Sour Cream Pound Cake

SOUR CREAM POUND CAKE   The cake I bake for all my friends at Christmas!
½ lb. butter (2 sticks) room temperature
3 c. sugar
½ tsp salt
6 eggs room temperature
3 cups all-purpose flour
¼ tsp. baking soda
3 drops lemon extract (1/8 tsp)
1 c. sour cream
1 tsp vanilla

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs one a a time. Add vanilla and lemon. Sift all dry ingredients THREE TIMES. Mix into wet mixture, alternating dry ingredients with sour cream.
Bake at 300 degrees for 1½ hours in tall 2-piece tube pan. Cool five minutes in the pan. Slip the outside of the pan off  and cool to room temp before removing the metal base/tube.  Pound cakes meld with time, so don't plan on eating the day you bake, but wait a day or two for the flavors to intensify.

Vegetable Stand Soup

I was going to make cream of mushroom soup, but the mushroom farm in the neighboring city of Zellwood had run out of mushrooms to sell to the general public!  Oh no!  On the way home I swung into a really nice roadside fruit and vegetable stand.  I bought snap beans, cabbage, tomato, carrots, onion, red new potatoes, and red bell pepper.  On the way home I stopped in the grocery store and bought a pound and a half of ground beef.  While the beef was cooking, I chop chop, cut cut, slice sliced, adding each ingredient to the pot along the way.  I forgot to get beef broth, so I tossed in a packet of onion soup mix and picked a bunch of herbs I have growing on the front porch and added those too.  I love to grab palmfuls of spices and add them to a huge pot of bubbling yummy broth!  It turned out wonderful, especially with the cuban rolls I got today.

My soups never taste the same, as I never follow a recipe when it comes to filling a pot with wonderful goodness.  I love soup!  My family likes it too, as there are rarely enough leftovers to last two meals, even a pot this huge!

Chili

Homemade chili with hamburger and sweet italian sausage, light and dark chili beans, and every spice I could think of to make the most amazing chili on earth!  I also had green, red, and yellow bell pepper, onion, and all sorts of goodies.  I love to create!

Meow for Catfish

• fresh catfish filets, soaked in milk, seasoned, and dredged in corn meal, fried in a little vegetable oil
• coctail sauce
• mashed potatoes
• green beans
• carrots

Orange You Glad We Like Chicken?

A whole chicken, stuffed with orange slices and bay leaves, with a squirt of orange on top with Sauzon Seasoning and baked under a tinfoil tent for an hour, then I drained the chicken juice and squeezed some more orange on top and baked uncovered for about ten more minutes.  Yum yum!
With this I had garlic olive oil cuscus and I took a giant can of green beans, drained them, and stir fried them in butter and squished garlic.
David made a tray of brownies for dessert.
Audrey, David, Mark, and I were home for dinner and it was delicious. No leftovers for Robert, but hey, you have to be present to win!

Beef Stew

Beef stew made with potatoes, carrots, onions, and celery.
Served with Ezekial bread and a pickled peach (thanks Patty, they're delicious!).

Fishy Friday

Daddy brought home some fish a friend of his caught in the intercoastal waterway -  saltwater fish.  He didn't know what it was, but the filets were small, white, very mild flavored, and about the size of large bream.  I cooked it in a mix of olive oil and butter, and sprinkled with some orange mixed seasoning salt with pepper.  Very good.
Served with baked potato with butter and okra and tomatoes.

Pork Chops

Pork chops cooked on the grill, brussels sprouts, cole slaw, pickled beets.
At my parents house.

Beans N Rice

Black beans, brown rice, baked sweet potatoes, and collard greens.
I'm at my parents' house.

Baked Chicken

Baked whole chicken, stuffing, green beans, waldorf salad.
At my parents house.

Waldorf Salad: peel and cube two apples into bite-sized pieces, add 1//4 cup raisons, 1/4 cup pecan pieces, 1/3 cup chopped celery, and a few tablespoons of mayonaisse.  Stir up and chill in fridge.

Stuffed Pork Chops

pea soup
pork chops, butterflied and topped with stuffing and baked
glazed carrots

BBQ Ribs

Made a big slab of BBQ ribs, served with warm Italian bread and a fluffy iceburg salad with grape tomatoes, cucumber, and homemade buttermilk ranch dressing. Sugar Ray's Sweet N Smokey BBQ sauce is gooooood. A beer and some football rounded out the meal.
Banana bread in the oven, cooked this time with chopped pecans.

