elote

locally grown sweet corn

mayonnaise and cayenne pepper

This is my favorite way to eat corn. I think it was made even more popular by the movie Nacho Libre which we happen to love as well. One of the characters, Esqueleto is always eating elote.

We usually grill it inside the husks and then pull the husks back when they are charred and use the husk as a handle. It's just as good boiled though. I found two recipes online. I've tried them both and they are good.

Nacho Libre-style corn from Chow

Here's a recipe from all recipes

My way is much easier I must say. Even the cooking the corn part. Here's what you need:

• 4 ears of corn
• 1/4 cup- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1/4 teaspoon or more to taste of cayenne pepper
• 1 lime
• freshly shredded parmesan cheese

1. Remove husks and silk from ears of corn. Rinse.
2. In a large pot, filled 3/4 with water, bring to boil a boil on high heat. (some people put sugar in their water to boil, but we never do because our local corn is fresh and sweet).
3. Once the water is boiling, lower cobs into the water. Boil rapidly for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and drain. While corn is cooling down, mix mayo with cayenne. (must use mayonnaise. No miracle whip, or reduced fat recipes. It is best withplain ol' mayonnaise.
   
4. Place corn holders on each end of your cob and then slather mayonnaise mixture evenly over cob. Sprinkle or roll in the parmesan cheese (cotija cheese is the most commonly used cheese for elote, but I like it a little more mild. That's why I use pamesan. I also leave out the butter, salt, and garlic. It doesn't need it!).
   
5. Serve with lime wedges. I usually squeeze the lime evenly over cob and then dig in!
   

This is so good! At least I think so. But here's what our kids did when we tried to get them to eat it.

bento #4

This is a bento box that stacks two high. Maybe i'll get a picture of it sometime so you can see the whole look. It is really tiny, but I am surprised at really how much food I can fit in there.

The top box has Oatmeal Squares cereal, grape tomatoes from our garden, and cucumbers cut with flower cutter (also from our garden).

The bottom box has sliced strawberries, the little container has 1-2 teaspoons of homemade ranch dressing for his veggies, and bowtie pasta with butter and parmesan.

pinoche

My mother makes a delicious candy every Christmas called a Caramel Pecan Log, a recipe that's been in the family for a very long time. Inside this caramel pecan log, is a fondant. It's made with white sugar. I discovered that Pinoche is essentially this very fondant, but it's made with brown sugar instead. There are a number of ways to make this, and is also called a variety of names, such as brown sugar fudge. This was very sweet, rich, and in my opinion, too much. I felt the sugar rush go straight to my brain. It was good, but I could only eat one little square. I think it's the sweet brown sugar. I would rather eat the fondant by itself from the Caramel Pecan Log recipe. I would also rather just make fudge. But some people adore pinoche. And maybe there's a better recipe out there, but here's a basic.

2 cups brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 cup evaporated milk
1/2 cup butter
1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine sugars, milk, and butter. Cook, stirring occasionally to soft ball stage. Take off of heat, and add vanilla. Let sit until lukewarm. Beat with a wooden spoon (this is a major pain!) until it loses its gloss. Pour into a buttered 8x8 dish. Cool until firm and then cut into small pieces.

bentos #2 and #3 for daisy

Ugly picture, but this bento is PB and J sandwiches cut into squares. I "heart" you cut out of mango fruit leather, edamame on toothpicks, and cantaloupe in star and flower shapes. The lid has a small space for another item. I put a small package of cookies in it the first day.

cantaloupe, deli turkey rolled up, carrots, edamame, and squares of cheese

creamy chicken noodle soup

I know. It's too hot for soup. But it's been raining here, and I was craving it. For this recipe, I took a basic chicken noodle soup and made it creamy.

First, I bought a rotisserie chicken from Costco. When I brought it home, I took all the meat off the bones, and put it in the refrigerator. Next, I placed the bones, and whatever was left of the chicken and placed it in a stock pot. Then I covered it with about 6-8 cups of water or until the chicken was covered with water about an inch. You can also throw in carrots, celery, onions, parsley, and dill at this point. I brought it to a boil and boiled it on low for a few hours. Then I removed all the bones and even found more meat that I could use. I threw away the bones and pushed all the remaining bits through a sieve, including vegetables. I threw away the excess and then refrigerated the stock. The next day, I skimmed the fat layer off the top of the soup base and then brought my chicken stock to a boil. I added an extra bouillon to the stock. Once it was boiling, I added my onion, carrots, and noodles. I boiled until the carrots and noodles were soft. Then I added peas, the pulled chicken and a little dill and parsley. You can use whatever you have on hand. It's hard to ruin this soup.

