Four Salads

Do you get hungry for salad in the spring?  I do!  I think our bodies want the fresh green lettuce and veggies as part the clearing out process after winter.  That’s my theory, anyway.  But, I know that the fresh fruits and veggies taste extra good in the spring time, especially when you have homegrown lettuce! :-)
Here are four salads that I especially like.  Three are very simple.  If you sometimes forget or struggle to eat fresh fruit, three of these salads might be some help to you.
Blueberry-Melon Salad
This is a summer salad and probably my favorite.  I love the colors and the fresh berries!

As you can see, it only has three ingredients – leafy green lettuce, blueberries and cantaloupe.  I usually serve it with a sweet-sour dressing, honey-lemon is the best.  (I will try to share some dressing recipes later.)
Festive Banana Melon Salad

This salad is quite pretty.  It isn’t much different from the one above.  It has bananas instead of blueberries, and a maraschino cherry is put on top to decorate it.  This, of course, is optional.  (It’s hard to find maraschino cherries here that don’t have high fructose corn syrup in them.)  I serve this with similar dressings as I do the blueberry one.
Another variation of this is to leave out the bananas and add plain cooked chicken breast.  This then becomes a “main dish” salad.

This was an interesting one, but it was actually quite good.  As you can see I sprinkled some toasted sesame over the top of the sweet-sour dressing.  This would be so refreshing on a late winter day, I think! :-)
Chef Salad

This is one to two servings.

This salad is the not-so-easy one.  But, it is almost an entire meal.  All you need to add is some carbohydrate of some sort – bread, chips, biscuits, etc.  How about croutons?
When I make this I layer it.  Lettuce on the bottom.  Next some mixed veggies – cucumbers, carrots, etc.  Then the “julienned” ham slices and the grated cheese.  On that I sprinkled some black pepper.  The tomatoes (cherry or wedges of a larger one) and quartered boiled eggs look decorative around the edges.  Black olives rings would make a nice addition to the top as well.  If you don’t eat ham, try turkey or roast beef deli meat.  It’s good served with a savory dressing – Ranch, bleu cheese, Russian, Italian, Thousand Island, etc.
By the way, with attention to the ingredients these can all be made gluten free.  :-)  Just use a safe dressing and adjust some things in the Chef Salad.

Cooked Oatmeal Cake

[After I’d created this post I looked at the calendar and discovered that today is National Cereal Day.  How appropriate is that?! :-) ]
I hate wasting leftovers.  I always feel like I’m throwing away money!  Here’s a great way to use leftover cooked oatmeal.  If you don’t usually have leftovers and would like to make this cake, then make some extra next time! :-)

Cooked Oatmeal Cake

1 1/2 C. cooked oatmeal
1 C. brown sugar
2 eggs
1 stick butter (1/2 C.)
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon (optional)
1 1/3 C. flour
Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and beat.  Mix in oatmeal.  Add and mix in soda, cinnamon and flour.  Pour into a greased 9x13 cake pan.  Bake at 350F for 35-40 minutes.
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Mom and I made this together recently with some leftover oatmeal that my husband had cooked.  He’d put in dried cherries, so we reduced to the sugar (to the amount given above) and it came out really well.  We also omitted the cinnamon and put some almond flavoring in instead.  Then at the last minute we added chocolate chips!  It was really good, and not too sweet.  We substituted white whole wheat for part of the flour as well, but I don’t remember the proportions we used.
Anyway, this is a quick and easy cake, a nice way to eat leftover oatmeal, and quite versatile!  Use it for breakfast, for coffee cake, for dessert, tea, lunches, or just for a healthier sweet snack.  Try your own variations too.  As you can see in the picture, the batch I’d made there had raisins or cranberries in the oatmeal.

From My Kitchen Window – Snow from Last Year

Last winter we had some snow here in February.  It lasted more than a day which is very unusual here.  I managed to take some pictures of it from my kitchen window.  I just thought I’d share some with you. :-)

I love to watch snow fall when there is not strong wind with it.  It is so peaceful and restful.  But, I don’t enjoy dealing with slippery roads and long winters, so I’m just as glad to live where we don’t get much. :-)

Here is some of the accumulation on the ground.  Just the right amount. :-)

This picture was obviously not taken out the kitchen window. 

Snow is so beautiful!  Have you ever looked at it close up?  Next time it snows a fine snow where you live take a magnifying glass and dark piece of fabric (a coat, a blanket, a towel, etc.) outside.  (Note, don’t take something from the warmest part of the house or it will take a few minutes for it to cool off enough not to melt the flakes almost instantly.)  Lay the fabric out and allow it to collect some flakes, then look at them through the glass.  They are gorgeous even with out a magnifying glass.  I enjoy photographing them if I can. 

Job 38:22 Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail,

(Note: In the context of the passage this is taken from it seems to me that the treasures of the snow and hail are storehouse type treasures.  This is an interesting thought to me.  God uses gold for street paving and treasures (stores up) snow and hail.  We humans sure don’t think like He does!  Isaiah 55:8-9)

That snow “storm” in February 2010 was a good excuse to make hot chocolate at my parents’ house.  My sister-in-law has a dandy machine for this that works really well.  She brought it up and made some for those of us who were home at the time.  You just add milk, chocolate chips and maybe a bit of sweetening depending on how dark your chocolate is.  Turn it on and in a short time you have yummy hot chocolate.

