250 Cookbooks: Mexican Cook Book

Posted on July 17, 2013 by admin

Cookbook #38: Mexican Cook Book. By the Editors of Sunset Books and Sunset Magazine, Lane Books, Menlo Park, California, 1972.

This was one of my mother’s cookbooks. The first thing I notice when I pull this book from the shelf is a pile of loose recipe clippings tucked in the front cover:

All of the clippings are for Mexican-style dishes, and all are dated in the early 1970s. Mother’s writing is on some of them. Apparently she used this book as her “Mexican cooking file”. I sigh. Burdens of memory. I should toss the lot but I know I’ll go through them one by one, thinking of her planning dinners.

At first glance I thought I’d just recycle this cookbook. It isn’t old enough or personally marked up enough to warrant historical value. But actually, I find that it is a good reference for basic, from-scratch Mexican cooking. This cookbook is more usable than my other 250 Cookbooks entry, Elena’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking, at least in my opinion.

This Sunset Mexican Cookbook book gives straightforward directions for preparing all types of Mexican food. In the tortilla chapter, for instance, advice on buying prepared tortillas is given along with recipes for homemade tortillas. Recipes are given for basic sauces and fillings, tortilla dishes, enchiladas, tamales, appetizers, soups, salads, vegetables, rice, and desserts. The recipes don’t call for odd ingredients. My only complaint is that many of the recipes call for frying foods in oil, thus adding calories.

Like Elena’s, this cookbook discusses the history of Mexican-style cooking. I learned that the Aztecs were highly advanced in horticulture and grew tomatoes, avocados, sweet and white potatoes, peanuts, squash, pineapple, papayas, vanilla, and varieties of beans not known in Europe. And chocolate too. The Spaniard ships that returned to Europe were laden with seeds and cuttings, which flourished in various climates. And the Spaniards introduced many new foods to Mexico, such as beef and chickens, wheat, rice, nuts and spices, peaches and apricots.

Interesting excerpt from this book:

Now, what to cook? OMG, here is a recipe for Red Chile Sauce! To be used on enchiladas! Why does this interest me? For years, I’ve bought canned enchilada sauce. The price keeps going up, so that a small can now costs over 2 dollars. What the heck? Couldn’t I make my own? But I’ve tried, starting with tomato sauce and adding spices. Never could get that same “enchilada sauce” taste. My tries just tasted like tomato sauce, reminiscent of spaghetti sauce. So I had spaghetti-sauced rolled tortillas. Not very good.

So I started buying different brands of enchilada sauce and carefully noting the ingredients on each type. Most of them contain “dried red chiles” as the main ingredient (after water, that is). A couple of years ago I pulled a few enchilada sauce recipes from the Web and planned to try them. But I never did. So now is the time!

The Red Chile Sauce in this cookbook starts with dried red chiles. First they are soaked, then blended and cooked with a few spices and a small amount of tomato paste. I had nabbed an online recipe that is similar, so I sort of combined the two into a plan of attack.

I’ll use the sauce to make Folded Pork Enchiladas. Now, I have a method for making enchiladas that I like, and I’ll share that too. But I’ll do the Folded Pork Enchiladas like the recipe in this book, just to compare and contrast methods.

The Red Chile Sauce isn’t going to be a recipe for someone who doesn’t like fooling around in the kitchen. This is a recipe for a chemist at heart. For me, this is going to be fun. And messy. And potentially a failure.

The pork filling is cooked pork (I have some pulled pork in the freezer), cooked onions, green chiles, and olives, mixed with a little red chile sauce. Note that the tortillas are fried and then dipped in hot sauce. I usually don’t fry tortillas for enchiladas, but will for this recipe.

Now, here is the Red Chile Sauce recipe:

So what this involves is taking a whole bag of dried chiles, blending and cooking them until they make a sauce. I’ve always wondered why they sold bags of dried chiles in the Mexican foods aisles!

I don’t advise toasting the chiles, as I did and my sauce was slightly bitter. It wasn’t very hard to remove the stems and seeds, and there really wasn’t enough pith to worry about. I just chopped off the stems and shook out the seeds.I consulted another recipe, and decided to cook the chiles first, then process them in the food processor. It also suggested adding flour. I decided to use beef broth in the cooking liquid, as well as a few tomatoes and more spices.

Here is what the cooked mass of chiles looked like:

I put the cooked chiles in the food processor in batches. Then, I pushed the processed mass through a colander.

I put the processed-strained chiles back into a pot on the stove, tasted it, and added more spices and ingredients to get the taste more like the canned store-bought enchilada sauce that I like.

And here it is!

Now to assemble the enchiladas. Here is the pork filling:

The filled enchiladas:

The above covered with cheese:

Cooked enchiladas:

These were very good. I probably won’t make them this way again, though, mainly because of the frying step (calories). I usually steam the tortillas until pliable, fill with meat/cheese/olives/cooked onions, place not-touching in a glass baking dish, cover withe sauce, and then cover lightly with foil and bake at 375 for 15-20 minutes.

I will make the red chile sauce again, though. Plus I have lots frozen to use in the coming weeks. This was a successful project!

