Easiest Keto snack of all time

 Cheese "chips"

Well, OK, maybe not as easy as opening a bag of nuts. And only suitable for people who can eat dairy. This can help satisfy the craving for potato chips or other salty carbs snacks. 

1) Grate cheese

2) Fill a baking sheet with parchment paper, then spread cheese evenly. (I use an Epicure silicone pan liner: Worth. Every. Penny.) Note: some recipes say to make little piles of shredded cheese, but I find this too time-consuming. 

3) OPTIONAL: Sprinkle seeds, herbs, spices, or ground flax over top

4) Bake till cheese is brown and crispy (350 F is hot enough, but you can go as high as 400 F; just watch to make sure cheese doesn't burn)

5) Cool and cut apart. 

PS You can freeze these, but they will lose their crispiness. However, chewy is fine too. 

Removed from pan.

Cheese was cut in strips before baking.

Ready for freezing

The larger size makes them great for dipping and scooping (guacamole)

Left: a chip made from a tiny pile of shredded cheese;
Right: a chip cut from a strip of cheese.

Another great low-carb lunch...or breakfast

"What do you eat for breakfast?" a friend asked the other day. I couldn't lie. The answer was, "Coffee and Facebook." Sometimes I'm not hungry in the morning, and sometimes I'm too lazy or befuddled to make something, because I just don't know what to make. Carbs were my breakfast go-to, and now I'm off breads for the time being. So no more English muffins, toast, bagels, waffles, wraps, pancakes, hot (or cold) cereal.

My recent post about the Cheese-crusted Quiche was one solution, but that's not the sort of thing one tends to whip up on a weekday (however, you can save portions and reheat them, which I plan to do at some point with that recipe).

The other day I built myself a cabbage-leaf wrap for lunch. I didn't take any step-by-step pictures (y'all are smart enough to imagine this on your own). Besides, this is not a recipe so much as an idea. You can put virtually anything you like inside.

I removed, washed and trimmed the stem area from a couple of large outer cabbage leaves and laid them on a dinner plate. I lined the leaves with cheddar cheese slices and nuked it all for 1 minute in the microwave. This softened up the cabbage a bit and melted the cheese. Then I added two large slices of turkey breast deli meat, half an avocado (sliced), some alfalfa sprouts, and garnished it with some salsa.

It was really good. So good, I almost don't miss eating actual flour wraps.
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I am not on the Keto diet

But since I'm going low carb for the time being, I've been googling Keto recipes, and found this Cheese Crusted Keto Quiche last Saturday morning. I wanted something really delicious and satisfying. What ho! It was incredibly delicious and satisfying. I tweaked the recipe a little bit (of course) because I had no ham, but it turned out really well.

Hello from the amusement park!

Last post (oh so long ago-sorry!), I said my life was like a movie. Not really. It's been more like this:

I love this classic photo, which has inspired countless internet memes. It's all the more funny to me because the terrified kid reminds me of one of my daughters (when she was little), and the girl holding her hand reminds me of my niece, who is close to the same age as said daughter.

Every time there's a chronological gap in my blogging, I allude vaguely to how challenging life has been, and I more or less hint that I may explain myself in time, but somehow I never do.

Can cheesecake go bad?

I can't even believe I'm asking that question. I bought this the first week of February in honour of our granddaughter's birthday, and since there are only now four people living in my house and none of them are toddlers (it's SO quiet!) and we've been taking turns being sick with phlegmy coughs, stomach issues and so forth... that here we are, a WEEK LATER, and there are still some slices in the fridge. And, as Miss P#5 lugubriously lamented when she was four, "It'th Lent." So should I keep it till Sunday, or should I freeze it? 
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Never mind the pancakes

Or the Shrove* (got shriven two days ago, so I'm actually ahead of the game for once). Today was Vodka Tuesday at my house. I was going to post a photo of my empty vodka bottle (really, there was only one ounce left) but as soon as it was empty, my tidy hubby (God bless him) whisked it away to the recycling bag and it's already been carted away. But it was this brand.

I'm really not much of a drinker, but I do like my occasional glass of red wine, and the less occasional mixed drink (vodka with something fruity or spiced rum with cola, mainly). So it's a natural thing to give up for Lent. Funny--last year Lent felt so long. How long? This long: I was using mouthwash one evening at bed time towards the end of Lent, and --oh dear-- I was actually tempted to swallow. (I didn't.)

* Given the whole Shrove Tuesday thing, I wonder how many people think that word means "pancake." It doesn't; it's a verb. Found that out in Shakespeare class, reading Romeo and Juliet. So I'd like to think that B.A. degree wasn't a total waste of time and money.
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It didn't bubble, and it didn't squeak

And it was just about the most awful-looking thing I've ever cooked. Bubble and Squeak is a traditional British dish that you can make to use up leftovers. Its principle ingredients are potatoes and cabbage, and this is what it's supposed to look like:

I think my downfall was using purple (red) cabbage. Which is quite lovely when eaten raw in a cole slaw or salad. But cooking, not so much.

Not even a "golden" filter helped:

Oddly enough, it was delicious. But I'm never cooking red cabbage again.
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Facebook is good for something

I "like" a page on FB called Hillbilly Cast Iron Cooking (I also love cast iron), and that is where I got the idea to make chicken pot pie in my cast iron frying pan. (I am so obtuse, it has never occurred to me in my whole life to bake something in my frying pan.) But does it ever work well! I fried up the chicken pieces (you can't say "sautéed" in relation to cast iron; it's too snooty) and onion in the pan while I steamed cubed carrots and potatoes in another pot. I made the gravy in the frying pan, right over top the chicken and onion, dumped in the potatoes and carrots, and threw in a cup of frozen peas. Then I topped it with a purchased pie crust--because I was lazy, and it was music lesson day, thus, I got home late. (They were on clearance sale at the grocery store, which was a bonus.)

I baked it for about 30 min at 375 F, just until the crust browned. My husband loves pie, so of course he was pleased with the meal. And this is funny: I felt a bit guilty about making it a single (top-only) crust pie, since he loves the pie crust. But since you had to scoop it out of the pan with a spoon, it showed up on the plate as a big pile of chicken stew with broken pastry on top. And he actually didn't notice that there was no bottom crust. 

It was very tasty and a fast way to make savoury pie. Thanks, Facebook Hillbillies!

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Drunken Garlic Pot Roast...a No Fail Hit

There's not much here to indicate scale, but the pan above is a large turkey roaster, and those are three four-pound beef blade roasts, immersed in beef stock and beer. Why was I cooking 12 pounds of beef, you may ask? Because a family member on Mr. P's side was celebrating a milestone wedding anniversary, and it was a potluck, and I was asked to bring a meat dish. And this one is great. I've made it three or four times since last summer, and it's always a hit.

The original recipe is here at Genius Kitchen, so I will not need to repeat it. However, I will tell you that I have never followed this recipe to the letter (sorry!). The reason is that I've always made it in large quantities for large crowds, and the original recipe calls for something like 2.5 pounds of beef. Which is not so very remarkable but the 24 cloves of garlic is. You read that correctly.

So, say you wanted to triple the recipe, which I did the first time I made it. I didn't have 72 cloves of garlic on hand, and if I had, I wouldn't have wanted to peel them. But I did have 40, so that's what I used. And it turned out great. I think we did 60 cloves in the above recipe, and those were all hand-peeled too (thanks, Celeste and Adam!). Next time I make a recipe this large, I'll probably use the minced garlic in a jar--although there will always be purists who say it just isn't the same. I know it isn't the same; it can never be the same as fresh. But it takes a long time to peel 60 or more cloves of garlic.

Oh, and I usually brown AND cook my roasts in my 7-quart cast iron pot. (I loooooooove cast iron--our great-grannies knew their stuff! I'm happy to see it regaining popularity year by year.) But as large as my pot is, it would not accommodate 12lb of beef, so I seared each roast in the CI pot, and slow-cooked them in the turkey roaster. This recipe (Genius Kitchen) is for a slow cooker, but I have always cooked mine in the oven at 325 degrees F, and they are usually done in a couple of hours.

The fun part about this recipe is that the taste changes every time, depending on what type of beer or ale you use. So far, I've used everything from non-alcoholic types, to Molson Canadian and Budweiser, to these:

I like that the liquor store sells many of these imported beers by the can, so that if a brew is not to your taste, you don't have a whole case on your hands. I'm looking forward to trying this recipe with Guinness. Bon Appétit!
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It's not every day that the word "Lust" is printed on my birthday presents

But then, it's not every day that my birthday presents are in German. I had to do a double take when I saw this label. 

