Summer Time Grilled Chicken

As the weather warms up I tend to start cooking on the grill a lot. The beginning of spring is my favorite time to bust out the tongs, open up the propane and make all of my favorite foods that were impossible to make with 3 feet of snow on the ground.

In honor of the copious amounts of snow on the ground, I thought I'd share with you a recipe I made up when I was about 15. It's still one of my favorites and just the smell of it makes me think of summer.

Summer Time Grilled Chicken

Ingredients:

• 3 chicken breasts, cut in half to form 2 thinner pieces
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 Tbsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp Tabasco sauce
• 1/4 tsp black pepper
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp rice wine vinegar (or red wine vinegar... whatever you have that isn't white)

Directions:  Mix all ingredients in a large bowl and pour over chicken breast. Allow to marinade for at least 15 minutes prior to grilling. Grill on medium heat until cooked through.

Optional: You can also either boil the heck out of the remaining marinade for a sauce or you can make a second batch of the marinade (light on the oil) and use that as a sauce.

The smell of this marinade always reminds me of the summer and the finished product is light, slightly spicy and delicious. Serve it with a pasta salad and some grilled vegetables. Yum!

Advice for Bachelors

Attention Bachelors!!

I'm about to give all of you single, unattached men out there a very important bit of advice, so pay attention. If you really want to wow a woman, learn to cook. I don't mean that you should be able to turn out 5-star food on a daily basis, but knowing how to at least feed yourself is a good start.

If more than half of your meals come out of the freezer or a can, you really can't say that you know how to cook. Especially not if the other half of your meals are delivered to your house from your local take-out place. You should at least know the bare minimums, like how to cook pasta and maybe grill something.

So why does this matter? Knowing how to feed yourself will make you look more like an attractive, independent man that's able to take care of himself. Women don't want to adopt an overgrown child. Do your own laundry, keep your apartment reasonably clean and know enough about cooking that you can feed yourself.

Even if you (and your future spouse) picture a relationship where your wife does the cooking and the cleaning, she'll appreciate the fact that you know how. There are situations that will come up where these skills will take a lot of the stress off of your wife, like when she's in the hospital following the birth of baby #3 and you're at home taking care of babies #1 and #2 between sitters.

So learn the necessary skills to make yourself into an attractive mate and you'll see how quickly you find Mrs. Right.

Avacados

In my continuing attempt to expand my culinary horizons, I thought it would be fun to pick something that I've used a lot and try to find a new application for it. Since avacados were on sale at the grocery store this past week, I thought that would be the perfect ingredient to try to experiment with.

First, a lot of people don't know how to choose a rip avocado. The trick to getting one that's delicious and creamy is to simply give it a small poke. A ripe avocado should be soft, but not squishy. The outside should be black or dark green and bumpy. If the avocado still has a stem nub on the top, you can flick it off and check out the color of the avocado's flesh. Bright and green means good, while black or dark brown meals over ripe. Of course, if you're not the one flicking the stem bump off, this rule doesn't apply.

Anyway, I went and picked out a nice rip avocado and brought it home with me to experiment. I am a sucker for guacamole, so I thought that would be a good place to start. I mixed up my avocado with salt and lime juice, then added in some diced onion, diced tomato, chopped cilantro and a couple dashes of hot sauce. I know a lot of people use jalapenos in their guacamole, but I am partial to using Tabasco for the heat. Not to mention it instantly distributes the heat throughout the guacamole so you can enjoy it right away. :-)

So then I started wondering where I could use said guacamole. While I pondered this, I enjoyed some with chips.  Ok, so it was more than "some"... it was more like half of it. That was my best brainstorming session to date.

I know I like guacamole on sandwiches, so I started thinking about the next logical step up... hamburgers. Ah, my quest was finally starting to take shape.  I quickly Googled the combination and found that I wasn't the first person to have this idea.  With the knowledge that others had tried the combo and lived to blog about it, I went ahead with my experiment. I wasn't really sure what to put on the burger besides the guacamole, so I went with cheese, guacamole, lettuce and tomato. I omitted the other condiments as well as the pickles because that just seemed yucky. I know my guacamole already had tomato in it, but I really heart those red globes of deliciousness.

The end result was nothing short of a victory. Guacamole not only makes a good sandwich condiment, it also makes an excellent burger condiment. Try it the next time you get a craving for a hamburger and see what you've been missing out on!

Dinner Rut

I've been in a dinner rut lately. Its been an endless cycle of the same foods over and over again and my family is getting a little sick of the lack of variety. With that being said, I decided it was high time to get a little more adventurous in the kitchen.

Before the kids were born I used to have "fun food Fridays" and "Easy Wednesdays". On fun food Friday I would try a new recipe, a new main ingredient or a new take on an old favorite. It didn't matter, as long as it was new.  On Easy Wednesday it was my day off. We'd have something easy like chicken nuggets, sandwiches or leftovers. The mid-week break was a nice way to re-start my system and keep me from getting burned out.  I don't know why these things stopped when the kids were born, but they did.

So I'm bringing them back!  This Friday we'll be experimenting with Perch. It's a type of fish that we've never had, so it'll be interesting to see what I can come up with. If anyone reading this has had Perch, I'd love to hear what you did with it. Leave a comment and let me know!

