Fish tacos and next week

Quick update on the fish tacos -

Pros:
Super easy to make with very little investment of cooking time.
Actually got hubby to eat fish and lick the plate.

Cons:
The fish wasn't salty enough for me - it was kind of bland, to be honest.
I didn't much care for the sauce that was with the recipe either - it was just bleh.
The fish cost $11.00 to feed the three of us, which is usually twice what I spend on meat for a meal.

However, daughter wants me to definitely make them again, and husband liked them well enough to give it a thumbs up so while not my personal favorite, we can use the recipe  in a pinch.

Link to the recipe follows, for anyone who wants to give them a shot. Please add more salt than what the recipe calls for - double it (seriously) in the seasoning on the fish when you go to pan fry.

http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/blackened-tilapia-baja-tacos-50400000110429/

Also, wanted to post the lineup for this week, and I'm tired so this blog entry will be short & sweet. We all got to pick one favorite this week, so that all of us are represented in the menu. Remember, any day can be any meal, although I am leaning toward making the char siu for Friday.

Spinach Ravioli
Shrimp Fettucine (daughter's pick) - fish #1
Turkey taco night (hubby's pick)
Pizza night (my pick - and I'm making the dough in the bread machine, yay)
Pasta Puttanesca (fish #2 from cooking light cookbook)
and
Char Siu pork roast from the cooking light crockpot book. I plan on making that with some brown rice cooked in chicken stock and then sauteed in some light oil with stir fry veggies and soy sauce. Should be delish.

Since the words are looking blurry and I keep making typos, that's it for tonight. I'll update more when I start cooking this week's meals.

I also made a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread today, and a gingerbread cake, which is one of my favorites.

How did we do this week?

You may ask this question, if you are keeping up with the blog - and -

It was a tough week, I'll be honest. But we made it! And although I was sorely tempted to hit that drive through, I am happy to report that I didn't do it all week long and we ate at home every single night this week.

The lineup ended up being:

Monday: Black beans & rice
Tuesday: Sauerbraten
Wednesday: Tuna pasta salad
Thursday: Turkey meat sloppy joes & corn
Friday: Blackened baja fish tacos (which I am making for dinner tonight)

Stress at work has been driving me insane. By Wednesday, I was ready to cave, plus my car had a seizure (NO OIL due to a leaky oil filter... thanks, Fram, for almost totalling my beautiful truck) so the stress levels were high on both me and my husband. And the additional $300 it cost to get my car towed and fixed isn't helping anything this month. Hubby would have fixed, but this apartment doesn't have much of a garage, so it was off to the mechanic.

I can say that the pre-chopping really saved me, as all I had to do was come home and just throw stuff in a pan and we had dinners within 20 minutes. Which was amazing. And not only healthier for us, but better on our budget.

While the blackened fish tacos are still an unknown quantity, I can say that the sauerbraten is a recipe we won't be trying again any time soon. While no one in the family HATED it, no one loved it, either. And it's very weird to me to eat a roast that is sweet - thanks to the ginger snaps in the marinade/gravy.  Although they both consumed it and said it was OK, I was the one that ended up eating sauerbraten for lunch for the rest of this week. And I'm pretty much over it for quite some time.

The big stars this week were the black beans & rice (which I posted earlier) and the sloppy joes. They want me to make these more often. So this is the recipe I am posting for your enjoyment. The total cook time is only 20 minutes, and you can serve them on whole wheat buns, add cheese, or even serve them over baked potatoes. I will admit, it was really quite good and another nice warm comforting meal to come home to when it's 1 degree outside and the wind chills are 30 below zero, as happened to us this week.

I already did the meal planning and food shopping for next week, and I'll post that lineup later on.

In the meantime, here is the sloppy joe recipe (serves 4)

1 lb ground turkey breast
1/2 cup diced green pepper
1/2 cup diced vidalia onion
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp mustard
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1/2 cup ketchup
1 tbsp white vinegar
 8 ounces tomato sauce (I like to use Classico tomato & basil)
and buns, of course!

Combine the meat, peppers, and onions in a large skillet over medium heat. Brown and drain fat. Add remainder of ingredients. Cover, and reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes.

That's it - pretty darn easy recipe and very, very tasty.

And now, I'm off to twitch for awhile while I watch my guilty pleasure show, Mob Wives. 

