We all know that a stir fry is a really quick and easy meal. I make them pretty often, especially during the week when I don’t have a lot of time. The only problem I have is that they can get pretty boring. Sure, you can try different sauces (those I usually make my own) or meats, but that will only get you so far. Last night I took some extra time in the super market, thinking about what I could do to add some spark to my latest stir fry, and I was pretty happy with the results.

I didn’t change much, to be honest, but the meal felt really fresh and different. I bought my usual broccoli, because I love it and can’t stir fry without it. I usually go with chicken, but this time picked up a pork tenderloin and cubed it for my meal. It was a nice choice. It offered a different flavor and texture than chicken, but still went really well with all the typical stir fry flavors (ginger, chili, et al).

I was also looking for something different to add to my dish, and as I was perusing the vegetable aisle, something a bit outside of the box caught my eye: a package of cole slaw mix. You’ve seen them before, they have sliced cabbage and carrots all ready for some cole slaw dressing. I figured cabbage and carrots would go great in a stir fry, and by buying them this way I wouldn’t have to do any chopping. I’m not going to argue with that!

The final difference is one that I’ve done before and I find it’s the most important change that I can make to a stir fry. I bypassed the rice, which I find can get pretty tiresome. When I opt for something different, I usually go with Udon noodles. I’m just crazy about the big, slightly chewy noodles. Last night I tried some rice noodles, like you find in Pad Thai. It added some welcome change to my stir fry and I was really happy with the results.

Alright, so adding noodles and cabbage may not be groundbreaking advances in stir fry, but I know they were outside what I usually do and made all the difference in the world. Do you have any great stir fry secrets?

If you love peanut butter as much as I do, this probably won’t be a surprise to you, but the peanut butter sandwich is a wonderful thing. There are so many variations and just about every one of them is delicious. I don’t think there’s anything easier than a peanut butter sandwich, and it’s pretty much my go-to snack, breakfast, and lunch.

I find that a lot of people have a problem with peanut butter sandwiches. They either got burnt out on it as a child, or simply don’t understand how many different things you can do with it. There is a whole lot more to a peanut butter sandwich than just peanut butter and jelly.

Here are some of my favorite combinations:

• Peanut Butter and Jelly: I have to start with the classic. I still love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If you’re finding yours to be a little stale, it’s easy to change up: try some different jelly. There’s a lot more available than just the classic grape (which I can’t eat anymore) and strawberry. Try blueberry, blackberry, or even something like a black currant which will add a sour bite to your sandwich.
• Peanut Butter and Fluff: If you grew up in New England, like I did, you probably are already familiar with the “fluffernutter.” It’s made with peanut butter and marshmallow spread. A while back it was even nominated to become the official state sandwich of Massachusetts. It’s a little sweet for my taste, but it is delightfully sticky.
• Peanut Butter and Banana: This is my personal favorite. There’s just something about the combination that works so well. The subtly sweet mush of the banana cuts through the slightly salty stickiness of the peanut butter. This is great on toast, or just a couple of slices of fresh bread.
• Peanut Butter and Honey: Next time you’re looking for something different drizzle some local honey over your peanut butter. The sweetness of the honey goes perfectly with the peanut butter. Last night I even sprinkled a little ground cinnamon on the combination and it was fantastic.
• Peanut Butter and Nutella: Nutella is so delicious by itself, I usually don’t ruin it with anything else, but I know many people who swear by their peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches. For you chocoholics out there, this one is for you.
• Peanut Butter and Apple: This one takes me back to my childhood when my mom would make me peanut butter and apple sandwiches. Thin slices of apple add a nice tart and sweet crunch to the smooth creamy peanut butter. In fact, you don’t even need the bread for this one — peanut butter and apples go together great!

What’s your favorite peanut butter sandwich variation?

I have been told by friends who are either from Philadelphia, or have spent time there that if you’ve never been there then you’ve never really had a Philly cheese steak sandwich. I have tried the West of Philly Cheese steaks shop in Boise and thought the sandwiches were okay, but not all that great. I decided if I can’t get a real Philly cheese steak sandwich I would try my hand at making my own Redneck version.

I have written about using Steak-umm’s to make jerky in a previous post, but what I really like about them is that they can be used for so many things. they are fast and easy to cook so they take very little time and are a quick way to add some meat to any dish. This makes them perfect for these sandwiches. I also decided I would make some potato chips to go along with my sandwiches. I like making my own chips because they are thicker than most chips you can buy and yet they are not tough and hard to eat like some of the thick-cut fries I have tried.

Redneck Steak and Cheese Sandwich

Ingredients:

• 6 to 8 Steak-umms
• 1/2 medium onion, sliced
• 1/2 red, yellow, orange bell peppers, sliced
• 4 to 6 medium potatoes
• 4 to 6 hoagie rolls

I like big pieces of peppers and onions on my sandwiches so I slice the onion and peppers fairly coarsely. In a medium frying pan heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of garlic powder or some fresh minced garlic. Add the onions and peppers and saute. I like to cook them just to the point the onions turn translucent.