Red Chile Sauce (note: updated recipe, 2019)
use for enchiladas

12 ounces dried mild red chile pods (I found a 14 ounce bag and used most of it)
1 tablespoon cumin seed
3 tomatoes, cored and peeled (or use canned)
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 teaspoons Mexican oregano
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 cups stock, beef or chicken
6 cups water

Cut the stems off the dried chiles and remove the seeds. In a large pot, toast the cumin seed until you smell the aroma, then add the chiles and the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil and then simmer 30-60 minutes. Let cool a little.

Place the chiles and the liquid in your food processor in batches – it probably won’t all fit in at once. Process until very smooth, a couple minutes at least.

Press the processed chile mixture through a colander. This removes any big pieces of chile skins.

Put the sauce in a pan. Taste and adjust seasonings. I added:

5 ounces tomato juice
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon dried cumin
1-2 tablespoons vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar

Simmer about 15 minutes to blend the flavors.

To make enchiladas, I used a couple cups of the above sauce and added just about a half cup of canned tomato sauce. The flavor was a tiny bit bitter (I think because I toasted the peppers) and I thought the tomato sauce mellowed it to perfection.

250 Cookbooks: Quick and Easy Recipes

Posted on May 30, 2013 by admin

Cookbook #34: Quick and Easy Recipes. California Home Economics Teachers, California Cookbook Company, Orange, California, 1986.

This spiral-bound book is a collection of recipes contributed by home economic teachers in California in the 1980s. It’s a notched-up version of a “community” cookbook, as it is professionally published (it has an ISBN) and has good color photos contributed by several food companies.

My sister sent me this cookbook for Christmas in 1986. She was a teacher in the California school system and that’s probably how she came across this book. She notes three recipes – layered spinach salad, orange bread, and spinach dip – as being really good. Layered spinach salad was a classic back then, a great dish for bringing to a party. You make it the day before so the flavors can meld. This version has spinach, bacon, frozen peas, Romano cheese, fresh mushrooms, red onions, mayonnaise and sour cream. I have made and liked the orange bread (you blend a whole orange!) and the spinach dip, served with fresh vegetables, could be made low-cal by using Greek yogurt.

Like the spinach salad, the recipes in this book are a very good reflection of American family cooking in the 1980s. Classic recipes include artichoke dip, clam dip, cheese rolls, molded salads, tuna casseroles, hamburger stroganoff, and chicken rice casserole. The recipes are not always from scratch, but they are still home-cooked. Examples of typical 80s ingredients are Bisquick, frozen dinner rolls, crescent rolls, packaged pudding, canned soups, cake mixes, dried onion soup mix, tater tots, canned tuna, canned clams, and canned French fried onions. These ingredients may not be the best for us, but they aren’t terrible and they bring both ease of cooking and (to me) a sense of comfort food. And on the healthier side, many of this book’s recipes do include only non-packaged and fresh ingredients, and several recipes are labeled “low-fat”.

I will go back to this cookbook for some of the classics I remember from that time. If I ever want to make artichoke dip or layered salad, now I know where to find a recipe without going online. Plus the cookbook has a note from my sister, so I definitely will keep it!

But what to cook for this blog? As usual, I’m looking for something low-fat that uses ingredients I have on hand, and that will add to my cooking repertoire. This cookbook has a chapter titled “Stir Fry Cookery”; sounds right up my alley. I chose to try the “Shredded Beef with Green Peppers” because (1) I have a flank steak in the freezer and (2) flank steaks are a lean meat and (3) I like the tablespoon of fresh ginger it includes and (4) it calls for very thin slicing and then marinating of the flank steak before cooking. I’m usually pretty impatient when preparing meat for stir fries, tending to cut it into large slices. That works for chicken or pork tenderloin, but not for beef (too tough). I think the very thin slicing – shredding – will get me out of my usual rut.

I plan to modify the recipe (surprise!). My dining partner doesn’t like green peppers, so I’ll tone them down and add some other vegetables that I have on hand.

Looking carefully at the above recipe, I see a mistake: It calls for 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil in the marinade and 1/2 cup for cooking. But in the directions, it says to put 5 tablespoons of oil in the wok, and never says what to do with the other 3 tablespoons. And half a cup of oil is way too much oil anyway – that’s almost 1000 calories!

Another issue: it has way too little meat, at least for our tastes. Two-thirds of a pound of meat is about 10 ounces; I use about 9 ounces for 2 people, and this recipe claims to feed 4.

I don’t like sesame oil very much, and I think it needs soy sauce, so in my version I will put 1 tablespoon soy sauce in the marinade and then taste to decide if it needs more after it cooks. I’ll also up the vinegar (and use rice wine vinegar, not “rice wine”). Why baking soda? That’s a strange ingredient for a stir fry; I’ll leave it out. I also think it needs thickening, so I’ll add a touch of cornstarch.

Guess I pretty much mangled the original recipe, even before I started! And then I began cooking … oooh, more changes are needed. I got the wok nice and hot with a little oil in it, then added the finely shredded beef. No way was it done cooking in 10 seconds. After about 30 seconds there were still a lot of raw pieces of meat, but then the meat released a bunch of juice into the pan. I probably cooked the meat 5 minutes before it was all cooked, and then I had quite a bit of juices in the pan. The juices are sure to add to the flavor – I decided to take it off the heat and keep the juices. (Maybe it would have been done in 10 seconds if I had used 5 tablespoons of oil, but heck, it would have splattered all over the place.)

