g • Carbs: 31.5

9 lasagna noodles, cooked
10 oz frozen chopped spinach, thawed and completely drained
15 oz fat free ricotta cheese (I like Polly-o)
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 egg
salt and fresh pepper
32 oz tomato sauce
9 tbsp (about 3 oz) part skim mozzarella cheese, shredded

Preheat oven to 350°. Combine spinach, ricotta, Parmesan, egg, salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Ladle about 1 cup sauce on the bottom of a 9 x 12 baking dish.

Place a piece of wax paper on the counter and lay out lasagna noodles. Make sure noodles are dry. Take 1/3 cup of ricotta mixture and spread evenly over noodle. Roll carefully and place seam side down onto the baking dish. Repeat with remaining noodles.

Ladle sauce over the noodles in the baking dish and top each one with 1 tbsp mozzarella cheese. Put foil over baking dish and bake for 40 minutes, or until cheese melts. Makes 9 rolls.

To serve, ladle a little sauce on the plate and top with lasagna roll.

Beef Empanadas

Another yummy recipe from the Mad Hungry cookbook.  Seriously, go and buy it today.  You'll thank your self later.

This recipe was really pretty easy, but much more time consuming than I normally would go for on a week night.  But, since my husband is a work-a-holic and we've been eating dinner an hour later than normal, I had the time.

Anyway - for the first time, it took me two hours from start to finished and on the table.  Was it worth it?  Oh yes.  So worth it that I might make them again next week - but actually figure out how to make a side dish, too.  Not that these babies need anything else.

First, you need to make the pastry.  At a minimum, the pastry needs to chill for thirty minutes.  Mine chilled for about 8 hours and then needed to sit on the counter for a good 15-30 before it was ready to roll out.

Cream Cheese Pastry
8 tbsp unsalted butter at room temp
4 oz cream cheese at room temp
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 and 1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp salt

cream the butter, cheese, and cream with an electric mixer.  Add the flour and salt until incorporated.  Split the dough into two equal sections, form into two disks and wrap each one separately in plastic wrap.  Place dough in the fridge.

Beef filling
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, chopped fine
1 small green pepper, chopped fine
1 lb ground beef
1 tsp ground cumin
3/4 cup olives, chopped (green or black)
3/4 cup raisins (I didn't use these)
1 tsp honey
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
dashes of hot sauce to taste
2 eggs, separated

Chop the onion and the green pepper and start to saute them in a very hot pan, in the olive oil.  When the onions are starting to get translucent, add the beef.  When the beef is almost 100 % cooked, add the olives and raisins (if you like), the honey, the cumin (I didn't have cumin so I just used a whole butt load of different seasoning salts), the honey, salt, pepper,  and hot sauce.  Let cook until the beef is completely finished and turn off the heat.

The beef needs to cool completely in the fridge.  After it has cooled completely, stir in the egg whites from your two eggs.

While the beef is cooking, get out your cream cheese pastry so it can warm up a bit.  Once the beef is in the fridge to cool, it's time to roll out the dough.

Work with one disk at a time and roll it out like you would for sugar cookies.  Make sure you have a clean, well floured work surface and a good rolling pin.  Roll the dough pretty thin and then use a medium bowl (about 5 inches across) as your dough cutter.  Place the bowl on the dough and with a knife, cut around the edges.  Repeat the process, only re-rolling each piece of dough once.

If you do it right, you should end up with 10-12 circles of dough.

To assemble the empanadas, place a couple small spoonfuls of meat filling onto one half of a dough circle.  Wet the outer edge of dough with some water and fold it over, pressing each edge together gently.  Then with a fork, crimp the edges together.  Do this for all of your dough circles, making little half moon pies.

Once all are finished, place them on a cookie sheet and stick them back in the fridge while the oven heats up to 375 degrees.

Once the oven is hot, take the empanadas out of the fridge and poke some holes in them with a fork.  Then, take the two egg yolks, mix them with 1 tbsp of water and give each empanada a quick egg wash.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden brown.

Let them rest for about 7 minutes before you devour them.  They will still be super dooper hot.

So yummy, so yummy.

Enjoy!

Italian French Fries

I have a new cook book.  Mad Hungry!  The book?  Holy cow.  Reading it is like reading a novel that I cannot tear myself away from, except that my mouth is watering the entire time.

The recipes are amazing, yummy and fantastic.

I'm making a couple of the recipes this week and the first was last night - Italian fries.