But fear not, it has an innocent meaning (though I'm sure that some of the eloquence must be lost in translation):

And when we're talking Römertopf  (Deutsch for “Roman pot”), "delight" is surely the operative word! I received a lovely 6 qt clay roaster for my birthday. It happened one or two years ago, but I'm only getting round to blogging about it now. (Procrastination is an ongoing issue; I'll deal with it someday.)

Contrary to what many might assume (that I received it from my daughter who speaks German and spent time working in Germany), it was given to me by my sister, Mrs. Doris Rose Jones, and she bought it in Saskatoon. But it was made in Germany, as all genuine Römertopf  products are. 

A friend once told me that she didn't collect things like this because she was not a gourmet, and to that I must respond by saying I DO collect things like this for exactly the same reason. 

I don't love Römertopf (or clay bakers in general) because I am a gourmet, but because such cookery is absolutely, positively idiot-proof​, and thus entirely suited to my culinary skill level. I quote from the (1970s era, thus the goofy title) Romertopf Cooking is Fun (why did everything have to be fun back then? I guess it was better than everything being an unconscious-bias microagression) cookbook my SIL gave me:

"Overdone" and "burnt" are words which are competely unknown in the Romertopf kitchen. Once a dish is in the oven nothing can go wrong. (bolds mine)

What's not to love about that? Especially for cooks like me, who can vanquish even the simplest "No Fail" recipes. 

The baker is made of (mostly) unglazed and porous clay; you soak it in water for 15 minutes before patting it dry and putting the food in. The moisture given off during cooking prevents the food from drying out. Thus the clay baker is not so much a vessel as a process; it really can't be compared to glass or metal (even cast iron, which would probably give similar results, given the heaviness of the lid). Clay bakery produces the most succulent roast chicken and beef/bison/pork roasts we've ever eaten. Plus the heavy clay keeps the food warm for much longer than most other roasters (and if you like 'rustic', it's pretty enough to go straight to the table.) 

Fresh herbs make every chef appear Pinterest-worthy!

Das ist mir Wurst!

Translation: "That is my sausage/It's all sausage to me/I don't care"
(it's apparently an idiom, not just a declarative sentence.)
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The world can end now (the Rhubarb Files)

Because I finally found a rhubarb cookie recipe that I like.

Rhubarb and I go way back. (It probably began because Auntie Anselma, God rest her soul, did not put enough sugar in her rhubarb pie. For that matter, neither did Mom, but she used more than Aunt Anselma).

I have never, ever understood rhubarb. I think it is one of the mysteries of the food universe, like tofu. I'm not alone: even the Wizard of Id made regular fun of rhubarb.

Retro Cookie Charm

Yes, by golly, it's the vintage Tupperware cookie cutters! Did you have these as a child? (In other words, did your mom or grandmother?) Our mom did, and my sisters and I grew up baking with them. So much fun (but I never understood the pig. Why a pig? What holiday has a pig for an emblem? I found only National Pig Day, but that's a bit of a stretch, especially since the holiday only seems to date from 1972! Something to do with Ireland was the best I could come up with, but there is clearly no shamrock associated with the Tupperware piggy.)

Many twenty years ago or so, I was at a garage sale, and I found two of them: the Santa and the gingerbread boy. I was so excited, I bought them right away. But the entire set eluded me (eBay, of course, was not invented back then) Then last year (Christmas 2015), I received this set from the Beazly household. As I vaguely recall, I squealed in a most unladylike fashion when I opened the box and saw them all there. 

"If You Have Cake Troubles"

And by golly, who doesn't?! My main Cake Trouble is that I eat too much of it, but that is a story for another day. This post is about cookbooks. Or rather, one cookbook in my collection. 

If there is anything more wonderful than a vintage cookbook, it's a vintage Church-Lady cookbook. This one is from the 70s, from the Bethel Christian (Dutch) Reformed Church in Saskatoon.

I ask you, what chance does a girl have?

Especially an old girl like me, who scarcely ever has the willpower to exercise. I'm trying to lose weight, because a cardiologist told me to, and with good reason, because I am shaped like an apple, not an hourglass. But really, one of my daughters is an aspiring pastry chef, and she gets it into her head any old day of the week to make things like eclairs, cream puffs and (above) chocolate trifle. Not for any special occasion, but just because she feels like it. Which is really lovely, and really delicious, but also really calorific. And there are only five of us at home now (where once there were nine), so the temptation lasts for days and days. Self-control was never so difficult! 