Now, I'll leave you all with a challenge. If you find yourself in a food rut, challenge yourself to try something new every week. It doesn't have to be anything exotic, just a new dish, a new main ingredient, a new vegetable or a new style of preparing the food. Keeping your meals exciting will help keep cooking from being like a chore and it'll keep your family interested in eating.

Home Canning and BPA

The newest worry to hit the internet is the threat of BPA in food containers. It seems like everything is now labeling itself as being BPA free, even though the average consumer has no idea what BPA is or why it's bad for them.

BPA stands for Bisphenol A.  It's a chemical that is used to harden plastic or coat metal to make it rust-proof. Understandably, both of these traits are desirable in food grade containers. Unfortunately, when food comes in contact with a surface treated with BPA, the BPA can leak into the food and be taken into the body.

Once BPA enters the body, it acts like estrogen. This can lead to a variety of health problems in both men and women. It's especially dangerous for children that are still growing and developing.

So what does any of this have to do with the picture above?  Well, for years people have thought they could escape the evil food industry by growing and preserving their own foods. It seems that those people might not be as safe as they thought. Canning jars like the one pictured above have metal lids. Those metal lids are treated with BPA to make them rust-proof, so you can boil them without fear of them rusting. Where there's food and BPA there is contamination.

Before you freak out and throw away all of your hard work, know that the risk of BPA contamination from home canned foods is extremely low. If you handle your jars correctly and always store them in an upright manner, the number of times food comes in contact with the lid can be limited. This will also limit the amount of opportunities BPA has to leak into your foods.

Home canning is still safer than commercially prepared foods, but if you are still worried about BPA contamination, you can always use a reusable lid made of another material, such as Tattler canning lids. These types of lids are BPA free and they will last for the lifetime of the jar. They cost more initially, but after a few seasons, the cost evens out.

If you're concerned about BPA, you should educate yourself as much as possible and then look for alternative ways to minimize the risk to your family. Vigilance now will pay off with a future of good health.

If you would like to learn more about home canning, please visit http://www.balljellyjars.com or http://www.howtocanning.com.

Party Planning

So this weekend my husband and I are hosting yet another party. This time it's just a casual gathering with college friends, so I don't feel the need for a real formal meal. That being said, I thought I'd toss out some ideas that I have for my party to inspire others looking for some easy (and cheap) food options.

Hot Appetizers

• stuffed mushrooms
• buffalo bites (chicken nuggets coated in hot wing sauce)
• spinach and artichoke dip
• 7 layer dip/taco dip
• crab dip
• bruschetta
• cocktail wieners in a BBQ/pineapple sauce

Cold Appetizers

• veggie tray
• fruit salad
• chips & dip
• shrimp ring
• chex mix
• crackers & cheese 

 Like I said, I don't plan on doing a formal meal, but I may throw together a turkey to 1.) keep the oven going and 2.) provide a source for fresh meat for sandwiches. It all depends on the price of turkeys at the store. Not to mention, I didn't get a chance to cook a turkey last year.  :-) If I do make a turkey, I'll probably serve it for hot open-faced turkey sandwiches with plenty of yummy gravy.

Another thing that happens when we have parties is that at least a handful of people wind up crashing in our living room.  That means I have to serve breakfast the next day.  Continental style breakfast is usually my preferred choice, with fruit, scrambled eggs, toast/bagels, sausage, bacon and fried potatoes.  Setting the oven to 250 degrees is the easiest way to keep the meats & potatoes warm while you cook the eggs. It also dries the grease off the bacon and finishes crisping it up.

Review: McCormick Cinnamon Ornaments

CINNAMON ORNAMENTS - * (1 Star)

Through the great powers that are Pinterest, I recently came across a recipe on the McCormick website for Cinnamon ornaments.  Since I had a rather large surplus of cinnamon I figured I'd give it a try.

Epic. Fail. Batman.

I followed the directions and combined 3/4 cup of applesauce with 1 cup plus 2 Tablespoons of cinnamon.  I mixed it up with my hands until it was well combined.  The directions said I would need to bake the ornaments for 2 1/2 hours or let them dry overnight.  Well apparently the air in my kitchen is super dry because the dough was drying out before I could even roll it.  I considered adding applesauce to the party, but decided against it since that sort of thing never works out for me.  I pressed on, hoping the directions were right and crumbly dough was the norm.

Turns out it's not the norm.  My ornaments barely stayed together.  I could only roll a small section of "dough" into a flat surface before the edges started crumbling and breaking the whole thing apart.  Once about 1/2 the ornaments were done, I got fed up and threw the rest of the dough in the trash.  Using a drinking straw I carefully CAREFULLY made holes in the ornaments for a ribbon or hook.  I treated those things like I was doing surgery on them and they still broke.  Fragile doesn't even begin to describe these things.

Finally, I put the ornaments into my food dehydrator and turned it on.  It has been about 20 minutes and they seem pretty dry.  Hmmm 20 minutes versus 2 1/2 hours?  Something went horribly wrong.  I now have brittle, fragile, vaguely cinnamony-smelling "ornaments" to decorate my trash bin with.  Hooray.