Summer Salads

This is one of my favorite summer salads. Unfortunately, no ones else in my family likes it, so when I make it I have to eat it alone. Perhaps I will make it for picnic in the park next week. It's a great way to use up tomatoes and onions, which are often in abundance.

Tomato Crouton Salad

• 3 large tomatoes, cut into bite sized pieces
• 1 large onion, chopped (I prefer a sweet onion, but use your favorite)
• 1/2 cup finely chopped parsley or basil
• 2 cups croutons
• 2 Tbsp. Italian dressing

Toss tomatoes and onions and parsley with the dressing. Just before serving, add croutons and toss again. Serve immediately. (The croutons get soft quickly, so don't add them until the last minute possible.) So yummy! And easy. And I'm all about easy.

Anything Goes Muffins

This is a recipe I got from a friend, Jenny Chamberlain. It's a lovely recipe because it's so versatile. I have adjusted her original recipe, found here, for my humongous family and for the sweeteners that I use. Today I used vanilla yogurt and applesauce as the 2 c of anything. I also threw together a quick streusel topping (sorry, no recipe on that) to make them even more yummy. They were delicious.

Anything Goes Muffins

Preheat oven to 375.
4 c. flour (I like 2 c. white, 1 c. w/w, and 1 c. oats)
2 Tbsp. baking powder
2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. powdered stevia
1/2 c. sucanat
1/4 c. molasses
2 c. Anything (moist - such as bananas, shredded carrots, pumpkin...)
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1-1/2 c. milk
1/2 c. oil

Sift dry ingredients. Mix all wet ingredients. Stir wet into dry just enough to moisten. Bake in preheated oven for 15-18 minutes. Makes 24 large muffins.

The real versatility of muffins lies in the plethora of moist ingredients you could use (the "Anything" of the recipe.) A favorite is 1 c. shredded zucchini and 1 c. cranberry sauce. Another fun idea would be peanut butter and banana. Or strawberry/banana, or applesauce/yogurt, or perhaps peaches/sour cream. How about squash muffins with some butterscotch morsels stirred in. Ooooh, and pumpkin/cranberry would be really good. Enjoy!!

(Here is a pre-cooking photo. I was going to be sure to take a finished product photo, but the kids ate them too quickly.)

Juicy roasted chicken

I have recently discovered that I can, indeed, roast a chicken. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until a few months ago, I had never roasted an entire chicken before. It just seemed so advanced, so grown-up. Well, after becoming educated about how chickens are generally raised for slaughter (in horrendous conditions and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics) I had just about quit eating chicken altogether. I missed it. Chicken is so good, and healthy. Then I discovered that Costco carries a brand of chicken called Coleman's Natural that is organic, antibiotic and hormone-free, and that are fed no animal by-products. It's expensive, though. Really expensive. As one would expect, the full chickens are the cheapest per pound. So I needed to learn to either cook a full chicken or cut up a raw chicken. I went with the former. And guess what I discovered? It's easy. Really easy. Who knew? (Probably lots of people, actually, but not me.) I picked up a simple recipe from Allrecipes.com and made a few tweaks, and I couldn't be happier. Delicious, moist chicken. We always roast 2 at a time, one for eating and the other to cut up for other recipes. Finally, I am a real grown-up cook. (Don't tell anyone, but I've never roasted a turkey either. Maybe now I can take a stab at it. How hard can it be?)


Juicy Roasted Chicken

1 whole chicken, giblets removed.
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup butter
1 stalk celery, cut in sticks
1/2 of a lemon, quartered,
1/2 of a small onion, quartered

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place chicken in roasting pan (a square Pyrex dish works great) and season inside and out with salt and pepper (be very generous). Place 3 Tablespoons of the butter in the chicken cavity. Then stuff the chicken with the celery sticks, the lemon and onion wedges. Arrange the remaining butter, sliced into pats, on the outside of the chicken (see photo below). Bake chicken for 1 - 1/4 hour to 1 - 1/2 hour in the preheated oven. Remove from oven and baste with the drippings. Cover with aluminum foil and allow to rest for 30 minutes before serving. Delish.

Homemade trail mix

Yesterday I went shopping at Costco for the month's groceries, and when we got home, we made trail mix. We like to make our own trail mix here, for a couple of reasons. 1: It's significantly cheaper, even if you use the same ingredients, which we don't. 2: You can personalize it. I will not give you a recipe here, because I like to think anyone capable of reading this blog is capable of figuring out what they want in their trail mix. But I will give you some ideas.

Costco trail mix, which is my inspirational basis, has peanuts, almonds, cashews, raisins, and m&m's. It's a very basic mix, but good enough to have it's own facebook fan page. (These day, I wonder if that actually means anything.) As we have no allergies in our house, we use peanuts for our base as well. We also add almonds (the bags of baking almonds at Costco are cheaper than the roasted almonds, and you could roast them if you wanted to, but I leave mine raw.) We grow our own pecans, so they go in as well. Cheapo, and yummy. I have several in my family who do not like cashews, so I don't put them in. (I just buy them and eat them myself.) For the sweet, we put in raisins and Craisins. The Craisins add a bit of color, and they're well-priced at Costco. I don't want m&m's, because they're a bit pricey, and total sugar. I do like the sweet ingredient, though, so we also add chocolate covered raisins to ours. Finally, we add some sort of cracker-y thing. Pretzel sticks are great, or cheese nips. Whatever you like and find on sale. This month I splurged and bought goldfish to go in. That will drive the price up, but the kids thought I was a very cool mama. The trick to making it cheaper is to look at the per ounce price (so conveniently figured out for you at Costco. Use a calculator anywhere else.) If the per ounce price of the ingredient is lower than the per ounce price of pre-made trail mix, you're saving money. There are a lot of other ingredients you could add, if you liked. I've though of a few for future use: shredded coconut, gummy bears or Swedish fish, yogurt covered pretzels, sunflower seeds, toasted pumpkin seeds, skittles, cheese balls...the possibilities are vast. Good luck with yours. Once you get it made, the real trick is to keep it from disappearing too fast.

BLT Pasta Salad

This is a salad that always gets good comments at a picnic or barbecue. It's a little different than the norm, but it's easy to make. And it has bacon. It's hard to go wrong with bacon.

BLT Pasta Salad

2 cups uncooked macaroni
5 green onions, finely chopped
2 tomatoes, diced
1-1/4 cups diced celery
1-1/4 cups mayonnaise
5 teaspoons white vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 pound bacon, cooked and crumbled

Cook macaroni, drain and rinse in cold water until cooled. In a large bowl, combine the macaroni, green onions, tomato, and celery. In a small bowl, combine the mayo, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Pour dressing over macaroni mixture and stir to coat. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours. Just before serving, stir in bacon.

New England Clam Chowder

This recipe is a family favorite. As always, the amounts here make a pot of soup big enough to feed a family of 7. Or a hungry family of 5. Possibly a starving family of 3...well, you get the picture. This soup really improves with age, so if you can make it the day before, refrigerate it overnight, and then reheat, it will be even better.

Clam Chowder

1 large onion, chopped
3 Tablespoons olive oil (or bacon grease, if you have it)
1/4 c cooked, crumbled bacon *
~1lb. frozen hash browns (or equal amount potatoes, 1/4" dice)
1/2 cup flour
3 cans clams, drained (reserve juice)
1 c. cream or half and half
3 cups milk
2-3 teaspoons salt

Saute bacon and onions in oil until translucent, about 8 minutes. Add potatoes and stir to coat. Cook about 2 minutes. Sprinkle flour over all and stir to incorporate. To reserved clam juice, add water to make 2 cups. Stir clam juice, cream, and milk into potatoes, stirring well. Add salt. Bring almost to a boil, stirring, until thickened. Reduce heat and cook until potatoes are done, about 15 minutes. Stir in clams, heat through, and remove from heat. Let sit about an hour, reheat, and serve. Alternately, you can refrigerate overnight and reheat and serve the next day.
(*If I have time, I will cut up and fry the bacon before cooking the soup, leaving the appropriate amount of grease and bacon in the pan to saute the onions.)

Homemade yogurt

We talked about homemade yogurt at the park the other day. Here is a link to a recipe for crock pot yogurt that sounds like the recipe I used to use (which I cannot find.)