Home Made Yogurt

I attempted to make yogurt with my Mom's yogurt maker a few days ago. It tasted great, but I didn't get the texture I wanted. It was too watery with a few clumps. However, I was able to use it for alot of things anyway.

It's easy to make. You just heat up milk on the stove with the yogurt cultures.
I was supposed to use 5g culture powder for 24oz milk. I don't think I put in the whole 5g's because I didn't measure.
Also, I think slowly cooking the milk for a longer period of time while stirring should help thicken it up before you pour it into the little yogurt containers.
After pouring the milk in the containers, you just turn it on for10 hours.

Like I said, it had a really good tangy taste in the morning, but it was too watery. I didn't want it to go to waste, so here's some things we did with it.

Used it instead of milk to make smoothies. I put banana, papaya, honey & the yogurt. The yogurt taste offset the sweet taste of the other ingredients perfectly.

Put it in my chili instead of sour cream.

Mixed it with jelly and granola for breakfast.

It was really good each of these ways. So if your attempt at yogurt fails, don't dump it!
You could also make salad dressing, or spread it on sandwiches. Even use it instead of mayo for chicken or tuna salad.

Rice Krispie Treats

I could eat an entire pan of these. This is the original recipe. They have alot of variations on their website at http://www.ricekrispies.com/

3 tbsp butter or margerine
One package (10 oz or about 40) regular marshmallows
6 cups Rice Krispies


1. In large saucepan melt butter over low heat. Add marshmallows and stir until completely melted. Remove from heat.
2. Add KELLOGG'S RICE KRISPIES cereal. Stir until well coated.
3. Using buttered spatula or wax paper evenly press mixture into 13 x 9 x 2-inch pan coated with cooking spray. Cool. Cut into 2-inch squares. Best if served the same day.

Lemon Chicken Marinade

Got this recipe from cooks.com

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 tbsp lemon zest
1/2 tbsp kosher salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
4 large cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped

Put all ingredients into a blender or food processor until liquids are fully combined and garlic is well pureed. Mixture should be opaque and fairly thick. Pour over chicken and marinade for 4-8 hours.

This has a good taste. I marinated boneless chicken breasts and broiled them in the oven. Afterward, I made salad wraps with them.

Cream Cheese Cookies

1 stick real butter
3 oz cream cheese
1 cup sugar
1 cup plain flour
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)

Preheat oven to 375

Cream butter and cheese. Add sugar and mix well. Add flour, vanilla and nuts.

Drop by teaspoonfuls on ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake until brown. 8-12 minutes

Chocolate, Banana & PB Smoothie

This was so good!

In a blender, mix

2 bananas
1 tablespoon cocoa
1 heaping tablespoon peanut butter
1-2 cups milk (depends on how thick you like it)
Sweetener **

** I found that one packet of stevia worked really well. Prior to that, I used a tbsp of honey which was fine.

New House Cleaning Routine

Here's my new routine to keep up with the house. It's going really well.

Daily

Before bed,
Make sure kitchen is clean and ready for tomorrow's breakfast (do after dinner)
Take 15 minutes, run through the house as quick as possible putting left-out items where they belong.
Vacuume the parts of the house that get the most traffic
Lay out clothes for next day

Every morning
Make bed
Bath, get dressed. Wipe down tub, sink and toilet while getting ready. Scrub toilet bowl quickly with old shampoo that's there.
Make breakfast, and clean up afterward

Sometime during day
Do 1-2 items on my 'kitchen detail' list
Do 1-2 items on my 'basement detail' list

*This is how I incorporate spring cleaning with my routine. I made a list of 25 items that need to be done periodically in the kitchen, though maybe not every single week. This can include changing the foil on the range, cleaning the oven, organizing cabinets etc. I made a detail list on every section of the house, and focus on a new section every 2 weeks or so. Before you know it, the whole house has been spring cleaned over a span of a few months.

Weekly (spend 15 minutes on each item, and move on when time is up)

Feather dust entire house
Wipe down surfaces, walls and doors that get fingerprints.
Vacuume entire house
Change sheets
Mop non-carpeted floors

Mexican Salad

I don't know if I read a recipe for this, or I just stole the idea from a restaurant, but it's good.

In a large bowl, make a bed of romaine (chopped into thin strips) and chopped onion.

In a smaller bowl, mix together:
A handful of chopped cilantro
1-2 tomatoes, diced
1 can of corn, drained
1 can of black beans, drained
1 package of taco seasoning mix

Scoop corn/bean mix onto each serving of lettuce and onion.
Add broken tortilla chips and sour cream (or dressing of choice).

French Fry Omelette

Sad that your leftover french fries don't taste good the next day? Throw them in an omelette.
I got this idea from my mom. Boys and men love this food!

