Tasty Tuesday – August 28, 2018

Today for dinner we had steaks cooked on the grill, carrots, wild rice and grilled pita breads.

Another meal we had was homemade Alfredo sauce over pasta.

Stay tuned for upcoming reviews for Grammar Planet and Roman Roads Media.

Tasty Tuesdays – March 13, 2018

 

For lunch today I had a salad made with spinach leaves and arugula leaves along with cherry tomatoes, snow pea pods and an avocado I cut into pieces. I then took a package of imitation lobster claw meat I bought at Aldi, added diced onions, celery pieces, fresh lemon juice, and Olive Oil Miracle Whip.  I mixed it all together and added salt and pepper to taste.  I topped the salad with the lobster salad mixture.

Here is a picture of the salad.

Then for dinner tonight we had sushi that we made with sushi rice, the seaweed wrappers,  crab meat, carrot sticks, and cream cheese.  We bought a sushi kit from Amazon that we tried for the very first time tonight.  We also made a ginger sauce and ginger dressing from scratch.  We fixed a version of Japanese Miso soup, egg rolls, fried rice made with steak and chicken, and zucchini sauteed with onions.  The meal was absolutely delicious.  Normally, we would not make this elaborate of a meal on a weeknight.  All in all, it took us about two hours to fix the meal.

Here are some pictures of our preparations this evening.

 

And here are some more pictures of our preparation and our meal.

 

So what are you cooking at your home?  I would love to hear from you.

If you would like to read what other members of the Home School Review Crew have to say, click here or on the image below.

Tasty Tuesday for January 30, 2018

So I am back with another post for my Tasty Tuesday’s series. Today I will not be really sharing any recipes, but I will be sharing pictures of some of the food we have eaten over the last week. My favorite meal was our scallops wrapped in bacon that we broiled in the oven. We bought a bag of scallops from our local Sam’s Club.  We defrosted them, dried them good, wrapped them in bacon, seasoned them with salt and pepper and garlic and then placed them in the broiler for roughly five minutes on each side.  Then I fixed drawn butter – which is melted butter, garlic powder, and lemon juice.  Each family member was given their own dish of this tasty side.

The second dish I want to share is Italian Subs.  I grew up in New Jersey and nothing beats a good Jersey sub, except perhaps an incredible Philly Cheesesteak.  However, finding true subs in the heart of Texas is not easy, so we have taken to making our own.  We buy our sub rolls at H-E-B, our local grocery store, the Italian lunch meat from Sam’s Club and typically the cheese comes from H-E-B also.  We add shredded lettuce, thinly sliced onions, thinly sliced tomatoes, mild banana pepper rings, along with a mixture of olive oil, vinegar, and Italian seasoning. The results are delicious.

So what tasty dishes have you had lately I would love to hear from you.  If you would like to read what other members of the Home School Review Crew have been up to, click here or on the graphic below.

Tasty Tuesday -Baked Chicken and More

My tasty Tuesday meal this time included baked chicken, stuffing, steam broccoli, deviled eggs and mashed potatoes. I want to focus on the chicken, however.

 

We purchased our whole chicken at Aldi since it will be lactose-free. My husband or my oldest son always rinse the outside and inside well before we season it, We first coat the inside with olive oil and herbs and spices. I used a blend of Kick’n Chicken seasoning from Weber, salt, pepper, and parsley, This time I also added rosemary to the blend.

 

Then we repeat the process for the outside of the chicken. We lay the chicken breast side down in a cast iron Dutch oven and then either cook using coals or in the oven for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.  We like the skin to be crispy, which is why we tend to cook it outside using coals – where the coals are placed under the Dutch oven and on top of it as well.  But the oven works when the weather is not the best for cooking outside.

To save time, I use stuffing mix I buy at Aldi as well.  But I kick it up by sauteeing onions and celery that have been diced (about 1/2 of a white onion and about 2-4 stalks of celery depending on the size.  I use lactose-free butter that we buy at Sprouts, which my children call ice cream butter because of the wrapper.

So what is one of your family’s favorite meals to have or what is one of your favorite meals to prepare?  I would love to hear from you.

If you would like to see what other members of the Home School Review Crew have to say this week, click here or on the image below.

Tasty Tuesdays – Oriental Food

Today I am starting something new on the blog – Tasty Tuesdays, where I will share some of our favorite foods along with some recipes occasionally.  For this first installment, I am going to share some of our favorite oriental food.