Whew, lots of changes. The recipe below is how I actually cooked this dish.

Shredded Beef with Vegetables
serves about 2 people

I served this over rice.

Steak and marinade:

9 ounces flank steak, sliced across the grain, at an angle, as thinly as you can – you want it “shredded”
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
sesame seed oil to taste (I used a few drops)

Vegetables:

1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger root
a mixture of thinly sliced vegetables, such as green peppers, green onions, carrots, baby bok choy, cabbage, mushrooms, and/or celery
1/4 teaspoon sugar
soy sauce to taste: I used about 2 tablespoons reduced-sodium soy sauce

Combine the sliced beef with the marinade ingredients and let stand about 15 minutes. While it marinades, prepare your vegetables. I used shitake mushrooms, baby bok choy, carrots, green peppers, and green onions. Aim for about the same amount of total sliced vegetables as you have sliced beef.

Heat a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil in a wok (or any fry pan) over high heat for 1 minute. Add the beef and stir fry until all the meat looks cooked but not so long that the juices that come out of the meat evaporate away. Remove the cooked beef (and its juices) from the wok and put in a bowl.

Return the wok to medium high heat. You can add a few drops of oil, if you wish. Add the vegetables (don’t forget the ginger) and stir fry for 2-3 minutes. Add the cooked beef and its juices back to the pan. Add:

1 teaspoon cornstarch dissolved in a couple tablespoons water
soy sauce to taste (1-2 tablespoons)

Heat through and serve over rice.

I sharpened my knife and took some time to “shred” the beef. The pile of sliced beef is about 9 ounces; the rest went back into the freezer for another meal.

Above are the sliced vegetables (and a hunk of ginger root) that I used in the dish.

And above is the cooked dish. We liked it a lot! Some red peppers might have been nice for color. It had just enough sauce to serve over rice. Taking the time to carefully shred the flank steak before cooking is really worth the while.

I now have a new stir fry recipe in my repertoire! Hmm, this would be good with hoisin sauce in a flour tortilla. Moo shoo beef. Stay creative!

250 Cookbooks: Crepes Cook Book

Posted on May 18, 2013 by admin

Cookbook #32: Crepes Cook Book. Better Homes and Gardens, Meredith Corporation, 1976.

I bought this cookbook used for $3. It’s the only cookbook I have that is devoted specifically to crepes, and I love crepes! (See my Beef Jardiniere Crepes post for more crepe-praise.)

There is only one recipe in this book that I have used a lot: Shrimp Chow Mein Dinner. But looking over the recipes now, I find it easy to find one to try for this blog, and I marked several more to try later.

The first pages of the book present crepe cooking instructions. (I only disagree with it on one crepe-making issue: when making the crepe itself, I always cook both sides.) Then it gives a variety of recipes for crepes: main dish, calorie counter’s, buttermilk, cornmeal, Parmesan, whole wheat, sour cream, dessert, chocolate dessert, lemon dessert, and coffee dessert crepes. Basic sauces and fillings come next. I sort of like this, because it encourages you to be creative. However, I wish they would have at least cross-referenced each crepe recipe with the entree/dessert recipes that they are used for in this cookbook. For instance, if I want to find a recipe using “Cornmeal Crepes”, I have to scan each recipe in the book – it has a crummy index that is no help in my search.

Recipes that I have marked to try include: Szekeley-Filled Crepes (potato crepes filled with pork), Home-Style Pork Pie Crepes (ground pork in buttermilk crepes), Crepe-Style Manicotti, Beef Enchilada Crepes, and Low-Calorie Cherry Crepes (a dessert crepe). Chinese Mu-hsu-jou Crepes remind me of my Moo Shoo Turkey. The Mu-hsu-jou crepe batter substitutes water for milk. I should try this recipe sometime, since crepes might be better than flour tortillas for moo shoo wraps. A google search reveals that Mu-hsu-jou recipes employ “Mandarin Pancakes” and one recipe I found online for these pancakes is identical to the recipe in my Crepes Cook Book.

Intrigued by the use of crepes in Chinese food, I decided to try “Chinese-Style Dinner”. This recipe is an egg roll in a crepe. Egg rolls are usually deep fried, so this seems like a good way to bring a low-fat version of this treat into my repertoire.

One more discussion before I get to the Chinese-style dinner. This cook book is pretty good about using fresh ingredients, except for canned shrimp, and frozen asparagus and fish. Whole grains and fresh vegetables are often used. So except for a few fat-laden sauces, the recipes fit into my healthy eating plan. This is funny though: in the Greek-style Crepe Casserole, they suggest that you can substitute American cheese for feta cheese. That’s just silly!

Back to the Chinese-Style Dinner. Even though these are not deep-fried like egg rolls, this is not a quick recipe. The ingredient list is long, and you have to chop up seven vegetables and two meats, make crepes, and make one or two sauces. Let’s see if it’s worth the trouble!

