Making some ‘Shroom Salad for a late lunch today. Sooo easy to make & tastes so fresh! And look how pretty it is too!
Ingredients:
1 cup Sliced Mushrooms
1/4 small Red Onion, diced
1/4 cup Parsley (fresh), chopped
2 T Olive Oil
1 small Lemon, for juicing (or 1/2 large)
A few shakes of Black Pepper
A few shakes of Oregano
4-6 Fresh Spinach Leaves, chopped, optional
Directions – Salad
Obviously, already sliced mushrooms is the easiest way to go. (If you only have whole mushrooms on hand, then you will need about 4-6 mushrooms to make a cup, depending on size. DO NOT wash your mushrooms as they retain moisture. Instead, dampen a paper towel and wipe them clean.)
Toss the mushrooms, red onion & parsley together in a small bowl and set aside.
Directions – Dressing
In another small bowl, squeeze the juice of 1 lemon (remove any pits that you missed!).
Add the oil, pepper & oregano and whisk together with the lemon juice.
Give it a taste & add some more pepper and/or oregano if desired.
Pour over salad.
Some Tips:
Another way to mix your dressing would be using a small container with a lid & shake vigorously for about 15 seconds. This is my fave method although please take a lesson & hold the lid closed while shaking! 🙂
Squeeze lemons cut-side up in the palm of your hand over your other hand to help catch pits or you can also squeeze them over a small strainer.
You can garnish this salad with some fresh chopped basil if you like.
Give this recipe a try & let me know what you think! Tasty? Easy directions? Any variations you tried?
People often ask me what made me decide to write a cookbook for single people? As if the obvious reason wasn’t enough (me being single, lol). Well, I’ll tell you. A tray of lasagna, that’s what.
One Sunday, being the Italian that I am, I made a pot of gravy and a tray of lasagna for dinner. (It was also probably the only time I’ve ever used my RV’s oven.) After hours of cooking, the house smelled great. My stomach was grumbling loudly in anticipation of my feast. I couldn’t wait to eat!
Finally, the timer went off. I took the tray out of the oven. I cut myself a nice healthy slice of lasagna and put it on a plate. I topped it off with some more gravy and a meatball and sat down to eat.
After I was done, I burped (cause that’s what Italian’s do after a good meal), put my plate in the sink and proceeded to cover up the remaining lasagna in the tray with tin foil. I walked over to the refrigerator and “OH CRAP!” It doesn’t fit! Now what??
My RV has a side by side refrigerator which in the RV world typically is envied. It’s one of the first things people say when I show them around… “Oh, you have a side by side!” In hindsight it was a huge mistake putting this on my list of must-haves when searching for the perfect RV. That said, I’m not sure that even a top/bottom fridge would hold a tray of lasagna. I’m going to say no so I can keep my sanity and stop beating myself up for my choices.
So I removed the tin foil from the tray and cut down the lasagna into single portions that would fit into smaller tupperware containers. This got me thinking. Maybe, just maybe I’m cooking too much food for myself. (Ya think?!) Perhaps I should start to scale down my meals so that I don’t have so many leftovers. Even though I love leftovers, they are not RV friendly.
A star was born! Or rather an idea was hatched. I dug in and researched to see just how many cookbooks were out there solely dedicated to single portion recipes. Now we’re talking 5 years ago so back then my research showed that approximately 1 book per year was published in the previous decade on this subject. (Wow, it just hit me! I’ve been at this for 5 years now. How quickly time flies when I’m having fun creating new things in the kitchen.)
I bought a few of these cookbooks and found out to my disappointment that not one of them truly had single portion recipes in them. In most cases the recipe yield was for two people at best. One recipe suggested I cook a duck and gave me 10 ideas on what to do with the leftovers. I was truly astonished!
My current research shows that more books have been coming out on this subject, but again, most, if not all of them contain recipes which are not geared towards the solo diner. Just because you cook it in a crockpot doesn’t make it a meal for one. The recipe has to actually serve only one person.
In recent years, as self publishing becomes more popular, it will pave the way for every Tom, Dick & Julia to publish a cookbook in record time and numbers. It will be interesting to see if any of them will actually cater to single people.