In a separate frying pan break up the steak-umms into pieces and fry until the meat is brown. turn the heat down to low and add the onion and peppers. Mix well and let warm together.

Place the hoagie rolls on a baking sheet and fill with the meat mixture. Add a slice of cheese on top and place under the broiler for 1 to 2 minutes to melt the cheese and lightly toast the rolls. Add your favorite condiments and enjoy a tasty sandwich.

For the potato chips I just peel the potatoes and slice them as thinly as possible. If you have a mandolin slicer you will get more consistent chips that will make cooking easier. I normally just use a knife and cut them as thin as I can by hand. I don’t mind the differences in the thickness.

You can cook the chips in a deep fryer if you have one, but I like to cook them in a wok. Put about a cup of oil in the wok, add a teaspoon or two of sesame oil and heat to about 375 degrees. Add the chips a few at a time. Add enough to cover the pan, but not so many that they are overlapping. Cook until they are a good golden brown. Remove from the oil and drain on a paper towel. Add some salt and you will have some good chips that are crispy on the outside, but tender on the inside to go along with your sandwiches.

I don’t know where you’re sitting right now, but I’m in the D.C. area, and we are currently under a blizzard warning. This, of course, comes after the 2-3 feet of snow that got dumped on us over the weekend. Suffice it to say, I’ve become intimately acquainted with my home over the past several days.

So what do you do when you have two people off of work and a toddler in the house? You certainly don’t clean, as the state of my living room will attest. Instead, you eat, pray for the baby’s naptime, and eat some more. I’ve used this time to make my vegetable muffaletta, as well as some to-die-for spicy molasses cookies.

My friend Lauren over at Baking, Books and Booze, posted this molasses cookie recipe after the last time she got hit with a snow dump. I had never had them before, and honestly molasses cookies didn’t sound terribly appealing to me, but I had all of the ingredients and clearly nothing better to do, so I went for it.

I basically followed the recipe she posted, except, like her, I kind of kicked up all of the spices a little bit. Plus, I added my new favorite thing for desserts: Chipotle peppers. The funny thing is, is that I always forget how large the holes are in the chipotle peppers bottle, so I kind of dumped more in there than I was planning.

However, the cookies turned out awesome. It’s like cookies and candy got married and made hot, fiery love. These guys are definitely spicy, but are so good that even my 16-month-old doesn’t care about the burning, and has been known to snatch these right out of my hand as I’m eating.

They’re super quick and easy to make (they only bake for 10 minutes), and are so worth the mild effort put into them. So whether you’re stuck in the snow, or just know the value of a good cookie, you should definitely give these bad boys a shot.

Normally around my house we only have French toast when we have some leftover bread that is getting too dry to make good sandwiches. However, now that we’re making our own bread instead of buying bread we don’t have much bread that gets dried out. I still like having French toast for breakfast once in a while so this morning my wife and I made some with the homemade bread.

French toast is a quick and tasty breakfast to make. It is quite filling and really is an ideal way to use up dry bread, however if you use fresh homemade bread it is even better.

French Toast

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
• 6 thick slices fresh bread
• salt
• cinnamon
• vanilla

Crack the 4 eggs into a bowl and whisk them until well blended.

Add the milk, a pinch of salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and cinnamon to the eggs and whisk again to combine the ingredients. I don’t really measure the cinnamon, so start with 1 teaspoon. I put in enough that I have a good even distribution throughout the egg mixture.

Place a medium size frying pan on the stove and heat to a medium heat. Use some butter or pan spray to help keep the toast from sticking to the pan.

For the bread I like to cut slices that are 3/4 to 1 inch thick. This is more of a Texas toast size slice and it makes for a much more substantial slice that really holds a lot of the egg mixture.

Once the pan is hot, dip a slice of the bread in the egg mixture. Give the bread a few seconds to soak up the egg mixture and then flip it over and soak the other side. You want to give the bread enough time to get fully saturated with the egg mixture. Let the excess egg drip off the bread into the bowl and then put the slice into the frying pan.

Let the bread cook until a nice golden brown then flip it over and cook the other side. The cook time will depend greatly on the thickness of the bread. The thicker it is the longer it will take. I have also found that if the heat is too high the outside will brown quicker, but the inside will not get cooked. You will end up with a nice crispy outside and a doughy, soggy inside. If you gently press a finger into the bread in the pan and no egg comes out, and the bread bounces back it is ready.

Serve the French toast with pancake syrup and butter, or cover with your favorite sausage gravy and enjoy a filling breakfast that will get your day off to a great start.

