quickandeasycooking

I’ve got another delicious chicken marinade for you today. We have good friends that used to live in Miami, and that is where I first sampled Cuban food. Mojo chicken was a favorite. Every time we visited them, I bought several bottles of mojo marinade and tucked them in my carry-on. Now, I can find mojo marinade at my local grocery store. I’ve even gotten it at Costco. But it’s easy to put together at home. Give it a try!

Mojo Marinade

½ cup fresh orange juice

2 tbsp lime juice

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 tbsp chopped garlic

½ tsp hot sauce or more if you like it spicy

½ tsp ground cumin

¼ tsp coarse salt

½ tsp black pepper

Combine all the ingredients together and marinate chicken for several hours or overnight. Grill over medium heat until done.

And thanks to my good friend Kathy for introducing me to Cuban food. It’s great!

We’re right in the thick of grilling season, and in my house, we grill several times a week. I promised one reader I’d deliver some more quick and easy marinades, so here goes! This is an easy honey-mustard marinade to try with that old standby: boneless, skinless chicken breasts. It takes just a few minutes to put together.

Honey-Mustard Grilled Chicken

½ cup Dijon mustard

¼ cup honey

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 tbsp lemon juice

2 tsp curry powder

½ tsp garlic powder

½ tsp coarse salt

¼ tsp black pepper

Just a touch of crushed red pepper

Mix all the ingredients together and marinate chicken for three to five hours. If you marinate the meat in a plastic bag, you can turn the bag over several times to get all of it well coated. Grill over medium heat until done. Don’t overcook!

To get two meals out of one, grill an extra chicken breast and serve sliced over a salad the next day.

Crock pots became the rage in the 70’s. I received one for college graduation, and it was always on the kitchen counter in my first apartment. And with today’s busy woman, they’ve certainly made a comeback. You can find them in all sizes, from the baby “crockette” to the super size.

My problem is that so many crock pot recipes are too similar to each other. I’ve had crock pot cookbooks with about 100 recipes for pot roast, each one differing by one or two ingredients. So, lets share some great recipes. I use mine for chili often, fondue sometimes and barbecue all the time. (See an earlier post on crock pot barbecue.) I also make the perennial
Campbell’s Glorified Chicken. If you’ve never used your crock pot for this one, it’s super easy and kid friendly.

Campbell’s Glorified Chicken

Chicken pieces ( I use breasts, legs and thighs)

1 can of
Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup

1 can of
Campbell’s Cream of Celery Soup

Garlic powder to taste

Salt and pepper to taste

Place the chicken pieces in the bottom on the crock pot. Cover with the soups, add garlic, salt and pepper. Cook on low until done, about six hours. This makes an incredible gravy.

But I need some more crock pot recipes! Care to share?

Banana pudding may just be the ultimate Southern dessert. At my parents’ home, my mother would never have dreamed of using instant pudding for her banana pudding. It was homemade. I, on the other hand, make banana pudding all the time, and I always use instant pudding. It’s still delicious.

If you want to give the from scratch kind a try, here’s an easy recipe.

Banana Pudding

1/2 cup sugar

3 tbsp flour

4 eggs, 3 of them separated

2 cups whole milk

½ tsp pure vanilla extract

Nabisco vanilla wafers

Five to six ripe bananas, sliced

Combine ½ cup of sugar and the flour in the top of a double boiler. Mix in 1 whole egg and 3 egg yolks. Stir in the milk. Cook over boiling water, stirring constantly, until thick. Remove from heat. Add vanilla. Let cool.

Cover bottom of a dish with a layer of vanilla wafers. Spread about 1/3 of the pudding over the wafers. Top with a layer of sliced bananas. Repeat layers, ending with the pudding. Top with whipped cream.

We never had tuna casserole when I was growing up, although apparently everybody else. We did eat chicken casserole a lot, always with wide egg noodles. As far as I knew, there were three kinds of pasta: spaghetti, macaroni and egg noodles. My mother often made chicken with cream of mushroom soup. I still make that today, only mine goes in the crock pot. It’s one of my son’s favorite dishes.

But my mother’s chicken salad, in my eyes, will always be a golden oldie. Chicken salad is huge in the South, and used to be served at every ladies function. There’s no real recipe for my mom’s chicken salad. All you really do is poach chicken breasts (never use dark meat in chicken salad), shred it and add mayonnaise, chopped celery and onions and salt and pepper to taste. I’ve updated it a bit. I usually roast my chicken instead of poaching, and I often add curry powder to give it a big of a zing. Give it a try. It’s great! A classic southern dish is fresh tomatoes stuffed with homemade chicken salad.

Sometimes you just crave that comfort food from your childhood. There are those few dishes that take us right back to a moment in those long and golden days of growing up. Just like when you hear a song that was popular during your teen years, a special dish will make you remember exactly what you were doing the first time you had it.

