Terry's 3M's
I love cooking. But, I hate the mess that it makes. So, while the dishwasher is broken, I do less of it than I might.
Some chefs have secrets that they guard. Not me. But, since I don't measure
anything when it's not absolutely necessary, I guess at the amounts that I
write down. So venture forth at your own risk.
For a quick light dinner, make corn pancakes with vanilla syrup. To packaged pancake mix, add one can of creamed corn and a couple shakes of nutmeg. For the syrup, mix and equal amount of sugar and water in a saucepan, bring to a boil, stirring once in a while. When the sugar is dissolved, turn off the heat and add a capful of vanilla. This syrup is very thin. For thicker syrup, add more sugar. To add a special touch to a corned beef dinner: Make a special gravy. Melt butter/margarine in a large frying pan and then stir in an equal amount of flour. (This is what the cookbooks call a roux.) Add some of the broth from pot that you cooked the corned beef in. (The cookbooks call this pot liquor.) Add about a half cup at a time and stir until smooth after each addition. After adding about a cup and a half of pot liquor, slowly add some milk a bit at a time and KEEP STIRRING until the gravy is as thick or as thin as you like it. Then add about a teaspoon or so of dill weed. When making chicken and dumplings, add some tarragon to the soup mixture. (If you're intimidated because you don't know how/can't make dumplings--my kids like it best the easy way--just pop open a tube of refrigerated biscuits, lay them on top of the broth in a circle, and cover for 15 minutes.) My son just asked me to make him toad-in-the-hole for breakfast. This is NOT the British version of toad-in-the-hole. This is just bread buttered on one side; cut a circle out of the middle of the bread with a glass; place the bread, buttered side down, in a frying pan that has been heated to about medium-low; melt a bit of butter/margarine in the hole and add an egg. Then just continue as if you were cooking an over easy egg. Keep some liquid smoke on hand. Delton likes to use it on burgers all year. Me? I use it to make homemade barbecue sauce. The recipe for barbecue sauce varies as it depends on whether I have brown sugar, molasses or honey to work with. But, a basic sauce can be made with one of the above for sweetening (add white sugar if using molasses), catsup, Worchestershire sauce, mustard (just a little), and a few drops of liquid smoke. Forgot to soak the dried beans overnight? Bring the beans covered with water to a boil for about 5 minutes, turn off the heat, and let set for an hour. Then you can proceed as usual. And NEVER add salt to beans until after they are cooked as soft as you'd like. It will take far longer to cook them if you add the salt before they're done. Some quick desserts for kids: 1. Take some leftover rice and add milk and cinnamon sugar. Let them choose from the food colorings and add a drop or two to make the rice green, blue, whatever. 2. Slice an apple and dip the pieces into some cinnamon sugar on a plate. 3. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar (notice a pattern here?) on a flour tortilla that has been spread with butter and nuked until the butter has melted.
4. Spread a slice of toast with applesauce and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.
The best grilled cheese sandwiches require the broiler to be fired up. Butter the bread, place buttered side down in a frying pan and place cheese on BOTH slices of bread. When the bottom is brown and the cheese has just started to melt, transfer to a broiler pan and stick under the broiler until the cheese starts to bubble up (watch carefully!!). Then just put the sandwich together. This is why I sometimes long for a toaster/oven/broiler again. You don't have to buy cinnamon sugar in those little shaker bottles. Just add a teaspoon of cinnamon to a cup of sugar in a plastic bowl with a lid and shake. Seasoned flour mix: to a cup or so of flour, add paprika, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. I use this to bread chicken for frying and also to use as a base for milk gravy. Bryan likes to make dinner occasionally. This recipe is simple enough for a child to make. We call it campfire stew. (Bryan actually took the ingredients along on an overnight with his uncle and they cooked it over a campfire.) Just brown about a pound of ground beef in a large pot. Open and add 2 cans of pork and beans. Stir in about a half a bottle of barbecue sauce. Heat and eat.
Well, I gotta go because it's almost lunchtime. There's a pound of ground beef
that has to be used up. The kids want campfire stew.
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