Pizza Night

My 9 year old daughter informed me that she was making pizza for all of us for dinner tonight.    We would each have a personal pizza.   I ordered a veggie pizza.

My wife took our daughter grocery shopping for the ingredients.   They bought pizza dough, Ragu pizza sauce, a 5 cheese mix for the topping, olives, bell pepper, onion, and mushrooms.

Even though we don't have a pizza stone, the pizza did turn out well.   My daughter did a great job spreading the dough and making the pizzas.    Pizza fresh and hot right out of the oven is always delicious.   I was surprised at how much I liked the Ragu pizza sauce.   My daughter also made me a salad to go with the pizza.

On a more serious note, I have recently discovered that my blood pressure is creeping up, and although I have been making pretty healthy dinners (for the most part), I need to start watching the sodium more closely and lose some weight.   Pizza was not a good start to watching sodium as each personal pizza had over 900mg of sodium.   The recommended daily intake according to the American Heart Association is 1500mg per day, which I find to be a very challenging limit.

In order to lose some weight over the next few months, I will be trying to keep my daily caloric intake to under 2,000 calories, higher if I start exercising regularly.   I have been tracking my food, calories, and nutrients on my iPhone using an app from MyNetDiary off and on for a few months now and I have found that the 2,000 calorie limit is reasonable if I watch what I am eating and don't eat out for lunch (that means taking left overs for lunch).

A few months ago I started making extra quantities of my healthy dinners and freezing them for lunches.   This worked out great, but I got out of the habit of doing this.    I have noticed in the past then when I don't eat out for lunch and bring my lunch to work, I start to lose a little weight.

Chicken with Creamy Herb Sauce

I tried a new recipe tonight, Chicken with Creamy Herb Sauce.    I found this recipe on myrecipes.com.    It was rated as a 5 star recipe, but when I looked more closely, I saw that only one person had reviewed the recipe.   The numbers of stars don't mean much if there are not many reviewers. 

I decided to go ahead with the recipe anyway since it looked like it could be good and it three of my favorite ingredients are in the title:  Chicken, Fresh Herbs, and Creamy Sauce.   The sauce is basically buttermilk and mayonnaise with fresh herbs and roasted garlic.   The best part of the sauce was the roasted garlic and fresh herbs.    The buttermilk made the sauce taste a little like ranch dressing.   It was interesting, but I probably won't repeat this recipe.   The chicken was just ok. 

I also made fettuccine and steamed broccoli and served the chicken and broccoli over the fettuccine with the sauce over the top.   The concept was good, the flavors not quite right.   The left overs are supposed to be dinner tomorrow (Friday) night.

Spicy Thai Coconut Chicken Soup

In one week, I will have recorded two months of meals I have made for my family.   After I hit the one month mark, I realized that it would not be too difficult to go two months without repeating the same meal over the two month period.   Now, I am shooting for three months.   My goal is to use a unique recipe every time I cook, over a three month period starting from when I started this blog.

So, far I have cooked 32 meals and we have either gone out to dinner or ordered take out 3 times.   Since I generally cook 4 dinners per week, in 3 months, on May 16, I will have made 53 meals (assuming we do not go out to dinner on a night I would normally cook).    Even if we do go out once or twice, it will still be over 50 different main dishes.

In order to meet this goal, I am going to have to try several new recipes.   Tonight was a new recipe and it turned out great, although it did not make enough for left overs for tomorrow night.

Tonight I made Spicy Thai Coconut Chicken Soup.   This is a Cooking Light recipe from myrecipes.com and it is very easy to make.   Chop up some bell pepper and mushrooms, mince some garlic and fresh ginger, stir fry, throw in coconut milk, chili paste, fish sauce, and chicken broth and simmer for a bit.   Then throw in some roasted chicken breast and then put green onion and chopped fresh cilantro on top.   Squeeze a couple of limes and put the juice in.   That's it.   It is super good. 

The recipe is supposed to make 4 servings, but each serving is only 1 and 1/3 cup.   My wife and I had close to 2 cups each for dinner along with some fresh spring rolls I picked up from Thai Orchid in Campbell, California.   So, like I said earlier, there was not enough for leftovers for dinner tomorrow night.   I might cook something else tomorrow night or it might be an "on your own" night. 

I was going to make the spring rolls myself, but Whole Foods in Campbell did not have any rice paper for the rolls.   The rools look like they might be pretty easy to make.   If they turned out looking anything like the spring rolls from Thai Orchid, they would be impressive.   Spring Rolls are definitely going on my "learn how to make" list.   The peanut sauce from Thai Orchid was also really good.   Peanut sauce makes these rolls great, so if I decide to make the rolls at some point, I will also need to make the peanut sauce!

Carolina Pulled Pork Barbeque

Today was my second attempt at making Carolina Pulled Pork Barbeque.   My mother-in-law is from Gastonia, North Carolina and she makes this dish sometimes when we are visiting and my wife and I both love it.   Its the best pulled pork barbeque we have ever had.

Last time we were visiting my wife's family, my mother-in-law gave me the recipe.   I tried making it in January but it was a poor imitation of my mother-in-law's barbeque, and I have been wanting make a second attempt at this.  