This Week and the Plan

So in the true spirit of eating meals at home and incorporating two fish meals into our diet this week, I sat down this weekend and pre-planned the meals. This week's dinners are:

Spinach ravioli (low fat cheese ravioli in a spinach-tomato sauce)
Black beans and rice (Cuban style, over brown rice)
Ground turkey sloppy joes with corn
Slow cooker sauerbraten with spaetzle and green beans
Tuna noodle casserole (at DH's request)
Blackened Tilapia Baja tacos

The tuna casserole is to ease DH into fish this week. He requested it, so I figured if I could keep him happy by making him something he wanted, then I could get him to eat the fish tacos later on ....

I like pre-planning the meals this way and making the grocery list with the cookbooks on hand, so we don't buy anything extra, and I don't have it planned by day by day, so I can still make what I feel like making when I get home, as long as I stick with the overall meal plan for the week. Flexible, yet planned. I love it!

Another thing that I think will help immensely is that I did all the prep on Sunday afternoon. I previewed the recipes and pre-chopped everything ahead of time and stored them all in the fridge, so now when I get home I can just grab the ingredients and cook. The prospect of having to chop when I get home at 6PM is off-putting and sends me to the drive through more often than not. Now, this required about an hour of my weekend time, but I think it will be worth it in the end.

I had a huge "derp" moment, though - I was going to do the sauerbraten in the crock pot while I was at work today, but it didn't dawn on me that it only needed to cook for 5 hours on low setting. I pre-read the recipe, and noticed that the meat had to marinate for 24 hours and I took care of that, but why the 5 hours cooking time did not compute, I couldn't say. I leave for bus stop drops/commute to work at 7:15AM, and I don't get home much before 6PM, and I was not comfortable leaving the crock pot on and unattended for that long. Plus, the roast is just going to dry out if it sits there for 11 hours, even on "keep warm" setting.

So, change of plan: I'm doing the sauerbraten tonight in the slow cooker for tomorrow night's dinner, and all I will need to do is reheat it and cook the spaetzle when I get home.

This evening's dinner, by request from DD, was black beans and rice. The pre-chopped ingredients worked like a charm, and I'll let you in on a little secret: I use homemade chicken stock when I cook the brown rice to give it a flavor boost. Here is the recipe, which was given to me by my mother in law and which I tweaked, just a bit:

2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup finely diced onion
2 tsp minced garlic
2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1 tsp oregano
1 packet Goya Sazon
1 tbsp wine (white or zinfandel works best, and if you don't have wine, it's OK to use a wine vinegar)
4 slices turkey bacon, pre-cooked and chopped
16 ounces (2 cups) chicken stock

Cook in a separate pot:
Brown rice (I use Minute Rice and make around 2 cups yield, using chicken stock in place of water)

Heat the olive oil over medium heat, and add the onions and garlic. Saute until onions are translucent. Add seasonings, wine, and bacon, then black beans. Stir in chicken stock last. Bring to a boil, then decrease heat and let mixture reduce until liquid is absorbed (about 30 minutes or so).  Serve over separately cooked brown rice (about 1/2 cup rice to about 1/2 cup black bean mixture). This recipe serves 4.

I'll let you know how the sauerbraten is, tomorrow evening. They are forecasting temps at 15 below zero for tomorrow so I think that's a good warm choice for dinner.

The 12 Healthy Habits Challenge

A new year, yet another New Year's resolution to get fit, lose weight, and move on with my life.
I have been on so many diets over the course of my life I really should be writing a book on them. Lord knows, I've tried them all: NutriSystem, Opti Fast, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and all sorts of fad diets that I've found in Cosmo and women's magazines. When all is said and done, one year after I start the diet, I end up 30 pounds heavier and hundreds of dollars poorer. Because all of those different "programs" never teach me how to eat or change what I'm doing. Scratch that - Weight Watchers does - to a point. But ever since they changed the plan into the points system, I find it very hard to follow. And I already have enough going on in my life without having to sit down and perform calculus on every morsel I put into my mouth.

It should be simple - you need to burn more calories than you take in. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Putting it into practice with emotional eating is another kettle of fish, so to speak. But I really do get it. I swear.