My version of the recipe (below) is half of the one given in the book. I made the full amount of crepes, though, and used them for breakfast the next couple days. It made seven filled crepes for our meal; we ate all but one. I used some pre-cooked shrimps that I had on hand in the freezer, but I think you could use raw shrimp. I weighed the pork and the shrimp amounts. I was out of fresh mushrooms so I used canned. I like water chestnuts, but this recipe only uses 1/4 cup, which means you will have some leftover – leave them out if this is an issue. The point is, you can be pretty free and creative with what you include in this recipe.

I made only the Sweet and Sour Sauce for these crepes; I suggest you also try the Horseradish-Mustard Sauce as in the scanned-in recipe. Feel free to use a purchased, bottled sweet and sour sauce if you want to save time.

Chinese-Style Dinner, or, “Egg Roll Crepes”
serves 2-3

Crepes:

1 1/2 cups milk
1 cup flour
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (you can leave this out to save calories)
1/4 teaspoon salt

Filling:

1/4 pound ground pork
1/4 pound cooked (or raw) shrimp
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup finely shredded bok choy, baby bok choy, or cabbage
1/2 cup mushrooms, preferably fresh, shitake would work great
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
1/4 cup finely chopped water chestnuts
1/4 cup grated carrot
1/2 of a beaten egg (yes, I beat one egg, then divided it between this recipe and my accompanying Chinese fried rice)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1-2 teaspoons dry sherry (you could leave this out if you don’t have any on hand)
1/4 teaspoon sugar (double this if you are leaving the sherry out)

Sweet and Sour Sauce:

1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 tablespoon cornstarch
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup chicken broth or water
2 tablespoons finely chopped green bell pepper
1-2 tablespoons finely chopped red pepper, or used canned red peppers or pimentos
1/2 tablespoon soy sauce
a few dashes of garlic powder
a few dashes of ground ginger (or a little grated fresh ginger)

For the crepes, put all of the crepe ingredients in a blender and blend on high until well mixed. Scrape down the sides, then let rest an hour or so. Blend again. Heat a pan, coat it with non-stick spray, then pour about 1/3 cup of the batter into the hot pan and tilt the pan so the batter spreads to the edges of the pan. Cook until brown, then flip and briefly cook the other side. I made about 12 crepes from this recipe of batter.

For the filling, heat a non-stick pan, then cook the pork until it is browned. Stir in the garlic and cook a minute or so. If necessary, drain off any fat. Add the vegetables and the shrimp and cook and stir 2-3 minutes more. Remove from heat, put in a bowl, allow to cool, then add the egg, soy sauce, sherry, and sugar.

For the sauce, combine the brown sugar and cornstarch in a small pan. Stir in the remaining ingredients and cook and stir till bubbly.

To assemble, place a crepe on your work surface. Fold the edge nearest the filling up and over filling just till mixture is covered, fold in the two sides, then roll up tightly as for a jelly roll. This is how much filling I used per crepe:

Place the filled crepes seam side down in a non-stick-sprayed baking pan. The recipe says it makes 32 crepes, but I only made 7 with a half-recipe. Guess I stuffed them fuller than they intended.

Bake, uncovered, at 375˚ for about 20 minutes. Serve with the Sweet and Sour Sauce. I added my Chinese-style rice and steamed broccoli.

These were a big hit! We both really, really liked them and I will make them again. We didn’t try to pick them up, we just poured the sauce over and used a fork. They have more filling than a typical egg roll, and the crepe wrap brings great flavor to the dish. The eggs in the crepe batter bring new meaning to “egg rolls”. Once again, I am glad that I am doing this 250 Cookbooks blog. Another great recipe: Found!

250 Cookbooks: The Low-Fat Way to Cook

Posted on May 10, 2013 by admin

Cookbook #31: The Low-Fat Way to Cook. Oxmoor House, 1993.

I have used this book a lot, both as a reference on low-fat cooking and for recipe ideas. I’ve made the Dijon pork chops and sweet and sour chicken many times, although I’d forgotten about them until I pulled this book from the shelf. This book is an old friend.

This is a large hardcover book with good color photos. The recipes are easy to follow and pleasantly laid out. It’s not very personal; this book has editors rather than an author. Nutrition information is given for each recipe. Most main dishes are 250-400 calories per serving.

I pretty much cook the way this book outlines. Since it’s a 1993 book, I was already cooking like this when I purchased the book, so I guess I wanted reinforcement and recipe ideas.

So what are low-fat guidelines? Choose lean cuts of meat, poultry without the skin, and fish. Bake or broil instead of frying. Use vegetable cooking spray or when absolutely necessary, reduced calorie margarine. Braise tough cuts of meat (long, slow cooking). En papillote cooking is great – this is cooking in paper packets. Top pot pies are topped with phyllo sheets rather than fat-filled crusts. Choose low-fat dairy products and use egg substitute or egg whites. For baking, use very little oil and incorporate vegetables, fruits and whole grains.

Beyond the above suggestions, this cook book encourages the reader to watch serving size and read labels. Page 17 has a great chart of “serving sizes”.