Chopped Steak

Pan fried chopped steak, cooked in a swirl of olive oil and with quartered onions in the pan, seasoned with general seasoning salt, called sauzon or something like that. It's probably just a Spanish word for Season! It's more green than the orange Season-All, (which has an icky taste to me).
I made yellow squash with onion, cooked with a pat of butter, salt and pepper added to low water.
Cooked chopped cabbage, more onion, half water and half beef bullion, pepper.
I'm ready for winter. Throw in a tomato and some bell pepper, and toss this all in one pot and you'd have a yummy soup!

Cheesy Hash Brown Chili

http://www.rachaelrayshow.com/food/recipes/cheesy-hash-brown-chili/
Yep, Rachael Ray, quick, easy and cheap meal!
Served that with a lettuce salad with homemade buttermilk ranch dressing on top.

Our son David LOVED this meal, surprising, as he usually doesn't comment.

Chicken, scalloped potatoes, spinach

Baked chicken breasts with wonderful spice mix sprinkled on top turned out wonderfully juicy with crisp skin.
Boiled sliced potatoes, thickened milk with flour and added cheese, poured over the potatoes and baked. Yumm.
Cooked spinach.
It's all good!

Moose Poop

• In a huge plastic bowl - melt 2 cups milk chocolate chips and 1-1/2 cup peanut butter in the microwave until the chips are melted.
• Add a teaspoon of vanilla and stir well. Pour in a box of rice chex, a big handful of raw almonds (pan toasted if you like, but I just use the raw ones), a couple of handfuls of pecan halves, a half-cup of M&M's and a half-cup of Reese's Pieces.
• Stir and fold with a big cooking spoon until all the chocolate at the bottom of the bowl has coated all the cereal.
• Pour a box of powdered confectioners sugar in a NEW paper grocery bag, shake to coat the bag, pour the bowl of chocolate coated in, and seal the bag. Shake shake shake until the powdered sugar has coated all the cereal. Sprinkle 1/2 tsp. cayanne pepper, 1 tsp salt, 3-4 Tbsp. ground cinnamon and shake again. You can't taste the pepper - it opens your tastebuds to the sweetness.
• Lay a 3 foot sheet of wide tin foil lined with a sheet of waxed paper on the counter and turn out the cereal mix, spreading out well. Let it dry for about an hour, then transfer into a big plastic container with tightly fitting lid and watch it disappear!

Pork Purlo

A few days ago I cooked a pork roast in the crockpot. What to do withtons of leftover pork? Purlo!!

Cook a large onion (chopped) in olive oil and then added about 5 cups of shredded pork, a small bag of frozen mixed vegetables, two cups of water and two cups of beef broth. Bring to a boil while you "fry" the brown rice.

A few swirls of olive oil go in a frying pan on high. Add 3 cups brown rice and cook on high until you smell a wonderful nutty aroma, plus some of the rice begins to turn golden. This prepares brown rice for cooking so it won't split and get all sticky. Dump into boiling pork mixture. Lower the temperaqture to simmer and cook for 30-40 minutes, or until all liquid is gone.

Add a few shakes of smokey chipotle hot sauce, salt, & pepper and serve with a side dish of pickled beets. Yummmmmyyyyyyy.

Shepherd's Turkey Pie

Mark and I visited England in 1992, and we ate shepherd's pie in a cozy little pub. They had sprinkled the mildest hint of nutmeg on the top, and it was wonderful!! When I make my shepherd's pie, I always remember to sprinkle on nutmeg. This time, to offset all that mashed potato starch, we had ground turkey instead of hamburger. Instead of peas, we had mixed vegetables (cooked, from frozen). It was good. Later, while watching TV, Mark and I had a grape popsicle for a dessert!

Tilapia

I cooked fresh tilapia filets in a pan with olive oil. While the fish cooked, I drizzled fresh lemon and sprinkled some spice on. A pot of cooked spinach and some brown rice rounded the meal out fine. Yummy! David doesn't eat fish, so he had leftover spaghetti instead. He and Audrey had a bowl of vanilla ice cream with fresh raspberries for dessert.

Turkey and Veggies

Two turkey wings go a long way! Five of us shared a big bag of frozen mixed carrots, brocolli, and cauliflour cooked on the stove, and turkey wings cooked in my Nesco roaster. I love my roaster and prefer to use this as much as possible in the summer, as the oven heats up the kitchen too much. Florida is already hot, hot, hot! Of course with summertime, a fresh cold pitcher of iced tea is a requirement with dinner.

