I couldn’t help but wonder what their opinions are regarding the bill.

I wasn’t at the grocery store however to interview people or to overly think what’s happening with the State. I was at the grocery store picking a few odds and ends and thinking about Creamy Taco Mac.

There is nothing too spectacular about the preparation or ingredients in this recipe. It’s just plain simple and tasty.

I enjoyed this outside enjoying the last few days of Spring, sipping a virgin margarita .

Creamy Taco Mac

Ingredients:

1¼ lbs. ground turkey

8 oz. dry pasta shapes

1 small onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes, drained

4 tbsp. taco seasoning

3 oz. cream cheese

½ cup sour cream

Salt and pepper

Shredded cheddar cheese (optional)

Directions:

Bring a large pot of water to boil. Cook pasta according to the package directions. Drain, reserving ½ cup of pasta water. Set aside.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet or sauté pan, cook the ground turkey over medium-high heat until no longer pink. A few minutes before the turkey is cooked through, add the chopped onion to the skillet. Once the turkey is cooked through, mix in the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Mix in the diced tomatoes and taco seasoning and let simmer over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Stir in the cooked pasta, cream cheese, sour cream and reserved pasta water, and continue stirring until the cream cheese is melted and the sauce is well blended. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Simmer over medium-low heat 3-5 minutes to reduce the sauce a bit. Remove from the heat and top with shredded cheddar cheese, if desired.

Source: adapted from Delish

via Annie’s Eats.

Share/Save

My grandmother had a lot of amazing qualities. Many of my most cherished memories are rooted in family dinners. I was lucky  that every Sunday lunch after church was at her home. And, the meals she prepared were always easy, delicious and  beautiful.

One thing for certain is that she had a good eye for simplicity. I’m pretty sure the year Pillsbury came out with ready made pie crusts that she never made one again. More on that in a different post.

Lemon Mousse was a dessert staple at her table for years. Her recipe differs from traditional mousse in that there are no eggs. Her recipe leans more towards fluffy and light, opposed to creamy and thick.

MooMoo’s Lemon Mousse

2 lemons or 3 T. bottled lemon juice
1/2 lb. cream cheese room temperature. Don’t substitute with reduced fat. You’ll compromise the texture.
3/4 c. sugar
1/4 t. vanilla
1 cup whipping cream

1 c. fruit berries of your choice

Grate 2 tsp. lemon zest from lemons and squeeze 3 T juice.

With mixer set at medium speed, beat the cream cheese, zest, juice, sugar and vanilla until smooth.

Bean whipping cream until it holds soft speaks. Gradually fold cream into cream cheese mixture.

Spoon into individual glasses, smooth top, cover and chill several hours or overnight.

Top with berries before serving.

Share/Save

It was a footnote I wish I would have noticed before I peeled three pumpkins with a potato peeler. One I wish I would have read before I pan roasted the pumpkin and before I cooked and pureed it for four hours to turn it into pumpkin butter.

For anyone who has canned, the sound of a POP is the best sound in the world. The pop is an indacator that the jar sealed. I waited in suspense to hear the pop and when I heard eight little pops I was elated!  Then I heard more pops which was odd considering I only had eight jars made.

Then I realized that was the jars unsealing. Yes, apparently you don’t can pumpkin because it’s high Ph levels and pumpkin gas expands once it’s in a jar. So they all very quickly unsealed and I had to toss all of them.

These jars were handmade with love, but washed out with a lesson learned.

Share/Save

I’m trying to control it, but it is prickly pear season, and I feel like I need to get while the gettins good.

There are several methods you can use to juice prickly pears and I don’t suggest hand picking them as I attempted last year. Gloves, tongs and protective body wrap are necessary (maybe the last suggestion is a little extreme, but seriously, wear gloves and use tongs).

I learned how to juice the fruit with a pillow case. You can learn more about it in an article on AZCentral.com.

Simply, you take a batch of 12-15 prickly pears, rinse, put them in a pillow case, place the pillow case in your pot and put enough water to cover the fruit, about 1″ and simmer until the fruit is soft. With a masher, mash the fruit. You’ll see the water quickly turn a brilliant pink. With your tongs, squeeze out the excess moisture. That’s all it takes to get the juice from a prickly pear.

I put my gloves back on to dump the excess skin and seeds out of the pillow case into my composter. One interesting note is that the prickly pear will not stain your pillow case! Seriously, it’ll turn hot pink, but it won’t stain. Wash it and you’d never know the difference.

I keep a stash of extra salsa and pickle jars. I filled several jars with the prickly pear juice to use later in the year to mix in jams, syrups and sauces.