Last week, we had my dad and step-mother over for the football playoffs. Luke, who uses any excuse to spend a billion dollars at the grocery store, decided he wanted to make subs. Except, that’s not what he was planning on doing at all. He said “subs,” but what he actually meant was “a muffaletta the size of my head.”

He was planning on making a vegetarian version that involved vegetarian lunch meat, but that wasn’t sounding too great to me, mainly because the second I heard “muffaletta,” I had a completely different picture in mind. There’s a cafe around here called South Street Under, and they make a vegetarian muffaletta sandwich that is to die for. So that’s what I set out to do.

I couldn’t remember exactly what they put on the sandwich, but I had the general idea, so I just decided to wing it. I was going to put zucchini, squash and eggplant, but unfortunately, the grocery store across the street was out of yellow squash, so I just used extra zucchini and threw in some spinach and mushrooms that I already had in the house.

I figured Luke would be bringing home a long Italian roll, but instead he brought home these huge rounds. Apparently, that’s traditionally how a muffaletta is served, and you cut pieces like you’re cutting a cake. A giant sandwich cake that was perfect to share while watching football. So perfect, in fact, that I’m serving it again during the Super Bowl!

Before we go any further, here’s the recipe:

Vegetarian Muffaletta

Ingredients:

• One large round (if you’re feeling daring) or Italian loaf
• 1 cup olive tapenade (from this recipe)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 lemon
• 1 baby eggplant
• 1 zucchini
• 1 yellow squash
• 1 cup portabella mushrooms (I used baby bellas)
• 2 cups fresh spinach
• pepper to taste
• 8 slices provolone cheese

The first thing I did was whip up my trusty olive tapenade. It takes a minute to just throw in the food processor, and it’s delicious. The problem with sandwiches like this is that oftentimes they end up bland. The tapenade adds the kick that the veggies need.

While I’m working on this, I heat up the oil in my saute pan. I had to do this in two batches, so I used half the oil. While that’s heating, I spread the tapenade on the bottom half of my bread and set it aside. I saute the veggies, making sure to add the spinach last, as to not get it too wilted. As they’re sauteing, squeeze the lemon onto them. Generally, I saute vegetables in garlic, olive oil and pepper, but in this recipe I replace the garlic with the lemon, since the tapenade is quite garlicky enough.

After you have your sauteed vegetables, pile them on top of the bottom half of the bread and cover with the provolone cheese.

Cover with the top of the bread, and bake in the oven at 375 for about 10 minutes or until the cheese is melted and bubbly, and the bread is crusty.

Cut like a giant sandwich cake and enjoy!

In my quest to improve my diet and eat healthier, I’m trying to expand my cooking skills to new and different ingredients. I’ve spent a lot of time searching for recipes on the internet. Recently while searching for fish recipes, I came across this delicious Mexican orange chicken recipe on allrecipes.com. For me, fried is about the only way I like my chicken so this recipe is one of several I’m trying now that are way outside my comfort zone.I decided that I would take this chicken recipe for a Recipe test drive. My biggest problem when it comes to eating healthy is that I have certain things I like and I stick to those things. I know how to cook them and I know that I will have a satisfying  and filling meal.

When it comes to chicken I defer to my wife. She is the Queen of cooking chicken and I just can’t make chicken taste as good when I cook it. I’m a beef eater and can out-cook her when it comes to anything beef so she was skeptical when I told her I was going to try this new chicken dish. One of the great things about allrecipes.com is that you can enter the number of people you are cooking for and it will modify the ingredients list for the number of servings you requested. This does not change the cooking instructions so you may have to modify that yourself. I always look at cooking times as a suggestion anyways and check my dish often as I cook until it is cooked to my liking. I modified the recipe for two people and followed the ingredients list provided with the revised Mexican orange chicken recipe.

The cooking directions I left as is except that I did shorten the cooking time to 1 1/2 hours.

When the chicken is done, there will still be a lot of juice left in the pan. The recipe does say that this is the way that the dish should turn out. I had decided already to serve the chicken over rice so the extra juice was added to the rice to add the flavor to the rice. This turned out to be a very good idea. The juice added a citrus, bacon flavor to the rice that was amazing.

For the rice, I cooked 1 cup of rice in 1 1/2 cups of chicken broth and 1/2 cup water, 1 tbsp margarine, and a pinch of salt. Whenever I am cooking rice to use in a dish I like to cook it in chicken broth to add a little flavor to the rice.

As we sat down to eat we were both anticipating a tasty treat. The aroma of the chicken was wonderful. The chicken was incredibly juicy and the bacon and citrus flavor was infused throughout the meat. The flavor the juices from the chicken enhanced the rice and really added to the meal. This is one recipe that will be a showing up on our menu again.

For better or for worse, pasta is a staple in many vegetarian diets (and that sentence is how I am able to justify this as a “Hold the Meat” post [brilliant!]). A lot of times, I’ll pretend to be healthier about it by buying whole wheat pasta and/or organic noodles. However, sometimes I”ll just throw the $1.00/box stuff in there too.