Sketti

We had spaghetti, made with sweet italian sausage and lots of mushrooms in the sauce, and served over whole wheat noodles. Whole wheat garlic bread, and a nice fluffy romaine salad were great with the spaghetti. I made peach jello, but somehow David hijacked it to his little fridge in his bedroom. Guessing he likes peach.

Lonely Roast Beef

We have eaten A LOT of food since my last post, just in case you were wondering.... After having been out of town for about three weeks, then working until after dinner at Bonnie's travel office two night (meaning ANOTHER dinner out), I finally got to cook a meal! I defrosted the roast on Tuesday, planning to cook it that night, but I worked way too late. We went to Habanero's for Mexican food. After a marguerita and a basket of warm tortilla chips and salsa, Mark had a pulled beef burrito and I had a shrimp burrito, stuffed with plump grilled shrimp, onion and bell pepper stips, refried beans and rice on the side. I could only eat half and Robbie finished it off when we got home. Wednesday was another late work night, and although I was offered to join Bonnie and Ken for sushi (oh mayun, to pass that up!!!), but my family duty came first. I stopped by Albertson's and bought two rosemary roasted chickens and items to make a big salad. Dinner was delish, simple, and everybody was home to enjoy.

Now to last night's dinner:
I cooked the roast beef - a standing rump roast -in a Nesco 5-quart counter top roaster oven and it turned out wonderful, juicy and bright pink on the inside, yummy brown glazed outside. It was delicious!

After oiling the outside of the roast, I sprinkled some wonderful boutique-mixed herbs and spices all over, then sealed in the juices by doing a quick brown to each side in a hot frying pan before putting the meat into the 325F preheated roaster. I cut a giant onion in big chunks, sprinkled that around the sides, deglazed the frying pan with a cup and a half of dry red wine, then poured that over everything along with another good dose of the bottled herb and spice mix. Lid on, timer set for 20 minutes per pound (1hr,40min for 5 lbs), and I left the kitchen.

Sometime later, as the roast began to smell so wonderful, I was whimsically surprised that all the woodland carnivores weren't pressing their hungry faces against my windows! I made a big pot of brown rice with sliced mushrooms and a cup of frozen peas thrown in to be pretty, and brewed a pitcher of sweetened iced tea. Once the meat was done, I took it out to sit for a few minutes while I steamed brocolli, then made semi-thin gravy and cut the roast in beautiful thin slices. It was 6:45, perfect timing for the family and dinner, and all was perfect! Seven o'clock and still nobody was home. I couldn't wait, so I fixed a plate and enjoyed a wonderful Sunday dinner all alone on a Thursday night!! Everybody was due in at any moment and I KNEW they were gonna fall face first into this delicious feast!

Although I announced yesterday morning that I was not going to leave the house and planned a wonderful roast dinner, I guess everyone forgot. David arrived shortly after I started my meal and announced that he could only eat half a meal, because Audrey's mom was having company over and he was expected to eat dinner at their house. Audrey was helping her mom. Rob called to tell me he was going to watch the Magic game downtown with friends and was eating there. Finally Mark came moseying in around 8:30, changed the channel to the basketball game without even asking if I was watching the movie that I was intently watching (and we have 3 other televisions in our house!), then sheepishly told me a customer was having a cookout and he couldn't resist, so he wasn't hungry. He fixed himself a glass of iced tea and fussed that I had sweetened it. I verbalized at this point on exactly how I felt about him, his children, and the world in general.

I fell asleep watching a stupid basketball game. They lost...so there! I woke up and went into the kitchen to put all that food away (sigh) before going to bed. Cooking took some time, but cleanup was a mysery to me. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself and unappreciated... It won't be as delicious reheated tonight.

Mark went to bed while I was still cleaning the kitchen, 'didn't lift a finger to help, but then again, he probably felt safer not to be in the same room with me by this time. As I walked through the living room toward our bedroom, Mark turned off his bedside light and so I was left walking in the dark. I went into the bathroom and fumbled in the dark for the light switch, washed my face, put on a nightgown and headed to bed in the dark. I stumped my toe on the bedframe and blame Mark for this additional mysery.

Indian Tandoori Chicken

I got the recipe for Tandoori Chicken and had to look up (and create) one of the spices, garam masala, which turned out great. I soaked some brown rice, cooked it, then added some fresh chopped rosemary, and we had steamed brocolli and baked sweet potatoes. Dinner was good, Reminiscent of the Indian buffet I had in Sedona. I could swim in it! Mark, Audrey, and I loved it. We'll see if David will eat it when he gets home. I know he won't eat the potato. This big meal is for Robert when he gets home later tonight. Robert ate it and liked it, but was repulsed by the salmon pink color.  It would have reddened up if the chicken was cooked on the grill.