Super easy and they were awesome.

Here you go.

Russet potatoes (for our little family I used 3, but use enough for all the people you're going to feed)
dried oregano
dried thyme
garlic salt
Romano cheese
butter
salt and pepper to taste

heat your oven to 400 degrees and lightly coat a cookie sheet with olive oil.

wash, dry and slice your russet potatoes like french fries.  I left the skin on mine.

arrange your potatoes on the cookie sheet - they can overlap - and generously season with the oregano, thyme and garlic salts.

once seasoned, sprinkle the shredded Romano cheese all over the top.  Then, using about 2 tablespoons of butter, spread little pats of love all around the pan.

coat the top with a little drizzle of olive oil and put them in the oven for about 45 minutes.

At this point, for me, the potatoes were done, but the cheese wasn't yet crusty so I turned my broiler on high and broiled them for about 5 more minutes.

Serve and enjoy.  They were so good I'm tempted to fix them for dinner tonight, too.

When a friend gives you peppers

It's already Wednesday and we haven't been to the grocery store this week.  We went on Saturday for Father's Day Feast supplies, but the basic weekly staples are elusive.  In fact, I don't even remember what we ate for dinner on Monday night.  How crazy is that!

The other day, a good friend whose got produce connections, set me up with a giant bowl of peppers.  Ooooohhhhh, peppers!  We'll be eating them for the rest of the week for sure but last nights' dinner with them was pretty tasty.

Like I said, we haven't been to the store.  All I really had int he fridge was a piece of meat (Tri-tip steak), some shallots, cilantro, and oh yeah, the peppers.

We settled on steak fajitas.  The steak was grilled and sliced thin.  The peppers were sauteed with the shallots.  Cilantro was sprinkled on top as a finishing touch.

The end result turned out pretty tasty.

Father's Day Feast

Every Sunday we enjoy dinner at my parents house.  It's something I look forward to for the entire week.  On a few ocassions however, I invite the fam. over to my house for Sunday dinner.  Today being Father's Day, I decided that it would be a good time for such an invitation.

Today's Menu:
Baby Back Pork Ribs
Warm Potato Salad (with no mayonaise)
Corn Salad with Green Onions and Vinegar Dressing
Green Salad
Sourdough Rolls

Cookie Dough Cupcakes for Dessert

The perfect onion ring

I'm a sucker for a good onion ring.  French fries are usually my first choice when going with a greasy side,  but a good onion ring?  It's part of food nirvana-land for me. 

Now, there are a few places around town to get good onion rings but making them at home has always been a challenge for me.  I've bought the packets of mix at the grocery store and made up my own recipes and nothing ever really seems to work out. 

That was, until this week.  I had buttermilk in my fridge and some self-rising flour in the pantry.  After reading a couple of recipes and knowing that I had some good onions in the crisper I embarked on an onion ring adventure.

First, I sliced those onions as thinly as I possible could.  Nothing more gross that a fat, slimy onion ring.  Next, I put the onion slices in a bowl of buttermilk and let them soak.  While they were soaking, I made a quick seasoning mix:  self-rising flour, cayenne pepper (I was brave and used a little more than I thought I should), garlic salt, some all purpose "fiesta" seasoning, salt and pepper.

How did I know if I got enough flavor in the flour?  I didn't but my rule of thumb was to make sure that the flour wasn't stark white - that the color had changed a bit because of everything I added.

So, the onion slices went from the buttermilk, to the flour mixture, to a cookie sheet covered in wax paper with a thin layer of flower to keep the onions from sticking.  Once I had most of them ready, I started to fry.

We don't fry much in our family.  In fact, we don't fry anything, but the occasional chicken finger and that's in just a little bit of oil.  Our french fries are always baked and just a few months ago we gave our fry daddy (a seven year old wedding present never opened) to good will.

I never really know how hot oil needs to be, but I just started dropping my rings in and adjusting the temperature as necessary.  One thinly sliced onion makes a lot of rings, by the way.  Once they were golden brown, I took them out of the oil, placed them on a plate with a bunch of paper towels and gave them a final dusting of salt.

Holy crap!  These suckers were good.  They were so good that I fixed them for dinner the next night and ate almost an entire onion by myself.

We ate them on steak sandwiches and hamburgers.  They were also excellent plain.  I'm not sure what to "dip" onion rings in, but they were seasoned well enough, especially the second night, that they were just super tasty all on their own.