Cut up your fries to be bite sized and fry them in a small pan in butter.
Beat up 2-3 eggs and pour over the fries. Season to taste
When bottom of eggs become firm, take a spatula and push them over, so the egg on top can pour onto the pan.
When mostly cooked, flip the whole omelette over and turn heat to low.
Sprinkle cheese on one side and fold the other side over it to melt.

Almond Leek Soup

I wasn't excited about trying this when I made it, but it was so good! It's a Vitamix recipe, so you may have to do more chopping so a regular blender supports it.

Simmer 6 cups vegetable broth and 1 cup blanched almonds for 30 minutes.
Saute 1 chopped leek (white part only) and 2 cups chopped celery until the leeks caramelize.

Add sauteed vegetables to the broth and simmer 5-10 minutes
Salt & Pepper to taste

Pour mixture into the vitamix. Start on Variable 1, gradually raise it to 10, then switch to high for 45 seconds.

Serve.

Hot Chocolate

It's that season again. Not really, but I believe you can have hot chocolate at any time of the year. Home-made is so much better than packaged, if you're serious about your chocolate.

Hot Chocolate:

You'll have to keep testing and adding the following ingredients to taste as you add it to a small sauce pan.

I use half milk, half water, because I don't drink milk usually. Plus, you have a more chocolate flavor if there is less milk.

I notice that 3 tbsp cocoa, and an equal amount of sugar gives it a rich chocolate taste that is not too sweet.
Stir well, and throw in some chocolate chips to melt in there, or chocolate syrup.
Add 1 tsp of vanilla extract.

Heat up until ready.

Pour in cup and add whipped cream, marshmallows, or both.

Whipped Cream:

Home-made whipped cream is the best. Just buy a jar of heavy cream and whip it with an electric beater until it is firm. I add just a little bit of sugar, and rum. You can store it in an air-tight container for a few days if you whip it firm enough.

Fun fact: Did you know that if something like heavy cream is 'Ultra-Pasteurized', you don't have to store it in the refrigerator until it is opened?
It is just in the cold section of the grocery store, because that's where people expect to find milk products.
In reality, anything living and beneficial has been killed in it, so it has a shelf life comparable to cereal.

Fiesta Rice

I can't believe I haven't posted this. It's so easy, and adding the black beans makes it a one-dish vegetarian meal.

Chop up one onion and one green bell pepper
Saute in butter in med-large pot
Add one can of diced tomatoes plus a can of water
Add one cup of uncooked rice

Cover, until rice has absorbed the water.
Stir in a jar of salsa and a can of black beans
Salt and Pepper to taste

Add sour cream as garnish when you serve

Bi Bim Bop

This isn't really a recipe from scratch, more like preparation instructions. Bi Bim Bop is Korean mixed vegetables mixed with steamed rice. If you were to prep the vegetables yourself, you would be making 6-7 separate dishes in small amounts.

Steam rice. When mine was done, I added a tbsp of bean paste (found in a Asian market) and sesame oil, salt & pepper

Mixed vegetables. A good Korean grocery store should have these already prepared. Mine was labeled 'Seasoned 5 vegetables' It contains bean sprouts, radish, carrot, watercress, fernbracken all seasoned differently.

Put rice in a large bowl and arrange a portion of each vegetable on top.
Top with a fried egg.

To eat, mix everything together in with the rice.

Couscous Salad

This is such a refreshing summer dish. I don't have the amounts to most of this stuff, just use your judgement as to how much of each ingredient to put in.

Cook up Israeli Couscous (about 2 cups)
Stir in a good amount of olive oil and place in fridge covered to cool.
Chop up mint leaves and cilantro stir into couscous
Add minced garlic and sea salt
Stir in:
feta cheese
garbanzo beans (1 can)
grape tomatoes (halved)
balsamic vinegar (a splash)

Chill in fridge

Chicken Barley Soup

JR was sick today, so I made this hearty soup.

3 carrots
4 stalks of celery
1/2 bell pepper (because it was in the fridge)
1/2 onion
about 2 cups cooked chicken (cut to pieces)
2 qts chicken broth
water
seasoning: garlic, caraway, rosemary, thyme, parsley, sea salt, pepper
Braggs Liquid Aminos
1 pot of cooked barley (I cooked 1 cup barley with 3 cups water)

Chop up vegetables and place in bowl
Dump bowl into crock pot, fill same bowl with same amount of water
Add seasonings and Liquid Aminos
Cook on high 2 hours

Add chicken, cooked barley (may have to break it up), 2 quarts of chicken broth.
Add more seasoning if desired.

Cook on low until heated up.

Brownies from Scratch

Ingredients

¾ cup butter (170 g)
1+½ cup sugar (330 g)
2 teaspoon vanilla
3 eggs
¾ cup all-purpose flour (85 g)
½ cup cocoa powder (50 g)
1 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt (optional)
3 oz (100 g) chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat Oven to 350
2. Grease parchment paper and place in 13X9 pan
3. Melt butter
4. Mix eggs and sugar, then add rest of ingredients
5. Mix until smooth
6. Bake for 20-30 minutes until you can poke a fork in and it comes out clean.