My garden (again, with the tomatoes!)

Since my yard is currently all-over mud and snow and slush and dead stuff, I decided to go back a few months and relive the sunny warm weather and reminisce about my vegetable garden. The comboxes have been filled with queries about "where I grew all those tomatoes," and so I'm going to answer Daria in a new blog post. 

This is where I grew them. We live in a very small town (population like 70-something), in a fairly large yard (it's a triple lot: the house sits on two lots, and the garden occupies the third lot, east of our house. The dwelling you see in the background is my neighbour across the back alley.)

This was my garden in early July, before things got out of hand. 

Left to Right: 2 rows potatoes, 1 row onions, 2 rows peas, 2 rows beans (one bush bean, one pole bean--they are beside the wrought-iron rail), 1 row carrots. The tomato plants are on the far right. Though you can't see it, they are, at this point, confined to their cages (which were meant to 'support' the plants, a quaint notion to which, if tomato plants could talk, they would have responded, "Bwahahahaha").  

A few weeks later: the peas are finished (hence the empty patch), and the pole beans have swallowed the railing. To the right, the tomatoes are starting to rebel and take over the east side of the garden. (There is a cucumber plant lying low to the left of the tomatoes, but eventually it disappeared.)

Can you spot the tomato cages? Neither can I. The plants became monstrous. They rose up out of the soil, crushed and swallowed the cages, and then proceeded to spread across the garden. Imagine putting a corset of pipe cleaners on a baby boa constrictor, and hoping it would confine him in some way. That was the story of my tomato cages. 

What began as two neat rows of 15 plants became a tangled tomatoey jungle. 

Close-up evidence of a cage on my Roma tomatoes. The plants were so huge and bore so many tomatoes, that the formerly upright cage was wrenched and twisted, and left at a 45-degree angle by the plant. 

Although I'm happy we can grow so many vegetables, my true gardening enjoyment comes from the flowers. Here are a few snaps, with more to come another day.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Have you ever eaten them? And if so, what did you think? I speak mainly to my Canadian readers (mainly because I know that 4/6 of you are Canadian; there is one American and one Australian among you.) A few weeks ago, we decided to give this famous Southern dish a try. 

I must admit to being unimpressed. But I also must admit to having made a mistake and put TRIPLE the amount of salt into the recipe. It was a group-mistake: my daughter was helping mix the spices, and she grabbed the tablespoon instead of the teaspoon. But then I took the tablespoon from her and used it to measure the salt, without once looking down at it and thinking/saying, "Hey, this is a tablespoon!" (Dementia, anyone?)

So yeah, they were too salty. But even if they hadn't been, I can't say that I liked the tanginess of the green tomato inside the batter. But I am willing to give them another try, perhaps with another recipe (we just grabbed a random recipe online).
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Busy in the kitchen

Yeah, as if my week hasn't been busy enough... I made potato buns yesterday (I CANNOT throw out the water when I boil potatoes. It makes the most delicious soft buns you can possibly imagine). I had to make homemade buns, because they need to be made into sandwiches for a road trip, with the turkey I roasted earlier this week. (I had to cook a turkey, because we're going to be travelling on Thanksgiving Day.) 

My potato bun recipe is loosely based on Jean Pare's
"Awesome Potato Rolls" in her Company's Coming "Breads" cookbook


If I receive a significant number of requests in the comment section (1 or more),
I will happily post the recipe. 

I have the First Edition;
it's quite beat-up, as a favourite cookbook should be. 

Second Edition, Available at Amazon 

Yesterday, I also made Salsa Cruda (raw salsa). I suppose I could post this on a Raw Organic Vegan Gluten-free website, because the salsa is pretty much all of the above. But then again, I could not, because there is no recipe. It was one of those "Enough for Your Family" recipes, where you make it up as you go along. I can tell you that it contained chopped tomatoes, red onion, green pepper, red pepper, avocado, cilantro, two crushed garlic cloves, lemon juice, red pepper flakes, cumin, salt, chili powder, and black pepper. But not the amounts, sorry. It tasted ok, but I thought something was missing. Not sure what. I'll keep experimenting. The kids liked it though, and it certainly was healthy enough. So there's that.