The other day though, I was reading All & Sundry, and she was talking about how she’s recently been making more food from scratch. This is something I’ve been trying to do as well, especially now that Cooper is a bit older and is eating human food (as opposed to, you know, dog food). So I clicked through to some of the recipes that she’s used, and holy crap! Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me that there are only three ingredients in pasta, and that they’re all things that I have in my house right now?

2 1/4 cups flour, 3 eggs, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. That’s all! It’s super-easy too. You just beat the eggs, and put them into a little flour nest in a large bowl, like so:

Then you mix it all together until it forms a ball of dough. Knead it about five minutes, and then put it in some greased plastic wrap (I just sprayed some cooking spray on it) and let it sit for at least 30 minutes, at which point you can get your sauce on the stove. After that, take about 1/4 of the dough and roll it out.

This part was actually pretty fun for me, because it was the first time I’d actually used a rolling pin (I know, I’m really pathetic).

Roll it out until it gets about as thin as you would want a noodle to be. Then, roll it up like you would a jelly roll and cut it into little wheels:

After that, just unfurl them, and put them aside. Do this for the three remaining quarters of your dough, then boil the pasta for about 5 minutes, until it’s firm but tender. The noodles start to float when they’re done; it doesn’t take long at all. After that, you’ve totally got pasta– without even having to have a pasta machine.

For a first try, I was really impressed with how it came out. Other than the 30 minutes the dough has to rest, it’s actually a pretty quick process. I made it kind of slow, just because I was nervous about it, but in general you can do this pretty quickly. It’s important to note that you don’t really have to roll the dough up– you can just roll it out and cut strips. I’ll probably do that next time, because the noodles ended up being a little thicker than I wanted them to be.

Going forward, I’d like to experiment with filled pasta, as well as different kinds of flour– maybe I’ll even use Debbie‘s favorite, spelt flour. But for the first time I wanted to keep it as straightforward as possible, and I’m quite pleased with the results.

I love looking at recipes. I’ve been know to literally waste hours at a time browsing through recipes, looking for inspiration or just something delicious to make for dinner. I don’t think I could ever have too many cookbooks. They have beautiful pictures, are full of recipes, and can double as great coffee table books.

There are some gripes that I have with a lot of recipes, however. It’s really just a nitpick, but I don’t think I’m alone….

It seems like some recipe writers just have no common sense. I run into this problem much more in cookbooks than I do with online recipes. Here is my issue: I hate it when recipes list out ingredients in strict measurements when the ingredient itself comes in an easily measured form. What I mean is this: why can’t a recipe just call out one chopped medium onion (and many do), instead of one cup of chopped onions. How am I supposed to know what a cup of chopped onion looks like when it isn’t chopped yet?

The worst offender always seems to be cheese. I was making a mac and cheese dish a couple weeks ago and the recipe for the sauce included two cups of grated cheese. I tried eying what I thought would be two cups when it was broken down, but I wanted to make sure that I had enough. What I ended up with was more than twice as much cheese as I actually needed for the recipe. Many recipes list out the approximate weight or size of something, and I am appreciative of that, but they don’t make up for the recipes that don’t.

I’m not a restaurant. As much as I would love to have all that fancy cooking equipment and a kick ass kitchen, I don’t. As such, I also don’t have a sous chef and an endless supply of chopped onions and carrots. Thankfully, one thing I do have is The Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. You know the one: red plaid, has everything in it. One of my favorite features about the book is the little page in the front that gives equivalents between whole foods and measurements. Just a quick check and I can be sure that I’m buying the right amount of onions to fill up that cup.

The recipe for Divine Hot Chocolate that Kelly Estes posted looks relatively easy and super delicious, but I’m lazy (hence the feverish devotion to my Keurig). So to that end, I’d like to share a simple way to give any hot chocolate a little kick, whether it be fancy, or made from a powder.

I was over at a friend’s house recently, and she had the Food Network on. They were talking about Jacques Torres Chocolate in New York; specifically the Wicked Hot Chocolate that he makes there. Obviously, it’s made with a crapload of real chocolate, and it also features a dollop of whipped cream so heavy and solid that it looks as though you’re ordering your hot chocolate a la mode. That, however, isn’t what struck me. What struck me is that he used chipotle peppers in it. Maybe I’m naive, but using a ingredient for chili never occurred to me vis a vis hot chocolate.

I’m sure it’s a secret recipe, so they don’t go into the amounts of the spices, but in addition to chipotle and ancho chili peppers, they also use cinnamon and allspice. So while I couldn’t recreate it myself, I knew that 9 out of 10 times I wouldn’t want to bother anyway– so I experimented.