I like this cookbook a lot better than the Cooking Light Cookbook 1992, which was the first of my 250 Cookbooks posts, and also an Oxmoor book. The recipes in this cookbook don’t call for all sorts of weird ingredients – they call for items I already have in my pantry/refrigerator. Sensible.

So what recipe to try? I am going to “try” Sweet-and-Sour Chicken. Now, I have made this before; I have a post-it next to the recipe stating that it is “pretty, spicy and thick sauce, good with pork too”. But I had forgotten this recipe, and it’s time to try it again.

Sweet-and-sour dishes need to have just the right combination of vinegar and sugar. This is one time when I actually carefully measure the vinegar and the sugar. Other than that, this is a really simple dish. Just stir fry the vegetables and the chicken, then add the sauce and heat. Takes about 10 minutes to cook.

The only thing I disagree with in this recipe is that it calls for reduced-calorie catsup – just ridiculous when you are only using a couple tablespoons in a dish. One tablespoon of regular catsup only has 20 calories! So I used regular catsup. (I always use low-sodium soy sauce so no problem there.)

I have another sweet-sour recipe in my repertoire and I am incorporating an idea from it: onions. I like onions in my sweet-sour dishes, so I include them in my written recipe below. I also like a touch of tomato. And, you can add carrots and use fresh ginger instead of powdered ginger. Hey, recipes are guidelines, not written in stone!

Sweet-and-Sour Chicken
serves 2 people

9-12 ounces of skinned, boneless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 8-ounce can pineapple chunks (or a 10-ounce can if you can find one)
2 tablespoons vinegar (white, white wine, or red wine)
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons catsup
1/2 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/3 teaspoon ground ginger, or about a teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder, or one minced clove
1/4 of a small red pepper, cut into julienne strips
1/4 of a small green pepper, cut into julienne strips
1/4 of an onion, cut into 1/2-inch squares
optional: diagonally sliced carrots
optional: half a tomato, peeled and cored and chopped
cooked rice

Drain the pineapple chunks, reserving juice and setting the chunks aside. Combine the juice with the vinegar, and the next 7 ingredients (soy sauce through garlic powder) in a small bowl or measuring cup; stir well and set aside.

Heat a nonstick pan over medium-high heat until it feels hot when you hold your hand an inch above it. Then, coat it with cooking spray and add the chicken and cook 5 minutes or until chicken is browned on all sides. Add the peppers and onion (and carrots or any other veggies you are using) and cook 2-3 minutes, until the veggies are crisp-tender.

Add the pineapple chunks (and the optional tomato) and stir a minute to heat through. Give the pineapple juice mixture a good stirring to distribute the cornstarch, then slowly add it too. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened and bubbly. It only takes a couple minutes.

It’s ready to serve, over your favorite type of cooked rice!

Here are the gathered ingredients:

At the preparation point when I took the above photo, I hadn’t decided to add the tomato or not, so it’s sitting there uncored and unpeeled. Below is the cooked dish.

Yum!

Favorites: Moo Shoo Turkey

Posted on May 9, 2013 by admin

If my eyes fall upon the bottle of hoisin sauce in my refrigerator, I think of Moo Shoo Turkey and get a hankering to make this for dinner. Moo Shoo Turkey is really just a stir fry in a flour tortilla, why do I like it so much? Dunno. I included it on the short list of main dishes in my 1990s blog, and I still make it today, in 2013. I am not sure where I got the original recipe, must have been from a magazine or newspaper. It is low-fat, and tasty. It takes a little while to pull together the ingredients, so I won’t say it’s really “simple”. But it’s worth it.

Hoisin sauce is a “sweet and garlicky bean sauce” (Cook’s Thesaurus). I find that different brands taste quite different. I have found it at the Asian Seafood Market, Safeway, and Whole Foods (my current brand). It’s essential for this dish.

I sprouted mung beans to make the bean sprouts for this dish. Why? Because I could. Also, I often find that supermarket bean sprouts (1) come only in a large package and (2) are often slimy by the time I go to use them. If you are in Boulder, though, you can drop by the Asian Seafood Market and buy just the right amount of very fresh bean sprouts, as she sells them in bulk.

Photography: I’m finding that cooked entrees often take terrible pictures. So I’m trying something new, a photo of the ingredients for this dish. They take a pretty picture:

Moo Shoo Turkey
serves 2 (depending on appetites)

Combine and marinate at least 30 minutes (can marinate all day):

3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon lime juice
dried hot peppers (a few shakes)
12 ounces raw turkey breast, thinly sliced

Prepare/gather:

1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon grated or minced fresh ginger
1 carrot, julienned
1 cup shredded cabbage
1/2 zucchini, julienned
several mushrooms or shitake, sliced
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 cup bean sprouts
chopped green onions for garnish
hoisin sauce
3 flour tortillas

Stir fry the garlic, ginger, and carrot for a couple minutes on medium-high heat (use as little oil as possible). Then add 2 tablespoons of water to the pan, cover, and cook for 1 minute.

Uncover the pan and add the cabbage, zucchini, mushrooms, and the 1 tablespoon soy sauce. Cook a few minutes, until the vegetables soften. Then remove the vegetable mixture from the pan and set it aside in a bowl.

