Wednesday, April 12, 2017

GUEST POST FROM JERSEY BEAT PUBLISHER JIM TESTA

I've been trying to eat vegetarian as much as possible. I love doing stir fries and quiches, great way to use up leftover veggies and it's fun to work with different flavor combinations. But my favorite recipe is my pantry burritos.

I made these because I had half a can of leftover vegetarian baked beans. I mixed the beans with one package of instant Mexican rice (the pouch you microwave kind) and a bag of shredded Mexican mix cheese. (There are lots of vegan cheeses out there if you dont want to use a milk product.) Microwave the rice, warm the beans, and toss everything together in a bowl. Then stuff burrito size flour tortiallas with the mixture. Brown them gently in a frying pan to crisp the tortilla (it also melts the cheese and helps them stick together) then top with a jarred salsa or mole sauce. Yum yum!

Thursday, March 9, 2017

I realize it's been a LONG time since my last post. A lot of the cooking jawns I've rolled with I've had to come up with for various reasons. But things have been useful and satisfactory for a while so I've had no great impetus to invest new recipes.

But there's been a confluence of circumstances. My blood pressure started acting up in late 2015 and I had to add fruit to my diet on a daily basis. My metabolism has slowed down so I find myself putting on weight very easily and having a hard time shaking it. And now it's Lent and typically I give up goodies. Rolling econo I grab whatever fruit's cheapest at the grocery store - so that's apples and oranges. Just been thru an oranges phase so back on apples. But I ate the latter so regularly last year -- that I'ma little sick of 'em. One solution was to bake 'em - just cored an apple, added a little sugar, mebbe a splash of red wine, mebbe raisins. And into the toaster oven for about 45 minutes. Which was good enough.

But the coring kinda sucks without a proper coring tool so I tried slicing up the apple and wrapping in foil and making 45 minutes. And actually that cooked worse than the whole apple.

SO I decded to try nuking the sliced apple for 5 minutes in a sealed Pryex dish. That worked GREAT! Cooked thoroughly and was pretty delish. And then I started with add ons and frankly each one was mighty fine. Though at the same time, none was necessary, so I'd count each as a valid and delicious variation to be deployed as yr fancy dictates.

In each case you start with a sliced apple (skin on), nuked for 5 minutes in a covered Pyrex dish. The add on options are:

teaspoon of cinnamon

tablespoon of raisins

teaspoon of butter - diced and sprinkled throughout yr pile of apples

tablespoon of leftover rice (I usually have some cooked brown rice lying around)

I'd also tried sprinkling a tablepoon of bran cereal or Grape Nuts over the cooked apples - and that was OK but frankly I thought they were better with the rice or with no grain products whatsoever.