I knew that the topic would catch on eventually and I would have to figure out a way to make my cookbook rise above the rest. I have a few ideas in mind, though I’m not quite ready to share them with you just yet. But I think they will seriously make a difference. Let’s hope I do it right!
In the meantime, I would love to hear some ideas about what you think would make my cookbook stand out from the pack?
If you’ve read my About page, you’ll notice that I mention that I can’t cook a turkey to save my life. Seriously, I’ve tried so many times, each ending in failure. One year, it didn’t defrost all the way. The next year, it burned. Every year was another catastrophe so I finally gave up and meatloaf because our Thanksgiving meal.
I have an update. Recently, I barbequed a turkey leg with a dry rub of just some herbs and spices in the cabinet. Wow! It came out perfect! If I had known it was that easy to bbq a turkey leg, I would have made one for everyone at Thanksgiving. Just imagine all those scenes in the movies & on TV when the hostess comes into the dining room carrying that big, beautifully cooked bird. Now imagine me coming into the dining room with a big tray of turkey legs! Hey, anyone who knows me would NOT be surprised by this.
I’ve been reading a bunch of posts on different blogs today about organic foods. While there is certainly alot of arguments ‘for’ buying organic, there are just as many arguments (or opinions) for not. I’m still on the fence about it all.
Since I am a solo cooktician, I don’t tend to shop in the larger stores like Costco and Sams, since buying in bulk doesn’t suit my RV lifestyle and I don’t like to waste food. So I stick to the 99 Cent Only store, Big Lots and hit the chain grocery stores about once or twice a month for some meats, poultry, fish/seafood and items not readily available in my discount stores (which isn’t much nowadays). I also shop at Sprouts (my preference over Trader Joe’s) for whatever produce I can’t get that week at the 99 Cent Only store and bulk grains like brown rice and quinoa (my new favorite). I only hit Trader Joe’s once a month for TT’s chow since it’s the only place I’ve found that carries a brand worthy of my pooch’s palate.
Yesterday, I took a run over to Big Lots since I haven’t been there in a while because I was out of Almonds (due to all of the almond milk I’m making lately). You can get a 15 oz. can for only $6 or two 9oz. cans for $7 (you do the math). Needless to say I bought 4 of the 9oz cans and one is already soaking in water this morning.
Ok, so I went in for almonds and $88 dollars later…. to my surprise I found that they are now carrying many of the items you can find in Trader Joe’s or Sprouts. They carry a full line of Bob’s Red Hill products. For those of you not familiar, they are organic & gluten free items such as bulgar, quinoa, flaxseed, various flours & grains, etc. and all at a MUCH lower price than TJ or Sprouts! I immediately starting dumping bags into my cart. Just to prove my point, I went to Sprouts after this shopping spree and compared prices. Let’s just say my bill would have been almost double had I not stopped in Big Lots first!
I am also constantly amazed at what I find in the 99 Cent Only Store. I have to give them kudos for jumping on the bandwagon and recognizing an opportunity when they see one. They too have recently begun to carry these items. I was so pi$$ed to find the very same bag of flaxseed for a dollar that I had just spent $6.95 on in Sprouts an hour before! (This was a few weekes ago before I realized they were carrying these items now).
They also carry organic produce and some organic canned goods (like my favorite Aunt Penny’s Organic Garbanzo beans for the various different humuses- is that a word? – that I’ve been making lately). And everything is a DOLLAR!. I come home weekly with organic baby spinach, organic fruits, organic veggies and my grocery bill rarely goes over $30.
It used to be that only the TJ & Sprouts stores would carry all of this stuff and they milked you for it too. The only other place to pick up your organic produce used to be at a farmer’s market, again, at inflated prices. Now with the convenience of my favorite discount store carrying these items, if I choose to go down the Organic highway, it won’t cost me an arm & a leg anymore.
Like I said, I’m on the fence about buying organic, but if they’re available at a reasonable price, I’ll buy them. Otherwise, I’ll just do like mama used to do, wash everything when I get it home or grow it myself.
