LUNCH: Spring Ham Salad

This is my go-to meal for a quick, easy, amazingly tasty, satisfying, and healthy lunch.  Super easy to throw together, low carb, good protein, and good fats for a meal you'll never feel guilty about eating.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups spring salad mix
6 or 7 cherry tomatoes
1/4 oz. shredded Mexican cheese blend
1/2 oz. sliced ham
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Simply put the salad mix in a bowl, sprinkle the tomatoes, cheese, and ham over the top.  Mix the oil and vinegar and use as the dressing.

For this one, I'll even include the nutritional info...

Calories - 176
Protein (grams) - 9
Carbs - 15
Fat - 9
Sodium - 218
Sugar - 5

Glucose Effect:
Pre-meal level   - 127
Post-meal level - 118

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Sunday Sauce

No, not the name of the blog but an actual Sunday sauce. It's a basic ingredient for many Italian dishes and is named because it takes an entire Sunday afternoon to cook before it's integrated into a satisfying Sunday dinner.

I'm not saying I'm an expert in Italian cooking, far from it, but I've been experimenting with these sauces for awhile and found that even a novice like me can make a sauce from scratch that's better than anything you can buy in a bottle.

You can too.

This is just one of many variations of a Sunday sauce you can make. Once you get rolling with it, you'll find your own way to put your own personal stamp on it.

INGREDIENTS
1/2 white onion, chopped.
3 teaspoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 sherry
1/4 teaspoon Kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon oregano
1 tablespoon shredded parmesan
1 can (28oz.) peeled San Marzano tomatoes

In a medium sauce pan (I'm using a 4-quart pan for up to 6 people), heat up the oil on high heat and put in the onions and cook until translucent. Add the sherry and stir up to deglaze the pan.

Empty in the tomatoes. Rinse the sides of the can to clean it for disposal and dump that water in the pan, too. Add the garlic, salt, pepper, and oregano. Bring to a boil for 10 minutes, stir occasionally.

Lower the heat to a low simmer and add the parmesan.  Cook, stirring occasionally, for around 3-4 hours. When reduced to a fairly thick consistency, almost a paste, you're done.

Be sure to taste at various points along the way and add ingredients to improve taste if it needs it.

The sauce can be used in a myriad of dishes, especially pasta, and can also be put in jars and frozen for future use.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Pizza!

Originally, I was going to do this on my gas barbecue but my pizza pan wouldn't fit with the lid closed so it was off to the kitchen oven to cook.

There are two time consuming steps to this but this is another one you can do a few hours ahead of time and stick in the fridge until it's time to cook.  The first step is the sauce and the next is rolling out the dough, which not only takes time but is pretty labor intensive, too.

Except for the sauce, I bought all the other ingredients premade at a local Italian deli, Capri in Covina, California. That makes things a bit easier.

INGREDIENTS
16 ounces of pizza dough (you can make this yourself but I just buy it premade at a local Italian deli. You can also find it at Trader Joe's and other stores)
6 medium Roma tomatoes
1 teaspoon oregano
3 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 links Italian sausage
1/4 pound prosciutto
1/2 pound mozarella cheese
1/2 cup shredded quattro formagio (four cheeses, available at most supermarkets - substitute with a high quality shredded parmesan if you can't find it)

Sauce
Take 5 tomatoes (you may want to cut them in half first) and puree in a blender with 1 cup of water.

Cut the 6th tomato up into cubes.

Put 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a sauce pan. Pour your pureed tomatoes on top of that and bring to a boil. Boil for 10 minutes, then set to low to simmer. Put your tomato chunks, garlic, oregano, salt, and sugar into the mix and stir. Simmer for 2 hours or until reduced by two thirds. Stir occasionally during this time (maybe every 10 or 20 minutes). Taste a spoonful occasionally to see if the taste would be good on a pizza. Add ingredients to adjust, sparingly, until you get your perfect tast.

When sauce is thick, a little thicker than you'd want to serve on pasta, take it off of the heat.

Pizza
Preheat oven to 450 -500 degrees...very hot!

On a large, wooden cutting board, sprinkle about a quarter cup of flour and spread out over the board. Place dough on it and roll out flat. This will take quite some time as the dough will keep wanting to snap back to its original shape. Keep at it and, eventually, the dough will lose its elasticity and you'll have a flat dough. be very careful not to tear your dough.

Put a tablespoon of olive oil and coat it with a paper towel over a round pizza pan. Transfer your dough into the pan and, carefully, spread it to the edges.

Using a ladel, spread your sauce over the dough, leaving about a half inch clear around the rim to be able to hold your pizza slice later.  Put a think layer of mozzarella over the sauce. Put on your toppings (we're using Italian sausage and prosciutto but the sky's the limit on what you'd like to put on it). Sprinkle quattro formagio on it. 

Cover with another layer of mozzarella (I'm using a mozzarella ball for this and laying slices of it around the pie).

Put in oven and bake for 10 minutes.

Put parchment paper on your cutting board and transfer finished pizza pie to it once done. Let sit for 5 minutes before slicing.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Resuscitation

Tomatoes are annual plants. At least they're supposed to be. I look out the laundry room window and I see that the hanging cherry tomato plant is gone.

I go out to uproot it but...what's this?...there are some new green leaves coming out.

Instead of uprooting it, I give it a haircut.

All the dead trimmed away, let's give it a chance to come back.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

RECIPES FOR A CHEAPSKATE: Guacamole

In my seemingly never ending quest to use all of our tomatoes, this week I made some guacamole.

