| tomatillo salsa | portlandpiper | I picked up some really nice tomatillos from Dave this past week and turned them into some delicious salsa. This salsa is great as a sauce on eggs, chicken, and pork. It can also be used as a base for a tomatillo soup and is a nice addition to green chile.
For me tomatillo salsa has to be kept simple. I have seen and tasted many recipes that include many extra spices and seasonings, including sugar, and they all taste wrong. Use fresh ingredients and treat them right and you will be rewarded.
Freeze the extra in small containers or ice cube trays for use throughout the winter. |
| "quick" strawberry sorbet | dave | What makes this recipe "quick" is that you get to accomplish the prep all at once, it still takes time to freeze the result. There is no need to chill the base in the refrigerator for several hours before putting it in the ice cream maker because it uses frozen strawberries and it starts out pretty darn cold.
I made this today to break in my new ice cream maker, and give my girlfriend a nice surprise when she got home. The recipe can easily be cut in half for one of those small, counter top ice cream makers. |
| Crockpot shredded chicken | dave | A new farm showed up at the farmer's market last season that supplies pasture raised chickens. For those of you not familiar with the practice, the chickens are raised outdoors in mobile pens. Instead of eating only grain rations, much of their diet is made up of grass, weeds, worms and bugs. Their grain ration is a supplement to their diet, not their only source of nutrition. They also get a lot more exercise than their mass produced relatives. In other words, they get to grow up and act like chickens. These birds also have a lot more flavor and a better nutrition profile than the supermarket birds.
While I sometimes make a whole smoked or roast chicken for a meal, one of my favorite things do when I'm short on time during the school year, is to toss it in the crock pot to make shredded chicken. Not only does the meat come out incredibly tasty, moist and easy to shred, I also get two quarts of some of the best chicken broth imaginable. I can easily make 4 meals for the two of us out of one bird. |
| broiled tomato sauce | portlandpiper | A tomato sauce to take your taste buds out of Italy and into Spain and Portugal. |
| tomato vegetable soup | portlandpiper | A light and refreshing soup to enjoy some of the middle to late summer vegetables. Freeze in small to medium size batches to enjoy your summer vegetables all winter long. |
| scones for two | portlandpiper | This quick version is based on the blueberry-vanilla scone recipe that is already on this web-site. It has been reduced for baking in a toaster oven. |
| basic white bread | portlandpiper | My kitchen is gone and I am only two weeks into the remodel. I can not take it any more! I have to bake something! All I have to bake in tonight is a toaster oven so a single, small, loaf of white bread is on the way. |
| quick & easy tomato soup | portlandpiper | Quick & easy were important for this recipe since I am doing all of my cooking in my utility room right now during my kitchen remodel. Right now my cooking appliances are a single induction burner, a toaster oven, a microwave oven, and an immersion blender. |
| beef & mushroom taco filling | portlandpiper | A rich and authentic tasting taco filling mixture. This mixture also works well baked into a casserole. Just increase the beef stock in the recipe to 1 c. and mix in with 1 lb. of cooked pasta and a couple of peeled and diced tomatoes. |
| teriyaki pork & pineapple burgers | portlandpiper | A nice hot sandwich that goes great with a crisp green salad and a big slice of watermelon. |
| teriyaki sauce | portlandpiper | A simple teriyaki sauce that can also be reduced further to work as a glaze or a dipping sauce. |
| oven roasted beets | portlandpiper | A nice side dish to go with early season corn on the cob. |
| blueberry-rhubarb syrup & jam | portlandpiper | Just one more delicious thing to do with rhubarb - which we got a goodly amount of from our CSA shares. |
| beef short ribs w/ herb & sweet potato sauce | portlandpiper | The beef short ribs looked really good in the store last weekend and I came up with this interesting little recipe after looking through the pantry and refrigerator. |
| oatmeal walnut chocolate chip cookies | portlandpiper | I was playing with a few different types of sugars this weekend and made these three minor variations of oatmeal cookies. The base recipe came from the back of an old Quaker oat box but I weighed all of the ingredients and timed the mixing of the ingredients so I could make several identical batches of cookies to compare how the different sugars reacted - and of course tasted. |
| sweet potato pancakes | portlandpiper | This recipe is modeled after a sweet potato pancake appetizer that we used to get at one of our favourite little local restaurants - The Compass in SE Portland. Unfortunately the restaurant closed after several years and I have had to make due by recreating some of our favourite dishes that we have not found in other restaurants.
Definitely take the time to make the pear chutney. It is not much more work and it really makes the dish stand out. |
| banana nut muffins | portlandpiper | These muffins started out as the Hana Banana-Nut Loaf recipe from "Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads Revised and Expanded", which I will have to review some time, but I like more crust on my banana breads, plus a bit more spice, so I adjusted the recipe a bit to make these muffins.
These muffins also freeze and thaw very well and are a great way to use up a couple of brown bananas when you do not have any ice creame in the house for banana milkshakes. |
| clean out the refrigerator w/ eggs | portlandpiper | I love my wife, she gets up early, sometimes several hours before I do, and goes to bed early, again sometimes several hours before I do. This works out well for us since we each get a little alone time each day and one of the things I like to do in my alone time is play in the kitchen. Sometimes I work on knife technique, or a bit of pastry work, or make up a few items for dinners later in the week, and every now and then I get to clean out some really nice leftovers from the refrigerator. So after a quick look-see in the refrigerator I determined that tonight was clean out the refrigerator night. I really love my late night snacks... and my wife.
I have shared leftover fried rice and lemon leftover chicken recipes with you already, but those are more like real meals. Clean out the refrigerator w/ eggs is serious snack food. So, on to the recipe... |
| good baked french fries | portlandpiper | I really like good french fries but my wife picks on me about the amount and quality of oil used so I decided to make a really good oven baked "fry".
In this case I was not after one of the big fluffy potato wedges that are more liked baked potatoes than fries. What I wanted was a thin 1/4" to 3/8" fry with a crispy skin and a dry fluffy interior. |
| stewed beef (Ethiopian flavour) | portlandpiper | This is a simple stewed beef (or lamb or buffalo) dish that I worked up for my first dutch oven gathering (DOG). The spices remind me of a "mild" beef dish called "alicha wat" that I get at my favourite Ethiopian restaurant. |
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