Home Made Crackers

I got this from www.101cookbooks.com

I only used all-purpose flour for this, and they turned out great. I also sprinkled parsley, rosemary, and garlic on top before I baked them. It's really a good idea to have a pizza stone for this.

Olive Oil Cracker Recipe

If you have trouble tracking down semolina flour, just substitute white whole wheat flour (or all-purpose flour), it will be make a slightly different cracker but should still work. To get creative with your crackers you can top them with lots of things before baking: freshly grated cheese, artisan salts, cornmeal, a dusting of your favorite spice blend, seeds, or a wash of your favorite flavored or infused oil. You can simply cut the unbaked cracker dough into various shapes using one of those pizza cutting wheels.

1 1/2 cups semolina flour
1 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour (or all-purpose flour)
1 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt
1 cup warm water
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

special equipment: pasta machine (optional)

Whisk together the flours and salt. Add the water and olive oil. Using a mixer with a dough hook attachment mix the dough at medium speed for about 5 - 7 minutes. Alternately, feel free to mix and then knead by hand on a floured counter-top. The dough should be just a bit tacky - not too dry, not too sticky to work with. If you need to add a bit more water (or flour) do so.

When you are done mixing, shape the dough into a large ball. Now cut into twelve equal-sized pieces. Gently rub each piece with a bit of olive oil, shape into a small ball and place on a plate. Cover with a clean dishtowel or plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature for 30 - 60 minutes.

While the dough is resting, preheat your oven to 450F degrees. Insert a pizza stone if you have one.

When the dough is done resting, flatten one dough ball. Using a rolling pin or a pasta machine, shape into a flat strip of dough - I can usually get down to the 4 setting on my pasta machine w/o trouble. Pull the dough out a bit thinner by hand (the way you might pull pizza dough). You can also cut the dough into whatever shape you like at this point. Set dough on a floured (or cornmeal dusted) baking sheet, poke each cracker with the tines of a fork to prevent puffing, add any extra toppings, and slide into the oven (onto the pizza stone). Repeat the process for the remaining dough balls, baking in small batches. If you don't have a pizza stone, bake crackers a few at a time on baking sheets. Bake until deeply golden, and let cool before eating - you will get more crackery snap.

Makes a dozen extra large crackers.

Football Cookie

If you click on 'chocolate chips' in the labels section, you can find the recipe for this cookie cake.
To do the above:
After baking the cake, cut it into the shape of a football.
Take a strainer and fill with powdered sugar, and dust the cookie until it's completely white
Cut parchment paper to resemble the stripes of a football, and press them down on the cookie
Take a strainer again, and fill it with cocoa, and dust the cookie until it's all brown.
Remove the parchment paper carefully, and you'll have the white stripes
Take ready-squeeze white icing to create the stitches.

Now you'll be ready for next year. Since Football season is over now.

Washing Dishes by Hand

Keep a bar of soap on the sink edge for those times you only have a few dishes to wash. Then you can just rub your scrub brush on the soap, and it will be the perfect amount for what you're washing. If you do this, you won't run out of liquid soap for large loads as quickly.

Pancake Mix

These pancakes are delicious enough to eat without syrup. Here's the batter ingredients:

1 1/2 cup flour
3 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/4 cup milk
1 egg
3 tablespoons melted butter

Organizing Office Supplies

I got this idea on Hints from Helouise. Use your empty vitamin bottles to store things like thumb tacks, rubber bands, and paper clips. If you have little ones that put these things in their mouths, they have a safety cap on to prevent them from opening.

Fancy Soap

Since Macy's was giving away free cosmetics as their punishment for over-charging customers, Dylan went and brought me back some 'Euphoria' body wash. We try not to use soap with harsh perfumes and chemicals like that when we take baths. So, I'm using it to clean the house.
I put it on the scrub brush when I clean the toilet bowl, and on the mop when I clean the floors. As Fly Lady would say: "Soap is soap".
Now, our house smells so 'Euphoric'.
Thanks Dylan!

Hybrid Home-made Jarred Salsa

I always think store-bought salsa just tastes like spicy tomatoes. However, you might not feel like starting from scratch with making your own.
Today, I bought a jar of Newman's Own salsa, with a fresh bunch of cilantro, and one onion.
I chopped up the cilantro and onion, and mixed it with the salsa.
It tastes home-made, but takes about half the time.

An Intuitive Home

I'm coming to realize that part of a wife's job is to make her home at peace with her husband. This is a balance of making it intuitive to his habits, and giving him the proper tasks with the proper reward for performing them.