I could have asked my neighbor for a couple avocados but since I was thinking about this while I was at the store, I took the easy way out and bought a couple of Haas avocados, some green onions, and a lemon. I probably could have used a homegrown onion but I used it last week on another meal and don't have another.

This tomato...

...and these chiles, however, came straight from the garden.

It's a pretty easy recipe, first dice up the tomato.  Take the dead skin off of two whole green onions, along with the roots. Chop it all up into 1 inch pieces.

Put the onions and the chile...I've got a very small Anaheim chile, a Thai chili, and a few serrano chiles..into a food processor and chop up into fine mixture of little cubes.

Scoop out the avocados into a bowl, add the tomatoes, and mash up like mashed potatoes. Add a teaspoon of minced garlic and another of salt.  Squeeze lemon juice over everything and add the onion and chile mixture.

Add half and half or heavy cream to give a creamy taste and texture. Stir thoroughly and add salt and cream sparingly to taste.

When done, we add it to our tacos, as shown at the top. You can also use it as a very tasty dip for your tortilla chips.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

September Harvest

Great haul this week.

Heirloom tomato, guavas, hybrid tomato, Anaheim chile, hot chiles, and onion. Time to make salsa.

These cherry tomatoes will be used for a Caprese salad.

Darryl

A Labor of Love

Well, Labor Day 2015 has just passed, marking the unofficial end of summer. How did our garden do? This year was much better than last. We had a lot more good news than bad.

Let's start with the good stuff and save the bad for next time.

On the sweet side of things, the guavas are ready to start picking. Some are already dropping on the ground. Lots of fruit on this tree.

The dragon fruit aren't ripe yet but they're getting there.

The tomatoes have done great. Three plants have put out enough that we haven't had to buy tomatoes for two months now. Maybe not enough to share with all the neighbors but a banner year still, especially compared to the lousy year we had last year. 

The hybrid has put out many in clusters like this.

The heirloom has been a bit stingier, only giving us about a half dozen but they were pretty big, tasty, and spectacular.

Although the leaves could look healthier, the hanging cherry tomato has been loaded down all summer with tiny, tasty fruit.

On the spicy side of things, the pasilla I planted last year that I gave up on because it was ravaged by squirrels has made a comeback and is providing a good, late harvest. When done, I will transplant it into a more suitable spot.

Another plant that was rodent plagued last year was our Anaheim chile plant. It has also produced handsomely this summer. Great with eggs or in salsa.

Need some more heat? I've got more than enough serrano and Thai chiles for the whole neighborhood. This shows just a tiny portion of those plants.

And coming soon, this Meyer lemon should be leading our late fall and winter citrus parade.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved.

RECIPES FOR A CHEAPSKATE: Lasagna

God has given us an abundance of tomatoes this year, the challenge is to use them all.

This week, it's everybody in the pool as I make a sauce for my lasagna. I have four hybrid, 1/2 heirloom, and about a dozen cherry tomatoes leftover from last week's harvest that I need to use before they go bad.

First step, chop them all up into cubes. The cherry tomatoes will just be cut in half like I did with my pizza sauce a few weeks ago.

As I dice, they all go into a bowl, awaiting their fate.  A tablespoon of olive oil in the bottom of a sauce pan is getting hot in the meantime, where I saute half an onion chopped up in a food processor.

Once the onions are translucent, the tomatoes join them along with half a cup of water, half a teaspoon of sugar, teaspoon of salt, a generous sprinkling of pepper, half a teaspoon of minced garlic, and another half teaspoon of oregano.

I bring to a boil, stirring, for ten minutes and then let simmer on low for a little over an hour.

When done, the sauce looks like this.

Next, I fry up a pound of Italian sausage and cook some lasagna noodles in boiling water for about eight minutes until slightly soft (al dente).

I oil up a baking pan with olive oil, lay in two strips of the lasagna noodles, and start to create layers. One layer may be sauce with sausage and parmesan cheese, the next sauce and ricotta cheese, the next sauce, cream, and mozzarella...it's up to you, whatever you want to put in.

Finished, I top with a generous layer of mozzarella to have a nice, melty layer of cheese on top.

375 degrees for 45 minutes, covered with foil. Remove the foil and cook for another 20 minutes. Take out and let cool for 10 minutes.

Serve and enjoy.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Hot Time in the Garden

The biggest chore I had this week was deadheading the roses but the temp is 110 and climbing. I expect it'll hit 115 before the day is over.

Just too hot, so I'm just fertilizing and check the progress of the crops.

These tomatoes have weighed down their part of the vine so that they're resting on the soil. I don't want them there where the worms and other insects can get to them.

Gingerly, so I don't break their branch, I lift them up and rest them on the neighboring hot chile's cage. Now, they're about a foot off of the ground.

Something's already got this green heirloom, so I picked it off and threw away. Nothing else seems to be affected right now.

Except this little zucchini plant. It's hard to see in this picture but something has been digging at it's roots and the plant is a bit wilted from it.

Across the path, it's sibling is finally producing some fruit. Homegrown zucchini on the way.

This pasilla chile has three fruit that should be ready in about three weeks and will feed the three of us with the tastiest peppers in the garden. A lot of trios in that paragraph and there's also about 40 more chiles on the plant in the earliest stages of ripening.  Can't wait.

Finally, although most of our crops are in between harvests right now, I got one good heirloom tomato, one hybrid tomato, and a nice little Anaheim chile to go with a good harvest we already got last week.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved