Fish Tacos

Once in a while, I get a hankering for fish tacos.  Thankfully, the most recent episode was on a Friday, so we had time to be relaxed after work and school.  This dish doesn't take long to put together, but it did require a quick trip to the grocery store for fish, since I didn't have any on-hand.

The traditional fish taco is a little different than ours, but we improvised with a few extra ingredients (more veggies) and they were wonderful. 

This kind of dinner is fun to enjoy with kids.  You have to play with your food!  The only cooking was done in one pan, and since I think it's best to serve the fish warm, but not necessarially hot-off-the-stove, it makes the whole dinner more relaxed.

As people drifted in and out of the kitchen, the tomatoes were sliced, the limes were sliced, the peppers were chopped and the zucchini was stirred.  The fish was last into the pan, for just a few minutes, and when it was all spread on the table it looked like a party.

Friday Night Fish Tacos

3 small tomatoes, sliced
1 lime, quartered
lettuce, shredded
8 small flour tortillas
guacamole

0.5 lb fish per person - sea bass, cod or other white, firm-fleshed fish

options:
sliced zucchini, sauted with fish
shredded cabbage
salsa
sauted green/red peppers

Prepare and set out the tomatoes through guacamole.  Saute any veggies in the pan that need to cook more than a few minutes.
I added a little olive oil and sauted the peppers and zucchini for about 8 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Add the fish, lightly salted, to the hot pan.  (you can remove the other veggies and put them aside in a serving dish if they're cooked though at this point, if not, they can cook with the fish).  Cook the fish about 4 minutes each side for thick pieces, 3 for filets.  When the fish is opaque and flakes easily, it's done.  Put fish in the serving dish, break into chunks and serve.

We assemble ours by putting some guacamole on the tortilla, adding the fish and other ingredients and wrapping.

I suppose this approach would work with lots of other ingredients - chicken, tofu, scrambled eggs - time to play with our food!

In fact, playing with the ingredients on the table led to another wacky-flavor combination: apple slices and lime juice!  I'm wondering if there's a new Fall pie in this one!

Oatmeal

Oatmeal has been with us for a long time.

When my son was about 2, he'd wake up in the morning and stand in his crib calling over and over "oat-oat da-da." 

It was the first breakfast I taught him to make by himself.  Thirty seconds at a time in the microwave.

One morning when I'd slept in until nearly seven (!) I heard the microwave going.  And going.  I dragged myself out of bed.   In the kitchen, the table was set with a random assortment of bowls, plastic spoons, some with animal faces, and oatmeal.

"I made breakfast for everyone!" 

This time of year, it seems natural to switch from granola back to oatmeal.

I often make it with milk, not water, but I was running low on milk the other morning so we did half milk, half water.  The difference was pretty interesting.  The oatmeal was creamy, but not as rich as before.  More surprisingly, the flavor of the oats was much more pronounced.  I gather that the milk has been overwhelming the oats until now. 

We like ours with brown sugar, rasins optional.

It's a pretty simple thing for kids to make too:

Classic oatmeal, two large portions, three small portions.

Bring to a boil: 1 cup water + 3/4 cup milk
Add 1 cup old-fashioned oats (not quick oats!)
and a pinch of salt.

Turn down the heat and cook at medium-low for 5 minutes, stir frequently.

Serve with rasins, brown sugar, salt, milk, chopped nuts, cinnamon, maple syrup or whatever else strikes your fancy.

Hot-Dog!

When was the last time you had a hot dog?

For me, it was last week.  At the North Carolina state fair.

I love food, and I love to cook.  But sometimes, a hot dog is the right thing to eat.  With chili sauce, thank you very much.

Some of my first solo cooking experiences involved hot dogs.  Frozen ones, in a pack of twelve.  My mom would call to say she was headed home and I'd take them out of the freezer, peel off the plastic, put the whole frozen lump in a pot of water (I can picture the exact brown enameled pot with a creamy-white interior), and wait for them to boil.  

These days they're usually reserved for outings - like the fair, ball games and BBQs. 

Along with the corn dog.

