Herb Yogurt Dip

I'm all about the fresh herbs. My dad keeps a pretty intense herb garden, and I plan to do the same.

I whipped up this sauce / dip and then put it on some smoked gouda quesadillas.

Ingredients:

Plain greek yogurt

3-4 sprigs of fresh rosemary

5-6 sprigs of fresh thyme

juice of 1/2 lemon

Peel of 1/2 lemon

Black Pepper

Ground Crushed Red Pepper

Direx:

Chop up the rosemary and lemon peel as small as you can get 'em. Add all the ingredients together and stir it up. It'll probably be extra good the day after you make it. I can see slathering this al over cucumbers.

Szechwan-Style Stir Fry

I thought I'd already posted this on here, but I can't find it. So if this is a repeat, apologies. This is slightly modified from my ever-trusty Menus in Minutes. This is one of our favorite stand-bys. It's easy to make a bigger batch, if you've got a wok (hard to find a big enough skillet). I actually like this cold, too. I serve it over basmati or jasmine rice (which I make in my rice cooker), but you could do it with hot cooked rice noodles, too. Or probably just linguini. I haven't tried it, but I bet it'd be good.

Stir together (whisk, really)

1/3 C. bottled teriyaki sauce

3 Tbsp Szechwan spicy stir-fry sauce

2 tsp cornstarch

Set aside, but stir ocassionally through prep & veggie cooking process.

Prepare:

• 1/2 C chopped red onion (these are all approximate and to taste. Add whatever you like. I chop the onion into maybe 3/4 inch pieces)
• 1/2 C. broccoli florets
• 1 medium sweet red pepper, cut into bite sized chunks
• 1 medium green pepper, cut into bite sized chunks
• I love mushrooms, so I use about a big bag and a half of sliced baby bellas, maybe 4Cs? But that's just me. The book calls for 1 4&1/2 oz jar of sliced mushrooms, drained. I think fresh are way better.
• 1 14-15 oz can whole baby corn, drained and cut in half
• 1 C. fresh snow pea pods if you've got 'em, trimmed.

In a large skillet or wok, preheat about a tsp or 2 olive oil over medium-ish. Add the onion; cook and stir for about 2 minutes. Add mushrooms; cook and stir for maybe 4-5 minutes. Then broccoli, cook and stir for another minute or so, then peppers for another minute or so. Then the corn and pea pods. Basically, you want all of this sort of hot and tender crisp.

You can do this next part by pushing the veggies aside, but it works best if you remove them from the pan. Then stir the sauce, add it to the skillet. Cook and stir until it thickens and gets bubbly. It'll get darker, too. This won't take very long. Dump the veggies back in, stir to coat with sauce and heat through.

Serve over basmati or jasmine rice.

If you want, you can add shrimp to this, as I do sometimes. I buy the precooked, just cuz it's easier. I make sure it's thawed, take the tails off, cut it into bite sized pieces if it's not bite-sized already, and throw it in when I throw in the baby corn.

IF you want to do chicken, you want to cut a 1 lb skinless boneless chicken breast into bite-sized strips. Once the veggies are done, take them out of the skillet, then add about 1/2 the chicken at a time, cooking about 4 minutes. Remove when no longer pink in the middle. Then take the chicken out, too, and do the thing with the sauce.

Awesome Cannelinni Spread

Found this recipe in a cooking mag and added some of my own twists to make it easier and tastier. It's kinda like hummus, but the cannelinni beans give it a deeper, smoother flavor than chick peas can. I like it muchly.

Stuff Y'all'll Need

1 Can of Cannelinni (White Kidney Beans)

1 lemon

2-3 garlic cloves

2-3 sprigs of rosemary

Pinch of dried red pepper flakes

olive oil

Food Processor

Stuff Y'all Do With that Stuff

Take a vegetable peeler and peel off 3-4 strips of the lemon peel. Slice it into little strips and throw it into a pan with a good slather of olive oil. Mince up the rosemary and the garlic, and throw them into the olive oil with the crushed red pepper. Drain and rinse the beans, and add those to the mix. Make sure there's enough olive oil to get everything good and coated.

Let that all sit and simmer for 5-10 minutes. When it feels ready, spoon the whole works into the food processor, squeeze the juice from 1/2 of the lemon in there and blend it. Add a little olive oil while it's spinning if it's too thick for you.

It's good on toast, bell peppers, spoons and tongues.

Grilled Cheese with Bacon and Red Onion

Grilled cheese and bacon is old news. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.

But adding sliced red onion? Solid, buddy. Real solid.

probably don't need any directions or ingredients for this one. I will say that putting the cheese in the middle (i.e. bread, bacon, cheese, onion, bread) did help the loose ingredients to stay in place while I chomped. Also thought it might be good with a little mustard sauce, if you want to go all French-fancy on things.

Wasabi-Soy Glazed Salmon

I adapted this recipe from Menus in Minutes . I used salmon because, well, I love salmon. But I'm sure you could use any sort of fish. The actual recipe calls for whitefish. Just fyi.

2 salmon filets/portions

Glaze

2 Tbsp soy sauce (can use reduced-sodium soy sauce)

1 tsp toasted sesame oil

1/2 tsp sugar

1 tsp wasabi powder (can use less, but this isn't super spicy)

Mix glaze ingredients in small bowl & stir well to dissolve sugar & wasabi powder.

Rinse salmon and pat dry with paper towels.

Transfer about 3/4 glaze to shallow bowl and place salmon skin-side up in glaze. Reserve remaining glaze for after you've cooked the fish.

Place fish (in bowl) in fridge and let marinate for 15 minutes or so. Heat up the grill while fish is marinating.

Grill salmon, starting skin down. Brush a bit of the glaze (the stuff the fish was sitting in) onto the top of the fish as it cooks. Then make sure you get rid of the "used" glaze as you don't want to mix it up with the stuff that you reserved. Grill about 4-5 minutes. Turn fish skin side up, grill for another 5 minutes or so, or until it's opaque and flakes easily.

Remove fish from grill and brush on a little of the remaining (clean) glaze. Enjoy.