Susan's' Black and White Chili

My friend Susan gave me this recipe and I put it here so I can cook it this week. Tried it before and it is really good!

3 cans of black beans, 1can of corn- drained, 1can of original rotella tomatoes, 1can del monte diced tomatoes with jalapenos, 3-4 chicken breasts, a few gigs of hot sauce, ( I add a little fresh garlic and onion powder, but you don't have to) cook on low 8 hours in a crock-pot, take chicken out and shread, return to crock for 20 mins. Top with cheddar cheese and sour cream with chips or Doritos.

Pasta Puttanesce Again

Yep, cooked that again. It's sooo good! This time I threw in some sliced mushrooms and just before serving, fresh baby spinach leaves were wilted into it. Served over macaroni noodles, because that's the only kind I had.

Hammy yammy

spiral-sliced ham with glaze, baked sweet potatoes, spinach, rolls, and vanilla ice cream

No Soup For You!

The Soup Nazis rejected the dinner I had planned, so I will wait and cook soup on Monday or Tuesday instead. Tonight we had steaks on the grill, baked potatoes, and brocolli. Dessert? A scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Pork Chops, Bok Choy, Salad

Mark put the pork chops on the grill with some steak seasonings shaked on. I sauted bok choy in garlic, ginger powder, olive oil (heat oil and seasonings first to flavor the oil, then add the bok choy and saute a few minutes, turn down and cover until time to eat). Salad was romaine lettuce, lots of sweet clover sprouts, chopped cucumber, little grape tomatoes, and sliced carrots with balsamic vinigarette dressing. After dinner we had sponge cake with strawberries and whipped cream on top. Everything was so good.

Pork Ribs

Last night we had organic cucumber salad; peel & slice cucumber, halve grape tomatoes, and toss in balsamic vinigarette dressing. I've never had such crisp cucumbers in my life! Oh they were deeeeelicious and I wished for more cukes so I wouldn't have to share. I could have just eaten this for dinner. Everyone noticed how crispy the cucumbers were and it was a shame I only sliced one cucumber. I also made potato salad and cooked two slabs of ribs. Robert said they were the best ribs he'd ever eaten. I should have taken a picture, it was a pretty meal.

BBQ Ribs:
Cut slabs in thirds and place bone-ends down in large pot of water. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat so it remains almost at a boil. Flip ribs over after 1/2 hour. Continue to cook for another 1/2 hour. Baste back sides with smoke-flavored BBQ sauce and bake 5 minutes, BBQ side up. Flip over, baste again, and bake 10 minutes. That's it. Yummy yummy.

Weekly Menu using new Organic Produce

Orlando Organics came through with delicious produce!

Tuesday
B- cereal , banana, milk
L- tuna salad on a bed of romaine lettuce with tomato and carrots
D-chili, with cheese & onion, romaine salad
Wednesday
B-oatmeal with raisons and pecans
L- tuna sandwich, apple
D-hot dogs, chili, potato salad

Thursday
B-popeye eggs in toast
L-fruit salad, cheese
D- BBQ Ribs. Oven baked potatoes, potato salad, cucumber/tomato salad

Friday
B-grapefruit
L-pear, sandwich
D-grilled pork chops, romaine saad with cucumbers, tomato, carrots, and avacodo, bok choy cooked in garlic/ginger infused oil, strawberries and angel food cake with whipped cream topping

Saturday
B-eggs, bacon, grits, toast
L-orange, sandwich
D-cream soup with bacon roux, potatoes, collards, Italian sausage, onion, garlic. Bake a cake!
Sunday
B- grapefruit, boiled eggs
D-roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, cooked carrots, mushrooms, spinach

S-leftover lunch, fruit
Monday
B- eggs, grits, toast
L-roast sandwiches
D-chicken pot pie with carrots, onion, potato, mushroom, with romaine salad made with onion, tomatoes, clover sprouts, avocado
Tuesday
B- cereal, banana
L- tuna salad, orange slices
D- ham, macaroni & cheese, green beans, dinner rolls
Wednesday
B-oatmeal
L- turkey sandwich, apple
D-chicken legs & thighs, broccoli, raw carrots
Thursday
B-biscuits with apple butter
L-egg salad in tomato, with celery and carrot sticks
D-something with hamburger, depending on newest produce choices