Bacon Delivered

I love bacon. You love bacon. We all love bacon…Hey! Its almost a song. I have found a way to get great bacon, for cheap and delivered. Not to your door, but to your neighborhood at any rate. I have written posts about Zaycon before. They have a great deal for Chicken Breasts. Now, they are offering and I have ordered their bacon as well! Bacon is not something that I eat every day, even if I want to. But I do like to add bacon in my Broccoli Salad, soups or as a side with breakfast. I still try to eat healthy and work out, update on my Fitness Friday this week. But, sometimes, a little bacon goes a long way. Stay tuned for more bacon recipes or check out this blog: 365 Days of Bacon, its delish!

If you click on this link to Zaycon, you can register to order bacon for only $3.49/lb. That is less than what I find at the grocery store. I am a deal finder, a hound if you will for decently priced meat, and bacon seems to be the one to break my self imposed per-pound limits. So yummy and a great treat once in a while. Here is an excerpt from their site to tell you more:

• High quality, medium-cut hickory smoked sliced bacon (14-18 slices per pound)
• Order includes 12 X 3 lb packages per case (Total order size is 36 lbs)
• Bacon is fresh, but frozen for your convenience
• Premium, high-quality and consistent, this hickory-smoked bacon has a wonderful flavor and represents a great value for families
• Easy to share with a friend if you do not think you can use the entire case. Our new smaller 3 lb packages make it even easier to split up with friends and family.

 

**full disclosure: By clicking on the Zaycon link above and here, I do receive a referral for the company. But seriously it’s GREAT!

Homemade Cheez-It Crackers

Im pretty stoked about this reblog. My family loves Cheez-It crackers! But, with all the strange ingredients and general un-healthiness of them, we generally reserve these as ‘Treats’ for a special occasion. Then I stumbled up on this recipe from the Americas Test Kitchen Feed and Im sold. Soooo good. In order to make sure I give credit where it is due (definitely not me) I have linked the picture to the left from the original blog and the link at the bottom to the original recipe. Enjoy!

Homemade Cheez-It Crackers from America’s Test Kitchen Feed (step-by-step pictures also available here!) {Note: the annatto seeds are completely optional, they just give the crackers their orange color. I didn’t have any luck finding them locally and ordered mine from Amazon.}

3 tablespoons boiling water 1 tablespoon annatto seeds
Coarsely ground 6 oz (1 1/2 cups) finely grated sharp cheddar cheese
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch

In a heatproof bowl, stir together the water and annatto seeds. Allow to steep for 5 minutes, then pour the mixture through a fine mesh strainer. Discard the seeds and save the (now orange) liquid. Let the liquid cool to room temperature. Add the cheese, butter, salt, and pepper to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on low speed until the mixture comes together and starts to stick to the sides of the bowl, about 30 seconds. Add the flour and cornstarch, beating until incorporated – the mixture should look like coarse sand. Stir in 2 tablespoons of the reserved liquid the annatto seeds steeped in and mix just until the dough starts to come together. (If the dough seems too dry, you can add up to 1 tablespoon of additional plain water to bring it together.) Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and shape into a disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 375 F. Line two baking sheets with parchment. On a lightly floured work surface, roll the dough into a rectangle with a thickness of 1/16-inch. Using a pastry cutter (or if you don’t have one, a pizza cutter or sharp knife will work) cut the dough into 1-inch wide strips, then cut 1-inch squares from those strips. Transfer the squares to the prepared baking sheets – you can pack them in pretty tightly, they don’t spread much.

via Tracey’s Culinary Adventures: Homemade Cheez-It Crackers.

Roasted Tomato Salad Dressing

I usually eat Salads for lunch. I find them filling and dynamic. Nothing I hate more than eating the same thing day after day after day, unless it incorporates bacon and cheese. Unfortunately, those two things are not on my healthy eating plan. (*pout*)

One way to change things up in a salad is to change up the ingredients. Recently, Ive been all about red peppers, cucumbers, and tuna or chicken. But another way to change up the taste of the salad is to change the salad dressing.

Historically, I love blue cheese dressing, another no-no in the new eating plan. So I rotate usually between italian or a drizzle of balsamic with olive oil. The cafeteria in my building has recently started offering a Roasted Tomato Vinaigrette. I am in LOVE! The tomatoes lend a creamy and hearty substance to the vinaigrette and just taste good. So, I have scoured the web and found the following recipe that looks extraordinarily promising. Im going to make this this weekend.

via the For the Love of Cooking website:

Roasted Tomato Vinaigrette:
Recipe and photos by For the Love of Cooking.net
Inspired by Mingo

Drizzle of olive oil
8-9 small vine ripened tomatoes, sliced in half
2 cloves of garlic, skins on
3 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp canola oil
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp fresh basil, chopped
Sea salt and freshly cracked pepper, to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with tin foil then coat with cooking spray.
Slice the tomatoes in half then place them on the baking sheet; put the two cloves of garlic (leave the skins on) in the center of the tomatoes.