I went into the cabinet, grabbed my cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and my nearly empty bottle of ground chipotle peppers (we like things spicy here). While I’ve long added cinnamon to my coffee and hot chocolate, this was new for me. There’s no real recipe, I just threw in a dash of each spice into my empty mug and placed it under the Keurig. About a minute later, I had a delightful cup of steaming hot chocolate with what looked like dirt floating around in it.

Not one to be overly concerned about such things, I just grabbed the whipped cream out of the fridge and, voila! If you cover it up, it’s totally cool. I took a sip, and I was in heaven. You wouldn’t think that chipotle pepper would be a good idea, but the other flavors mask it, leaving just the spice behind. It’s a lovely drink, and in an instant you can feel all warm and fuzzy. Even though the holidays are over, you can make this and feel like it’s Christmas morning all over again.

I have been writing my weekly post here for some time now and I have never really paid much attention to how healthy, or more accurately unhealthy, most of my posts have been. Now that we are starting the new year 2010. I am starting to look more closely at what I am eating. I will turn 45 years old in June. I am wondering where all the years have gone. It seems like just yesterday I turned 21 and today I am looking at 45? How does that happen?

I’m also looking at the addition of two more grandchildren to my family in the next few months. I know it still feels weird to think of myself as a Grandpa. I’m looking forward to the grandkids, but I suddenly realized how much energy a toddler has and then multiplied that by three. Holy guacamole, I am in no shape to keep up with them! It’s time to make some changes.

Over the years I have tried many different fad diets. All of them have worked and I lost weight, but the problem with diets is they are impossible to stick to long term. The idea of a diet is to severely restrict what you eat in order to starve your body and force it to consume the stored fat and muscle to get the energy it needs. At some point I have always gotten to the point that I can no longer overcome my urge to eat all the things I have been denying myself and end up going on an eating binge that leaves me dazed and drooling in a near catatonic state. This is not a good feeling. I usually then convince myself that it is better to go back to my old eating habits instead of going back on the diet and heading for another binge.

So what is the answer? Well the answer is to teach myself to eat healthier. For this year my goal is not to lose weight. I have thrown the bathroom scale out the window. That evil satanic device does me no good, it simply mocks me and shows that I have failed to meet my goals. I have seen more people give up on a healthy eating plan because the scale says they gained weight instead of lost it. Couple this with the weekend state from the exhaustion of focusing all of their will power on the diet to stay on the plan and they just give up and eat a box of Twinkies. So my goal is not to lose weight, but to change my lifestyle and eating habits.

Here is my simple plan that I believe will help me to get into better shape to chase three grandchildren around the yard on a summer day.

First. Sit down and look at what I’m eating. Get out the ingredients and look at the nutritional data and start calculating the calories, fat, sodium, and cholesterol that I am eating on a daily and weekly basis. Identify the foods that are the most harmful to a healthy life style and which ones are good for me too.

Second. After identifying the unhealthy things in my diet, look for healthier replacement items and healthier ways to prepare the things that are unhealthy. One of the things I have done and been able to stick to is drinking diet soda instead of regular soda. I know that diet soda is not all that good for you either, but I do like my soda and I just cannot quit drinking it all together. I have cut way back on the amount I drink, and when I do drink soda I drink diet.

Third. Before going grocery shopping write out a menu for the week and a shopping list. When I go shopping only buy what is on the list. No more impulse items that just sound good because I am hungry.

Fourth. Snack foods are my biggest downfall. I love potato chips especially. Find healthier snacks. Popcorn is one that I like. The problem with popcorn is not the popcorn itself, but the extra stuff added to it that makes it so good. I have started making popcorn in oil and just adding a little salt for flavor. No butter or anything else and this makes for a healthier snack.

Last. I will not deny myself any food. If I get the craving for a bacon double cheeseburger with all the fixings I will have one. The trick will be not to have them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I will also start looking for new recipe ideas. Find some new cookbooks that have recipes for healthier dishes and new foods. Smaller portions of the less healthy foods and add more healthy foods to the meal. If I decide to have the bacon double cheeseburger instead of the greasy fries I will have some mixed vegetables to go with it. or some fruits. It can be hard to find good fresh fruits and vegetables in my area this time of year so I often times by the frozen veggies and canned fruit. When buying the canned fruit I buy the “no sugar added” fruits packed in fruit juice instead of the syrup. This is not as good as fresh but is better than raspberry-filled powdered doughnuts.

The key to this plan is to focus on changing the lifestyle and not worrying about how much weight am I losing or gaining. I’m looking now to find more fish recipes to add to my menus and look forward to sharing those recipes here with everyone. I’m a cube dweller at work so I don’t get near the exercise that I should so I will also be adding more exercise to my lifestyle as well. I will post more on that when I figure out how I am going to add that into my daily routine.

