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Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts

12/27/2010

Savory Oven Baked Triangle Tip - A Family Tri-Tip Recipe

Oh boy, we're going to have Tri-Tip for dinner tonight. Most of you know that a triangle tip comes from the sirloin section of very delicious beef cattle. We're going to use a way of cooking called the "Dry Heat" method. All beef loin and sirloin should be cooked using this method of cooking, or it won't come out right at all. It goes just like this.

* 3 1/2 to 4 lb. Tri-Tip Roast
* 1 Tsp. Black Pepper (Any grind you please)
* 2 Tsp. Salt (2 1/2 of Sea Salt if you like)
* 2 Tbs. Bacon Fat (Good Stuff)

Unwrap the Tri-Tip and rinse off the blood with cool fresh water. Pat it dry and liberally rub the roast down with a little bacon fat. Then, wash your greasy hands please. Now, put the salt and pepper into a small bowl and mix it together with your clean dry finger. Place the roast in an appropriate sized roasting pan. An oblong pan that is not oversized will work just fine for this recipe. We ain't gonna add no veggies. We then sprinkle the salt and pepper mixture onto both sides of our roast, the edges included. Place the roast fat side up in the pan.

Pre-heat your oven to 325º F and place the roast in the oven. Do not cover the pan, this is an open heat cooking process. Place it in the oven after it reaches 325º F, not before please. Now place a basting bulb on the stovetop for easy access.

Notice we ain't put no water or booze in this pan. Keep it that way cause we do want dry heat and no cover. In about half an hour, check the roast to see just how much juice has flowed free so we can baste it. If it's enough, use the basting bulb to suck it up and liberally baste it. This should be done every 15-20 minutes, for a total of 1 1/2 hours (Medium) to 2 hours (Well). That would be from the point we placed this beauty in the oven.

Now, don't that smell real good? Looks good to me too. (Ha Ha Ha) Wish I was there to help ya'll eat it. Serious now, lets pour the juice from the pan into a small measuring cup. Cover the roast lightly and put it in the warm turned off oven. Let some heat out before you do it so it don't cook no more. We just wanna keep it warm.

In short time the oil and juice will separate, leaving the oil on top in the measuring cup. Decision, decision, what comes next? Well, are we gonna make a nice brown gravy, or go with a beef au ju approach? Being as I called this a "Savory Tri-Tip", we'll go with the au ju. Boy, that sure does sound good now don't it?

What we'll do now is take the roast out the oven. Place that on your cutting board. Get a nice platter with a raised juice retaining edge, and a real sharp carving knife. Slice the roast about 1/4" thick and arrange each slice on our platter, slightly overlapping. Remember to slice against the grain so we got nice slices

If your done slicing, we can suck up the fat from the top of our measuring cup using the basting bulb method. Having done this, pour the juices back over the slices on the platter, cover lightly and place it back in the warm oven. Keep it warm at 125º F until you've got the rest of your meal ready.

Now, ain't that good? Ole Emerile Legasse ain't got nothing on us now does he? Eat and enjoy your meal, now hear? Ooowee: Hope you emptied the baster properly!

Enjoy!

8/14/2010

Stay Healthy With My Tips on How to Prepare Easy Healthy Family Recipes

Preparing healthy recipes seems too tough and time consuming to most people. But with some advance planning and gathering most basic knowledge of nutrition, it is easy to create a week's valued of healthy meals. The important key to make quick and healthy meals for the family is planning.

Planning ahead of time a whole week of healthy recipe meals is the best way to produce dishes that you and your family loved, while saving cost and time commitment to a minimum. Below are some great tips you can utilize to prepare healthy delicious meals right away.

Healthy Cooking Recipe Tip #1:

Cooking large quantities of healthy food recipes and freezing the leftovers is a great way to save time. Making double and even triple batches of stews, casseroles, soups, and pasta, and freezing the leftovers for later use, can save up both your time and money.

When freezing leftovers, however, it is essential to mark the containers carefully, utilizing freezer tape and a permanent marker. Try to arrange the oldest foods near the top to avoid having to throw away expired items.

Healthy Cooking Recipe Tip #2:

Maintaining a well stocked pantry is as important as keeping a well stocked freezer. Stocking the pantry with a good supply of staple items like canned vegetables, canned fruits, soup stocks and the like will produce healthy cooking recipe planning much faster and smoother.

Stocking the pantry can save up your money as well as time. Grocery stores are always running sales, and these sales are a great time to stock up. Buying various cases of canned vegetables during sale offer, for instance can save lots of money and provide the basic ingredients for many nutritious, easy to set up meals.

Healthy Cooking Recipe Tip #3:

Make use of convenient electrical appliances such as microwaves and slow cookers will save you huge mount of time when preparing meals. There are a lot of easy and healthy food recipes that can be started in the morning and left to cook all day in a crock pot or slow cooker.

There are many microwavable healthy family meals you can prepare at home. Use single serving microwave safe containers so that each member of the family can eat on their own schedule.

