Just 10 days out to Thanksgiving, by far my favorite holiday because all that’s expected is a fully-flavorful meal and being together with family and friends.
At the same time, I know from my own experience that laying down a Thanksgiving dinner for those same family and friends, especially if it’s your first time around, can be stressful. The goal here is to provide straight-forward stress-relief, which you can access by:
clicking this link or the tab above labeled Thanksgiving Help for a Thanksgiving dinner planning and timing guide and uniquely easy to follow step-by-step picture book recipes that show how to make roast turkey, turkey gravy, mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, apple pie, and fresh whipped cream and more.
getting your own first-of-a-kind Stress-Free, Quick & Easy Thanksgiving Dinner video/picture ebook for $2.99 (it’s extraordinarily affordably priced, especially these days, to make it as widely accessible as possible). Click this link to a short video trailer about the ebook. The ebook itself is available at:
What doesn’t go great with fresh whipped cream? I often have the vat-sized measuring cup you see below in the fridge good to go whenever I need it: in coffee, on pancakes, French toast or with fresh fruit – and it’s incredibly easy to make!
The secret to whipping cream as quickly as possible is using cold ingredients: fresh heavy whipped cream straight from the refrigerator and, if you have time, even using a freezer-chilled mixing bowl or measuring cup, as shown below.
Here are the only 3 ingredients and pieces of kitchen equipment you need.
Click this link or any picture on this page for a complete step-by-step picture book recipe.
October 29th, 2021 BlogComments Off on Margarita Cocktail – all in Pictures
Was speaking with Tom, one of the good people running our local Hickory, NC, ABC store and a big Margarita fan, about the need to use quality ingredients to make a Margarita cocktail the full-on flavorful way it was meant to be made. Though no one agrees on that exact origin of this wildly popular cocktail, the “original” Margarita recipe calls for only the following 3 ingredients/ratios (minus the salt on the glass rim that I never use): 1 part lime juice, 1 part orange liqueur and 2 parts tequila.
Considering that tequila makes up half the drink and is, therefore, the Margarita flavor driver, I strongly agree with the dead-on accurate advice I’ve gotten from my good friend and well-trusted Julio’s Liquors owner, Ryan Maloney, and his staff, as well as what I’ve read in print and on-line that the best tequila to use to make a Margarita is 100% pure agave blanco (white) tequila, like the one shown in the photo above. As an alternative, and to make a less dry (sweeter) drink, you can use reposado tequila, which gets its name from “resting” (that’s what “reposado” means)in oak barrels for 2-24 months.
Once you’ve decided to use good tequila, I certainly recommend not ruining it with low grade orange liqueur, like run-of-the-mill triple sec. Instead, use a higher grade orange liqueur, which, yes, is more expensive but is well worth the price if you want a crisp, clean, explosively flavored Margarita. My go-to orange liqueur, which was recommended by my same Julio friends, is Pierre Ferrand Orange Curaçao, which has a flavor very much like Grand Marnier but is not as syrupy sweet.
Finally, there’s no substitute for fresh lime juice even if you don’t have a citrus juicer and have to squeeze the lime by hand.
Here’s what I use to make a fresh Margarita:
Click this link or any picture on this page for a complete fresh Margarita picture book recipe – and enjoy! (Tom, I appreciate the fun talk the other day!)
Last post showed how to make very quick & easy – and fully flavorful – simple banana ice cream made with only bananas, vanilla extract and ground cinnamon. This recipe takes that banana ice cream from simple to exciting by adding fresh mango, coconut flakes, raisins – and even rum-soaked raisins (they go GREAT with this!). Of course, like any recipe you see here, the added ingredients I just mentioned, though they work terrifically well together, are just suggestions. You can substitute mango with pineapple, blueberries, or strawberries. You can use any kind of dried fruit and add chocolate chips or chocolate powder – and much more. So, use your imagination to make your full-on banana ice cream the way you want to suit your taste and dietary needs.
Here are the ingredients I use (yep, rum raisins in the jar).