So this year, I'm trying to look at things differently. I'm going to be monitoring my activity on the Bodymedia FIT that DH kindly bought me for Christmas, and I'm going to be following the Cooking Light Food Lover's Healthy Habits challenge. I have been wearing the Bodymedia FIT band for the past two days to get a baseline on where I am and what's going on with me, and I can already see that I need to bump up the workouts, and cut the high calorie dinners and snacks.

I like the Healthy Habits challenge, because it's not a "plan", per se - but a guideline to make real life changes that you can incorporate into your daily existence and get them to "stick" -  into habits.

For January's Healthy Habits, I've decided to tackle two:

• Cook at least 3 more meals at home each week
• Eat more fish (make fish the centerpiece of at least 2 meals per week)

I chose the above, because they are the most glaringly obvious changes we need to make. If I can plan right and make it work, these will benefit my entire family immensely.

Because I'm working and I get stuck in traffic after I pick DD up from the after school program, by the time I get home at night I'm starving and just too worn out to deal with figuring out what to put on the table. We resort to fast food far too often. And the only fast food place that is local to us is McDonald's - the Fat, Calorie, and Sodium fest. Which isn't good for any of us. And DH's schedule is just so hellish I never know what time he's going to get home at night, so the meal planning is entirely in my hands.

The fish piece should be a particular challenge for us, because as you know if you've been reading this blog, my spouse is of the Picky persuasion. And I'm certain that the bitching and beefing will be heard as far as California, even though we currently reside in New Jersey.

However, I am hoping I can get him on board by making less fishy fish, and putting it into foods he already loves - just need to add fish as the meat component - so things like fish tacos, salmon burgers, and mixing it with pasta and tomato sauce. And I need to stay away from the "slimy" fish like oysters and clams. I may be able to get him to eat scallops, but I'm not sure. The good thing is, he agreed to do this to help me and to help lower his cholesterol.

DD will not be a problem at all, as she loves anything that swims, as do I.

Tomorrow, I'll be doing the meal planning for the next week, and I will post the results of the recipes I find on here, as well as review our progress in incorporating the habits into our daily routine.

And if I didn't mention this before, I am starting a gourmet cooking class on January 21, so I am hoping that it will help me bump up some good options for us going forward, and help me hone my skills.

Wish me luck - and Happy New Year!

I'm back... with more slow cooker fun

Santa was very good to me this year, and brought me a bunch of different cookbooks for the holidays.

Since I'm back at work full time and living in yet another apartment on the east coast, I'm going to be using a lot of the slow cooker recipes - which I am trying from Cooking Light's "Slow Cooker Tonight" cookbook. I tried to select recipes with an 8 hour cooking time or thereabouts so that I can start to use it once a week while I'm at work.

For New Year's Eve, I thought I would kick it off with my first choice from the book, Beef Burgundy with Egg Noodles.

It was a snap to make - prep time took maybe all of 10 minutes max, and the apartment smelled heavenly all afternoon. It seemed to have cooked in less time than the 8 hours on "low" setting called for, but a pretty good recipe nonetheless.

Link is here if you want to find it online:
http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/beef-burgundy-egg-noodles-50400000124208/

I used Beringer's White Zinfandel for the wine, and Angus stew beef. When the beef was done, it literally fell apart and everything else was so flavorful and very good.  I think the Angus made a big difference in the flavor, and it also probably helped that the entire thing was stewing in wine all afternoon :-)

It's one of the perfect winter stews, I think. Best part about it was, entire family loved it - got a solid 3 thumbs up from all of us so it's made my "make this again" list.

I've started by marking the slow cooker cookbook with post-it flags - blue are for recipes I've yet to try. When I find one we like, I'll mark it again with a red flag so that we know this is a good go-to recipe for the future.

I am also going to be following the food lover's 12 healthy habits cookbook and plan on incorporating two of those healthy habits in January - I will let you know what they are and how they are progressing as we go.

The only thing I have to decide now is what to make  for next week's crockpot meal. What would you choose?

Char Siu Pork Roast (Chinese BBQ pork shredded and served over veggie stir fry and rice)

Sauerbraten (which I haven't had in YEARS - my family used to go to the Triangle Hofbrau on Route 23 in Wayne, NJ for that and I believe the Hofbrau has been closed for a long time).

Potato-cheddar soup with homemade bread

or something not listed here - I want to give chicken a break for awhile as we've been chicken'd to death lately. I may also break out into some seafood in January as that's one of the healthy habits we all need to incorporate. Til next time (and hopefully I can keep up with the blog this time around, and I promise to make every effort to do so).

