Sea Bass

Okay, so we have all decided this is the month, this is the day, this is the hour that we get healthier.  Our time to change our lifestyle and make a deference is here.  You don’t have to go “drastic”, you do have to change the way you eat.  The whole method is to limit the amount of food you eat.  Portion control is the answer.  This doesn’t mean bland food and constant hunger.  This means balanced meals; why shouldn’t these be great tasting meals as well.

At emealsforyou.com we offer many remedies, we take the work out of your “diet.”   We have categories to make you successful in your efforts without alienating the entire family along the way.  Our healthy, easy recipes and meal planning provide you with all that you will need to accomplish your goal.  With categories like Diet Friendly, WOW (Watching Our Waists) and even special needs programs for Diabetic Healthy, Gluten Free and more; coupled with our automatic recipe calculator (how many people are you  feeding)  we make it easy to get the whole family involved.  Pick the recipe / meal, determine the number you are feeding, and print a shopping list; for one meal or several weeks’ worth.  As they say, ” It is what we do.”  Cooking something else for the kids, we have recipes / meals that they will love.

The bottom line is why pay for a program that costs you an arm and a leg, when you only want to lose a little weight.  Cooking at home can not only save you money, the food is tastier and healthier than the frozen entrees they send you.  All this for a yearly subscription of $17.95, less than a dollar and a half per month; we are the best bargain around.  Click here to sign Up NOW!  Take control of your family’s well-being.

P.S. any firm white fish will work in the recipe below.

I enjoy cooking, and thinking about cooking.  We do have a rule around here that you can’t talk about the next meal while eating the current meal.  Cooking is all about confidence.  Confidence is about trying new recipes and having them turn out great; or sometimes making them a few times to get it right.  The important thought here is to try.  Don’t be put off by something new or  a “fancy” name.  Our readership is composed of all levels of cooks; from chefs to the newly wed preparing her or his first meal for the in-laws.

So here we go!  This sounds crazy but it will take a store-bought carrot cake to a new level of dessert.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Chicken Cacciatore

I think we have hit a new low in laziness.  Along with the open the pouch, pour into a pot and heat ” meals” on the market we now have McCormick’s new spice packets.  For a couple of bucks you get six small packets; about a teaspoon or less, of six spices with an idea of what to cook using the spices.  No measuring needed, simply rip off the back of the packet and you have the spices for the meal.  For that $2 you get about 35 cents worth of spices.  But hey, look on the bright side, no measuring spoon needed.  Just think for a mere $14 a week McCormick will ensure you dump the right amount of their spices into the pot.  You still have to brown the meat, add other ingredients and actually cook.  I guess I just don’t get it.

Spice up your life; try measuring the spices yourself.  The Cacciatore recipe is for a white wine sauce; not the usual red sauce.  Give it a try and BTW only 3 spices needed.

Chicken Cacciatore

Brown chicken in oil, add onions, mushrooms and garlic sauté for 3 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, simmer for 30 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.

Note: If you prefer red sauce, add 1 LB diced tomatoes, 2 TB tomato paste and substitute red wine for the white wine.

If you want ideas on what to cook for dinner try our website at emealsforyou.com but you will have to measure the spices yourself.

Chicken Soup

From the label of Campbell’s Chicken with Rice Soup.  Ingredients: Chicken Stock, Rice, Chicken Meat, Carrots, Less than 2% of: Modified Food Starch, Chicken Fat, Salt, Celery, Monosodium Glutamate, Flavoring (Soy), Potassium Chloride, Sugar, Maltoextrin, Onions, Vegetable Oil, Mechanically Separated Chicken, Yeast Extract, Cornstarch, Lower Sodium Natural Sea Salt, Beta Carotene, Sodium Phosphate, Soy Protein Isolate, Disodium Inosinate and Disodium Guanylate, Lactic Acid,  Spice, Chicken (Dehydrated)

WOW, I can’t pronounce half of these ingredients on the Campbell’s Chicken with Rice can much less want to feed them to my family.  Hard to believe all of these are in a 10 1/2 oz condensed can.  Come on people; you can do better than this.  It takes only a few minutes to start a great pot of soup for your family.  Let it cook for a while and you will have a wholesome meal for your family with enough left over for at least one more meal.  Make my soup once and I promise it will become a family favorite; or perhaps your really like Disodium Inosinate.

