Sheila Salad

This salad is named for our good friend Sheila who used to make this for us all the time in Missoula. After living in Kalispell for a while, she came up here to visit her sister and we all had lunch together and she made her classic salad. We realized how much we missed it and started making it for our family too!

Ingredients
Lettuce - I like using spinach and a spring mix. But you can use Romaine, or even Iceberg if that's your thing.
Tomatoes, chopped - If I could, I'd always use cherry tomatoes, quartered.
Cucumbers, chopped
Bell peppers, chopped
Colby Jack Cheese, cubed
Carrots, chopped
Optional: bacon bits, green onions, croutons, cubed ham, hard boiled eggs, etc.

This is a real, make it how you like it salad. What we love most about it is the variety of things to put in it, and we make it quite chunky. This way the flavors are a lot stronger. We're also fans of the colby cubes. We just had this for a birthday dinner with a medium-sized group of family and had everything in separate containers so everyone could literally create their own salad with the fixings they like best. This salad's a big hit with our family, and we just love it.

Italian Chicken

This is another "spice up this recipe so dinner's not so boring" recipe. 

Ingredients
Chicken - I cut mine up into tenders
1 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp Alpine Touch (all-purpose seasoning with salt, pepper, onion, garlic)
2 tsp italian seasoning
sprinkle of paprika

Honestly, I'm not sure exactly what I put in this. I wanted something light, and it was. I recall being pleased so I took a picture. But this is the general idea.

Make your flour and seasoning mixture. Coat chicken in the mixture. Spray a pan with cooking spray and put over medium heat. When hot, add a tbsp of oil and toss in the chicken. Cook until done.

We just had a simple light dinner with some butter noodles, chicken and veggies. It's not really overly flavorful. (Although that would be easy enough to change.) But it was something I just put together, and I'm always pleased when something I make up actually tastes good. This breading was my inspiration.

Toasted Spiced Ham Drizzled in Honey

This Easter, I got excited about making some traditional foods. Mostly because I don't know much about the "traditional" foods. I'm not a real holiday food person, outside of candy canes, candy corn and jelly beans. So I found a recipe on foodnetwork.com for a traditional Easter ham, and this is what I found.

Ingredients

1 boneless country ham
2 cups honey, for glazing ham
2 tablespoons Toasted Spice Rub recipe below- The recipe makes 1 cup. DO NOT use the entire 1 cup. 
1 tablespoon thyme, chopped fine
6 celery stalks

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.  Place ham on an open brown paper bag for easy clean up. With the tip of a paring knife carefully score a 1-inch grid pattern around the outside of the ham. Brush the entire surface of the meat on all sides with some of the honey. Season the entire surface of the meat on all sides with the toasted spice rub and thyme. Add about a half cup of water to the base of the roaster. Place ham on several celery sticks in the roasting pan. Cook for 1 hour. Every 15 minutes, baste ham with juices that collect in the base of the roaster and the honey. Let rest for 15 minutes before carving as desired.

Toasted Spice Rub:
1/4 cup fennel seeds
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon peppercorns
1 1/2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
1/4 cup (1-ounce) pure California sweet chili powder*
2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

Toast the fennel seeds, coriander seeds, and peppercorns in a small, heavy pan over medium heat. (Toasting freshens spices, releases their oils, and makes them more fragrant, as well as adding a new dimension of flavor.) When the fennel turns light brown, work quickly. Turn on the exhaust fan; add the red pepper flakes, and toss, toss, toss, always under the fan. Immediately turn the spice mixture out onto a plate to cool. Put in a blender with the sweet chili powder, salt, and cinnamon and blend until the spices are evenly ground.
If you have a small spice mill blender or a coffee grinder dedicated to grinding spices, grind only the fennel, coriander, pepper, and chili flakes. Pour into a bowl and toss with the remaining ingredients. Keep the spice mix in a glass jar in a cool, dry place, or freeze.

*Chef's Tip: Taste your chili powder and, if spicy and hot, cut back the amount. California chiles are almost sweet, not hot.