Chicken.... Delicious Chicken

I don't know about you, but I'm always trying to find new things to do with chicken. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) Le Spouse of the Fussy Persuasion refuses to eat much else;
2) It's a good low-fat protein option;
3) It's affordable; and
4) It's pretty versatile.

But since I've been with my husband for over 20 years, (23 to be exact), there are only so many times you can make stir-fry chicken, chicken sandwiches, chicken parm, chicken salad, or oven roasted chicken without going insane. My favorite kind of chicken, for the record, is a roast whole chicken. Makes the entire house smell fantastic, it's super easy to make, and the meat falls right off the bone if done right. Whole chickens are also pretty inexpensive and I'm able to pull about 3 meals out of one bird for the 3 of us.

Aside from that tangent, tonight I found a new recipe to add to my chicken bag o'tricks.

The September 2012 issue of Cooking Light magazine features flavorful entrees for less than $2.50 per serving. You know I'm all about the budget meals that are tasty, and are good for us, so I was very pumped to receive this issue.

The recipe I made for dinner tonight was Chicken with Honey-Beer Sauce. Let me tell you something, this recipe was not only super-easy to make, it was also very inexpensive and it took 20 minutes. 20 minutes! And the sauce is FANTASTIC.

Only problem with this recipe was that Le Spouse and I don't drink. And finding just 1/2 cup of beer that the recipe calls for was rather difficult. I don't know if you are aware of this, but most stores do not sell single containers or bottles of beer. And I didn't want to purchase an entire 6-pack when nobody in the house would drink it. Of course, I only looked in grocery stores for it. I probably could have found a tall boy in a convenience store somewhere. Do they sell single cans of beer? It's been a long time since I've bought any and I don't usually look in the convenience stores to check.

I decided that I would substitute 1/2 cup of chicken broth for the 1/2 cup of beer the recipe calls for, and it worked beautifully - gave the sauce a buttery, rich flavor and probably reduced the overall cost of of the dish.

Link to the recipe is here:

http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/chicken-honey-beer-sauce-50400000122903/

It was great - involved barely any chopping, and according to Cooking Light, only costs $2.36 per serving. The only thing I did a bit differently was to pound the breasts down to about 1/2" thickness using saran wrap and a meat mallet, because you want to be sure all the chicken cooks evenly.

The only caution I might have for novice cooks is that you will have to reduce the sauce, which can be daunting. Be sure to keep an eye on it and stir it frequently. When it starts to thicken, add the chicken back to the pan and flip until it's fully coated in the mixture.

It was so delicious that words fail me. Buttery, oniony, tangy but sweet - and the chicken was very moist. I served it with a mixed green salad covered in a light Italian dressing.

I want to make it again and again. If you are a fan of chicken, and are running out of ideas - definitely give this recipe a try. Totally worth it. A solid 5 out of 5 stars. 

Baking with Fondant and GIR

I know, I know - it's been two months since I've posted on here. I'm sorry. Life has just been incredibly busy lately.

A little known factoid about me - I enjoy making custom cakes. I don't do it often enough because I'm generally pressed for time and to do a good custom cake correctly, you really need to go slowly.

My daughter's 10th birthday is tomorrow and in honor of it, I made her a cake of GIR from the cartoon Invader Zim, which shows on Nickelodeon on weekend nights at 11PM. Apparently, this is an older discontinued cartoon from 1995 or so that is making a comeback with a new generation of kids. I started watching it with her and I love the sarcastic/cynical sense of humor regarding society that the writer brings to the cartoon . GIR, in case you are not familiar with him, is a robot that was made out of spare parts (a couple of screws, some bubblegum and spare change). He is sent to Earth with Zim by the Irken leaders to get them out of the way of Operation Impending Doom II. During Operation Impending Doom I, Zim destroyed Irken, so they want him gone. As you can imagine, GIR isn't the brightest light bulb in the pack, so he's always acting oddly. He has a bizarre Southern accent and comes out with the most random stuff. My favorite quote so far is when he fell face down and said, "Hiya, floor! Make me a sammich!" Oh, and to "blend in" with Earthlings, they decided to disguise GIR as a dog (hence the zipper).