Old Fashioned Chicken Soup

This recipe makes a lot of soup and you will have extra cooked chicken leftover for another use. Heat a large soup pot, add the olive oil, when it begins to shimmer add the cut up and dried chicken. Brown, don’t burn, the chicken on both sides. Add the onion, carrots, celery, salt, and stir. Lightly brown the vegetables; add the broth and water and stir. Cook on a low boil for 20 -30 minutes; until the chicken is fork tender. Remove the chicken to a platter and taste the broth. Depending on the chicken, the broth may need to be reduced to concentrate the flavors. Cook on the boil until the broth is tasty. In the meantime, remove the chicken from the bones. Cut half the chicken into small pieces and add back to the soup pot. Once the soup is done adjust the salt and pepper to taste. (It is important to not add the salt prior to reducing; as the soup will become too salty)
Bring the soup back up to the boil. Drop the spaetzle batter into the boiling soup to form small dumplings.

Use the remaining chicken in chicken salad or tacos.

More delicious soups, less crazy ingredients at emealsforyou.com.

I am in the middle of adding a bunch of Diabetic Healthy meals and recipes to my site: emealsforyou.com. This requires lots of research and as it turns out a little soul searching as well.  As we age we find we begin to eat a little less than when we were in our teens and twenties, devouring everything in sight.  The only problem with the high caloric intake is that back then we were constantly on the go with continual physical activity.  Now we tend to watch a little more tv and exercise a little less.  My patron saint of cooking, Julia Child, used to say, “everything in moderation.”  Problem is if you are like me the moderation was in the exercise and not in the feeding frenzy.

So I sit here and go through my recipes and meal plans and do the math on the number of calories, carbs, fat and protein grams and get a good idea of what it is we are putting in our mouths; or more importantly the quantity of what goes in.  Checking the Nutritional Values I am amazed at the difference a smaller portion of protein, whether meat or fish, makes to the overall value of the meal.  By cutting back on a 6 -8 ounce portion to a 3 -4 oz portion we are saving ourselves a bunch of  “bad” down the line.  The other eye-opener is that the cut of the meat has a significant effect on the healthiness  of the meal.  Before you fire off the emails telling me that 3-4 ounce portions are too small consider this:  A Micky D’s Quarter pounder is exactly that, 4 ounces of meat.

Bottom line here is buy smaller and leaner and you may be exactly that  soon.

See our Diet Friendly, Diabetic Healthy and WOW – Watching Our Waists categories at emealsforyou.com

Note: 3 -4 ounces is about the size of a deck of cards.

Our friends and old neighbors were here this weekend.  It was great to catch up, great conversations over good food and wine.  One thing stood out; after our week-long trip to New Jersey last week and their visit this week I found myself saying over and over again, “it’s on the site.”  I provide free recipes here on the blog but I have hundreds of recipes and meal plans on my website: emealsforyou.com. If you like what you see here you should go over to the website and give it a try.  The goal is to get you and your family and friends sitting down to good food and great conversations.

Here is a really good recipe for margaritas provided by our friend Laura from her father.  These are smooth, delicious and deadly.  Thanks Rick!

As frequent readers will know we moved just before the New Year.  Setting up the new kitchen, getting things where I want them, getting a “good flow” of movement has been a building process.  Sometimes it’s the little things we miss.

This weekend I was responsible for the desserts at a neighborhood picnic.  I settled on Croissant Bread Pudding and Hazelnut Toffee Cheesecake, as both are great and serve a ton of people.  Baking the desserts seemed to take longer than it should have.  I should have looked into the reason why but rushed through and they came out great, although taking longer and requiring me to constantly check on them.

I should have remembered installing a new oven for my mother-in-law a few years ago.  Visiting months after the install she said her recipes were taking a longer time to bake.  I cooked some David Lee Shrimp ((From the Appetizer Collection at emealsforyou.com)  and they seemed to take forever to bake.  Pulling an oven temperature gauge from her closet I found her oven to be off by about 25 degrees.  The fix was an easy one, the manual instructed me to push these buttons in sequence then that button to raise the temp and it is fixed.

Back to my problem.  When the light bulb in my brain went off I simply checked the real oven temp, hence the picture of the gauge above, and found my oven was off by 10 percent.  That means that my desserts, requiring 350 degrees, were baking away at only 315 degrees.  The bottom line is for a few bucks you can check your oven and perhaps save time when baking or at least have piece of mind that what you set your temp to is actually the temperature in the oven.