Here’s something kind of weird. I didn’t drink coffee until I was 25. I had tried it, and although I always thought that the smell was an intoxicating glimpse into what heaven would be, I never liked the taste. However, a guy happened to ask me out for coffee, and I didn’t want to be a dork and order tea or hot chocolate, so I had a cup. And then another. And then another. And while I haven’t spoken to the guy in years (he turned out to be a major d-bag), my love affair with coffee remains.

Maybe it’s because the first cup of coffee that I enjoyed was from a diner, but I’ve never gotten into the whole fancy coffee thing. I just like a cup of coffee, the more diner-y the better. My sister-in-law grinds her own beans and has a french press, and it’s just way too much work for me. I need my coffee right now. I don’t have ten minutes to get into a staring contest with it. What kind of bullshit exercise in torture is that? Luckily, I discovered the pinnacle in quick coffee achievement: the Keurig.

I discovered the coffee pod thing while I was doing market research at an airport. Most of the first class lounges had them, and I instantly fell in love. I had a regular coffee maker at home, and while that was fine, I don’t drink a dozen cups of coffee a day, so I would always inevitably waste some. Plus, it would sit in the pot for hours and then the pot would get stained, and on and on and on.

Enter the Keurig: Coffee? Done. Tea? Done. Hot chocolate? Done. There’s something for everybody. I can get the variety pack and have everything at my fingertips instead of having a freezer full of different flavored coffees, and a pantry full of hot chocolate and varieties of tea.

Ever since I had a baby, it’s been a godsend. When it’s 6 AM and you have an infant who constantly needs your attention, I for one can’t manage much more than pushing a button to release the sweet, caffeinated goodness into my face. I’m sure grinding your own beans is great, but short of an intravenous drip, this is the holy grail for me.

I consider myself a good cook. Sure, I’m still young and I have a lot of room to grow, but at the end of the day, I can put together some nice meals. So, it is with great embarrassment that I admit that I have had three fires in my kitchen in as many weeks. Seriously, I don’t know what I’m doing, but it seems like every time I turn around, something is bursting into flames.

The first I blame on the weather. It was a snowy weekend here in the northeast and I had a hankering to make some chicken parmesan. There was only one thing standing in my way: I didn’t have any breadcrumbs. I could have sworn that I had some panko in my pantry, and I did, but it turned out that they were very old, very, very old. There was one option left and I thought it was a slam dunk: I had a whole package of leftover pita bread that I wasn’t going to eat. I figured that I could toast it up and throw it in the food processor — instant bread crumbs.

The plan started out working well. I threw a pita into my toaster oven and let that puppy get nice and brown. I set the toaster oven to dark and when it dinged, I was slightly disappointed; the bread was barely toasted and needed some more time. Now here is where it gets interesting. I swear, I turned my back for approximately one minute and when I checked on the pita it was on fire. Literally, a piece of bread had spontaneously burst into flames. The scientist in me was secretly amazed and a little proud at this. The cook was mortified.

The second fire came just last night. I had hosted a New Year’s Eve party, and I had cooked up a few stromboli. I knew that they were going to make a mess in my oven, and I was right. While cooking, all the delicious pizza-filling leaked out of the dough and created a couple of large mounds of burnt cheese and sauce on the bottom of my oven. Of course, I forgot to clean it up and when I turned my oven on last night, they started burning. I didn’t notice at first, but then my eye caught the gently glowing light through the oven window. One of the blobs had caught fire during my oven preheat and was slowly (and controllably) burning. There was nothing that I could really do, so I cracked a window, plastic-wrapped my smoke detector (don’t try that one at home, kids) and let it burn off.

I thought I was fine. My house was relatively smoke free and I was ready to throw my dinner in the oven. It was then that I noticed that the second pile of goo had burst into flame. Well, after that smoke had cleared, I was able to cook my meal, and I think I’m going to be fire free for a while.

Have you ever set your kitchen on fire?

A lot of people are under the impression that, as a vegetarian, my diet mainly consists of salads. While that wouldn’t be a bad idea, there are actually several salads that are off-limits, including the ubiquitous Caesar salad. Even if you don’t add the grilled chicken to it, Caesar salads are still generally no-nos to vegetarians, due to the anchovies (a food which I still do not understand, even a little bit).

Some of your “fancier” Caesar salads will have actual anchovies in them, staring up at you as you’re pretending to be healthy by eating a salad. However, even your low-rent Caesar salads generally contain anchovies in the dressing. So, what’s a vegetarian to do? Eat something else. After all, we’re pretty used to that. Sure. Or, we could make our own non-anchovyish Caesar salad dressing. A dressing so versatile that it can even be made, sigh, vegan.

When I was with my family for the holidays, my sister made an amazing vegetarian chicken Caesar salad. I wanted to eat it all the time, so I was not to be deterred by the fact that she lives halfway across the country from me. I set out to recreate the goodness at home. So here you go:

Vegetarian/Vegan Caesar Salad Dressing (serves 2-4)

1/4 cup olive oil

1 tablespoon of mayonnaise (I prefer the mayo made with olive oil, but you vegans out there can use vegan mayo).

