Category Archives: lunch

Fish tacos with homemade flour tortillas

lunch, supper 13 Comments

What drives a girl to decide to make fish tacos for the first time? I’ll tell you:

  1. Finding this recipe for homemade flour tortillas this week. Doesn’t she HE (I am a moron) make it sound fabulously easy and do-able? Turns out it IS
  2. Realizing I had a giant stash of The Yankee-caught fish in the freezer
  3. Browsing through my new cookbook from Lulu’s

Honestly. What else would I do?

So first I made the tortillas. For those you will need:

  • 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 tsp vegetable oil
  • 3/4 cup hot milk

Assembly:

  1. In a stand mixer, mix up the flour, baking powder, salt, and vegetable oil
  2. Add in the hot milk and mix till the dough pulls together, then let it knead in the mixer for another four or five minutes
  3. When it’s nice and smooth, divide the dough into 12 pieces, about 2 ounces each
  4. Pat them into little discs, then roll out as thin as possible
  5. Fry on a very hot pan, about 30 seconds each side
  6. Pour some boiling water into a dish and set it on your turned-off oven. Set a plate beside the dish of water and keep your tortillas warm on that plate — the steam from the boiled water kept mine warm and kept them from drying out, too. Bonus!

Next: the fish! This was super easy. I had a ziploc bag of thawed fish and a hot pan with olive oil in it. I cooked the fish, sprinkled with salt, for about three or four minutes on each side till it was cooked through and easily flaked with a fork.

Now make tacos! For ours I used:

  • afore-mentioned homemade tortillas
  • afore-mentioned cooked fish
  • black beans
  • mixed cheeses
  • lime juice
  • cilantro

The beauty of this meal was that we had all the ingredients on hand. The fish and beans were in the freezer, the cheese was in the fridge, the limes were on the counter, and the cilantro was in the garden. A lovely, fresh meal without a trip to the grocery store? Definitely a winner in my book.

Summer salad

lunch, sides, snacks, supper 5 Comments

One of many perks to having a garden in the back yard? THIS at any time:

I love this super simple salad! Fresh baby lettuce from the garden, homemade croutons, diced tomato, cheeses, and just a bit of Newman’s honey dijon dressing. SO good! And now that we’ve installed chicken wire around the garden, all the salad is going to me — not the bunnies.

I have a lot of lettuce coming in… faster than I can eat it! So I’m sure I’ll have to get more creative with toppings as the summer goes on. What are your favorite salad toppings? Something unexpected, or do you stick to the basics? My friend loves Gorgonzola cheese on all her salads. The Yankee wants all Caesar all the time. The Kiddo wants, you know, yogurt and Cheerios. This post isn’t for him. 😉

So enlighten me! What else should I try while I have lettuce coming out of my ears?

Chicken and broccoli rice bowl

lunch, supper 3 Comments

This was such a quick and easy weeknight meal! And a light one too, which I love in the summer. Or spring. Whatever — it’s hot enough to be glow-inducing during the day already, so it sure feels like summer to me.

For this I made two cups of sushi rice in the rice maker:

And steamed two cups of broccoli, then sprinkled on some lemon juice:

And The Yankee grilled some teriyaki-marinated chicken:

Then we layered all that in bowls and added a bit of soy sauce. A la peanut butter sandwiches! Super easy fake-out take-out, minus the MSG headache.

What are your favorite summer meals when it feels too hot to eat?

Salsa roja (roasted red salsa)

lunch, snacks 476 Comments

I eat a lot of salsa. A LOT. I am rather notorious for this, in fact. My friend’s boyfriend once innocently asked if I had anything he could snack on — maybe some chips and salsa? My friend nearly fell on the floor laughing at the thought of me not having chips and salsa in the house. There is no risk of that. Ever.

So when my awesome world-traveling chef cousin came to town for a few days, she offered to teach me how to make roasted red salsa and tamales (more on that later). Can you imagine how much I hesitated? Not. At. All.

And people, this salsa. PEOPLE. With a lifetime of tasting, sampling, and gorging research on salsa, I have never in my life had salsa this good.

Note that this makes a lot — a big mixing bowl full. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how quickly it went here. 😀 Without further ado, I give you: The Best Salsa Ever:

  • 16 full size tomatoes, or nearly a produce bag full of roma tomatoes (we used roma)
  • 2-3 yellow onions
  • 20-25 Serrano peppers (remove caps) Note: this many peppers makes it hot. Feel free to reduce # of peppers, or scrape the seeds out of them
  • 8-10 cloves of garlic
  • 1-2 Tbsp salt
  • 1-2 bunches cilantro
    1. Halve the tomatoes and onions and lay cut-side up on a cookie sheet along with the peppers and garlic
    2. Roast at 375 till the onions look nice and translucent (see bottom left of the next picture), tomatoes look soft, and peppers are getting a nice char on them

  1. Let it all cool a bit, then run through the food processor with salt and cilantro (we had to do this in two batches)
  2. Stir it all together and eat with abandon. Trust me.

Update 6/24/09:

Got questions? Be sure to see the comments below from The Cousin — lots of great info from the salsa expert!

Cheeseburger pie

lunch, supper 6 Comments

We were drowning (drowning I say!) in frozen hamburger patties. And there are only so many burgers a girl can eat (no, really), so I decided to re-purpose some of the beef. And there was my big ol’ cast iron skillet, lying in neglect, not having been used since… um….  last night. For pizza. Um, anyway.

This is, obviously, an adaptation of the classic Bisquick recipe. 🙂

You will need:

  • 1 lb. ground beef
  • 1 onion — less or more, depending on the likelihood of smooching someone later; I used about 1/4 of an onion, maybe less
  • 1 cup shredded cheese (4 oz)
  • 1/2 cup AP flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp sugar
  • 1 tbsp dry milk
  • 1 tbsp canola oil
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 eggs
  1. Brown up the meat and onion, preferably in a cast iron skillet, and drain the grease out — I tilt the pan till any grease is on one side, then use a paper towel to blot it out
  2. Spread the meat and onion evenly in the bottom of your skillet (if you’re not using an oven-safe skillet, then spray a pie plate with non-stick spray and spread the meat in there)
  3. Sprinkle meat with cheese
  4. Using a fork, mix together flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, dry milk
  5. Drizzle in canola oil, then work it in with your fork till it looks crumbly
  6. To the flour mix, add milk and eggs and whisk together, then pour over meat/onion/cheese mix — since this was use-what-we’ve-got supper night, you’ll see some shredded mozzarella, some shredded colby jack and a few Kraft singles. It’s what we had! 🙂
  7. Bake pie at 400F for about 25 minutes or until knife inserted in the middle of the pie comes out clean

This was really yummy. Comfort food! If you don’t do it in a cast iron, this could easily be assembled and put in the fridge beforehand, too.