Here’s the Hazelnut Toffee Cheesecake  recipe.

Look, I have been telling everyone for over a year that they need to start preparing meals at home.  The more you make at home the less you are at the mercy of the 16 year old working the fry machine.  The second easy thing you can do is to stop using all of those pre-prepared foods.  Again, the companies load these up to make them taste good, taste good but very bad for us. Make meals using fresh ingredients, check out any canned goods you use in cooking.  There are low sodium versions of almost everything on the market these days.

So finally let me hit home…do it for the kids.  Make their meals and besides healthier meals , you may just have the opportunity to spend some quality time with them.  And as an added bonus, eating healthier yourself may just keep you around to see their kids.

Growing up we had no cell phones at the table, we had no tv on during dinner.  All we had was good food and a chance to talk to each other.  As my kids were growing up we had two, make that three, rules at dinnertime.  The first was when I put the food on the table you’d better be in your seat. Shirts were required and there were no hats, with the exception of stupid birthday hats, allowed.  It didn’t take long for my kids’ friends to catch on.  They were always welcomed at the table as long as they followed the rules.  Many good conversations took place at that table and I think both the adults and the kids learned from them.

Back to the phones at the table thing. I spend time and energy creating good meals.  I find it very annoying to have people constantly checking their phones while attempting to have a meal.  Are they that important that their texted comments, if not immediately sent, would set in motion the end of the world? Perhaps their friends would not be able to LOL, and we all need to LOL on occasion, if not for their texted insight into how the world works.   One frightening aspect about this new phenomenon is that the adults now feel free to join in on the texting at the table.  Maybe we should spend more time teaching how to use a knife and fork properly and less time LOL’ing; but them again I am just a grumpy old man.

Dana's Flourless Chocolate Cake

I’m doing the happy dance, I am back in the kitchen again.  Some of you will think I am nuts, some only semi-nuts and a few will understand.  For those of us who cook, eating in fast food restaurants, getting take-out, or even going to the chain restaurants is a punishment, not a plus.  The food is never as good as it should be, the atmosphere not great and not up to the high standard we set at home.  So you can see that now that my move is complete and my kitchen almost back to where I know what is “behind door number 3″,  I am extremely happy to be “home” again.  I am still trying to get everything situated in the kitchen, what goes in what drawer and where the particular plates are but man it is good to be making the food the way I want it and besides, no tipping required.

My wonderful brother-in-law came to town to help with the move and we are working on his kitchen skills.  Over the years he has paid attention, more attention than I thought, in the kitchen as we caught up on our lives.  We cooked a few meals together and I was pleasantly surprised that he had absorbed many of the basics.  Anyway, during the NJ Christmas trip he put in his “wish list” for desserts, we did 4 out of the 5 he requested.  The odd man out was a flourless chocolate cake so I thought it was fitting that we, actually he, would make this while he was here.  He did a great job on the cake.  We did think it took longer to bake than it should have so a good lesson here is to check the oven temperature on a new or different oven when baking for the first time.  Apparently my oven beeps when it is preheated; only problem was that it beeped about 20 minutes and 100 degrees before it reached the proper temperature.  This threw the total baking time off somewhat.  Anyway, the cake was great and I froze the leftovers, so last night I had a piece.  The cake was good, the memories better, so here’s to your, Campy, for all your help and for the cake.

Dana’s Flourless Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 350. butter a 9” springform pan; line the bottom with buttered wax paper, dust with cocoa powder. Melt chocolate and butter together, allow to cool slightly. Separate eggs; beat yolks on medium for 1 minute, add sugar and beat until light yellow. In a separate bowl beat egg whites until just peaking. Blend cooled chocolate with egg yolks, add cocoa; fold in egg whites. Pour into pan, bake for 40-45 minutes. This is a very moist cake and an inserted knife should come out barely wet. Allow to cool for ½ hour prior too removing from pan. Pour chocolate ganache over top, leave on counter until ready to serve.

If you refrigerate this cake the ganache will lose its shine.

·Note: This is almost a souffle; it will rise and drop, if the center caves in don’t panic. Fill with berries and pretend it was on purpose. It happens to all of us.