Want to treat your friend to healthier eating?  We can help. With the current tough economy, why not give a gift that is healthful,  and useful for the recipient.  We offer one-year membership gift certificates to our Meal Planning and Recipe website; just right for that hard to buy-for friend, aunt or anyone else who can use a lift out of the day to day cooking grind.

To purchase click on Register Now! On the Home page of our site: www.emealsforyou.com.  Complete the very short form with the person’s name (don’t worry if you don’t know their email address; use yours and use 12345 as the password; they can change both later), and use URGIFT-53 as the sponsoring Identifier and receive the discounted price of $30.  Then click on CONTACT at the bottom of the page and tell us who and where to mail the gift certificate.  That’s it; simple and quick.  If you wish to purchase more than 1 gift certificate contact us first and we will give you a further discount for multiple purchases. The gift certificates may be customized with photos or phrases.

Running a little late?  We can send you a certificate (PDF format) that you can print on your printer.  We are standing-by, remember to send us an email so that we can customize the certificate and get it right back to you via email.

Flourless Chocolate Cake

As you may know we are adding new areas to our website.  Besides expanding our Vegan category we have added a Gluten Free category.  It seems everywhere I go someone says they are gluten intolerant.  Being the huge “bread” person I am that really bothers me.  Along with registered Dietitian Lisa M. Ronco, MS RD CDN, we will endeavor to develop recipes and meal plans for our readers and members of our website: emealsforyou.com, who have problems planning meals around their eating preferences.

Most of us consider gluten free foods to be bland and tasteless; not so around here.  This cake is wonderful, smooth and chocolaty without a speck of flour.  As with all of our recipes in the Gluten Free category this is a keeper that you will find the whole family will enjoy, even without flour.

Currently in conjunction with our numerous recipe and meal plan categories ( to see all the Recipe and Meal Plan categories on emealsforyou.com click here ) we provide recipes and meal plans designed around:

Diet Friendly, good for you, balanced recipes along with Careful and Carefree Meal Plans providing 4 full weeks of meal plans  (3 per day) and snacks (2 per day) fully scalable to the number of people you are feeding.  As an added bonus simply click a button and print a shopping list for your choices.

Gluten Free, gluten free doesn’t have to be tasteless.

Sodium Reduced, healthier recipes for sodium restricted diets.

Vegan, for those who choose a diet based on a respect for the natural world.

Vegetarian Entrée, great ways to get balanced meals.

WOW (Watching Our Weight), our great recipes scaled down but not out.

Our  Weekly Meal Planner provides you with 5-day meal plans with no repeated entrees and 20 full weeks of meals. All of our recipes and meal plans are automatically scalable; design your menu around feeding 1,2,4,6,8,10 or 12 people.  Simply drop the recipes and meal plans in your Favorites Box and you are two mouse clicks away from printing a complete shopping list.

In the coming weeks we will add recipes and meal plans for creating diabetic friendly menus.  Additionally, Lisa M. Ronco, MS RD CDN will be creating a method to provide guidance for those who wish a more “hands on” approach to healthy eating.

Twice Baked Potatoes

Another weekend  another birthday party dinner, and of course I overdid it again.  Three appetizers, main course including two salads, two desserts.  It was worth it all though as we had a great time and the food was great.  I was looking for an alternative to my usual mashed potatoes and decided to take the extra steps to make the potatoes special.  Twice baked potatoes have always been a big favorite around here and just placing them on the table gets “ahs” all around.

Baking the potatoes instead of peeling and boiling them adds flavor and texture.  You can buy these pre-made at the grocery but come-on, a few minutes more and your kids will thank you for your effort.  Make a ton because they will disappear fast, and they also freeze nicely.

Dates and Goat Cheese

Melon and Ham

I seem to be on a mission to find  easy but good food; maybe it is the unbelievable heat we have been having.  Simple seems to have a special appeal when the thermometer reads in the high 90′s.  The neighbors came over last night for dinner and I was scratching my head to come up with some quick and easy appetizers.  I had a ripe cantaloupe, some excellent Polish ham, some dates and a little goat cheese.  Add a few drops of honey and you have  pretty good summer appetizers.  They must have hit the spot as they disappeared from the plate just about as quickly as they took to assemble.

See more quick, easy and good appetizers at emealsforyou.com

Grapefruit Sorbet

I’m big on “pantry cooking.”  I believe you should be able to make wonderful meals from what you have around the kitchen, whether in the pantry, frig or freezer.  With just a little imagination you should be able to cobble together an  easy appetizer, meal or dessert from items you have on hand.  At emealsforyou.com we give you a list of what we consider essentials for stocking away.