She still had melted snowflakes in her hair when I took this. :-)

New Uses for Everyday Items

A teapot I used as a vase.

New Uses for Serving Pieces – Appropriate those little used serving pieces for other jobs.

101 Uses for Everyday Things – A number of these items are technically “kitchen” items.  Some of the uses I question, but some are really useful.

50 All-Time Favorite New Uses for Old Items – Some non-kitchen things again, but a lot of interesting ideas.  (Note: I don’t think the stores would appreciate people collecting paint chips [or cards] for the purpose of making place cards.  I’m just saying…)

New Uses for Things In the Dining Room – There’s a little repetition here, but some good ideas too.  As regarding using a quilt as a table cloth, I suggest covering it with a piece of clear heavy vinyl cut the size of a table cloth.  You should be able to find this by the yard at a fabric store or Wal-mart.

Random Meal – A lunch

Just for fun I thought I’d try to post an occasional meal “menu”. :o)

My lunch – Fried egg cooked with leftover chicken noodle stew (it was too thick to be soup ;-) ) made with whole grain pasta; baby carrots, and a slice of mozzarella with homemade orange marmalade on it.

My husband’s lunch – Cheese and home grown lettuce on whole grain bread, peanuts and raisins (or maybe it was dried cranberries), and a homemade granola bar.

What's for lunch at your house?

Snow Ice Cream

This seems like a really appropriate recipe to post right now due to the heavy amounts of snow around the U.S. The only drawback is that if you don’t have the ingredients on hand you probably won’t want to go out for them! :-)
What you will need:
Warm clothes
Mixing bowl
Serving bowls
Fresh, clean snow
A level surface for working outside
Ingredients:
1/2 C. half/half or whole milk
1/4 C. sugar
1/4 tsp. vanilla
4 C. clean snow
Here is the instructions as given on YouTube by Tawra Kellam of Living On A Dime.

Note: I took these photos of snow when we were living in Tennessee. The car was “decorated” by my brother, Dan. :-)
Note: One friend pointed out that our air is not necessarily clean (at least in most areas). So, wait till you've had several inches of snow before you collect and then try setting out a bowl as Tawra did and catching only the fresh stuff. Or, you could carefully scrape off just the very top of the snow. If your area has had a lot of snow recently you're probably safe anyway on the air pollutions. As Tawra mentioned, don't collect snow where chemicals have been used - such as yard and garden sprays, etc

Making Meals Pretty – The Food

It isn’t hard to make a meal look attractive, but sometimes it’s easy to forget if you don’t keep it in mind. My great-grandfather had no sense of taste, so to him the appeal of a meal was all visual. Consequently, if it didn’t look nice, he didn’t really enjoy it.

My mom and sister both took home economic courses that taught them to make food look attractive by using different color combinations. It isn’t really that hard to do most of the time. But, it does take a bit of thinking ahead, and I admit that my efforts are sometimes haphazard. Sometimes I think about what I have on hand or what sounds good, only to discover when I serve the meal that it’s very unappealing visually. Here are few examples and illustrations to show what I mean.

Here is a meal I made that is balanced, but not attractive. It is all brown, beige and white. Though some people think these are lovely colors because they are neutral, neutral colors are neutral because they don’t say anything! They are blah, or perhaps I should say mute.

This next meal, which I made on another occasion has two of the same components, but with a colorful vegetable mix and drink (grape juice), it makes a pretty picture.

Notice the difference in these next two pictures where a pan full of food is dressed up with a small addition of color. It is not particularly striking, yet it really does look better.

To both the pasta/herb mix and the zucchini was added a sprinkling of shredded cheese (maybe parmesan?), and to the zucchini was added just a few black olive halves and some bits of tomato. But, it looks so much tastier to me! :-) Of course, melted cheese has the tendency to make a lot of things look yummier by virtue of the anticipated taste, but its’ color can be useful as well.

Here are some items that will add color interest when added to various and sundry dishes:

Tomato
Black or green olives
Carrots – slices, shaved or shredded
Green leafy vegetables, including lettuce
Sour Cream (for a bright white)
Cheese – especially orange cheeses
Green herbs
Frozen peas (I recommend adding them at the last minute so they keep their color and fresher taste)
Chives
Various fruits
Colorful peppers of all kinds

Even some flowers are edible and can perk up a salad. Just be sure not to use anything that has been treated with a systemic poison or something that isn’t safe for consumption.

Of course, try to match up the flavor of the things you add for color with the food you are serving. Chunks of watermelon hardly belong in potato soup. :-)

Anyway, this is just to encourage you (and myself) to try to dress things up just a bit with some color. It will make your meals more appealing visually, which is good for the artistic part of us. (Yes, we all have an artistic side – we are created in the image of God and He is the ultimate artist and master of color!) It doesn’t take much. If nothing else, serve some sliced tomatoes, carrots or apples along with the meal.