Click any picture on this page for a complete, easy-to-follow step-by-step picture book recipe.
Last post showed how to put together a fully-flavorful, energy sustaining sweet one bowl meal with cooked steel cut oats, nut butter, fresh fruit and kefir. As I mentioned in earlier posts, steel cut oats are richly versatile and can be used to make savory dishes just as well as sweet tasting dishes.
And I know that sounds counterintuitive, “my breakfast oats mixed with savory ingredients – really?”, but it works great!
Here’s an example: Savory Steel Cut Oats with Beans, Avocado & Bell Pepper that combines the full flavor, chew, and potent fiber, complex carbohydrate and protein benefits of steel cut oats and beans with the zesty flavor of vitamin-rich fresh avocado, bell pepper, and cilantro shown below.
Click this link or any picture on this page for the easy-to-follow picture book recipe, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is for you to use either as is or as a visual guide to improvise with ingredients and flavors to make this savory steel cut oats meal all your own.
March 12th, 2021 BlogComments Off on Steel Cut Oats with Nut Butter, Fresh Fruit & Kefir Picture Directions
Like I mentioned in the last two posts, steel cut oats are fully flavor and can be used in a wide variety of easy-to-make sweet or savory meals. As a guy living by himself right now, I’m a big fan of what I call one bowl meals.
Here’s a terrific breakfast one bowl meal that combines fully flavorful, highly nutritious cooked steel cut oats, with nut butter, fresh fruit and kefir that, in addition to tasting great, provides full-on, sustained energy whether you’re hopping out to do something physical or just want something satisfying to power you through the morning.
Here’s what I used to put it all together.
What you see above and also below in the recipe you can download by either clicking this link or any picture on this page is only a guide. As always, imagination is your only limit. Recipes like these just provide visual guidelines to help turn your imagination into fully flavorful reality.
March 9th, 2021 BlogComments Off on How to Cook Steel Cut Oats to Make Them More Easily Digestible, Especially For Those in Phase 1 IBD-AID
First, what is IBD-AID? The first part, IBD, is irritable bowel disorder, which translates in practical terms to a painful gut brought on by inflamed intestines. I’ve had it. It’s uncomfortable and recovery takes – and took me – a long time. AID stands for anti-inflammatory diet, which is a richly vibrant diet to live by, sure, to ease IBD, but also to improve digestion and promote a better quality of life overall for everyone. Here’s a chart from UMass Medical School’s Center for Applied Nutrition that highlights foods that promote good digestion.
You probably noticed that steel cut oats are right at the top of the prebiotic food list. Prebiotics are foods that helpful bacteria, or probiotics, in your gut need to eat to stay alive. Keeping those helpful bacteria properly fed, alive and well is exactly what makes for good digestion and helping you feel your best, especially considering that there are many times more bacteria than your own cells in your body.
Personally, once I learned about it, I’ve stuck to an anti-inflammatory diet for decades and absolutely love it for how much better my gut feels as well as for its full-on flavor and variety. Like I write here all the time, flavor rules(!) and no diet, which only means a method of food selection, ever has any chance of working successfully without flavors that taste good.
Click this link or either picture at the top and bottom of this page to learn more about steel cut oats and how to cook them to make them more easily digestible for IBD purposes or otherwise. You can also click this link for more AID specific recipes on this site.
Steel cut oats: great stuff – for lots of reasons!
First, taste – and tastes always rules! Steel cut oats have a rich, nutty flavor and taste great in both sweet and savory dishes – I’ll show examples in future posts.
At the same time, they are both a complete protein source and a complex carbohydrate, which makes them ideal for sustained, not spike and drop, energy, like the kind of energy you need for a good run, bike ride, hike or just to get through a long work day. They’re also rich in fiber and anti-inflammatory (next post will show how to cook steel cut oats to accommodate people on the first phase of a diet intended to relieve IBD).
Here’s how rolled oats (left) look compared to steel cut oats (right).
