Pass The Sushi!

I should start this post with a fun fact. I don’t like fruit. I hate the tex­ture. I don’t like the sweet­ness. I am not a fruit per­son. I’m not sure why I don’t like fruit but I’m pretty sure I just didn’t have it much as a kid so I never devel­oped a taste for it. Now it just creeps me out. Every now and then I try to taste things just in case my palate may have evolved — but I haven’t yet found a fruit I enjoy — unless just the skins of apples count.

I do love fruit fla­vors though. Straw­berry ice cream, blue­berry waf­fles, orange soda. All yums. I know, I know. They aren’t the real fla­vors, just sug­ary impos­tors. Hey, I’ll take it.


So today I made a clas­sic banana bread. Bananas as bananas = ew. Bananas as warm bread with a lit­tle honey but­ter = amaz­ing. Who could have guessed that one?


So here it is folks,

Clas­sic Banana Bread

Adapted from Myrecipes.com

• 2  cups  all-purpose flour
• 3/4  tea­spoon  bak­ing soda
• 1/2  tea­spoon  salt
• 1  cup  sugar
• 1/4  cup  but­ter, softened
• 2  large eggs
• 1 1/2  cups  mashed ripe banana (about 3 bananas)
• 1/3  cup  sour cream
• 1  tea­spoon  vanilla extract
• Cook­ing spray

Pre­heat oven to 350°.


Lightly spoon flour into dry mea­sur­ing cups; level with a knife. Com­bine the flour, bak­ing soda, and salt, stir­ring with a whisk.

Place sugar and but­ter in a large bowl, and beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended (about 1 minute). Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beat­ing well after each addi­tion. Add banana, sour cream and vanilla; beat until blended. Add flour mix­ture; beat at low speed just until moist. Spoon bat­ter into an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan coated with cook­ing spray. Bake at 350° for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in cen­ter comes out clean. Cool 10 min­utes in pan on a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool com­pletely on wire rack.

On an absolute side note the gar­den hasn’t died yet (amazed!) but some of the pre­vi­ous plants have returned from the grave. The appar­ently very resilient can­nas have dug their way up from what­ever root I left behind, bro­ken through the turf bar­rier and are over tak­ing a small plant that I planted (no idea what its called. Its thin and tiny and has leaves — yes, I really do know noth­ing about gar­den­ing). I plan on wreak­ing some kind of revenge on these can­nas when it stops rain­ing. Seri­ously though, I am kind of impressed by them.

This weeks “two new to try” was an easy two birds with one stone type of thing. I made a Caramelized Cajun Chicken from South­ern Liv­ing Annual Recipes 09 and stuffed pep­pers for my friends. I love try­ing new things and here is the one mis­take I con­stantly make — I try new things on peo­ple. Instead of going back to some­thing I’ve already made and know is a home run. It’s like “Oh, exper­i­ment time!”
 

You know what hap­pens then? About 5 min­utes before serv­ing time I start to won­der, “Hmm, was this a bad idea?” With no emer­gency suck­i­ness plan in my back pocket, I always go ahead with it. For­tu­nately, I haven’t served any­thing that wasn’t yummy. I did serve a ‘cookie pie’ a few weeks ago that was frus­trat­ing me to no end for its inabil­ity to cook through prop­erly. I’m blam­ing it on a crappy store bought pie crust in those lit­tle alu­minum pie dishes. It was late. I was tired. My par­ents stopped by unex­pect­edly. It was 10PM. It was a dis­as­ter. But the pie was eaten and my friends  still said it was good. Even­tu­ally, I’ll learn.
 

And because I can’t do any­thing straight of the box, I decided to do a “Grilled Jam­bal­aya Stuffed Pep­per.” Gotta keep with the theme right?
 

Grilled Jam­bal­aya Stuffed Pep­pers made by Me.

• 5 Large pep­pers (red, green, yel­low or orange) with their tops cut of and insides carved out
• 1 small onion finely chopped
• 2 cloves of gar­lic diced
• 2 tbs Olive Oil (enough to coat the pan)
• 6 oz Andouille sausage
• 2 cups cooked rice (to add extra fla­vor, cut back on time, and use up some pantry stock — I used Zatarans Jam­bal­aya fla­vored rice)
• 1 tbs Cajun seasoning

Start your rice.
 

Saute onion and gar­lic in a skilled for 5 min­utes. Add sausage. Cook through and crum­ble as much as you can (this will depend on the type of andouille you picked up).
 

You’ll want to start pre-heating the grill at this point. Get it going on a medium high.
 