To make it creamy: melt a cube of unsalted butter in a small saucepan on medium low heat. Once it is melted, add 1/2 cup of flour. Stir until thickened and starting to get bubbly then add 1/2 cup of milk. Stir until mixed thoroughly and then add to your pot of soup. This will make your soup creamy, and thicker. Everyone gobbled this up. HF said it tasted like a chicken pot pie without the crust. I guess that's good if you like chicken pot pie.

Serve with crusty bread.

about bento

Daisy's first school bento. They totally aren't as cute as the bento blogs I read, but I was using what we had, and trying to keep it simple. I would love to create the over the top ones that look just stunningly perfect, but I'm not that crafty. But she loved getting these her first week of school. And just about everything was eaten!

There's a nice arm shadow in the photo for you. This is what I put in there. Meatballs (the little pink container in the middle has BBQ sauce in it for dipping), a hard boiled egg, corn, a half banana, french bread pieces with a little butter, cheddar cheese cut into star shapes, and the lid contained 2 mini chocolate candies and I gave her a juice box as well. Those are pink and red silicone muffin cups by Wilton. They work perfectly for bento boxes. I have links to some bento blogs and places on the right. My sister is in Seattle this week and is getting a bunch of bento supplies from Daiso for me.

Chocolate Éclair Dessert

Not a very good picture, but I wanted to show how shiny and smooth my chocolate layer is.


Enough vegetables, let's have some dessert! I labeled this dessert as a kids recipe as well, because it's something that kids can help make, and it really is more of a kid's dessert in my opinion. Many people know this recipe from their childhoods. It's known by many names, and can be made a number of ways. Even though this is an easy recipe to make, and the ingredients are few, you have to make this a day in advance of when you plan on serving it. It should be refrigerated at least 24 hours before serving.

Chocolate Éclair Dessert

3 cups milk

2 small packages of French Vanilla instant pudding

8 oz carton of cool whip (Polysorbate 60 freaks me out, so I make my own and it works! But you have to beat it for a while-you can even search online for homemade cool whip recipes)

2 sleeves of Graham crackers

chocolate glaze (recipe follows)

• Make the pudding with the milk and cool whip
• In a 9x13 casserole dish, lay down a layer of whole graham crackers
• Spread half of the pudding/cool whip mixture over the layer of crackers
  
• Lay another layer of whole graham crackers over the pudding
• Spread the remaining half of the pudding/cool whip mix on top
  
• Lay another layer of whole graham crackers
• Spread the chocolate glaze over the top layer of graham crackers

You can use whatever chocolate glaze recipe you want as long as it spreads easily over entire top layer of graham crackers. Some people buy the small tubs of frosting and microwave it until easily spreadable. I like to make it with as few ingredients as possible from scratch.

Chocolate Glaze

3 TBLS soft (room temperature) butter

3 TBLS cocoa

1 tsp vanilla

1 ½ cup powder sugar

3 TBLS hot water (does not need to be boiling – just hot from the tap)

Mix until smooth

• IMPORTANT: Chill 24 hours – if not, at least overnight. It will not turn out as intended if not refrigerated this long.
  

roasted summer vegetables

Our first produce from the garden. The strawberries are all eaten and the cherry tomatoes are not pictured because Luke gobbled them up. The top 2 cucumbers are weirding me out though. One's dark and long and the other one is light and smaller. Maybe that's normal, I don't know. Some of this will be used for baby food puree and the cucumbers for snacking. The rest. . .
tossed with olive oil, coarse salt, and coarse pepper, and a little bit of grated parmesan cheese.


30 minutes later, hot roasted vegetables from our garden.
HF doused his with more parmesan cheese. Delicious. Especially with the tomatoes and zucchini.

This can be done a number of ways and with a number of vegetables. We used tomatoes, green bell peppers, yellow squash, and zucchini. I saw a recipe for splashing Italian dressing on it and then roasting. It's a nice way to use up garden produce. We baked it at 450 for 30 minutes. You could broil, or take it outside to the barbecue.

spinach and pesto lasagna

HF: This is really, really good. It just needs meat.

2 cups cottage cheese (you may use Ricotta, I just don't like it)
1 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1 large egg
1 pound fresh spinach leaves (or 2 10-ounce packages frozen chopped spinach, thawed, squeezed dry)
1 7-ounce package prepared pesto (or make your own)
3-4 cups bottled chunky pasta sauce (I used Emeril's Chunky Marinara this time)
12 no-boil lasagna noodles from an 8-ounce package
2 cups grated Mozzarella cheese

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. Lightly spray a 9X13 casserole dish with cooking spray.
   