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1-3 garlic cloves, minced (I use at least three, but I’m obsessed with garlic. This should really be to your taste)

1/2 lemon, juiced

Dash of soy sauce

salt and pepper to taste

Mix it all together, and BOOM: Best Caesar salad dressing ever. The best part is, you don’t have to mess with raw eggs or any of that nonsense, so it’s fast and less scary than just downing eggs.

As for the salad itself, follow your bliss. Romaine, croutons and parmesan are boring to me, so I decided to make a chicken Caesar salad. I added the parmesan (because it is delicious) and cooked up two of the Morningstar Farms Italian Herb Chik Patties, sliced those bad boys up and stuck them in. I also added cucumber because they’re delightful and we had some that needed to be used up. All in all, if I didn’t make Luke have some, I would have sat there and eaten the entire bowl of salad, which would have been pretty much the opposite of the healthy, “I think I’ll have a salad for dinner” choice.

Last week I wrote the review of the Breadman TR520 Bread machine. This week I am comparing two loaves of bread made in the bread machine.

I am sure that all of you read the manuals that come with new appliances cover to cover before ever using them. I don’t normally read them until after I cannot figure out how to make all the bells and whistles work on my own. The Breadman TR520 bread machine manual has a very lengthy explanation of why you should only use bread flour to make your bread.  The manual goes into great detail on glutens and elasticity, and various other reasons. I decided that the taste test would be the best way to determine whether bread flour or all purpose flour was the best way to go.

I decided to use the basic white bread recipe with all the same settings. I was off to the Walmart to find some bread flour. I had no idea there were so many different types of flour. Using various secret scientific methods to calculate which of the bread flours would be best for the bread, I had it narrowed down to three different choices. At this point, my wife, who was tired of standing there looking at flour, picked up one that said “best for bread machines” on the label and headed for the check out.

After our return from the Walmart I started a loaf of bread using the all-purpose flour. I added the ingredients for a 2 pound loaf, set the loaf size to 2 pounds, and the crust color to dark. After the all-purpose loaf was complete I removed it from the baking pan and let the pan and the bread machine cool before repeating the process with the bread flour. When the bread flour loaf was done I again removed it from the pan to cool.

I placed both loaves in a cool place for the night to cool. The next morning I took both loaves out and carefully cut the end crust off of them to compare the two loaves. According to the manual, the all-purpose loaf would be more dense and heavier. By holding both loaves in my hand the all purpose loaf did feel slightly heavier to me, but my wife thought the bread flour loaf felt heavier. after cutting off the end to examine the bread inside there was very little difference between the two loaves. According to the manual, the bread flour loaf would be more coarse and look more like normal bread whereas the all-purpose loaf being more dense would be less coarse.

The loaf on the left is the bread flour loaf and it is slightly more coarse than the all-purpose loaf on the right, but it is very hard to tell the difference by weight, or by visual look. So the final test was in the taste. Would I be able to tell the difference between the bread by tasting them? I took both end crusts and lightly buttered them then handed them to my wife to tell me which was which. She could not tell the difference between the two and really neither could I. Both loaves of bread had good taste and texture. They make good burger buns and sandwiches. As long as you’re careful when slicing the bread so that it’s not too thick for the toaster, both loaves also made great toast. I recommend that you follow the instructions in the manual for your bread machine when making bread, but as for me I’ll continue to make loaves of white bread using the cheaper all-purpose flour. I like the bread that comes out, I am happy with the taste and texture, and the homemade blackberry jelly will not soak through the bread faster than you can eat it.

I’m pretty proud of the fact that I’ve lost over 30 pounds in about three months. There’s nothing all that complicated about how I did it. Using the iPhone ‘Lose It!’ application, I simply counted my caloric intake and ate within my assigned limitation. If it looked like I was going over, I walked on the treadmill for an hour to bring me back in the zone. No special cabbage diets or carb limiting, though knowing the calories involved in certain foods did help me learn what I should try to avoid or at least limit.

I no longer use the ‘Lose It!’ app, since I’m pretty good at sensing what I’m consuming and burning; I’ll write up something in the future about my experiences using it. If there’s one thing I’ve taken from following this diet regimen it would be: eat slower and follow portion control. OK, that’s two things, but they go hand in hand. To help keep in check with those, I present to you the chopsticks diet.

It’s already been mentioned elsewhere that eating slowly can help you lose weight. One reason for this is food expansion once it’s begun being digested in the stomach. In particular, rice and other carbs like pasta will tend to fill you up or give you the sensation of filling you up, though some time has to pass. This is why sometimes, when you’re really hungry and you hoarf down a plate of pasta quickly, you’ll get to the point of feeling full … and then, without eating more, you’ll feel too full. “Oh why didn’t I just stop earlier?!”