You have to have a weird sense of humor, and I do. Sorry for the GIR tangent, by the way. On to cakes with fondant.

Normally, fondant scares the beejeezus out of me. It's usually stiff, sticky, hard to work with, dries out quickly, cracks, doesn't stick to the cake, and I don't like the taste. Too sweet for me. However, I have been using Wilton brand fondant and I have to tell you: don't buy it, if you're going to do a cake. Make your own instead. Wilton wants $10.99 a box and usually the fondant you get is not the right color, it's hard as a rock, and there is never enough of it. Making your own is cheaper, easy, it's pliable and a dream to work with!

To make a batch, all you need are: 8 oz of mini marshmallows (usually 1/2 a bag), 2 tbsp water, and 4 cups powdered sugar. Combine the marshmallows and the water in a bowl and nuke in the microwave for 1 minute. Stir until lumps are gone. Stir in powdered sugar. By the time you get to the 3rd cup of sugar, it's going to be hard going. Pour it out on the counter (make sure the counter has a powdered sugar coating on it, and you coat your hands as well - this is sticky stuff) and massage until the powdered sugar is incorporated and the fondant is smooth. You can then add any food coloring you'd like to make colored fondant. Wrap it in plastic wrap and keep it at room temp. If you're not going to use it for awhile, you can also refrigerate it. Important note: make sure it's wrapped AIRTIGHT or else it will dry out and crack. Also, if you're going to be making black fondant, start with adding chocolate to the original fondant batch and then add the black food coloring. Otherwise, you will have grey fondant, which isn't what you want.

To make the cake pictured below, I made (5) 9 x 9" square cakes, leveled them, and let them sit overnight before I started cutting to let them fully cool and settle. I then stacked the cakes and cut them to a GIR silhouette, based on an internet picture of him and a GIR plastic figure that my daughter owns. I filled the layers (butterscotch buttercream, per her request - yum!) and put on crumb coat #1 using thinned out regular vanilla buttercream frosting. I made the eye pieces out of halved cupcakes, and did the crumb coat for them,.

You may be asking: what is a crumb coat? It's a thin layer (think 1/4") of frosting that picks up stray cake crumbs and smooths out the cake in preparation for the fondant. The smoother your crumb layer, the more beautiful your fondant will look at the end. No bumps or lumps or crumbs. Crumb coats are also useful if you are making a frosted cake that requires a lot of decoration - keeps chocolate crumbs from getting in the frosting and polluting the look of the finished cake.

I refrigerated the cake overnight and added crumb coat #2, then put it into the freezer for 20 minutes to let it set. Pulled it out and smoothed the crumb coat using waxed paper and a fondant smoother - just to make sure it was ready to take the fondant with no lumps or creases.

Important to note that you want the cake to come back to room temp before you add fondant to it, so it sticks. Don't ask me how I found that out :-)

I have to give a special thanks to the Artisan Cake Company, who posted a tutorial for making a GIR cake here: http://artisancakecompany.com/2011/01/how-to-make-a-gir-cake/. Her step by step directions were priceless, especially for someone who hasn't really worked with fondant before.

My daughter got into the act with me and we sculpted body parts, ears, etc. out of fondant and added them after the crumb coat was ready. What I liked was how easily the fondant went on. What I didn't like is that the body parts are cracking because the fondant is drying out. I think that for my next attempt, gum paste body parts are the way to go. I also had to brush the cake with water to remove excess powdered sugar spots on it.

All in all, not as hard as everyone thinks it is. Lots of fun, you get to use your creative side, and the end result is pretty awesome. However, I will say that I understand now WHY Ace of Cakes charges $500 and up for a custom cake. These things are a lot of work and my kitchen floor is sticky with sugar now. How 3 people (the extent of my family here in CA) are going to eat all of this cake, I don't know.

What GIR is supposed to look like:

What the cake looks like follows.

In the first pic, you can see where I have a weird flap of fondant. I was so happy, because I was worried about the green fondant and nervous I was going to mess the whole thing up, so I was almost done and saying, "Wow! I'm doing it with NO CREASES! I can DO FONDANT!"  and then "Oh, shit! My finger slipped!" The eyes also have some blotches (DD painted the eyes) and there is another finger slip on the left eye, but still pretty good for my first attempt at a real fondant cake.

So, tell me: would you attempt this, or any other kind of customized cake?