3. Wash spinach leaves and press water out with towels, paper towel, or using a salad spinner.
   
4. In a small bowl, mix together the cottage cheese, the egg, and the pesto.
   
5. Spread 1/2 cup of pasta sauce on bottom of dish.
6. Layer with 4 of the lasagna noodles. Spread a thin layer of the cottage cheese mixture over noodles. Top with spinach, 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese, and 1/2 cup of mozzarella. Repeat layers with sauce, noodles, cottage cheese mixture, spinach, and cheese. When all your layers are made, top with remaining cheese (I probably used 3 cups of cheese instead of the two).
7. Bake for 1 hour. You can cover with foil to keep from burning, or leave the cheese off until the last 30 minutes, but I like my cheese layer on top to be well done as you can see in the photo above.

I thought this was a very good lasagna. Safe for vegetarians. I think next time I will add pressed garlic and I think instead of the chunky marinara sauce, I would like to make a homemade white sauce or Alfredo sauce. I think that's usually how spinach lasagnas are made. But this was really good.

guy food part IV

*another non-atrocious recipe from HF! (except don't listen to him when he says to use tapatio or KETCHUP of all things!) I prefer just the beans, the entire package of cream cheese, the monterey jack cheese, and the salsa. That's it.

Okay world, this recipe turns out some freaking awesome bean dip.

WARNING: make sure you have a friend or family member eat this with you, otherwise you won't be able to stop yourself from eating the entire thing. As good as this is going to taste, you don't want to eat the entire thing.

Here's what you need:

1 can of refried beans

Monterrey Jack Cheese

Fresh Salsa

Tapatio hot sauce

1/2 a package of cream cheese

For best results you're going to have to do some prep before you start cooking anything.
First shred the cheese. You want to shred a man sized fist amount of cheese. What's a man sized fist you ask? It's the size of your fist partially open as if it's holding a baseball. That's just one example of how we measure ingredients in the Cro-Magnon's kitchen y'all.
Next, remove the cream cheese from the box but keep it in its foil wrapper and cut it in half. Put the half you're not going to use back in the box and put it in the fridge.
Now you're ready to start cooking stuff. Empty the can of refried beans and it's accompanying juices into a pot.

Add about a finger tip's length of water to the pot. Don't ask me why, just do it.

Now turn up the heat on the stove (medium high) and start mashing the beans up with whatever heat resistant cooking utensil you can find. It's important to keep stirring the beans throughout the entire cooking operation. If you don't, they'll burn and stick to the bottom of the pot and you'll get in trouble with your wife.

Once you get the beans mashed up pretty good, go ahead and dump in that half block of cream cheese (make sure you take it out of the foil first), and mix it in. You may have to mash up the cream cheese as you mix it depending on how soft the cream cheese was when you added it to the beans. Don't worry though, it will start melting pretty fast once you put it in. REMEMBER TO KEEP STIRRING!!!

Once you have the cream cheese melted pretty good and mixed throughout the beans, add the cheese into the mix. KEEP STIRRING.

After the cheese is melted, add 3 heaping spoonfuls of fresh salsa. KEEP STIRRING.

Now that you've got the salsa mixed in good, it's time to add the secret awesome ingredient: Tapatio hot sauce.

Put in as much as you like. If you don't want it hot then don't put in a lot. KEEP STIRRING. Mix it all in until all you see is the creamy light brown of the beans.

When everything is mixed in nice, remove from heat, pour in a bowl, and enjoy!

My bean dip can be enjoyed hot or cold.

Now it's important to note that there are some alternative ingredients for those of you who don't like hot, spicy, picante, etc. bean dip. Instead of fresh salsa you can opt for a mild canned salsa like Pace Picante sauce or whatever generic brand is available. If even that's too spicy for you, go with good old Ketchup. It may sound gross using ketchup but you need that tomato flavoring in there for the end result. I've had it both ways and it's great either way. Lose the Tapatio too if you can't take the heat.

New York cheesecake with lemon curd

HF's very favorite dessert in the whole wide world is cheesecake. It doesn't really matter what kind of cheesecake as long as it is cheesecake. For the last few years we've been lucky to have a friend that makes cheesecakes for a living. She sells them to local restaurants/delis/bakeries and makes pretty good money from it. She knew of HF's love for the cheesecake so whenever she created a new recipe, she would bring us over the entire cheesecake for taste testing. She knew that not only would we happily consume and give her feedback, but we would share our abundance with other friends. I commisioned her for HF's 29th birthday to make a lemon cheesecake and it was spectacular. This is what that one looked like. You can see Luke's 18 month old finger marks on top.

Of course, her recipes are top secret so I will never know what she did to make it so amazing. She's moved now, so we don't have her cheesecakes anymore, but now I'm trying to become a good cheesecake maker. Some of the flavors she made us were dark chocolate, pumpkin with candied praline topping, lemon, "regular", that's all I can think of right now. WOW they were good. Better than The Cheesecake Factory, and better than the NY cheesecakes I tried when I visited NYC.

