fastest fried egg lunch salad

When there's no time, and fried eggs with toast don't seem "lunchy" enough, this is what I make. The salad is done as fast as you can fry an egg

FASTEST FRIED EGG LUNCH SALAD

ingredients

-- 3 cups baby spinach leaves, or other salad greens
-- 2 eggs
-- 1 piece bread
-- 2 t. mustard
-- 2 t. honey
-- salt
-- pepper
-- butter

method

1. Heat fry pan over medium-high heat, add in some butter. When hot, break 2 eggs into pan, salt and pepper eggs.

2. While eggs are frying, put bread in toaster to make toast. Fill a plate with washed baby lettuce leaves, or wash and dry some lettuce and cut it up and fill up your plate with that.

3. Check eggs to see if they are ready to flip. For this salad to work, you need to cook the whites but keep the yolks runny!

4. While the eggs finish, sprinkle the spinach leaves with mustard and honey straight from the squeeze bottles.

5. When the eggs are done to your liking, slide them out of the pan and onto your spinach leaves. Cut up the eggs and mix it all together so that the yolks mix with the mustard and honey to make a dressing.

6. Grab your toast and eat it up!

food for celebration of life reception thoughts

A friend of ours, Susie, passed away about 3 weeks ago. I volunteered to help the family out however I could, and thankfully Tom (Susie's husband) allowed me to organize the food for Susie's Celebration of Life reception. I say thankfully because I am grateful I had the chance to do something for a family I am so fond of during such a sad time. The loss they are going through is tremendous and if it make their lives a little easier for me to help arrange the food, I am so happy to do it. It makes me feel less helpless and I hope the food comforted many who were all feeling Susie's loss.

We were expecting rougly 100 - 150 people, I think a good 150 attended the recepetion. We had prepared:

-- 500 baked goods, including roughly 200 cupcakes, from McCormick family recipes
-- 15 pounds of assorted good cheese
-- 30 bottles wine
-- 8 cans pink lemonade
-- 8 pounds assorted cold salamis and pepperonis
-- 1 veggie tray from costco
-- 1 fruit tray from costco
-- assorted jams, nuts, etc

I had thought that the baked goods and the meat would be hugely excessive but I was wrong, every single cookie went, and most of the cupcakes too. Next time I would do even more cookies/bars and less cupcakes as they are a bit too large for an event like this. I had also thought the meat would be excessive, turns out it was almost all eaten. Susie's son Tim came up to me during the reception and said "thanks for the meat" which made me smile.

What did turn out to be hugely excessive was the cheese and the wine. we only needed half the amount of each. Unfortunately these were also the most expensive items. I had thought people would drink on average one glass of wine each, but many people didn't drink any wine at all. Even I preferred the lemonade to wine. We ran out of lemonade early on and I should have gotten double the lemonade. All the fancy jams I purchased were definitely not needed at all, next time I would leave them out for sure.

One thing I did do right was listen to Sandra, one of Susie's best friends. She told me to order the meat, and she set the number of baked goods correctly. Plus she did so much more, thanks Sandra for being my partner in crime, I couldn't have done it without you.

Best ever Blueberry-honey Jam

I have been experimenting with no-pectin jam for years, but last year I really took the plunge and tried making a jam with no pectin and no processed sugar, using only honey as a sweetener.

It was a bit nerve-wracking waiting to see if it would set up, but when all was said and done the jam was the best I'd ever made. The complexity of the honey sweetness really adds a special flavor to a simple blueberry and elevates it to something really really good. I give out jars as housewarming gifts and such, and many many people tell me how good it is, which makes me want to make and give more. Anyway, here is the recipe.

Best ever Blueberry-Honey Jam
(makes about 8 cups of jam)

4 lbs. (roughly 11 cups) fresh blueberries (I think you could also use pretty much any other kind of berry for this recipe, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, etc but I have only tried blueberry)
2 1/2 cups honey (if you have a choice a lighter flavored honey like fireweed is better than a cloying clover honey, but if you don't have a choice any honey will do)
1 Tablespoon fresh-squeezed lemon juice

1. Wash and pick through blueberries, taking out any that are rotten, moldy, or greenish and underripe. All of the berries should be firm and ripe. This is a very important step because one moldy berry can ruin a whole jar of jam.

2. Mix berries with honey, let sit 2 hours (I don't know why this step is there, I usually don't have the patience for this and just let it sit 30 minutes)

3. Put honey-berry mixture and lemon juice in pot. Boil on medium heat for 30 minutes, scraping sides of pot and stirring bottom as you go. The berries will burst and the jam will get thicker as you go. You can taste the mixture at this point, if you want sweeter jam just add more honey. Once the jam "sheets" of the back of a spoon (whatever that means) or seems to set up when you fling dots of it on a refrigerated plate, it is done.

