Tag Archives: cooking

Oat Muesli

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A recipe from the Westin Bay Shore, Vancouver, BC.

I like cereal for breakfast. But I don’t like heavily processed cereals with a lot of mystery ingredients and sugar.

So when I was staying at the Westin in Vancouver last week, I decided to give the muesli item on their breakfast menu a try. One taste and I was hooked. I had it every morning of my stay. And on the last morning, the waitress offered the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 cup uncooked oatmeal (not instant)
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup raisins (they used golden raisins)
1/4 cup canned peaches, drained and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 cup (or more) half and half or milk
2 cups fresh fruit like bananas, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries

Instructions:
Mix the first five ingredients in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, right around breakfast time, the oats should have absorbed all of the half and half or milk. In fact, if the resulting mixture is too dry, you can moisten it up a bit by adding more half and half or milk. The raisins will be plump, too. Dish out the mixture and top with the fresh fruit. Enjoy!

One note here: The recipe I got called for a mixture of cream and whole milk. That’s half and half, isn’t it? The waitress also said you can cut calories and fat by using just milk. If you do this, use whole milk — I don’t think lowfat milk would make the result as creamy and rich.

“Quiche”

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A side dish that turned into a main course.

We were going to have steak for dinner. Mike had bought two “beautiful” (I haven’t seen them) rib eyes at Albertson’s on his way home on Wednesday. I needed to make something to go with them and I didn’t feel like a trip to the store.

One thing we always have a lot of these days is eggs. With 8 hens, we normally get 5 to 7 eggs a day. Alex eats an egg every morning and sometimes Mike will have 2 or 3 (they’re generally smaller than average). And I’ll have 1 or 2 once in a while. Otherwise, we wind up giving quite a few away. Basically, if you hand us an empty egg carton, you’ll get it back a short time later with a dozen eggs in it.

I thought about that Bisquick quiche I used to make and tracked down the recipe in my stack of clippings. The recipe called for only 3 eggs; I wanted to use more. And the recipe said nothing about vegetables; I had a bunch in the freezer that I wanted to use up. So I improvised. The following is my approximate recipe; it actually turned out quite good. And when Mike got home with a headache, we had the quiche for dinner so he didn’t have to go out in the heat to grill the steaks.

Ingredients

  • 5 eggs. Remember, mine are small; if you buy large or jumbo eggs, 4 would probably be enough.
  • 1/2 cup Bisquick
  • 1/4 cup melted butter. The recipe called for 1/2 cup, but I think that’s too way much. It makes the final product greasy.
  • 1/2 cup milk. The recipe called for 1-1/2 cups, but I wanted to get rid of eggs, not milk.
  • 2-3 cups frozen (or fresh) chopped vegetables. I used asparagus, chopped spinach, and a potato/onion/pepper blend. I let them defrost for about a half hour on the countertop before I mixed them in.
  • 1/2 cup shredded cheese. The recipe calls for a full cup, but I thought that was too much. Also the recipe calls for cheddar, but I didn’t have cheddar so I used Havarti with dill.

The recipe also called for bacon, but since we were going to eat it with steak, I left that out.

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, beat eggs.
  2. Mix in the Bisquick, melted butter, and milk. Stir until blended.
  3. Add the vegetables and stir well.
  4. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased pie pan. (I used olive oil spray to spray the bottom of the pan before I poured the mixture in.)
  5. Sprinkle the cheese over the top of the mixture.
  6. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes at 350°F. Quiche is done when it begins to brown and crack along the top.
  7. Eat while hot.

The magic of this recipe is that the Bisquick automatically creates its own crust. And, between the olive oil spray and the butter in the mix, it did not stick to my glass pie pan. It made a nice meal.

Alex’s Favorite Snack

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Edamame.

Alex the Bird absolutely loves edamame — soy bean pods. I buy them frozen at the local Safeway Supermarket and keep them in the freezer. Every few days, I put a handful into a bowl, add a splash of water, cover the bowl, and put it in the microwave for 5 minutes on high. Ten minutes later (cooking time plus sitting time), they’re done. I let them cool on the counter top and then drain all the water and stick the bowl in the fridge.

Alex Eats EdamameWhen Alex is good — which is pretty often, I’m glad to say — I give him a few edamame pods as a treat. I usually give it to him when he’s standing on the divider between our two kitchen sinks (see photo) or in his cage — I really hate cleaning the shells up off the floor. He holds a pod in one foot while he uses his beak to coax out one of the beans. He peels the skin off the bean, mushes the bean a little with his mouth, and swallows it. Sometimes I think he swallows the bean whole. He can eat the two or three beans in a pod very quickly — faster than many people I know. And then he drops the empty shell and looks at me, waiting for another one.

Sometimes I take the edamame beans and stuff them with shredded paper into one of Alex’s cage-like puzzle toys. Although he used to pull out all the paper to find and eat the beans, he’s now learned how to get just the beans out, leaving most of the paper behind. I challenge him by stuffing as much paper as I can around the beans and he still amazes me by retrieving just the beans. Obviously, I need practice.

I think that if I put 100 beans in front of him, he’d eat them all. He really loves them. But then he’d get sick. And a sick parrot is not something I ever want to deal with.