Place into the oven and roast for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool. Once cooled, remove the skin from the garlic cloves and place into a bowl along with the roasted tomatoes.

Add the olive oil, canola oil, balsamic vinegar, rice vinegar, sugar, fresh basil, and sea salt and freshly cracked pepper, to taste. Mix using a emulsion blender until smooth and creamy. Taste and re season if needed. Set aside and let the flavors mingle for at least 30 minutes before using.

Chinese Buffet Disaster and Recipe for Fried Rice

I love my boys, but they need culture. We live in the great Pacific Northwest and that means we have access to a wide variety of food genres. In an effort to expose their mac-n-cheese loving pallets beyond the typical ‘kid friendly fare’, my husband and I decided to hit up a Chinese buffet. It was an unmitigated disaster, even if the kids did complement me.

We walked around the trays and found items of interest, but it was mostly ‘yucky’ until we reached the table with the cheese pizza and french fries. Maybe this stuff is out there because the owner anticipates children like mine, who have a difficulty getting that first ‘just TRY it’ bite down. But, that is about all they wanted to eat. Honestly though, I couldn’t really blame them. The food at this particular establishment was pretty horrible. I could barely eat anything. Perhaps if I want to win them over to yummy Asian food, I need to find a place that actually serves YUMMY Asian food. It was a new place, and it bombed. So, they ate pizza and I tried to find anything that was worth eating that wasn’t fried. I went home and ate a piece of peanut butter toast.

But as we left, Archie said to me “Mommy, your rice is better.” What a sweetie! (I am training him well for his future spouse!) So, here is my very white-girl version of fried rice. To all my Asian friends, I apologize for probably making this horribly, but my kids eat it. I like it because it contains some sort of vegetable and is a quick one-pot meal to use up random leftovers.  In fact, click on the picture below to a recipe I found here on WordPress that contains many other ingredients like shrimp. Be creative, throw in what you think will taste good and have fun!

Picture from Ohashi Method – click for recipe

Fried Rice

4C cooked short grain brown rice
6 Eggs
4C Chopped cooked protein (Chicken, Pork (Ham), Turkey etc.)
1 bunch Scallions (Green onions)
2C peas or finely chopped broccoli, cooked
6Tbs Sesame oil
1Tbsp Olive oil
pinch of pepper
Soy Sauce

Heat large dutch oven on the stove over med-high heat. Whisk eggs and pepper in bowl, set aside. When pan is hot, use the Olive Oil to hard scramble the eggs, set aside. Put chopped protein in the pot and brown off any excess fat (In case you are using ham or other slightly fatty meat). Bring pan to heat again and add the sesame oil with the meat and crumble the rice on top of the meat. Toss to coat the rice in the Sesame Oil. Let sit, while the bottom of the rice browns and toasts. Toss the rice 3 times and keep browning between tosses. Add Scallions, Peas or Broccoli, stir to incorporate. Add Soy Sauce to taste.

**You can also use broccolini n this, whole, but cook it first. My kids have a hard time cutting the broccolini in pieces to chew, so we just use frozen chopped broccoli (I hate eating peas, so I serve more broccoli.)

Connected Kitchen Scale From Chef Sleeve Tracks Your Nutrition Bite-By-Bite

Reblogged from TechCrunch:

• 

Chef Sleeve has been selling its iPad-protecting plastic sleeves since 2011 to keep kitchen gunk off the iPad you're using while you cook. They also make a dishwasher-safe, non-porous chopping board with a built in iPad stand (below right), and a smaller stand in the same recycled paper composite finish. But Chef Sleeve's grand plan is to create a range of connected devices for the kitchen that link up with an iPad app to let people track their nutrition in a highly granular, yet low hassle, way.

Read more… 604 more words

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300"] Image from TechCrunch: Click for orig article[/caption] This really makes my inner geek sit up and applaud for my inner foodie. Would you buy something like this? Im going to need more details though, like how much can the scale go up to? If I am able to make a big dinner for my family of 5, then this is even more doable vs. on a plate by plate basis. More research necessary, but could be O So Wonderful!