Here’s a jam recipe shared by African Kelli:

To every 2 1/2 cups of juice
Add 1 (1 3/4 oz.) package powdered pectin
Boil for a couple minutes
Add 3 tablespoons lemon juice and 3 1/2 cups sugar.
Stir often and boil hard for 5 minutes.
Pour in jelly glass and seal with paraffin.

I followed the preserving method from Ball for high acid fruits when I was ready to seal the jars.

Here are some other Prickly Pear recipes:

Prickly Pear Lemon Green Tea
Prickly Pear Margarita
Prickly Pear Lemon Cupcakes
Prickly Pear Arnold Palmer

Share/Save

It’s amazing how many resources there are online on the subject and how an online shout out got me an invitation to a friend’s house to take a stab at learning the process.

Ball’s website has online tutorials and downloadable PDFs
Ball’s website has an amazing blog roll to related resources
Food in Jars writes about current in season canning and preserving
Consider the Pantry is a clean well organized canning and preserving blog

With these sites bookmarked and recipes printed, I was ready to tackle my first batch of jam. Well almost. I had to pick up a few extra jars. Believe it or not, in Chandler, Az, it was quite a task.

Not all Wal-marts carry canning supplies (whoda thunk it, I went to 2)
My Basha’s is closing, so none there
Sprouts (my closest hippie store, nope)
Fry’s (Krogers in some areas) YES! They had a great canning section

With the biggest pot I’ve ever seen borrowed from the neighbor, ingredients prepped. NOW, I was ready to start.

I decided to make Prickly Pear Jam, since that’s what I learned to make at my friend’s home and then I wanted to make a marmalade.

I got two amazing batches made. One batch that got tossed won me the comment, “Look! You learned how to make gummy bears.” Which was my sign that I used too much pectin.

Share/Save

So when I was an Arizona local grocery store, Bashas and I saw a bin of Vidalia onions, I remembered an Onion Pie that stood out in my memory and I knew I would make one of those and I was hungry for a hamburger, and I figured that would also be on the menu.

This image is from Southern Living and the Wikipedia entry states the outstanding characteristic of this onion is it’s sweetness due to the low sulfur levels in the Georgia soil it’s grown in. I agree.

I like sauteed onions, usually on fajitas. The flavors in this onion really did stand out as sweeter and softer than a sauteed yellow onion.

Sauteed Vidalia Onions

2  pounds Vidalia onions

1/2  cup unsalted butter

Preparation

Peel 2 medium onions, and cut a thin slice from bottom and top of each one. Scoop out a 1-inch-deep hole from the top of each onion. Melt the butter in cast in a deep cast iron skillet. Add onions and sautee until tender not brown. Season with cracked black pepper and Kona Sea Salt (if available).

If you’d rather grill, wrap each filled-and-topped onion in heavy-duty aluminum foil (or a double layer of regular aluminum foil). Grill over high heat (400° to 450°) 15 to 20 minutes or until tender. Let stand 10 minutes.

Other Vidalia Onion Recipes:
Squash-Vidalia Casserole from All Things Heart and Home

Share/Save

I also have an iTouch, that I has the exact same songs on it as did my iPod mini that retired after 4 years. So this fancy DVD thing has a place to attach your iPod to it and it feeds your songs to the TV.

I have a few playlists, but last night I decided to put it on my Top 25. I had never looked at it. Here’s a snippet:

1. S.O.S. by ABBA
2. Midnight Rider by Willie Nelson
3. My Maria by Brooks and Dunn
4. Check Yes or No by George Straight
5. Angel Flying to Close to the Ground by Willie Nelson
6. 7 by Prince
7. Seasons of Love from the Rent Soundtrack
8. Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2
9. Fernando by ABBA
10. Neon Moon by Brooks and Dunn

I still don’t know what to think about the randomness in my top songs, but I’m sure that I need to listen to more Aerosmith. I have no idea how they didn’t make it to the top 10.

My song psychology moment did help time pass by while I marinated and cooked a rib recipe I found over at Homesick Texan’s blog. I’ve cooked with Dr. Pepper before, I made these tasty Cherry Dr. Pepper Cupcakes and they were delicious.

These ribs were sweet, smokey and crisp on the outside and tender on the inside. I think you can’t ask for more from a rib. What I think really worked with the recipe is that the cooking method. If you’re going to cook ribs inside, I’d think you could create any variation of the recipe, but keep the cooking method and you’d end up with a great result.