Now, it is often the case that when I get recipes from people who have been making something for a long time, the recipe they give me isn't exactly what they do.   Sometimes it is because the recipe was written years ago and after making the dish from memory for years, the recipe naturally evolves but the written recipe is never updated.   Then, when I ask for the recipe, the old written recipe is pulled from a yellowed card stuffed into a decades-old cookbook.

Over the past couple of days, I scoured myrecipes.com for pulled pork barbeque recipes.    Most of these are recipes contributed by visitors to the website.  I probably looked at over 50 pulled pork recipes and there were another 50 or so that I didn't get to.   Most of these used an off-the-shelf barbeque sauce or such a simple version of the sauce that I could tell there was no way the sauce would turn out to be anything like the Carolina BBQ my mother-in-law makes.

There were 4 or 5 recipes which looked promising.   I put the ingredients for each recipe into a spreadsheet along with my mother-in-law's recipe and compared the various recipes.   I came up with a variation of my mother-in-law's recipe which I felt would be a closer match to the taste I was trying to achieve.   The changes I made were primarily in the area of increasing the amount of water, decreasing the amount of dry mustard, adding dijon mustard, garlic powder, onion powder, and cumin.   I thought it would be good to reduce the amount of vinegar, but I wasn't sure, so I left it at one cup of apple cider vinegar.   (the last time I made it, I used 1 cup of white vinegar and the pork was waaaaay to vinegary). 

Instead of using my mother-in-law's method of cooking the pork in the oven, I cooked the pork slowly in the sauce for 4 or 5 hours in a crock pot.

It turned out great.   My wife and I both loved it.   I would say it was still not quite as good as my mother-in-law's Pulled Pork BBQ, but it was pretty good.   The pork still had a little more of a vinegar taste than I would like, so next time I will use a little less vinegar.

My daughter actually prefers the barbeque from a very good local restaurant called Blue Rock BBQ.    So, I stopped by there in the afternoon and picked up a little Blue Rock for her.    I prefer the homemade barbeque we had tonight over Blue Rock, although,  my wife and I did use Blue Rock BBQ sauce on our pulled pork when we made our sandwiches.  

Blackened Halibut Baja Tacos

I love fish tacos and Cooking Light has several great fish taco recipes.   Saturday night is the night I usually try a new recipe and tonight I made Blackened Halibut Baja Tacos based on Cooking Light's Blackened Tilapia Baja Taco recipe on myrecipes.com.    I don't really like to use tilapia because its almost always farm raised and I try to avoid farm raised fish.    Fresh halibut season just started and the fresh, wild caught halibut was wonderful.   This was my favorite meal since the Putanesca I made about a week and a half ago. 

The spice rub on the fish consists of cumin, paprika, garlic powder, salt, brown sugar, red pepper and oregano.  I will have to go back and compare this to the pork tenderloin spice rub I use which is very similar in the ingredients used but a much different flavor.     We finished every bite of fish. 

The jalapeno sauce for these tacos is made of fresh cilantro (hard to go wrong when something starts with fresh cilantro), sour cream, lime juice and jalapeno.    The sauce was so good, that during dinner I was really wishing I had made extra sauce to pour over my taco.

My wife really liked this dinner as well, so this is definitely something I will make again in the future.  

Grilled Chicken with Cucumber Melon Salsa

It was a beautiful spring day in San Jose today.   We started the day off with a little rain.   After the rain, the warm, slightly humid air smelled wonderful.    I decided to grill outside since the weather was so nice and made one of my favorite Cooking Light recipes-  Grilled Chicken with Cucumber Melon Salsa.  

This is one of the first Cooking Light recipes I ever made and I was really surprised by how good this dish was the first time I tried it.   This recipe is all about the salsa.   Its a combination of fresh herbs, spicy jalapeno, and fruit.   Its a combination I had never tried before I made this recipe and such a delight when you try this for the very first time.   Cooking Light uses this spicy pepper, fruit, fresh herb idea in many different salsa recipes.  

Dinner turned out great.   Again, I used my new grilling method of stacking the charcoal around the outer edges of the grill it worked great.   We have plenty left for left overs tomorrow night.

Moroccan-Style Beef with Chickpeas

A few minutes before I needed to leave work to go to the grocery store, I logged onto myrecipes.com to get some ideas for dinner.   I was hungry and immediately decided to make the Cooking Light recipe featured on the myrecipes.com home page today.    The recipe is Morrocan-Style Lamb with Chickpeas.   My wife does not like the ground lamb called for in the recipe, and I was in the mood for something chunkier, so I substituted chopped sirloin steak for the ground lamb.

Overall the flavors were good and my wife really liked this dish.   I served the dish over the couscous with arugula as suggested in the Cooking Light recipe.   Overall, I was a bit disappointed.  The flavors are very similar to some other "Cooking Light" recipes which I like a little better.   Maybe, the cinnamon and nutmeg were just not that appealing to me this evening.   It was good, just not great.   I will probably not eat the left overs tomorrow night.