The big difference between the two is pre-processing. Unlike rolled oats, which are hulled, pre-cooked and then flattened by heavy rollers to allow for quicker home cooking, steel cut oats are not hulled or precooked, which allows the same oat grain to retain more of its nutrition and flavor.
To learn more about steel cut oats and how to cook them as easily as possible – just 25 minutes on the stove almost all hands-free, just click this link or any picture on this page for complete, easy-to-follow step-by-step picture book directions.
Last post showed how to make scrambled pancakes, which are really just modified scrambled eggs with pumped up flavor (flavor rules!) and nutrition.
This post shows how to take those scrambled pancakes from simple to exciting…
…using only “commonly” found ingredients, like those shown below. I put commonly in parentheses because ingredients that might be common to me – or anyone else in particular – might not be common to you. As always, what you see below are only suggestions to stir up your imagination and give you a sense of technique. Use any added ingredients you want to take your scrambled pancakes from simple to exciting.
With your portion of scrambled pancakes in a bowl either fresh off the stove or warmed in the microwave oven, start topping with a good spoonful of peanut, almond or any nut butter (to make your own in advance, click this link), a good spoon of jam (honey or maple syrup), and 1-2 tablespoons of yogurt (I like non-fat Greek yogurt for its flavor and potent protein content).
Add your choice of quickly rinsed fresh fruit. I’m using pitted fresh cherries (in the winter, from Chile – killer flavor and crisp crunch!) and blueberries.
Add any dried fruit – optional but something I always do. I’m using chopped dried dates, but you can substitute with raisins, dried cranberries, dried prunes – you get the idea.
Finish off with a good shot of kefir, whipped cream or anything you like.
And that is all there is to taking easy, completely improvised scrambled pancakes from simple to exciting, also by improvising to satisfy your drive for full on flavor.
As I mentioned in the last post, that you see above just as is powered me through the 40 mile bike ride shown below at a decent pace – no problem at all, except for keeping up with Josh, Greg and hammer-fast Juan.
The other day I wanted something a little different for breakfast with flavor and substance to power me through a good late winter Hickory, NC, group bike ride. Here’s what I came up with. I call it scrambled pancake because I used most of the ingredients I use to make a fruit pancake but scrambled the batter like scrambled eggs.
These are the ingredients that I mixed in the bowl you see at the bottom of the picture below.
Those ingredients and rough proportions are (no need to measure precisely: with these ingredients, your result will turn out great): 2 eggs, dash of salt, good shake of ground cinnamon, about 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1 big tablespoon of each: ground flaxseed, cooked quinoa (the red grains in the square container above the butter), cooked steel cut oats (the white grains in the square container between the vanilla extract), and a handful of raisins.
Of course, as an improvised recipe, which is just a guide, and I was using what I already had in the fridge, specifically regarding the quinoa and steel cut oats. I can imagine you don’t have those – and possibly not ground flaxseed also – ready to grab and go. No problem: just substitute any or all the grains above with any favorite cooked or ready to eat grain, like cold oat cereal, granola or wheat germ. Your imagination is your only limit.
Here’s how to cook what you’ve mixed.
Add about as much butter as you see above to a frying pan warmed to the same temperature needed to make scrambled or fried eggs. Add and spread the batter, and give the pan a good back and forth shuffle like you see in the last picture above to “encourage” the batter not to stick to the pan surface.
After a 1-3 minutes, when the bottom of the cooked batter looks lightly browned like the top photo above, use a spatula to turn the batter. Don’t worry about trying to turn it all in one piece. (I tried doing that myself – and failed with a smile). Then use the spatula to break and turn the batter, like you would do to make scrambled eggs, until it is cooked through as shown below.
You can then scoop what you’ve cooked into a bowl and add whatever you want want: maple syrup, honey, jam, peanut or any nut butter, yogurt, whipped cream – anything. Next post, I’ll show what I added to make what you see below that easily sustained me for 40 miles on the bike, no problem.
November 15th, 2021 