Just because we lived in the back of beyond didn’t mean we forgot to party. There was entertainment aplenty among the ladies. And party food meant appetizers. Wow!

The ultimate in sophistication in my tiny hometown was Lipton California Dip with “ruffled” potato chips. So delicious! And even though you can now buy it already made, the store bought version doesn’t come close to the one my mother put together with sour cream and an envelope of that mix. Can’t you just smell it? Bring it out again at your next party; it’s simple to throw together and always good.

Chex mix was another favorite party appetizer, except we didn’t call it that. My father’s maiden cousin gave us a batch every Christmas, and she called it “nuts and bolts.” I guess that was because it kind of looked like, well, nuts and bolts. She made it very spicy and very salty and we ate it by the handfuls.

My mother made a cheese roll that I still crave today. She had some kind of hand grinder that she attached to the kitchen counter. She threw it cheddar cheese, nuts and I’m not sure what else, ground it all together and then rolled the whole thing in chili powder. It was a big hit in the Christmas baskets she put together for friends.

Those are really the only three appetizers I can remember from my childhood. Surely we had more! How about you? What special appetizers were part of your growing up?

Tomatoes are a staple in the Southern diet. When I was growing up in rural Alabama, we had a tomato sandwich every single night for supper during the summer months. (”Dinner” was always at lunch time.)  Our tomatoes were fresh from the garden, instead of the hard, picked green ones you find at the grcoery store today. My Daddy had a huge garden every summer, and all our vegetables came from it. Even today, a tomato sandwich made with white bread and mayonnaise takes me back to those hot Southern nights when we sat on the front porch trying to get a breath of cool air.

I still love tomatoes and rejoice when I get a good one! Try this easy pasta dish if you can find some delicious tomatoes. But there’s a warning: it won’t be nearly as good if you only have the standard supermarket ones. How about the Farmer’s Market?

Pasta with Fresh Tomato Sauce

4 large tomatoes, chopped

5 tbsp chopped fresh basil

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

sliced black olives, as many as you want

1/2 to 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese

pasta, any type

Combine chopped tomatoes, basil, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. Cook pasta and drain. Top with tomato mixture, black olives and cheese. Enjoy the taste of summer!

Friday I posted about marinating chicken breasts and freezing them to grill later. It’s great to fill up your freezer with these and pull them out on a busy day. Here’s another easy marinade for chicken breasts. It has a sort of southwestern/tex-mex taste to it.

Chicken Marinade

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 small onion, finely chopped

1/3 cup fresh cilantro

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

1½ tsp paprika

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp chopped parsley

½ tsp salt

½ tsp black pepper

½ tsp crushed red pepper

Combine all the ingredients and coat your chicken. As Rachael Ray would say, YUM-O!

If you really want to spice up your chicken, increase the amount of crushed red pepper.

I should also say Kroger makes a great dry seasoning package you can mix with oil and vinegar to make a fantastic southwestern marinade. You can find it with their other dry mixes and gravies. It’s spicy and delicious!

At my Costco, you can buy chicken breasts already marinated and ready to slap on the grill. This is certainly convenient, but you also pay a premium for this service. It’s really easy to do this yourself. You can place the chicken breasts in a gallon freezer bag, add marinade and squish the bag a little to coat all the chicken and then pop in the freezer.

You can use bottled marinade or you can make it yourself. Here’s an easy Italian one to try.

Italian Marinade

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

¼ cup red wine vinegar

1 cup of chopped onion

6 garlic cloves, chopped (use the refrigerated kind that comes in a jar)

1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary

1 tbsp soy sauce

2 tsp pepper

A dash of salt

Combine all the ingredients and marinate your chicken. Good also on steak! Freeze the marinated meat, and it’s ready to grill when you are!

Don’t you sometimes feel as though food is running out of your ears, yet every time you turn around, you’re at the grocery store? With grocery prices so high, we probably all need to spend a little more time eating what we already have.

Every few months I do a Kitchen Sweep. That means I won’t buy any groceries, except for milk, juice and bread, until we pretty much eat everything in the pantry, frig and freezer.

Sounds good? My family absolutely hates this! I mean, they really hate it, particularly my teenage son. They don’t even like my weekly (usually) clean-out-the-refrigerator/just think-of-it-as-a-buffet night. 

Still, I persist. I always say we could eat for three months with what’s in the house. It just might not be everybody’s favorite every night. When we do the Kitchen Sweep, we certainly do eat some odd combinations. And, through the years, the kids have taken some unusual lunches to school. I’m sure they’ve opened that paper sack and complained loudly about their mother. But the Kitchen Sweep gets the job done.

Any war stories out there?