Healthy Cooking Recipe Tip #4:

Encourage family member to get involved when making your weekly meal plan by compiling their comment and taking down everyone's favorite foods. It is still very important to eat healthy meals, by avoiding taking heavy meals during dinner. By getting your family members involved in the healthy family recipe preparation, you can help to increase their interest in healthy eating right away.

3/29/2010

How To Keep Family Recipes

Have you collected a sizable number of recipes over the years? For example, think of your grandmother's special baked yams. Or, during the holidays, consider the wonderful mint lamb that your mom always cooks. An important part of being a cook is using a recipe. This is primarily why recipes that are valuable to us, are cataloged. These are important things to you, yet, if their ingredients and cooking instructions are not ever written down, they probably would get lost forever.

If you let this happen, you will might miss another important part of being a good cook. You would be not able to pass on these specialties to your future generation or anyone that is close to you. Besides preparing great food, tracking your recipes is a way to preserve tradition.

Here, in the text below, are some tips to get you started.

Put Everything In Writing

Keeping track of how you prepare foods is important and well worth doing. Even though, it may not appear relevant right now, consider what would happen if you suddenly could not remember one final ingredient or the right baking temperature. What if it has been years since you cooked the recipe and you completely forgot it? The chances of this happening to you will be slim, if you keep detailed notes. That way, no matter what you may forget, you will always have your notes as a backup.

As you store recipes for many years, you may also want to add what substitutes can replace an ingredient. For example, if one recipe calls for sweetened evaporated milk, and there is none on the shelf, you might include how you can use a mixture of a tablespoon of sugar or honey as a substitute. Also, if the recipe asked for a particular name of a food manufacturer, a similar food, but with a different manufacturer may be able to be used instead, and can be noted on the recipe.

What Is Your Perfect System

Jotting down notes on an index card and then storing them in a file box is the typical way to keep recipes. In addition to this method or several other storage options. There are a lot decorative kitchen binders that can hold many pages of recipes. Today, you can keep a track of your recipes on a hand held PDA or desktop computer. It all depends on what best suits your style and personality.

Expanding Your Collection

Even if you do not cook that often, as time goes by, you will probably end up gathering many recipes. A good way to manage your collection is to design it in such a way that it can be expanded. That is one of the key points as to why the familiar file box method remains popular. Putting the recipe in the index file is simple. Consider also, that you could do the same thing with a binder or a file on a computer. Any one of these methods will provide you with the ability to grow your collection easily as you store another new recipe.

For more tips and help on how to use recipes to help you become a better cook, visit the Internet where you can purchase an ebook on everything you ever wanted to know about cooking but could never ask.

3/24/2010

Cooking and Eating Italian Food - Delicious Food For the Family

Fresh ingredients:
Cooking Italian recipes depends upon one basic fact: the freshness of the ingredients. No processed foods are used in the creation of these delightful, elegant, yet deceptively simple meals.

Olive oil and garlic:
Staples of an Italian kitchen are olio d'oliva (olive oil) and aglio (garlic). Always choose extra virgin olive oil and fresh garlic. You will not see any garlic powder or garlic salt in a traditional Italian kitchen. Another common ingredient when in many Italian dishes is pomodori (tomatoes), which are used fresh in sauces, served in the antipasti or starter as a garnish over toasted bread, or in salads. Olive oil is used when Cooking Italian recipes for frying, sautéing, dressing on salads, and every other place where we would usually use shortening or vegetable oil.

Italians love their mealtime, and they take a long time to get through the entire meal. Dinner typically starts around 8:00 PM and is over around 10:00 PM. Family is key to Italians and you will often find children in the kitchen, learning to cook right along with the adults. The family comes together over the meal and large, boisterous meal times are not uncommon in an Italian household, with lots of shouting, laughter and good natured teasing accompanying the pasta. Cooking Italian recipes is something the Italians take very seriously.

The courses in an Italian meal:
The antipasti, or starter course mentioned earlier comes to the table on platters family style. It can be something as simple as a bruschetta (toasted garlic bread) with a variety of toppings to a more sophisticated dish made with zucchini flowers and grated parmesan cheese. By the way, when pronouncing Italian words, the 'ch' sounds like a 'k,' so the word bruschetta is pronounced bru-sketta. To get the 'ch' sound in Italian, put two c's together as in Gucci.

Following the antipasti, the primi piatti, or first course is served. This is usually a pasta course, but can also be a soup, crepe, polenta, rice, or gnocchi. Pasta is also a staple in Italian recipes, and you will usually find a pasta dish set on the table for every evening meal. Explore the Italian cookbooks for your favorite pasta or other starchy dish for your primi piatti.

The next course is the main course, or the secondi piatti. This is a meat course, served with a contorni or side dish. Beef, pork, veal, fish and poultry are all served and eaten with relish in Italy. Side dishes, or contorni, are sometimes salads, but often are starchy dishes like potatoes or beans.

Desert is not to be forgotten as a sweet, but not too sweet, end to your cooking Italian recipes experience. One of my favorite Italian deserts is contuccini. Contuccini is a small version of the popular Italian cookie called biscotti. These sweet, but hard, little almond cookies are served after a typical Italian meal with a sweet desert wine. Set shot glasses in front of your guests, fill each one with the desert wine and instruct them to dunk the contuccini in the wine before eating it. Delicicio!