Add the turkey with its marinade and cook until the turkey turns white and liquid is slightly reduced. This will take 5-10 minutes.

Add the vegetable mixture back to the turkey mixture in the pan and add the bean sprouts too. Heat through – just a couple minutes. Sometimes I thicken this mixture with 1-2 tablespoons cornstarch mixed with 1/4 cup water.

Spread flour tortillas with 1-2 tablespoons hoisin sauce each. Microwave them a few seconds to heat and soften, then add the turkey-vegetable mixture and some chopped green onions. Serve immediately.

I’m kind of generous with the hoisin sauce:

This looks kind of lonely on the plate. I often serve it with Chinese-style stir fried rice.Lonely or not, Moo Shoo Turkey was great once again!

Favorites: Southwestern Grilled Chicken

Posted on May 1, 2013 by admin

I clipped this recipe back in the 80s from the Colorado Daily, the campus newspaper of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Me, a seasoned cook, using a recipe from a campus newspaper, a resource that targets the 18-24 year old crowd! But this is a great dish for families too. I included it on the short list of main dishes in my 1990s blog, and I still make it today, in 2013. It is simple, low-fat, and tasty.

The original recipe suggested serving with grilled or broiled green, red, and yellow bell peppers. Instead, I always serve it with a good, chunky salsa, rice, and warmed corn tortillas.

Southwestern Grilled Chicken
serves 3-4, depending on appetites

8 oz. plain yogurt (Greek yogurt works great)
1/4 cup chopped green onions
8 oz. chopped green chiles (canned work fine)
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1 pound boneless chicken breasts (or chicken tenders)
hot salsa (your choice)
cilantro (optional)
cooked rice

I generally start this in the morning and let the chicken marinade all day, but a couple hours is sufficient.

Combine the yogurt, onions, chilies, cumin, and salt. Remove about 2/3 cup of this mixture, mix it with the tablespoon of mayonnaise, and set it in the refrigerator for later use (it’s a sauce for the cooked chicken).

Put the rest of the yogurt mixture in a bowl and add the chicken pieces. You can make the chicken extra tender by piercing it a lot with a sharp fork. Cover the bowl and set the chicken-marinade mixture in the refrigerator.

About a half hour before dinner time, remove the chicken from the yogurt marinade. Cook the chicken either in a broiler or on the grill:

broil about 5 minutes per side 4-5″ from an oven broiler set on high OR
grill over medium high direct heat, about 5 minutes per side

The chicken is done when an instant-read thermometer reads about 165˚. If you don’t have a thermometer, check for doneness by cutting into one of the pieces with a knife (it should no longer be pink inside).

Slice the chicken into 1/2″ thick pieces and plate it with the cooked rice. Sprinkle with chopped cilantro if you wish. Serve it with the reserved yogurt mixture and hot salsa. Warmed corn tortillas make a great addition!

250 Cookbooks: Prize-Winning Beef

Posted on March 13, 2013 by admin

Cookbook #23: Prize-Winning Beef. The Country Cooking Recipe Collection; Reiman Publications, Mary Beth Jung, editor, Greendale WI, 1993.

This little booklet of 32 recipes was part of my mother’s collection. Most of the recipes sound okay, but they are not very innovative. The recipes seem to be more from the 1950s or 60s than the 1990s. There are recipes for country ribs, beef meatballs, nachos, flank steak, southwest stew, chile, and the like; I already have my own ways of cooking most of these. A couple of the recipes are calorie-laden with the addition of pastry.

My mother marked one recipe: “Pop-up Pizza Pie”. She wrote that it was “very good”, so I decided to try that recipe for this 250 Cookbooks blog. Last weekend I tried another recipe from this booklet; it was for barbecue beef and it turned out well – I plan to add it to my personal recipe collection and might share it here eventually. But I am going to recycle the booklet itself. It has served its purpose.

The original recipe, below, supposedly serves 10 people. I will cut the recipe in half for the two of us. I expect I will have leftovers!

Note that the original recipe calls for “one envelope spaghetti sauce mix”. This means one of those small seasoning packets that once were so popular. I don’t keep any of these in my pantry. Since I want the dish to taste as close as possible to the original recipe, I searched online and found that several websites have posted recipes for spaghetti sauce mix. Most of these recipes include cornstarch, sugar, herbs and spices. I checked the labels of packaged spaghetti sauce mix in the supermarket and they too include cornstarch, sugar, and spices – I think I am on the right track.

But which spice recipe to follow? Then, just in time, one of the cooking blogs that I follow, Lynn’s Kitchen Adventures, posted a recipe for “Homemade Spaghetti Seasoning Mix“. Yay! I made up a batch of spice mix following her recipe. I suggest you do too. It’s an excellent seasoning mix that puts a spaghetti sauce on the table in a flash.

Pop-up Pizza Pie

Serves about 3.