African Grey, parrot, edamame

Atkins Eggs

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I go back on Atkins…and eggs.

I’m tired of being overweight. I’m tired of having only one pair of jeans that fit comfortably. And I refuse to buy new clothes in a bigger size.

So I’ll either have to continue to suffer, wear my Chefware pants all the time, or lose weight.

That said, I went back on Atkins today. While you’re free to use the Comments feature to tell me how bad Atkins is for me, I’ll probably ignore what you have to say. I lost 15 pounds on Atkins in a month two years ago and I’d like to see if I can do that again.

So here’s my very easy recipe for what I call Atkins Eggs.

  • 2 eggs
  • 1/4 cup Atkins-friendly veggies, chopped. I usually use spinach, asparagus, or broccoli. To make it really easy, I buy frozen veggies.
  • 1/4 cup grated or shredded cheese. I usually use a “4-cheese Mexican blend,” which is pre-shredded and packaged in a zip-close bag.
  • Spray oil. I use Olive oil, but you can use any oil you like.

Use the spray oil to coat the inside of a large glass custard cup. Break the eggs into the cup and scramble them. Then add the veggies and cheese and mix well. Microwave the mixture on high for about a minute (to get it going) followed by about 5 minutes on medium. (My microwave is programmable, so I can get the whole 6-minute program in and make my coffee while I’m waiting.)

Of course microwave times vary, so you want to keep an eye on it the first time you do this. My microwave is about 20 years old now (really!) and I think it’s low powered. The idea is to cook the mixture through without drying out the edges.

When it’s done, let it sit for a minute or two in the microwave. That’ll help finish off the veggie cooking, which is especially important if you didn’t chop finely. Then use a potholder to pull out the cup, loosen the contents with a fork, and pop it onto a plate. A little salt and pepper won’t hurt a thing. You can also top it with salsa, if it’s a low-carb mixture. I don’t go for that, but some folks like it.

The good thing about this recipe is you can really alter the flavor of the finished product by varying the vegetables and types of cheeses. I’m going to try some Saga Blue tomorrow morning. You can also add cooked or smoked meat — like ham or Canadian bacon to the mixture before cooking it.

If you try this, let me know how you do. Use the comments link or form for this post.

Land of the Sun Endurance Ride

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I mark horse butts and time in the riders.

Yesterday was the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association’s annual Land of the Sun Endurance Ride. And, for the fourth year in a row, I was one of about 80 volunteers enlisted to help out and make the event run smoothly.

For those of you who don’t know what an endurance ride is, our endurance ride is a 25- or 50-mile horseback ride over trails in the Wickenburg area. Endurance riders — people who actually like to cover that many miles on horseback — come from all over the southwest to participate.

The trails are created or maintained and then marked with ribbons by volunteers organized by Robin Ollendick and Nancy Halsey, who manage the whole thing. There are two loops, each of which are 25 miles long. The 25-milers do one loop and the 50-milers do both. There are vet checks, water stops, and check points along the way. There’s food and beverages for riders and horses at the vet checks and riders are required to spend a certain minimum amount of time at each one to ensure the health and well-being of their horses. There are drag riders who follow the last group out and remove the ribbons.

It’s a big deal and a great western event. This year, we started out with 148 riders. A few were pulled early on or on the trail for various reasons — for example, a problem with a horses’s gait or a horse “tying up” — but the vast majority finished their courses.

As a volunteer, I had three official jobs.

The first, on Friday, was to use “paint sticks” to mark numbers on horse butts. Each horse had a number and the number had to be visible by the folks at the check points so each rider could be tracked through the course. We used yellow, pink, or green markers to put the numbers on. The markers are similar to Cray-pas — soft crayon-like markers I used as a kid. But they’re fat — at least an inch and a quarter in diameter — and they’re a pain in the butt (no pun intended) to get off your skin and out from under your nails.

My second job was to make the vegetarian bean soup I make every year for the lunch stop. A lot of the riders are vegetarians and it seems that most other people put some kind of meat in their soups or chilis. I make it without any meat at all. The flavor comes from the root vegetables I include — onions, carrots, turnips, parsnips — as well as celery and leeks. I got it cooking in our camper, which we parked at the rodeo grounds (It’s for sale and we wanted to show it off to potential buyers.), on Saturday and it was ready just in time for lunch.

My third job was to work with Janet, timing in the riders. The first 50-milers, who had left at about 7:00 AM (before dawn!), started showing up at 9:45 AM. That’s 25 miles in 2 hours and 45 minutes. On horseback. Janet wrote down numbers and times on a clipboard while I handed out check in slips with numbers and times. The 50-milers were required to wait for a hour after their horses “pulsed down” before leaving on their second loop. The 25 milers didn’t get check in slips, but they did get champagne. By 1:30, the 50-milers were coming back from their second loop. Janet and I were relieved at 2 PM, when all the excitement was pretty much over.

I didn’t take any pictures yesterday. I was too busy with my jobs. But if Janet sends photos of the winners, I’ll insert them here.

The big surprise: the winner for the 25-milers was a rider on a mule!