Yum-my.

Shredded vs. Chopped

I've been out of town and eating way too much (good) food, so last night was a pseudo Monday and I wanted to do it right.  We also had a class at 5:00 and needed to do it fast!  Ah, the joys of the work-week.

I'd bought some easy salad ingredients to toss together, using some cooked pasta and some imitation crab as the protein.  I don't know about you, but for a long time I thought of imitation crab as....well, disgusting.  A friend re-introduced me to his rotini-crab salad and this is a twist on that dish (pardon the pun!).

I chopped a green pepper and put it in the bowl with some mung bean sprouts, cherry tomatoes, spinach leaves and the crab.  When I put the noodles on to boil, I left my son in charge of shredding the carrots for the salad and I jumped in the shower.

I came back to the kitchen to find this on the cutting board:

Kid-chef?  Nowhere to be seen.  So I drained the noodles, threw together the salad and turned around.  There he was, in his scout's uniform, which he'd suddenly remembered, mid-chopping, he wanted to show me.

You just can't be upset about that, you know? 

I served up the salad,

And it was good.

Here's what was in our Faux-Crab Salad:

1/2 green bell pepper, chopped small (so they don't see it....)

about a dozen cherry tomatoes, cut in half with kitchen scissors

1 package of imitation crab meat (made with fish and crab, good Omega 3s)

1/2 package of baby spinach

1/2 package of mung-bean sprouts

1/2 box of tri-colored rotini pasta, cooked al-dente

Vinagrette salad dressing to taste

2 medium carrots - shredded (with a veggie peeler).  Or chopped.

 

Instant Lasagna

This easy weeknight interpretation of lasagna was a great use of a few leftovers.  We'd made pizzas a few nights earlier, using about half a container of ricotta.  Ricotta is one of those ingredients that tend to linger, half-used, in the seventh layer of refrigerator purgatory until they turn green or qualify for a science fair. Trying to avoid that waste, I was on a mission for a quick-use solution.

We layered some spinach leaves in the bottom of the dish.  Spooned the ricotta in, added hot noodles and half a jar of spaghetti sauce, usually found doing penance next to the ricotta.

Toss, and serve.

It lacked the bubbly layer of melted cheese on the top, but that's probably not a bad thing in the middle of the week! 

A little ground pepper really rounded out the flavors of this one.  See our new page, Who Knew? Wacky Combinations for more about that!

Creme Brulee

With some obsessions, you know exactly when they began.  The first time.  The initial discovery.  With others, the beginnnig is less dramatic, it builds up over time until there's no more ignoring it.  Creme brulee is like that for me.  I don't remember the first time I had it and it probably wasn't any good.  But somewhere along the line, I had a few good ones and that combination of silky custard and crackly crust took hold.

Until now, I've reserved that pleasure for restaurants.  After all, who keeps a kitchen blow-torch at home?  Right?  It turns out, one of my best friends does.  And when she mentioned in an offhand way that they were easy to use, my curiosity was piqued.

Then I got one as a birthday gift.

You know what comes next, right?

The custards were easy enough to make, basically some egg and yolks, sugar and cream with a splash of vanilla and grand marinier.  They baked in the oven for about 40 minutes while we made and ate dinner.  Sugar sprinkled on top,

Then it was time for the heat!  I was pretty hesitant at first, and the button was hard to hold in, which makes it less appealing to the kid-chefs who were just *dying* to try!  But once we got the hang of it, the sugar toasted up quickly and lovely it was.

There are few sounds more satisfying than cracking through that sugar crust with your spoon.  Stepping on top-side frozen puddles in the winter, dropping a sheet of ice on the ground and hearing it splinter, cracking a creme brulee.  Ahhh.

As one kid-chef noted, the flavor is similar to that of palmiers, but the creamy texture of the custard was fantastic.  I wouldn't hesitate to make these for a dinner party because the custards can be made in advance and crusted just before serving.

Thanks for the inspiration, Ali.  Thanks for the torch, Neil.

Here's hoping you get a homemade creme brulee soon chez vous!