3/11/2010

Delicious Crockpot Recipes For The Family

For the working family these recipes work a wonder. Come home, relax, and enjoy a meal you only slaved 10 to 20 min prep in the morning.

Recipe #1:

To Die For Pot Roast

3 1/2 to 4 LB Rump Roast

1 Bag Of Baby Cut Carrots

3 Large Onions

5 Potatoes

1 Can Of Cream Of Mushroom Soup

1 Packet Of French Onion Soup Mix

1/4 Cup Water

Place rump roast in the crockpot. Place the baby carrots around it. Chop up onions into quarters. Slice up potatoes into small chunks, and place around the beef. Add mushroom soup and the onion soup mix. Mix about a 1/4 cup of water into the crockpot. Depending upon how thick you like your gravy mix you can add more water. Place crockpot on low for 8 hours. Stirring occasionally. Beef just pulls right apart. Serve with a nice side salad or some garlic bread. You will be coming back for seconds, thirds and fourths.

Recipe #2:

Moist Meatloaf In the Crockpot

2 Eggs

3/4 Cup Milk

2/3 Cup Seasoned Bread Crumbs

2 TSP Dried Minced Onion or Garlic

1 TSP Salt

1/2 Teaspoon Marjoram

1-1/2 Ground Turkey

1/4 Cup Ketchup

2 TBSP Brown Sugar

1/2 TSP Worcestershire

In a large bowl, combine the first 6 ingredients. Crumble the beef over the mixture and mix well. Shape into a round loaf; place in the crockpot. Cover and cook on low for about 6 hours. In a small mixing bowl, combine the ketchup, brown sugar, and worcestershire sauce. Gently pour it over the meat loaf. Cook for about 15 minutes or until heated through. Let stand for about 15 - 20 minutes before cutting. Serve with some garlic mashed potatoes and your favorite vegetable, and your family will think it was the best meatloaf ever.

Recipe #3:

Cheesy Chili Dogs

1 full pack of hotdogs

2 cans of chilli

1 can condensed cheddar cheese soup

1 can chopped green chillies

2 - 3 Dashes of hot sauce ( if you like it spicier judge accordingly)

10 hot dog buns

1 large onion chopped

Toppings:

Shredded cheddar cheese

Sour Cream

Salsa

Place the hot dogs in a slow cooker. In a bowl combine the chilli, soup and green chillies; pour completely over the hot dogs. Cover and cook on low for about 4 - 5 hours. Serve the hot dogs in the buns, you then top it with the chilli mixture, and onion. Then add the toppings you want. Great for kids. It can be cut up and served with Macaroni and Cheese.

3/03/2010

Healthy Cooking Ideas That Will Delight Your Family

Changing the way we cook our food can have a dramatic effect on our health. If we make wiser choices with our food and the way we cook it, we can significantly reduce our risk of contracting cancer and heart disease.

Here are some top tips for healthy cooking:-

1. Invest in non stick pans - With quality non-stick pans you can get away with not using oil at all or by using a low fat cooking spray. You can also 'fry' some foods in a little water to prevent them sticking. If you have to use oil, use olive oil and pat food with kitchen roll after cooking to remove excess oil.

2. Look through your recipes collection for diet recipes and low fat recipes. Cook them in batches and freeze so that you always have a healthy meal option available.

3. Steam or stir-fry vegetables - Cooking them using these methods will help the vegetables to retain their nutrients, colour and taste. Look for healthy recipes like Chinese stir-fries and invest in a wok and steamer. You can buy Chinese bamboo steamers, which just sit on top of a pan of boiling water, or you can buy electric steamers. You can get a good electric steamer for less than the cost of one meal out and the ease of use is a real time saver.

4. Use olive oil - Replace other oils or fats with olive oil which is a mono-unsaturated oil and actually helps to reduce cholesterol. Make your own salad dressings from olive oil and balsamic vinegar to give your salad a Mediterranean taste and this will be lower in fat than commercial salad dressings. Search online for free recipes using olive oil. Some muffin recipes use olive oil or corn oil instead of solid fats.

5. Use fat free milk in cooking and baking to cut the fat content of your healthy recipes.

6. Replace fat in baking - Look for low fat recipes for cakes and biscuits or replace half the fat in recipes with pureed prunes, yogurt or mashed banana. Search for diet recipes for sweet treats.

7. Use fat-free yogurt or creme fraiche instead of using cream for pouring on dessert recipes or fruit.

8. Add more vegetables to casseroles and soups and use fresh or frozen vegetables rather than canned.

9. Don't add salt to food - Season food with herbs, spices, garlic and lemon juice instead of salt.

10. Trim visible fat off meat and use lean meat in your low fat recipes. Cut down on how much red meat you consume and replace with fish and chicken or turkey.

Remember, cooking and eating healthy food is not hard work and definitely not expensive. If you play your cards right you can change you whole family's diet and they won't suspect a thing.
That isn't to say that they won't notice anything though, because they will - they may well notice that they are losing weight, feeling better and getting fewer minor illnesses.

If that isn't reason enough to try out a few of these tips, I don't know what is!