So I forgot to take my camera to the dinner, and didn't take a picture until after we got home and my hubs rinsed it off. I realized, just now, that I used the entire 1 cup of seasoning mix instead of 2 tbsp. Our ham still tasted good, but there was a lot of seasoning on it. You can see a little bit on the stump there what the seasoning rub looks like. I know my ham is in a shape not really natural to the nature of ham, but it was the cheapest I could find, and that's what we could afford. Looking back, I think if I had read the recipe properly, this would've been an even greater success than it was. Because it was a success. Unless everyone was lying so as not to hurt my feelings. Anyway, it was good, and the ham was used in recipes to follow. So keep an eye out.

Chili Upgrade

So we were making our normal chili but really wanted to make it a bit tastier, give it a little upgrade. So we combined it with the recipe for our white chicken chili and came up with something pretty yummy. It was kind of an on the fly recipe change, so bear with me. But I can still remember the gist of how we changed it. I know we started out with the original recipe.

Ingredients

1 lb. lean ground beef (or turkey)
1/2 onion, chopped
1 green sweet pepper, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced (Can't go wrong with more garlic either)
1 15-oz can dark red kidney beans, rinsed and drained (may use dried beans)
1 14 ½ oz. can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 8 oz. can tomato sauce
2-3 tsp chili powder
1 tsp dried basil, crushed
1/2 cup flax seed

Then we added some bits from the white chicken chili.
1 can of kernel corn

1 (4oz) cans diced green chiles
1 tbs ground cumin
1 1/2 tsp dried oregano

I want to say that was most of the additions.

Brown meat, chop veggies, toss it all in a crockpot and cook on high for 4-5 hours. You can saute your veggies before hand if you want to, as well.

Bam chicken

This is another thing we make on the fly. It's so simple, but I couldn't help but share it because it really does turn out great.

Ingredients
Chicken - However much you have on hand that's thawed and ready to be cooked for dinner
Bam - Use as liberally as you'd like

You can leave the chicken as breasts, or whatever cut you have, or you can cut them up into tenders or smaller, chicken nugget-type bites. Sprinkle Bam on your chicken, coating both sides, then cook in a frying pan with a little oil. Voila.

Excuse the lovely photo. I think we were already done with dinner, when I thought to myself, "I should post our Bam chicken." and took a lovely photo of the chicken serving plate, completely with bam-colored oil and juices. It's so simple and is packed with flavor. A great chicken addition on the fly.

Lemon Broccoli

My sister gave this to me and I was too excited to try it. I love sharing good recipes. (Can you tell?)

Ingredients
1 large bunch broccoli cut into spears - Don't leave out the stems either. There's so much there, but if you only use the trees, you lose a ton. When you're taking bites of it, you can't tell if it's mixed in with stems, and then you get so much more broccoli taste.
1 medium onion, halved and thinly sliced - Mine was red, which you can see in the photo. I normally use yellow.
1 cup thinly sliced celery
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons grated lemon peel - Don't forget about this lovely tip when it comes to lemon zest!
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Steam broccoli until crisp-tender. Rinse in cold waster; drain and set aside. In a large skillet, saute the onion, celery and garlic in butter for 5 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.  Add the lemon peel and juice, salt, pepper and broccoli. Heat through. 

So please excuse my photo, aside from the blurriness, my broccoli is most obviously overcooked! It is the saddest shade of green. I had it steaming above my rice in the cooker and totally forgot about it. I was seriously in mourning over the sad color of this broccoli. But let me tell you that the broccoli tasted great. It was a wonderful side dish. I love good veggie dishes that I can eat with a plain rice, and just mix together. This was mixed with a little bam chicken, that I believe will be posted next. So stay tuned!

Sunrise Smoothie

I am very pleased with this, my very own creation. You have to try it. Delish!

Ingredients
1 cup orange juice - You can substitute other juices. I've tried apple and grape. Both worked fine, but orange is my favorite by far.
1 cup frozen strawberries - You can use fresh. I did, but found that the strawberry flavor was much stronger when they were frozen.
1 medium to large banana - This surprisingly adds a lot of the sweetness.
2 tbsp flaxseed. - This blends right in and is a great healthy boost for a morning drink.

Put orange juice in the blender.  You'll want to put your liquid in first, to help it blend smoothly.  Add other ingredients and blend until all chunks are gone.

I love this. My kids love this. I broke my blender a few weeks ago and have been dying ever since. I can't wait til the replacement part comes, because I want my smoothie!