For Your Viewing Pleasure....

That's pastrami on a challah roll with thousand island dressing and cole slaw.  Courtesy of Chompie's of course.  Order these, and you get three of these little beauties on your plate.  OMG Soooo yummy!!!!!

Making Good Food Better

I've always found these granola bars a little on the dry side.  Still, for $1.99 a box, they're good enough for the kids.  (Because the Kind and Clif bars are for me.)  But now that I've tried them with the one thing that makes everything better (cream cheese) spread on top of them, I might switch over.  Well, probably not, but I might eat them once in a while.   :-)

You Can't Eat Raw Cranberries, Silly!!!

Every week I buy tons of fruit.  I drink it in my smoothies, and we also eat fresh fruit every day.  I'll get whatever fruit's on sale that looks yummy.  A couple weeks ago while shopping, my then-6-year-old asked me why I never buy cranberries.  I told her that you can't eat them raw, they're not very good.  She insisted that she likes them.  I looked at the price: $2.99, and decided to buy the cranberries.  We tried them the next morning, and of course, they're very sour and not yummy at all.

But now I had a whole bag of fresh cranberries, and noone willing to eat them.  Not ready to let them go to waste, and not exactly craving cranberry sauce, I looked at this bag of cranberries, turning it over in my hand.  VOILA!!!  There it was, right on the back: a recipe for Cranberry Nut Bread.

I already had all the ingredients!!!  (Luckily for me, I have two orange trees in my back yard, with ripe oranges on them!)  I cooked it right then and there!

CRANBERRY NUT BREAD

2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup orange juice
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
1 egg well-beaten
1 and 1/2 cups fresh cranberries, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup chopped nuts - I used walnuts and pecans

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  Grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan - I like to cut parchment or wax paper to line the bottom (and maybe even the sides) of the pan, and grease the parchment too.  That makes the bread come out of the pan easier.  Sometimes I'll even sprinkle a little flour into the greased pan.

Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in a medium mixing bowl.  Stir in orange juice, oil, orange peel, and egg.  Mix until well-blended.  Stir in cranberries and nuts.  Spread evenly in loaf pan.  Bake for 55 minutes until a toothpick (or bamboo skewer) inserted into the center comes out clean.  I had to bake it a few extra minutes till the skewer came out clean.  Cool on a rack and then take it out of the pan.  Slice and eat!!!

For extra yumminess, serve with Cream Cheese Topping.

CREAM CHEESE TOPPING

1 8-oz. package of Cream Cheese
2 tablespoons of Sugar

Mix the cream cheese and sugar together until it's smooth and spreadable.  A fork works well for this.  Spread it on top of anything to make that food better!

Heaven......

Smoked fish + a 6-pack of beer = Pure Heaven.  I found this one at Chompie's.  It's smoked whitefish.

That's CAULIFLOWER??????????

When we were little, my mom had one way of serving cauliflower: whole, drowned in cheese sauce and baked.  It was pretty delicious but it seemed like a lot of trouble for a veggie side dish.  By itself, cauliflower is pretty bland, so it really needed that cheese sauce.

I haven't bought cauliflower on a regular basis for a long time, so I don't know how I thought of this.  Mashed Cauliflower!!!  I thought to myself, let me just treat it like a potato: boil it, mash it with cream and butter, and put it on the plate next to my steak.  Anyways, it was delicious with my little New York strip steak and a small arugula salad.  And it didn't make a huge mess!  Here's the whole meal:   :-)

EASY STEAK

Make sure you get a good cut of steak, like a ribeye, New York strip, T-bone, skirt steak (churrasco), etc.  I usually end up with a bone-in New York strip because I can sometimes get those for $4.00 at Fry's, which seems like a pretty good deal compared to the other steaks.  And it's very tasty!

Steak
1 Tbsp. Butter
Salt and Pepper

Season your steak with salt and pepper.  Melt the butter in a non-stick frying pan over medium heat.  Make sure the pan is hot enough for the steak to sizzle when it hits the pan.  Place the steak in the melted butter, seasoned side down.  Now you can season the other side with salt and pepper.  Fry your steak until it starts getting brown (see picture), then turn it over and fry the other side.  It doesn't take very long, just a few minutes.  When it's done the way you like it (i.e., rare, medium, well done), take the steak out of the pan and let it sit for a couple minutes before you cut into it.  Pour the melted butter from the pan over the steak before you serve it.

You can also serve your steak sliced.  It's super yummy if you pour the butter over the slices!

MASHED CAULIFLOWER

1 Head of Cauliflower
2 Tbsp. Heavy Cream
1-2 Tbsp. Butter

I cut the cauliflower into pieces but I don't see why you can't leave it whole to boil it.  It fell apart when it got soft anyways.

Boil the cauliflower in lightly salted water until it's soft, then drain it well.  Add the heavy cream and butter, and cream it with an immersion blender (also called a "stick blender").  That's it!!

BABY ARUGULA SALAD

Baby Arugula Leaves, lightly chopped
Lemon Juice
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper

I like to chop my salad greens lightly so that I don't end up with giant salad leaves on my fork.  I'm kind of obsessed with arugula right now.  You should be able to get the baby arugula leaves in a bag or a box, cleaned and ready to eat.

Dress the arugula with lemon juice instead of vinegar, for a nice lemony taste.  Add your olive oil and salt and pepper.  Super easy!

USELESS TRIVIA:

My mom is Japanese, so she can't pronounce "arugula" very well, even though she's lived in America for decades and doesn't seem to have trouble with other English words.  She thinks she says it just fine.