Okra Croutons

Just when you thought salad was boring, along comes inspiration:

See those crunchy things next to the chicken?  The ones that look like croutons?  They're actually fried okra slices!  This brilliant idea (which was not my idea) was the perfect twist to a weeknight chicken salad.  If you haven't tried okra, this is a great little test.  The brilliant chef took about a dozen pods, fresh from a friend's garden, and sliced them. Dipped them in half-and-half (because milk is too thin and milk+egg, which is the traditional wash, tends to make a clumpy breading) and coated them with a mixture of half flour, half cornmeal.  Fried in a small quantity of canola oil and salted, they provided the perfect crunchy, salty complement to the cool salad.

Okra is a vegetable I occasionally had as a child, and hated.  It was served up in a slimy stew and the texture was completely off-putting.  It wasn't until just a few years ago that I rediscovered this vegetable and served them pan-fried to my kids, who gobbled them up.

It's splattery when you fry them, so that's not a great step for kid-chefs, but dipping, breading and eating are!

Thanks for sharing!

The Real Thing

We're finally getting some cooler weather around here, but this weekend was sunny and beautiful.  Perfect for celebrating the end of summer with a final ice-cream blow-out. 

After the goat-milk ice-cream, we went to the other extreme and visited a local soda shop that specializes in floats, sodas, egg creams and sundaes. 

We had a couple of scoops and listened to the clamour of people talking, metal dishes clanging and the fizz of the whipped cream dispenser.

Wouldn't you rather treat yourself to scoop of this stuff every now and again than have frozen-light-yogurt-ice-cream-substitutes every night of the week?

Here's to the arrival of Fall.

A Different Kind of Kid

This weekend, the kid-chefs and I got to know goats.  Five of them, to be exact.  And they were cute!  A friend knew my son is enamored with goats and a local woman who raises dairy goats had an urban husbandry workshop nearby, so we checked it out.

She'd brought two does (females) and three doelings (baby girls, about 4 months old) in from her farm and demonstrated how to milk them, trim hooves and described what it's like to have a small herd.  They were hilarious. 

Munching on poison ivy and every branch in site, butting each other out of the way, bleating when the moms were led off for the demonstrations - they were very entertaining.

Then it was time for the food!

We tried some milk, fresh from the goat, some cheese and some icecream.

The milk tasted like the milk we're used to (cow's milk, that is!) and the cheese was a farmer's cheese, similar to chevre, but less creamy.  The icecream?  It was delish.

It was a fun couple of hours and I love that the kids (mine, not the goats') get to see where their food comes from, and hear about the effort it takes to raise it yourself.  Thankfully, there are so many local farms and people around our area making these kinds of events easy to find and experience. 

I left convinced that having a few dwarf goats on an in-town lot could be fantastic, but as of now, that's not an option in our town.

I'm not sure we'll be milking goats ourselves twice a day any time soon, but angora goats might be another story....once we move out of town!

Breakfast for Dinner

Having breakfast for dinner is like getting away with something you're not supposed to.  And when you're a kid, with parents who are always calling the shots and doing things the right way, there's something delightfully topsy-turvy about having breakfast for dinner, isn't there?

Our breakfast of choice the other night was french toast with sausages.  I could make various claims to pseudo-justify the menu (eggs, bread, turkey sausage, served with milk and grapes: wholesome, right?).  But really, we were having breakfast for dinner just because it was fun.  And easy.

I had a loaf of italian bread that was beginning to go stale, so we cubed about 3/4 of the loaf.  In a mixing bowl, we combined:

4 large eggs
1/4 cup milk (more if your bread is more stale)
1 TB of sugar
1/4 tsp of ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp (just a dash!) of ground cardamon and
a dash of salt

We mixed the bread into the egg mixture and let it soak while the pan heated up.

We spread all the cubes of soaked bread into a medium-high non-stick pan and flipped them a couple of times.  Allow about 6-8 minutes for the cubes to cook thoroughly.

Have a little fun sometime soon - after all, isn't breakfast the most important meal of the day, no matter what time you have it?