Over the weekend, our daughter stated she wanted to have teriyaki chicken on a stick.  So being the dutiful mother I am, I immediately went online to find a recipe for Chicken Teriyaki.  I found a recipe and we bought a family pack of chicken tenders to use.  Of course, when we got home I discovered we did not have any teriyaki sauce.  So again, I went online to see if I could find a recipe for homemade teriyaki sauce.  I had all the ingredients so I whisked up a batch and started marinating the chicken. Then yesterday, we started the rest of the preparations. Here is the chicken on the skewers we were going to cook them on in the broiler.

One of the other things my husband and I were really wanting to eat was egg rolls.  So a month or so ago, when we were in the commissary, we bought egg roll wrappers.  We used bacon, shredded some cabbage and thinly sliced carrots to put in them.  We took some flour and water to make a paste to seal them.  I wrapped them and my husband did an amazing job of flying them.  They turned out delicious.

We also took cabbage that was finely chopped and diced some onion and stir-fried it as well with some soy sauce.  We also took onions that were thinly sliced and sliced some zucchini and stir-fried it to make what our favorite Japanese Steak House in Jacksonville, North Carolina calls Japanese french fries.  Both of these dishes also turned out amazing.

Finally, we made stir-fried rice with rice, onions, carrots, garden peas, and scrambled eggs along with soy sauce.  We used three cups of rice, one bag of garden peas and approximately 3 carrots.  This also turned out amazing.

We used teriyaki sauce that we bought at Aldi after we made the homemade sauce.  The only thing I wish we could have had was chinese mustard and duck sauce for the egg rolls. Otherwise, the meal was fantastic.

So what are some of your favorite things to eat?  I would love to hear from you.  If you would like to read other posts from members of the Home School Review Crew, click here or on the graphic below.

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The Week of 4th of July

For those of us here in the United States, this week brought the 4th of July – Independence Day.  And one of our family’s favorite things to do at this time of the year used to be putting up corn each year.  When we lived in North Carolina, it was a family and friends event.  We typically put up around 5 bushels for just our family.  So this week, it was rather bittersweet to see my sister-in-law post pictures on Facebook of them putting up corn.

However, since we moved to Texas in March 2016, putting up food has become a wishful occupation.  We so want to put up food because we really enjoy it, but we have neither space or places to find produce to buy in bulk.

When we lived in the central part of Pennsylvania from summer of 2012 until March of 2016, we were blessed to have Amish farms to buy produce from in bulk.  The quality was amazing and the prices were extremely affordable.

Here are some pictures of us putting up corn in Pennsylvania.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the rows of jars on the shelves or bags full of produce in our freezer ready for us to eat in the future.

Here are some pictures of our shelves in Pennsylvania with items we were getting ready to put up or had already put up.

I think one of my favorite things to put up know is homemade sauerkraut.  The flavors are just so amazing.

So what does summer bring for your family?

Thankful for our Thanksgiving

So this was our first Thanksgiving spent west of the Mississippi.  We had a quiet time at home with our children and my mom along with one of my husband’s co-workers.  In typical holiday fashion, we fixed too much food.  We had a true southern Thanksgiving feast including turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, olive tray, green beans, collard greens and black-eyed peas.  My husband even prepared cornbread, and I prepared dressing as well because I fixed more stuffing than our turkey could hold.  We all indulged so much, we skipped dessert.  This is the first time in many years, I did not watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.  We have not been watching a lot of live television.  Instead, we have been watching Netflix, Amazon Prime, Feeln, and the Dove channel on my Roku.  I find  the lack of commercials refreshing.

One of the main reasons I watch a parade is to see the bands.  But it seems that lately, the networks prefer to show their commentators more than the actual parade.  I know how much time, effort and money these bands exert to get to a parade like the Macy’s parade, so I find it insulting that the channels prefer to show their own people or other celebrities more than those who are actually in the parade.  So I turned it off.

The best part of the whole day was spending time with our family.  Since our oldest is 20 years old and our youngest is 14, I know these family holidays with everyone home will fast fade into memory.  So I treasure these moments and am thankful for my family and my children.

Here are some pictures of our feast.

Here is some of the finished food on the counter.

 Here is our table.

 Here is our turkey after cooking and with the stuffing before my husband cut it up.

 Here are the deviled eggs we made.

 Here is the black-eyed peas with ham.

 Here are the collard greens with ham.

 And finally here is the turkey before cooking or stuffing.

 For those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving, what are you thankful for?  I would love to hear from you.