3/4 pound lean ground beef
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup roughly chopped mushrooms (optional)
1/4 teaspoon oregano
dashes of hot pepper sauce
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
spaghetti sauce mix (choose one from the following three options:

2 tablespoons Lynn’s Kitchen Adventures Homemade Spaghetti Seasoning Mix OR

1/2 package store-purchased sauce mix OR

1/2 each basil, thyme, oregano, garlic powder, sugar, salt and 1 tablespoon each cornstarch, dried onion, and dried parsley

1/2 cup milk
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1 egg
1/2 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 ounces grates mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Brown the ground beef and drain well. Stir in onion, green pepper, garlic, oregano, water, hot pepper sauce, tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce mix; simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

In a small bowl, combine milk, oil, and eggs; beat 1 minute at medium speed. Add flour and salt; beat 2 minutes at medium speed.

Put the hot meat mixture in an oven-proof pan or casserole. A 9-inch round pan or an 8×8-inch square pan works well. Top with the mozzarella cheese. Pour the batter over the cheese, covering the filling completely. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

Bake uncovered at 400˚ for 25 -30 minutes or until puffed and deep golden brown. Serve immediately.

Comments

Well. I was wrong, we hardly had any leftovers! We started eating and I said “I like this!” and my husband said “very good!” Hey, that’s what my mother wrote on the recipe! I went back for seconds and wanted more. I will definitely make it again. This is a good “comfort food” entree.

250 Cookbooks: Healthy Homestyle Cooking

Posted on March 6, 2013 by admin

Cookbook #22: Healthy Homestyle Cooking. Evelyn Tribole, Rodale Press, Emmaus, Pennsylvania, 1994.

This is another of my low-calorie cookbooks. Several pages are neatly dog-eared, noting recipes that still look interesting to me today, although I’ve never tried them. A page with a recipe for falafel is marked with a newspaper-clipped recipe for “Hummus Patties”. I love falafel (made from garbanzos), but they are usually fried in a lot of oil and so I avoid them because of calories. Both recipes I just re-found call for cooking in a minimum amount of oil in a non-stick pan. A great idea.

This is a useful cookbook, and I ask myself: Why is it that I haven’t I used it in ages? I think I know what happens. I buy a cookbook and read it and try recipes for a few weeks or months, then the cookbook gets covered with papers and forgotten and eventually re-shelved. Doing this 250 Cookbooks blog is great for me, personally, because the project is forcing me to re-discover books that have a lot of good ideas.

The good ideas in this book are lower-calorie versions of many common home-cooked meals: pot pies, lasagna, chicken divan, enchiladas, carrot cake, brownies, and lots more. Each recipe has a personal note and pointers on how to reduce calories. And as a bonus, the book is nicely illustrated with many full-page color photos.

I’m going to try “Greek Penne”. It’s one of the pages that I had dog-eared. This is a vegetarian dish, and I decided to try it on a night when I just have me to cook for. I’m looking forward to this easy-to-prepare dish of penne, tomatoes, spinach, pine nuts, and feta. It’s interesting that the tomatoes are just barely cooked: I just took a cooking class at Escoffier Boulder where we made a dish including barely-cooked tomatoes called “Concasse”.

The original recipe is below. I plan to change the recipe a little: I’ll peel and seed the tomatoes and use fresh spinach, and add a little fresh basil.

Greek Penne

This recipe serves about 6 people, depending on appetites.

12 ounces penne pasta
5 teaspoons olive oil (or to taste)
2 tablespoons pine nuts
5 cloves garlic, minced
10 ounces frozen spinach, thawed and drained (or use fresh spinach, see below)
4 tomatoes, peeled, cored, and chopped
1/2 cup cottage cheese (non- or low-fat for less calories; substitute with feta if you wish)
4 ounces feta cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Cook the pasta; drain and set aside.

Press the cottage cheese through a strainer into a small bowl. Rap the strainer against the top of the bowl to get all the cottage cheese into the bowl. You could also put the cottage in a small blender, but the texture is kind of nice if you use a strainer. Add the feta cheese to the cottage cheese and mash up with a fork (or pastry blender). Set aside.

Cook and stir the pine nuts and garlic in a small amount of olive oil in a pan large enough to hold the entire finished dish. Cook until the pine nuts are lightly golden – watch carefully as it doesn’t take very long. Then stir in the spinach and tomatoes and cook for about 5 minutes, until heated through.

The pasta is probably cool by now, so add it to the tomato-spinach mixture and heat and mix gently until it is serving temperature. Add olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Finally, add the feta cheese mixture and gently mix. Serve with a little chopped fresh basil, if you wish.

Comments

This was very good, and I’ll make it again. My following comments concern only the calorie-cutting suggestions.

The author states that the original recipe had 646 calories per serving, the new version has 365 calories. The calorie value of the original recipe must include a huge amount of butter/oil per serving. The best cutting of calories comes from not tossing the pasta with butter – duh. I think the nit-picking of using non-fat cottage cheese to cut the feta is a little obsessive.

Feta cheese: 4 ounces of feta has 320 calories, 200 of which are from fat. Per serving, that’s about 55 calories (33 from fat). If you don’t care about an extra few calories per serving, use a little more feta and skip the cottage cheese, because it isn’t going to change the overall calorie content very much.

Pine nuts have a lot of calories! But just a few go a long way.

Pine nuts: 2 tablespoons weigh 1/2 ounce, and according to Nutrient Facts this amount has 90 calories (mostly fat-calories). Divided amongst 6 people, that’s only 15 calories per serving. I’d say, add more pine nuts if you want.