I didn’t have chiplote powder, so I substituted anjo chili powder and smoked paprika. My variation to the recipe from Homesick Texas is reflected below:

Dr Pepper ribs

For the rub:
1/4 cup of salt
1/4 cup of black pepper
1/4 cup of brown sugar
4 teaspoons of mustard powder
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne
2 teaspoons of anjo chili powder
1/2 teaspoon of allspice

For the glaze:
2 cups of Dr Pepper
1 cup of ketchup
1/2 cup of mustard
1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons of molasses
4 teaspoons of smoked paperika

Two racks of St Louis ribs
1/4 cup of Dr Pepper

Coat the ribs with the rub, wrap in plastic and place in the refrigerator for at least four hours.

Heat the oven to 300 degrees and bring the ribs to room temperature.

In a foil-lined large baking or roasting pan, arrange the ribs with the meat side up, pour in 1/4 cup of Dr Pepper, cover pan tightly with foil and place in the oven.

Meanwhile, place all the glaze ingredients in a pan, bring to a boil and then simmer for 20 minutes until thick and syrupy.

After an hour and a half, take the ribs out of the oven and spread some of the glaze on each side of the racks. Place back in the oven, meat side up and cook uncovered for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, take out the ribs and spread more glaze over them and cook for 30 more minutes or until ribs are desired tenderness.

At this point, take the ribs out of the oven, spread more glaze on them and then cook each side under the broiler for four minutes.

Share/Save

You can’t help but wonder by the candy when you’re getting anything in the store. It’s amazing! The other day they had candied pineapples with lemon and chili. The flavor profile looked interesting and I tried one.

Yuck! Seriously, the candy was bad all the way around, weird chewy, gritty from the massive amounts of chili powder and not a hit of lemon flavor.  But I thought there was some reason they put those particular flavors together, so undetured, I started planning how I could that profile into a cupcake.

What I ended up with was the idea to make a Pineapple Chili Upside-Down Cupcake with Lemon Creme.

If you get really close to the monitor you can see the little chili flakes on the pineapple. These were some of my favorite cupcakes to date. I was able to bypass the whole “frosting” bit by adding whipping cream to the top.

I may make a batch of these again this weekend, especially since I know that my friend Wendy and her cupcake loving husband Jonathan are out of town this weekend!

Lemon Curd

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons finely grated fresh lemon zest
1/2 cup sugar
3 large eggs
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, cut into bits

Whisk together juice, zest, sugar, and eggs in a 2-quart heavy saucepan. Stir in butter and cook over moderately low heat, whisking frequently, until curd is thick enough to hold marks of whisk and first bubble appears on surface, about 6 minutes.

Transfer lemon curd to a bowl and chill, its surface covered with plastic wrap, until cold, at least 1 hour.

Lemon Curd Creme

1 recipe lemon curd
1 cup heavy cream

Whip cream until it has firm peaks and fold in lemon curd. Chill for 15 minutes before serving.

Pineapple Upside Down Cupcakes

1 batch of your favorite yellow cake recipe
Fresh Pineapplie Chunks (about 1 1/2 cups)
6 T Brown Sugar
6 T Melted Butter
Chili Powder
Non-stick Cooking Spray

Prepare cupcake tins by spraying with cooking spray. Pour melted butter into bottom of cupcake tins, enough to cover the bottom with 1/8 inch of butter. Add brown sugar, about 3/4 T. Arrange pineapple chunks into a fan pattern on top of the brown sugar and sprinkle with Chili Powder. Give it a good sprinkle. If you don’t the taste will get lost in the other flavors.

Picture of prepared tins:

Share/Save

I think it’s good to know how to set a table, where to put which glass, which bread plate is yours and how to pass dishes around the table. (BTW, we still get dishes that go every which way at every meal) Today we’re having a special dinner for my Dad’s birthday! More on the amazing dish my mom is making later.

Ok, here’s a fun quick lesson. Which bread plate belongs to you?

• Using your left hand, make the letter B by touching your index finger to your thumb.
• Your left hand makes a B for Bread. 
• When you’re sitting a crowded dinner table, you know to use the bread plate to you left.

Share/Save

So, far my trip to Texas has given me a change to disconnect. It’s easy to do with no computer, no Internet and no cell phone reception.

I’ve spent hours on this porch sitting in a rocking chair, drinking sangria and watching the water.

I bought a box of sparklers at this firework stand.

I drove to Snook to try an order of chicken fried bacon. The consensus at the table, it’s lighter than you’d imagine.

I hope you’re having a good Holiday weekend!

Share/Save