Another important principle is that a good wife must know the difference between female tasks and male tasks. You treat these tasks as differently as you would treat a female or a male person.

Each household is different as what would be called such.

In general, female tasks include:
Cleaning up behind someone (i.e. picking up shoes, throwing the teabag in the trash)
Child and Pet Care
Ridding the home of offensive smells (esp. when scrubbing is involved)
Chores that distress the husband psychologically (changing diapers, cleaning toilet, kitty litter)
Any task that requires you to be on hands and knees

Male tasks can vary greatly as long as doing the chore meets the following criteria:
Must elicit praise.
Preferably outside (so neighbors see he's doing a chore)
Must seem like it requires superior strength to perform (taking trash out, opening jars, etc...)

A wife whose husband supports her enough to be able to stay at home should be able to do almost all of the female tasks. However, if she has an extra burden, or added responsibilities on top of her home-making, delegation of some of these tasks will need to be made.

Asking a husband to perform a male task is relatively simple. The words must convey a dependence on the husband, as well as being favorably impressed with his abilities.

The following is a sample question that conveys these two points. Simply fill in the parenthesis with the appropriate word.

"I need you to (male task to be performed) because you're so (strong, skilled, smart)"

Notice the first thing the husband will hear in this sentence is "I need you". The last thing he hears is "You're so (strong, skilled, smart)".

With this wording, it makes the task he needs to perform seem as nothing to him. Following up his performance with lavish praise and loving treatment (especially physical) will encourage him to look forward to doing more tasks for you in the future. He may even do them without you asking him. It is a wife's duty to always recognize what a husband does around the house, and praise him accordingly.

The biggest challenge is to ask a husband to do a female task. Ideally, a house-wife would rarely need to do this. Unfortunately, circumstances such as chronic health problems, care-taking outside the home, or both partners being required to work full time, demand a delegation of the domestic tasks to the husband as well.

This is where making your home intuitive to your husband habits a real asset. Watch your husbands habits carefully, and switch things around so he only needs to make the smallest change to keep things orderly.

For example: does he throw his keys, pocket change and receipts on a table when he gets home? Set up a money jar there, and a key holder near the table. Then, you will only have to take care of the trash he's kept in his pockets. He will most likely respond to a request to put the items in the correct spot, since it's really not much different than what he was doing before.

Does he leave his clothes on the bathroom floor? Keep a hamper in the bathroom and your problem is solved. Even if he forgets to place his clothes in there, it will be easy for you to clean up.

Domesticity can be a joy when a good wife learns the proper way to put her husband to work, and to make the home intuitive to him. A peaceful house makes a peaceful family.

French Onion Soup

It's surprising how many things you can come up with for dinner when you're running out of groceries. I had a few small potatoes left, some onions that were going to go bad soon, and a bunch of Herbalife soup mix samples. So I made the above.

Slice up potatoes and throw in crock pot
Season to taste (s&p, garlic, dried onions)
Slice up onions and add to pot
Since I had them, I mixed up about 8 packs of soup mix (each contains about 12g protein) with hot water (about 32 oz) You can use regular chicken broth.
Pour it in the pot and stir.

After an hour of cooking on high (depending on how hard the potatoes) it's ready to serve.
Shred up some romano or other kind of cheese and put a thick layer of it on top.

Since I used protein soup mix for mine, it's like a meatless dinner that will fill you up.

Olive Tapenade

Trader Joe's sells their own. It's really good, but it's in such a tiny jar. So I decided to make my own with suitable portions.

You can chop up the following ingredients just like you're making salsa.

Green Olives
Diced Tomatoes
Roasted Pepper
Pickles
Minced Garlic
Salt & Pepper

Since I happened to have it in my fridge, I also chopped up and added:
Capers
Pickled Grape leaves

Add it to sandwiches, or crackers

Salmon and Potatoes

You'll have to use your own cooking experience for the details on this one. In parenthesis is what I personally did, and it turned out pretty good.

Preheat oven to (350)
Slice potatoes and add to bottom of 9x9 pan
Season to taste (salt, pepper, garlic)
Chop up onions and cover potatoes
Splash it with Braggs Liquid Aminos
Drizzle with olive oil
Cover with a handful of chopped fresh parsley
Place salmon filets on top
Season to taste (mine was preseasoned from TJ's)
Bake for 20-30 minutes

Tortilla Land

My friend Alejandra gave me a bag of 100 corn tortillas. So I'm trying to use them up. So far, I make cheese quesadillas, and a dessert thing.

Cheese quesadillas are easy: Melt butter in a pan, place one tortilla on pan. Sprinkle with cheese, put another tortilla on top. Flip over when it's browned, and serve.

If anyone can tell me the name of this dessert thing from how I describe it, that would be helpful. I know I'm not the first person to make this up:

Fry a tortilla in butter. Sprinkle with cinnamon, drizzle with honey, and serve.