Spinach

I cooked my own spinach. First, I weighed out the proper number of ounces (I was cooking for one, recall) and put it in a large sauce pan:

I added about a half-cup of water and set the pan over high heat, covered. When it came to a boil, I removed the pan from the heat, drained and chopped the spinach. Look how much it cooked down:

Of course, it’s easier to use frozen spinach, but the fresh spinach tasted really good.

Favorites: Shui Mai

Posted on February 26, 2013 by admin

The “Shui Mai” that I make are little pork-shrimp dumplings encased in a wonton wrapper, steamed, and served with a soy sauce-based dipping sauce. The spelling of “shui mai” varies according to the country or region of origin, and the Americanization thereof. In general, they are bite-sized dumplings served on small plates.

There are a lot of recipes already on the web for shui mai. I’m not offering a particularly special recipe – I’m just encouraging everyone to make shui mai because they are GOOD!

My recipe for shui mai entered my repertoire in the1970s. I learned of these treats from The Chinese Cookbook by Charles Claiborne and a clipped recipe from a magazine, way before shui mai (and pot stickers) became popular out and about. I made them just the other night when trying out the recipe for Chinese Asparagus Salad. Once again they were wonderful!

You need a steamer, either the electric kind or the stacked-bamboo type that sits in a wok. Shui mai take a little time to make but are worth every minute.

Shui Mai

This recipe makes about 40 dumplings and serves about 4 people. Usually, I serve shui mai as part of a meal, perhaps with a stir fry and rice. They aren’t a meal in themselves, they are dim sum, a “small plate” food. If you make too many, they are great the next day!

1/2 lb ground pork (use a fresh, quality ground pork)
1/2 lb raw shrimp, chopped into small pieces but not ground
1/4 cup minced water chestnuts
1/4 cup finely chopped mushrooms (preferably shitake)
1/4 cup finely chopped green onions
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon dry sherry or Chinese rice wine (optional)
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon sugar
wonton skins (you need about 40 skins)
1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water
dipping sauce (recipe follows)

Combine the filling ingredients. Brush a wonton skin with the egg-water mixture, then place about a teaspoon of filling in the center. Press together opposite corners of the square to make a packet. (See the photo of finished shui mai.)

Place the filled dumplings in a steamer. I use an electric steamer and I usually spray the plastic trays with Pam to prevent sticking.

Steam 20-25 minutes (in steamer).

Dipping Sauce

1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1/2 teaspoon sugar
a few drops hot chile oil (or use 1 tablespoon Thai sweet chili sauce, or pepper flakes)
sesame oil to taste (optional)
2 green onions, chopped fine
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro (optional)

The shui mai are at about 4 o’clock on the plate, with the dipping sauce in the center. There are many ways to gather in the sides of the wonton skins to form these dumplings; feel free to be creative. Round skins (gyozo) can also be used. And of course, you can vary the ingredients.

Favorites: Pork with Paprika and Mushrooms

Posted on February 22, 2013 by admin

Time to write down a recipe for something that I have always cooked without a recipe. It’s something that I just “throw together”. But this one needs to be shared, it’s that good and simple.

I used to take inexpensive cuts of meat and cook them for hours in onions, seasonings, and stock. When tender, I’d stir in a bit of sour cream and serve over noodles or rice. Comfort food. In the last several years, my old method for making this dish gravitated towards the recipe below. Instead of tough meat, I use pork tenderloin. This version only takes about 30 minutes prep and cooking time.

My husband asks: “What is that dish you are making?” and I never know what to call it. It emerged from my repertoire unnamed. Is it a stroganoff? A goulash? A paprikash? I really don’t know. All I know is that it’s very good, easy, and low-calorie (especially if you use non-fat yogurt).

You might already make something like this, but if not, try this easy recipe. I’ve named it “Pork with Paprika and Mushrooms”.

Pork with Paprika and Mushrooms

Serves 2.

9-11 ounces pork tenderloin, cut into 1/8-1/4-inch round or scallop-shaped pieces
1 small onion
1/2 red bell pepper, sliced (optional)
2 teaspoons paprika
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup chicken broth
3-4 ounces mushrooms (about 4 large), sliced
3 tablespoons sour cream or Greek non-fat yogurt
noodles (3 ounces dry will serve 2 people)

Halve the onion, then cut into slices. Saute in a little hot olive oil (add the bell pepper slices too if you are using them). When it begins to soften, add the pork tenderloin and cook a few minutes, until all the pieces are browned on all sides. Add the paprika and flour and stir until the flour is incorporated, then stir in the chicken broth and mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Simmer the mixture, covered or uncovered, for about 20 minutes. While it simmers, cook some noodles. Currently, I like pappardelle noodles. These are wide, long noodles, usually sold dry and nested. Fettuccini would work well too, or short, wide noodles.

When you are almost ready to serve, stir in the sour cream and gently heat for a minute or two. To serve, spoon the pork mixture over the noodles.

Here’s how it looks just before you add the sour cream/yogurt. You want a small amount of thick gravy, since the sour cream will thin this sauce.

Here it is, plated.

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