Now on to HF's 31st birthday cheesecake. I took these pictures in a hurry so we could get to eatin' it. I used this recipe from allrecipes.com except I used 2 cups of graham cracker crumbs, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, and then 1 cube of unsalted butter. I mixed to crumbs with the cinnamon and then poured in the melted butter. I used a 9-inch springform pan and I only packed the crust on the bottom, not along the sides. I like a thick graham cracker crust.

I wanted to make a lemon cheesecake, but wasn't sure on a good recipe or how to alter one, so I decided to use a lemon topping.

Lemon Curd Topping
2 eggs, beaten 1 cup sugar 1/4 cup butter at room temperature 1 teaspoon lemon rind 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice Place all ingredients in a small saucepan. Cook and stir with a whish over medium heat until the sauce becomes thick and just starts to bubble. Remove from heat. If you dip in a spoon and pull it out, you should be able to make a clear track mark down the middle with your finger without the sides running to fill your finger mark. If that makes any sense. Cool, cover, and chill.

After the cheesecake was done and refrigerated over night, I took the chilled lemon curd and poured it in the middle of the cheesecake. It spread very easily. I refrigerated it until we were ready to eat it. I added fresh strawberries and HF said that it tasted like a strawberry-lemonade topping. It was SO GOOD. I think that the lemon curd made it.

avocado egg rolls

I love these lil babies. I thought about them all week and couldn't wait to make them on Sunday, my "Free" day. I just completed week 2 of Body For Life. Sunday's are my free day. I was not disappointed. A couple of years ago we ate at the California Pizza Kitchen, and we ordered their Avocado Club egg rolls and I loved them. Then I thought, " I could totally make these". So I did. And it's more or less the same I think. And you get a bunch of them instead of like 2 for $10. So ridiculous! After making my version of them, I did some more googling, and found the actual recipe supposedly. It says that it's from the California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook, so it must be, right? This is what I did different.

To grill the chicken:
I put a couple Tablespoons of olive oil in an iron skillet on medium heat. Once it was heated, I placed 2 chicken breasts in skillet. I added the juice of 2 limes, 3 garlic cloves minced, and a handful of chopped cilantro. I then added a cup or so of water. This keeps the chicken tender and from burning. When the chicken was almost done, I sliced it into strips and let it blacken in the skillet. It was done when all the water evaporated. Make sure it is no longer pink anywhere in the chicken.

I added the following ingredients to the original recipe from the CPKF cookbook: I doubled the recipe because I made them for dinner- not as an appetizer, and wanted to use all the eggroll wrappers that came in the package. I didn't count, but I think it made around 16-20.

diced purple onion
1-3 more avocados (I like it heavy on the avocado)

I added cilantro in my previous experiment, but didn't need to this time because I grilled the chicken with it. I think next time I'll leave it off the chicken and add it separately. I also just mixed all the ingredients together in a bowl and then placed 2-3 tablespoons in each eggroll. I didn't follow the instructions in the recipe for placement and it wasn't soggy at all. I am not sure how much of a difference it actually would make.

This is just my opinion. The recipe would be fine without my additions, but I would definitely recommend grilling the chicken with lime and garlic or some other complimentary marinade. The ranchito sauce is very, very good and really made the egg roll sublime. We used Tabasco's smoked chipotle sauce.

Ice Cream Pie

This is a recipe from a magazine I got a few years ago. I don't remember which one, but I had cut it out. It might be Cook's Illustrated. We just made it for the first time this last weekend. We used to make ice cream pies pretty regularly, but we used Oreo or graham cracker pie crusts. This ice cream pie does not contain your usual graham cracker crust. It is crushed sugar cones. Chopped Oreo cookies were added to the mint chip ice cream. You can customize it by trying a variety of ice cream flavors and chopped cookies to use in this recipe.

For the crust:
12 sugar ice cream cones
5 Tablespoons unsalted butter, melted (it must be unsalted. you can really taste the salt!)
2 Tablespoons sugar

For the filling:
2 pints ice cream, softened
2 cups coarsely chopped cookies
2 cups plain or chocolate whipped cream

1. Make the crumbs: Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grind sugar cones in food processor to fine crumbs. (You should have 1 1/3 cups.)
2. Make Crust: Stir together crumbs, butter, and sugar in medium bowl until crumbs are moistened. Press crumb mxture evenly against bottom and sides of 9-inch pie plate, compacting it with your fingertips. Bake crust until crisp, 6 to 8 minutes. Let cool completely before filling. (Crust can be wrapped in plastic wrap and frozen for up to 1 month.)
3. Fill pie shell: Place ice cream and cookies in bowl and mash mixture with back of spoon until well combined. Turn ice cream mixture into prepared crust and smooth top with spoon. Cover with plastic wrap and freeze until filling is completely frozen, at least 3 hours and up to 1 week.
4. Cut and garnish: Cut pie into wedges and dollop each piece with whipped cream . Serves 6 to 8.