The chopsticks diet helps control the rate of food you shovel down at a meal. For bloaty foods like pasta and rice, you can only handle so much in one bite with chopsticks. I consider myself pretty skilled at using chopsticks (no flies caught yet, though), and there’s a bit more time involved between attempting to pick up rice or pasta with chopsticks and putting it to your mouth, versus stabbing or scooping it up with a fork or spoon. Simply put, you can down a lot more rice and pasta and other things with a fork or spoon in a much shorter amount of time than with chopsticks. Same with pretty much any food, for that matter.

Try it out sometime, and don’t give up and switch to some other utensil partway through your meal! Try it with anything that doesn’t require a spoon (soup, etc.) — salads, meats, veggies. Keep at it, and you’ll find you’re fuller on the meal earlier, and hence you’ve eaten less.

This can be tough when you have a child with food allergies. It can be incredibly hard when what your child is allergic to is in 95% of all packaged foods. This is the case with my son, who is allergic not only to soy and soy accessories but egg as well. Well, he’s allergic to cats and cockroaches too; we just don’t expect him to eat any foods containing those items.

The allergies came about unexpectedly. For the longest time he was able to eat products with both soy and egg in them. Then, as he was nearing his 2nd birthday, it all changed. My wife and I think it was the flu shot he previously received that kicked the allergies off. Not too long after that the baby-smooth skin he once had turned red, scaly and itchy.

After visiting with a number of doctors and getting a range of diagnoses from a simple rash to scabies (at the utter shock of my wife, who is a cleaning freak), one of them finally suggested we take him to an allergist. Lo and behold, a few skin scrapes later we learned of his allergies to egg and soy.

At first, we were a bit dumbfounded in what we could feed our son, who was already a finicky eater, now that our choices were limited.  We went from dumbfounded to disheartened when we discovered how many products featured eggs, soy, a derivative of soy (such as soybean oil), or were manufactured in a plant that used those products. I spent a good 45 minutes reading labels the first time I went looking for items that I thought he would like.

Once I found those items, few that they were at my local supermarket chain, I went into sticker shock at the prices. I was amazed at how much people could charge for these so-called organic items that were made without any soy or egg products. This was even truer when I found out later that my son was just one in a very long list of children and adults who have these types of allergies. While I could certainly afford it I considered the plight of those not as fortunate as me who wouldn’t be able to spend six dollars on egg replacement powder or five dollars on cream cheese biscuits. Heck, sometimes I had to wonder about my finances when the final total at the Whole Foods was $80 for two bags of food just for him.

It was certainly tough going at the beginning as we needed to practically re-invent the way that our son was eating. Eventually, though, we got the hang of it by simply looking at labels (one of the rare government initiatives that actually worked). Soon enough we realized that our youngest child could eat certain cereals, rice dishes and pastas as well as sandwiches and ice cream. As time went on we reduced our bi-weekly trips to Whole Foods, which was a 70-mile, round-trip drive, and began making food for him from ingredients we had at home. Let me tell you, there’s nothing better than homemade fries from real potatoes!

As my son nears his third birthday both he and I are happy with his current diet. Though, like any parents, we would like to see him eat more fruits and vegetables, he has adjusted well to a diet of mostly grains, lean meats and no-soy dairy. We can only hope that, as the doctor has said, he outgrows these allergies as he reaches school age. If not, I can see a difficult time ahead as we try to explain why he can’t buy lunches or trade desserts with the other kids.

While perusing the dried fruit section at Trader Joe’s, my four-year-old and I stumbled upon an new one: dragon fruit. Since the little guy spends half his days dressed up as a knight in shining armor, slaying his life-sized inflatable dragon, he thought that was pretty cool. So, for $1.99, we thought we’d take a chance. Heck, it was high in vitamin C and fiber.

We got home and proceeded to open the package of dried dragon fruit, eager to dig in and discover this new … taste sensation? Let me describe the dried dragon fruit: flat, round discs, about two inches in diameter, a vibrant magenta with purple seeds, just asking to be chomped. So I chomped, and so did the four-year-old.

The verdict?

You know, dragon fruit is pretty tasty. The sugar content was pretty high on the nutrition facts, so I expected it to be sicky- sweet, but it was not, which I was glad of. It’s crunchy and chewy, a teensy bit tart (perfect to me) and, well, healthy-tasting. The seeds pop in your teeth in the most pleasing way, and the rest just sort of melts.

I liked it, the four-year-old liked it, and all was right with the world. We’ve discovered a new snack with a novel texture and color and a high vitamin C content to boot.

But what is dragon fruit? Basically, just the fruit of a cactus, also called pitaya. Sort of a letdown, really. I wanted it to be more exotic. But the good part is that a new food is now part of our repertoire. Three cheers!