In my opinion, today’s society gets way too hung up on the word ‘healthy’. There are entirely too many ‘experts’ on the subject and the whole thing seems to have gotten out of control. I think ‘heathly’ is a relative term and personal to every individual.
Take for instance one of my favorite TV culinary wizards, Rachael Ray. Love her to pieces, super personality, great tips in the kitchen, but always emphasizes how her recipes are healthy. Really? With all that cheese & fat in the foods, how can that be? That would be HER idea of healthy, not mine. No offense Rach!
Another one of my favorites whom I had the pleasure to meet & take a picture with at the LA Food & Wine Festival a few years ago, Ree Drummond makes the same claims, healthy cooking. Love her website, love her ranch and wouldn’t mind a husband who looked like hers. But, and this is just my opinion again, I don’t consider most of her recipes to be healthy. The woman must own stock in butter because other than Julia Child, I’ve never seen anyone go through so much butter in one 30 minute episode. Again, no offense to Ree, I love her recipes!
You see, healthy is a relative term. Healthy for me is when there are proven benefits as a result of what I’m cooking and eating and when I say proven, I mean by me, not the “experts”.
My morning blast
I’ll prove my point… About 6 weeks ago I bought a Nutribullet (www.NutriBullet.com). It’s the best $80 investment I ever made and is now my new best friend. This whacking machine has turned my life around. I have changed my eating habits to disclude a drive by at McDonald’s for french fries or a burger from Wendy’s. I now eat salad and drink water every day, two things I’ve NEVER done before. I eat snacks which consist of fruits and veggies or something like homemade humus. I’ve cut out almost all of my caffeine and sugar drinks (I said almost) and my refrigerator is packed to the max with fresh fruits and vegetables at all times (seriously, stand back when you open it).
To my surprise when I opened my freezer yesterday, there were 2 bare shelves. That has never happened in my whole life! Why? Because I’m not buying processed or convenient foods anymore. I also noticed when I came home from the grocery store the other day with 6 bags, only 1 contained food that didn’t go in the fridge.
With the exception of weekends (I like to have my morning coffee via phone with my BFF in Alaska), I make a “blast” every morning in my NutriBullet. I prepare the cup the night before, stick it in the fridge & blast it before heading out the door to work. Since doing this, I have lost 6 pounds, have cut my caffeine & sugar (of the bad kind) intake down to about 1/3 of what it was before, if not less (I used to purchase 2 litre bottles of Pepsi like they were going out of style!), my sinus condition has cleared up and I don’t have that annoying sinus drip or sore throat anymore, my insomnia is gone, no more carb diving in the afternoon, no more mood swings or sugar ups & downs. I now fall asleep within 30 minutes of my head hitting the pillow each nite (it used to take me up to 2 hours), and I sleep like a rock all nite long without waking up. I have seen a dramatic change in my hair as well. Not only is it growing faster, but less of it seems to fall out these days. I just FEEL so much better !! You see – proven benefits.
For the last 5 days I’ve been on a mini-vacation. Didn’t go anywhere, just enjoyed being at home with TT and working on my cookbook. I decided NOT to make a blast for the entire 5 days to see what would happen… I also didn’t eat salad or fruits every day. I’ve been eating carb heavy meals & more meat. Well, the sinus drip is back and I’ve been sluggish and tired for the entire time. I can only imagine that if I continue this way for another week or two, the rest of my previous ailments would return and I would once again feel like crap.
So, healthy to me is making my blast every day, eating more raw foods, and properly combining foods-VERY important (Check out the Fit For Life program….meat + potatoes = delicious, but doesn’t digest properly and leaves you bloated & causes weight gain). Tomorrow I go back to work with my blast in hand, a salad in my lunch pail and some yummy homemade sweet potato humus with veggies to snack on throughout the day.
Finally scaled down my recipes today and came up with a final selection for the 1st cookbook! It wasn’t easy leaving out some of my favorites. But that’s ok, I’ll put them in the second book.
Hopefully, I’ve chosen an interesting mix of foods and flavors that everyone will enjoy. I’ll be looking for some test cooks in the near future. So if you’re interested in being a recipe tester, please leave me a comment or email me if you’re interested and I’ll put you down on the list.
Rv Mama's Table For One! 