Posts

Turkish Chicken Kebabs

By -
Image
Inspired heavily by Chef John's recipe , here are my notes: Step 1: Make marinade for chicken and let marinate around 8 hours. Ingredients: About a cup of whole greek yogurt. We've accidentally used vanilla and even regular (i.e. non-Greek) yogurt and all came out great. Juice from one Lemon 2 TBSP Olive Oil 2 TBSP Ketchup Garlic powder - some hearty shakes approximating 6 cloves 1 TBSP Aleppo red pepper - this stuff is amazing on many dishes. Just get it. 1 TBSP salt 1 tsp cumin, optional (usually go light on this) 1 tsp paprika A few shakes of cinnamon, guessing aroudn 1/8 to 1/4 tsp Chicken, boneless skinless pieces, either breast or thighs (both came out great), 2-3lb for two good skewers Step 2: Grill! Arrange meat on two skewers. This makes it much easier to turn. Prep note: Yogurt marinade makes a mess of the grill. Suggest letting marinate fully, skewering, and then not adding any extra marinade. It will be plenty moist from marinating. Turn eve
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple Chicken Enchiladas in Red Sauce

By -
Image
This is a simple recipe for delicious  chicken enchiladas in red sauce. It was inspired by several recipes: (enchiladas:  Skinnytaste , Foodnetwork , Food Wishes , shredded chicken:  The Harvest Kitchen . Start to finish at a lazy pace, this takes about three hours to make, most of which is waiting so you can do something else. Here's what the end result looks like - yumm :-) Main steps: Braise the chicken thighs in chicken stock/broth, diced tomatoes, and taco seasoning Shred the chicken and then simmer in the stock & tomatoes, reducing by more than half Assemble the enchiladas Bake, Garnish and eat! Ingredients: Boneless skinless chicken thighs. Around 2.5-3lbs makes 12 enchiladas. Salt & pepper 1/2 tsp each for the chicken. Be careful not to over-do seasonings, as the sauce reduction later will have a lot of spice/sodium! Diced Tomatoes (14.5oz can) 28oz, give or take, of red enchilada sauce (have had good results with both Safeway & Old El Paso)
Post a Comment
Read more

Quick & Easy Salsa Recipe

By -
Image
Question: Who loves salsa? Answer: All of us, especially when it's fresh. Answer: Parents when it's easy & healthy. This recipe is super easy and forgiving, resulting in a large batch of incredibly healthy salsa. Ingredients : 7 roma tomatoes, medium size (feel free to adjust quantity and type of tomato - romas where simply what looked the best this time) ½ sweet onion, medium (have also tried white, and other recipes call for red) Garlic powder or fresh/minced to taste (approx 1-3 cloves) Juice from one lime Two large jalapeno peppers Cilantro (used approx ½ to ⅓ of an organic plastic container from TJs) Instructions : Note: You will make this salsa in one blender, using the pulse setting to intermittently blend without turning the ingredients into mush. I've split this into three steps, with the most delicate ingredients at the end. First blend (these ingredients stand-up to more blending) Quarter tomatoes & remove stem-area, add to b
Post a Comment
Read more

Mexican Shredded Chicken Slow Cooker Recipe

By -
Image
Two of our kids love shredded chicken from our local taqueria, so I decided to give it a try at home. Found several recipes online and mixed and matched. Ingredients : 2lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts. (first try was about 1.8 lbs) 1/2 packet of McCormick Taco Seasoning A full 16oz jar of Safeway's Mild Southwest Salsa Three packets splenda Steps : 1. Place chicken in bottom of slow cooker 2. Dust top with the 1/2 packet of seasoning 3. Pour salsa in gently to evenly cover chicken 4. Cook on low for 4 hours 5. Mash (shred) the chicken. Pretty easy with a fork or even a broad spoon. Don't over do it - the goal here is to let all of the chicken marinate in the sauce, and it will naturally fall apart with more cooking and even transferring out of the pot. 6. Cook for another 2 hours Taste Test: Delicious! The kids should love this tomorrow. The chicken is tender and tasty and would be perfect on a burrito or taco. Together with the sauce, the flavor and tex
Post a Comment
Read more

Three kids in car seats. Options and reviews.

By -
Just posted this to a coworker, figured I'd post here as well. We have three as well. Here is our car setup: Honda Accord Sedan - 2006 Evenflo (always hated that seat - claimed up-to 56 lbs, but our 33lb 2 year olds are getting too tall for it) Radian (fantastic car seat. I wish we got these earlier instead of the Evenflo) Radian Honda Odyssey 2009 EXL (includes middle-row center "jump seat" with legal & functional seatbelt for car-seat install) Graco Nautilus (surprisingly happy with that seat, accomodates our large kids well, inexpensive) Britax Marathon (great, but does not age well. clips don't work well after any food gets in them. cover loose after just 18mo) Radian FYI: I was very reluctant to go the minivan route, but we're extremely happy that we did. When you have three kids, looking cool becomes much less important than convenience. Getting them all in and out of the Odyssey is much easier than the car, and from what we'
Post a Comment
Read more

Converting the family videos from raw DV format to MP4 with Handbrake.

By -
Going on 3 years in the parenting saga, we have a bunch of MiniDV tapes yet to be imported and shared with the family. I refused to use the built-in windows software as it doesn't support the most common or open formats, making an automatic "Windows Media Encode" out of the question. Finally, I found a solution that is, at this moment, about 75% of the way through the latest MiniDV tape. Steps and 3-line windows script (batch file) are: Import the raw DV files from your camcorder to disk. This part should be the easiest and requires little cpu, but a lot of temporary disk space (about 60G/hr). Install Handbrake if you haven't already. On Windows, the GUI download option now includes the CLI (command line interface). You can test one-off compression while tweaking settings in a mostly-complete UI. Note: Some options in the CLI are not yet in the Windows GUI, such as the latest de-interlacing option which uses less cpu while producing far higher quality video. R
4 comments
Read more

Things you want for your first baby (i.e. registry items).

By -
Some close friends just emailed asking what they need for their first baby, arriving in a few months. Thought I'd post here: Their questions: Crib In my opinion, cribs are overpriced and rather silly. Most kids outgrow them in ~2-3 years, so it's a short-term purchase. I've only read negative things about convertable crib-beds, which can easily end up costing more than a regular crib and separate toddler (or normal) bed. So - go for something simple and, imho, avoid Jardine enterprises. Our two cribs were recalled by them and the process was rediculously bad. Also - our cribs have drop-sides, which seemed like a useful feature - in 2 1/2+ years and 3 children later, we've never used them except by accident. Keep in mind you do want an adjustible height mattress-frame in your crib, and I think even the least expensive cribs have these. Crib Mattress I don't recall which exact one we got, but we got medium/high end of what they had in-stock at BabysRUs. The second t
Post a Comment
Read more