4. While the jam is boiling, get a separate large pot of boiling water going on another burner and sterilize 8 cups worth of canning jars, lids, and rings by boiling them in the water for 10 minutes.

5. Ladle jam into sterilized jars, leaving at least 1/2 inch of space. Put the top and ring on the jars and close, tight but not too tight.

6. Place closed jars in pot of boiling water until covered and boil for 10 minutes. This is called a "hot water bath" and my mom swears by this step although my aunt says she never does it with her jam. I play it safe and do it because I give away this jam and I don't want to poison anyone.

7. When done, place on counter, each jar should ding, making an airtight seal. Place any jar that doesn't seal in the fridge and eat that jam right away. A sealed jar should be good for at least 1 year in your cupboard, up to several years.

8. Months or years down the road, if you take a formerly sealed jar of jam out of the cupboard and find it to have lost its seal (you can tell by pushing on the top if you hear that clicking sound it is not sealed) DO NOT EAT THIS JAM -- it could have botullism or mold or other bad things in there, just throw it away. Only eat sealed jam from the cupboard.

Carbo overload

I haven't been cooking much lately, and have relied on other people's food, mostly in-laws and restaurants, and I have found the food I have been eating extremely heavy on the carbs (and drinking beer doesn't help any, either):

A few meals I have eaten lately:

-- Indian rice with potato curry on top (a bit of mint in the curry): 90% starch
-- Burrito with rice and meat filling: 80% starch
-- Naan wrap with potato and meat filling: 80% starch

In my own cooking and preferred eating, I usually try to eat not more than 50% of any meal as carbs (usually measured very unscientifically by volume), this can be difficult with vegetarian cooking but I try to eat salads before a carb-heavy main dish and load dishes like mac and cheese with lots of vegetables, and eat fruit for dessert. I will have to double up on my veg routine when I get back to cooking in a few weeks.

Better Roasted Gobi Manchurian recipe

Okay, so I have been trying different Gobi Manchurian recipes for the perfect sauce for my Roasted Gobi Manchurian, finally I found a really good one (adapted from http://www.hookedonheat.com/2006/03/09/fusion-cooking-at-its-best/ ) that I had to share:

Ingredients:

-- 1 large head cauliflower, cut into small florets
-- 2 teaspoons oil
-- 2 teaspoons sesame seeds
-- 6 drops spicy sauce
-- salt, pepper

-- 2 teaspoons oil
-- 2 Tablespoons garlic, minced
-- 2 Tablespoons ginger, minced
-- 1 bunch spring onions, sliced thinly on the diagonal

-- 2 Tablespoons ketchup
-- 2 Tablespoons soy sauce
-- 1 teaspoon white vinegar
-- 1 teaspoon rooster sauce (or other spicy sauce)

-- 1 teaspoon cornstarch
-- 1/2 cup water

-- 1 Tablespoon minced cilantro

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Put cauliflower florets on a baking sheet. Drizzle with oil, sesame seeds, spicy sauce, salt, and pepper. Put in oven, turning every 15 minutes until tender and beginning to brown, about 40 minutes.

2. Heat frying pan to medium-high heat. Add oil, then ginger, garlic, and 3/4 of spring onions (reserve a little for garnish). Fry for a minute until fragrant and then add in the ketchup, soy sauce, vinegar, and spicy sauce. Let that bubble a bit. Mix the cornstarch and water together, then add the mixture to your pan, boil for about a minute, it should thicken up a bit into a sauce.

3. Add the roasted cauliflower to the sauce, stir to coat everything completely. Turn out onto your serving dish, add the minced cilantro and reserved spring onions for garnish and serve.

So good!

Buckwheat Enhanced Bread for Bread Machine

I make this bread a lot. The original website that had this recipe no longer exists, so I am posting it here (with minor changes) for safe keeping.

Makes a 1.5 pound loaf in a home bread machine.

Bread flour -- 1 and 1/3 cups plus 1 tablespoon
Whole wheat flour -- 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon
Buckwheat flour -- 1/3 cup
Water -- 3/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons
Dry yeast -- 1 teaspoon
Salt -- 1/2 teaspoon
Molasses -- 1 tablespoon
Dry skim milk powder -- 1 tablespoon
Butter -- 1 tablespoon

Add ingredients to your bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer of the machine. Bake on basic/regular bread cycle.

Recipe developed and tested at the Grain Research Laboratory.

Another good and easy strawberry salad

OK so I had a good salad today, this is what it included:

-- lots of baby spinach
-- sliced strawberries
-- thinly sliced onions
-- goat cheese
-- balsamic vinaigrette

This was very good, next time I would add in nuts, and make the balsamic a bit sweeter by adding some jam to it or something.