This weekend we were running a little short on appetizers so I went to the pantry and started looking for a quick, easy appetizer to make.  A can of black beans from the shelf, some fresh cherry tomatoes from the garden, some pickled pepper rings from the frig and some frozen pita bread all went together to make a very good relish and chips.  Add a few spices and herbs to your taste and you will wish you had written the recipe down for future use.

Along these lines I give you the easiest recipe I can think of.  Serve this grapefruit sorbet between courses at a formal dinner or have it following a salad for lunch to make it special.  So the next time you are in the store pick up a can of frozen grapefruit juice to save for a “rainy” day.

We are having a going away party for a couple in our neighborhood group this weekend and I am responsible for the desserts.  I have over 100 dessert recipes on my website (emealsforyou.com) so finding something to make wasn’t the problem, deciding what to make was.  After kicking around several ideas we hit on having an old-fashioned Ice Cream Social.  We will set up a dessert station with ice cream, hot fudge sauce, caramel sauce, whipped cream and of course cherries to top it all off.  The perfect finish for the neighborhood party.

This hot fudge sauce is extremely easy it make and has always elicited rave reviews.  Make a double batch, it lasts forever in the frig, well almost forever depending on your families addiction to chocolate.

Hot Fudge Sauce

Heat sugar, syrup, vanilla, cream and butter in a heavy sauce pan until blended. Mix in cocoa and stir.

Hint: may be kept in the refrigerator for weeks. Re-heat in microwave.

Sunday Roasted Chicken

We found some New (red) potatoes at the local farmers’ market on Saturday and my wife said she would like to have some new potatoes with butter and parsley, just like her mom used to make.  After a couple of weeks of high “intensity” food feasts it made sense to get back to basics.  For me there is nothing like a great, roasted chicken to bring it back down to the ah!!!! refreshing dinnertime we all need once in a while.

Moist chicken, crisp skin and smooth, tasty gravy; there is nothing better to renew your belief in simple is good cooking.  Homemade bread, some fresh tomatoes and capers rounded out a quick and easy panzanella salad.  We even skipped dessert.

Sunday Roasted Chicken

Rinse and dry chicken thoroughly. Cover outside with olive oil, sprinkle salt and pepper over skin. Cut one lemon in half; cut garlic head in half, and place both inside cavity of chicken. Place in an over-proof roaster pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, roast chicken for 15-17 minutes per pound or until juices run clear. Place broth and lemon, cut in half, in a saucepan on stove, and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove chicken from pan, place pan on top of stove. Remove lemon from broth, add chicken broth, reserving 1/2 cup, to roasting pan and stir. Add cornstarch to reserved chicken broth, stir broth into roasting pan, and cook on low until thickened. Salt and pepper to taste. Remove garlic, discard garlic skin, and add cloves to gravy. Remove and discard lemon halves inside of the chicken.
Serve with gravy on side.

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!

Oven-roasted Shrimp

We made our quarterly trek to New Jersey last week to see family and friends.  The trip was great but a lot of driving as the side trips were a little more involved then usual.  We ate too much food, some at restaurants and most at my mother-in-law’s house.  Traditionally we do Porterhouse steaks on the grill on our last night there, this time we did them on the next to last.  With family, friends and friends of family present we had a wonderful time and I got to go to my favorite grocery store, Wegman’s, for the 2″ thick steaks.

I took along a carrot cake, some angel food cakes and those wonderful chocolate cookies/cakes that are used for ice cream sandwiches.  I also made, at my mother-in-law’s request, the largest pot of hot fudge sauce I have ever made.  Appetizers consisted of blue cheese stuffed mushroom caps, tapenade on toast points and the shrimp; which brings me to the reason for this post.

First a quick primer on shrimp.  I get questions all the time about how to determine which shrimp to use and why. so here we go.  The number on the bag is the number per pound, 15 -21 means that you can expect to find 15 to 21 shrimp per pound.  31-36 means 31 or so to the pound.  So basically the less per pound, lower number, the larger the shrimp.  The second fact is wild caught verses everything else.  Don’t worry about fresh verses frozen or frozen thawed as most of the shrimp is frozen as soon as it is caught to keep it fresh.  Unless you live on the coast and can buy your shrimp from the boat that caught them, and by all means do this if possible, buy the frozen.  If you can get the wild caught, this means they are not from a “shrimp farm” where they are raised on specific foods, usually in fresh water ponds;  spend the extra buck or two and see how good the wild caught really are.  A quick note on prawns, those huge 6 or so per pound giants in the seafood case, they are almost always farm raised and while impressive to see lack any real flavor.

Every time I make a shrimp dish using the wild caught I get tons of compliments on not only the taste but also on the texture.  Please don’t overcook shrimp, they cook very quickly, which makes them the ideal easy appetizer.  With cocktail sauce or sautéed or baked get a little wild in your life and give these a try.