Once the rice is ready, add the sausage, onions and gar­lic to the mix. Add the cajun sea­son­ing (if desired). Stir them all up and let them get to know one another. Keep warm.
 

Place pep­pers on the grill and rotate them every few min­utes to get a nice tex­ture all over and some brown­ing.
 

Fill pep­pers with rice and sausage mix­ture serve with Caramelized Cajun Chicken, spinach salad and corn bread to com­plete the meal.
 

Click here for a link to the chicken. I dou­bled the b. sugar and Cajun sea­son­ings. Most Cajun sea­son­ings have a high amount of sodium, so I didn’t feel the need to add any more salt.

 
PS. If you are going to use your friends as taste testers for your lat­est unknown con­coc­tion, I rec­om­mend ask­ing if they have an aver­sion to spicy foods first. Oh well.

Dear Mar­ble,

I adore you. You are always smil­ing. Your tail is always wag­ging. I can’t help but pet you. Seri­ously though, I am shav­ing your ever-shedding self the first chance I get. The hair­balls I sweep up on a daily basis are just crazy.

xoxo

Me

BBQ Pulled Pork

• 1 Onion
• 1 3lb pork loin (this could be done with pork shoul­der or another cut, but I’m telling you, the loin is delicious)
• 1 teas cumin
• 1 teas steak sea­son­ing (I use 20% less sodium Mon­treal Steak Seasoning)
• 1 teas salt
• 1 teas ground black pepper
• 1 cup water
• 1 bot­tle of your favorite BBQ sauce
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 2 tbs hot sauce
• 2 tbs Worces­ter­shire sauce

Place pork in crock pot, over the chopped onion and sea­son with cumin and steak sea­son­ing on high fro 6 to 7 hours (or until it pulls apart with a fork eas­ily). Pull the pork and add every­thing else. Some­times I make on the fly adjust­ments of more brown sugar or hot sauce. It’s really easy to tweak to your own taste.

 
This pulled pork is great on kaiser rolls with pep­per jack cheese, as a grilled quasadilla with Amer­i­can cheese and spinach (yes, some­thing about the Amer­i­can cheese made it mag­i­cal), or over a baked potato. Really, I haven’t found a way this pork isn’t good yet.

 
PS! The gar­den hasn’t spon­ta­neously com­busted yet!

It’s plain and sim­ple. I love my daddy. Pretty much the whole world knows it.

My dad and I didn’t always get along. I was a “week to week” kid between my par­ents for a long time which caused its own level of con­flicts. I also think my father pretty much didn’t have a clue what to do with me as a kid. He was dealt a deck and did the best he could with it. We had the rough teen years and actu­ally didn’t speak for quite some time.

It took the death of a friends father to make me real­ize life is too short for that kind of BS. I don’t want to look back and regret the mem­o­ries I may have missed out on. Ever since then my dad and I have been pretty much inseparable.

You don’t pick your par­ents. They are who they are. You don’t have to like them. But me, I love my daddy.

This week­end hit the spot. It was per­fect and I was able to start actu­ally putting things into the ground. My BF put mulch and weed bar­rier down for me and his mom brought over some already estab­lished (... less likely for my un–garden-educated self to kill) plants over. So Sun­day morn­ing, which no real knowl­edge of what I was doing, I started dig­ging holes and putting green leafy things into the dirt.


I so felt like I was slaugh­ter­ing some worms. Poor lil dudes. Every time I dug one up, I tried to put him back into the ground where I found him (Later that night on Dis­cov­ery I saw worms that got 10 feet long and really didn’t feel so bad about killing the ones I did ear­lier cuz that stuff was creepy!).

Where I am super excited about the now semi planted gar­den I feel kinda bad because the BF didn’t get to work on his motor­cy­cle at all this week­end. It’s gor­geous out and lots of peo­ple are rid­ing and I know he wants to be out there too. We need the motor­cy­cle fairy to come fix it so he can have his happy space back.

Onto the food.


Last night was a sim­ple din­ner of alfredo pasta with peas and grilled chicken sausage stuffed with spinach and moz­zarella. The sausage was nice, good fla­vor and easy to pre­pare, I am just not sure I am sold on it, mainly because of the cost. For $4.50 we got 4 links, which is only one meal for the BF and I. Obvi­ously, I’ll have to shop around a bit, but for $4.50 I could have had left over chicken or pork chops for another meal or lunches this week. Yes, I am that stingy, but who isn’t in today’s world. It was yummy though, so at least that was something.