BBQ Time Yay!!

The weather has finally turned this means grill time!  Given the climate here in Northern California, we cook out most days during the summer to keep the house cooler and save energy costs.  Last year I managed to cook out nearly every day so I'm trying to emulate it again this year.  It also means the return of last summer's favorites, tea-soaked chicken breasts, red pepper pesto and shrimp pizzas.  I'm also constantly looking out for new ideas, and we tried last night chicken with balsamic bbq sauce, I paired it with a home made Caesar salad, YUM!  I am going to try to get about a months worth of recipe ideas into my hand dandy mealboard app on my ipad so that meal planning should be a breeze.  I have to say despite the effort it takes to set it up the rewards of this program are huge, I think my only gripe is not easily being able to change the quantities for each recipe as I select them, and I get lazy just getting the basic ingredients in so I can do my shopping list, but it works for me.  I generally then double check the recipe on line anyways and read from the original rather than what is in held in the app.

I think the absolute hardest thing for me is veggie night in general, I'm limited somewhat by James's tastes and what the girls will or won't eat so it's always a challenge, kebobs seem to be more often the fare of the day on those nights and I keep looking out for other ideas, but they just seem to be the easiest as a lot of veggies need to be cut up small and often fall through the grate without the skewer.  Oh which reminds me portabello mushroom burgers!  Great for James and I not so much the kids but will come up with something for them one of these days.

To Laos and Back in One Night

As anyone that knows me or follows this irregular blog knows, every so often we visit a country at random and I attempt to transport us via cooking to that country for the night.  This is a challenge as there are some items that simply are not available from time to time and then there are the palates of the subjects for these experimentations to consider as well.  The last random country that was picked was Laos, it's located out by Vietnam, Thailand, China so in general you are looking at an Asian inspired menu.  The wonders of the internet means you can find a treasure trove of information on line for the selected country of choice.

Laos's biggest challenge oddly came from dessert, a lot of which contain coconut in some form or another, not a good choice given my dinning guests, this was solved in the form of a cake although I was missing starfruit.  So the menu...(take out egg rolls and thai iced tea) as much as I would have loved to do the whole meal I know my limitations when it comes to juggling the kids and cooking and their toleration for how long I spend cooking.  I followed this up with Laos Style BBQ ribs and Koua Khao (fried rice).  I was a little worried about the chili sauce that was to go with the ribs as I'm still always put off by the smell of fish sauce and not sure about the heat level either, however I figured it's a sauce if we don't like it we don't have to use it right?  I was surprised!  It was in fact a wonderful accent to the ribs and I was not the only one to enjoy it, in fact the only complaint was there not being enough, good for me.  The ribs however I didn't plan well and should have had on much sooner so I ended up par boiling them which just added to my kitchen pain, however the end result were great well cooked ribs so I'm not going to complain.  Fried rice, I didn't have enough chili's so I used sirracha hot sauce instead, not the best substitute but it worked, somehow I pulled off a great dish despite a few challenges which I will not go further into other than to say when my girlfriend showed up and saw my frantic state she just leapt straight in and helped get the meal onto the table.

So having indulged in the ribs and rice and egg rolls we moved onto dessert.  This was a Fresh Fruit Cake - Laos recipe and instead of adding starfruit I just added extra mango and bananas in to make up the difference.  Can I say YUM?  The cake was heavy and moist from the fruit puree and I was given an A for presentation.    A great finish to a fantastic meal and I will have to remember these recipes for the future.

Oh and my lesson for the day?  I finally figured out the best was to handle mangos!  You can still teach an old dog new tricks.

Yum o!!!

Monday we had a brief change in plans, our Loas extravaganza will now take place next week.  Tuesday we had an incredibly easy dinner great for the grill ( if it ever warms up here) Chicken-Tikka with Indian style sweet potatoes, YUM O!  I actually modified the recipe a little and added little tandoori spice blend to the chicken marinade although this can be a matter of personal taste I personally just love Indian spices so I am apt to add em when I can and penzey spices has a really great blend available. Now be forewarned this dish whilst easy needs extra time to allow the meat to marinade, I actually put mine in about 3 hours before we cooked the chicken up. Read ahead of the recipe tho as I didn't set aside the extra marinade before adding the chicken, however I had some luck as I still had extra yogurt to make additional batched for the salad and topping. Definitely adding this one to the must keep recipes.  We also used chicken breast rather than thighs as we had it on hand and we had to do everything in the oven and on the stove top.  Not a big deal just bake the potatoes at 450 f for 20 minutes turning once, and pan cooked the chicken.

Oh and have I mentioned how much I love MealBoard? It's the perfect app for me allowing cloud sync so I won't loose any of my data, now it doesn't have many preloaded recipes which works for me. I can create my own custom menus and delete things as I go along. I often have recipes worked out about a week in advance but I also have the ability to save menu templates, which is a great function. I love being able to keep track of my shopping list and it makes it a breeze to alter days and redo the shopping list if gets too expensive as I can enter in prices for food, given today's economic climate that is not a bad thing believe me. Love it love it and get better and better the more I use it, I now have 84 recipes saved and I often add at least lone new one a week so food in this household is never boring.

Wednesday we had Meatloaf Patties with Carrot Slaw.  Now they weren't bad and the whole meal was a good combination, but for my tastes I need to add some spices / flavoring to the patties.  I think I'll be adding some garlic granules and onion to add a bit of something I'm sure I can raid my pantry for appropriate seasonings to add that zing.