Grilled Peaches

Now that peaches are in season this makes a great summer dessert that is quick, easy, affordable, and great to serve to guests.

Ingredients:

peaches
grapeseed oil
molasses
vanilla yogurt (for this I prefer the Wallaby brand vanilla)

Instructions:

1. Heat the grill so it's nice and hot
2. Rub the peaches with a little grapeseed oil
3. Place the peaches on the grill for a minute or two on both sides, until they start to get grill lines.
4. Remove peaches from the grill, drizzle with molasses, put a dob of yogurt on each peach half and serve

Note: You can also try this recipe with apricots.

Savory Roasted Sweet Potatoes

This  is our goto recipe when we are hungry for sweet potatoes.  Serves 4

Ingredients:

3 sweet potatoes

1 head of garlic

butter, 3 or 4 knobs 

grapeseed oil, a small glug

smoked paprika, to taste

cumin, to taste

salt, to taste

pepper, to taste

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees
2. Peel sweet potatoes and cut into 1” by 1” cubes
3. Crush garlic and take it out of it's skin
4. Put sweet potatoes and garlic into a mixing bowl and toss with a small glug of grapseed oil, smoked paprika, cumin, salt, and pepper
5. Put sweet potato and garlic mixture onto a baking dish with a few good knobs of butter making sure the the potatoes do not overlap each other
6. Cook for 45 minutes or until sweet potatoes start to brown, turn half way through cooking.

Note: I prefer the taste of garnet yams, but there are plenty of good varieties of yams you can use.

Affordably Eating Grain-free

By removing grain from our diet, we essentially cut out the cheap (and completely indigestible to humans in it's natural form) filler from our meals.  Adding on top of that we try to eat organically grown and hormone free when it is available, this can greatly increase the price of the meals we eat, especially since I have a big appetite.  Here are a few tips I use to reign in my spending at the grocery store and still eat like a (grain-free) king.

• Do your meal plan ahead of time, but be flexible.  If you show up to the market and what you planned on is too expensive, change it.  On the flip side if you find a killer sale on an ingredient you know you have recipes for, or that freezes well, stock up!
• Buy in season.  Most time veg that is in season will be cheaper, and lets face it, taste a whole lot better.
• Plan the main course, but leave the sides open.  See what is on sale and plan your sides once you get to the market.  If you don't have a recipe for something you find, a quick google search once you get home will usually yield thousands of results.
• Frozen is your friend.  This is a time saver and potentially a money saver.  When I say frozen, I'm not talking about that prepared crap like hot pockets, I mean vegetables, uncooked meat, berries, and other fruit.  Once again, if you find them on sale they aren't about to go bad, so stock!  Thinking ahead is key.
• Use the whole chicken.  Buying just the breasts is really expensive by themselves, but a whole chicken is cheap by comparison.  Piece it and freeze what you don't use right away or roast it whole.  Jamie Oliver has an excellent recipe for whole roasted chickens , and I highly recommend any cook book of his.  
• An ever better money saving option to the whole bird is just the legs (thigh and drumstick, bone and skin on).  These are hands down the best way to spend your money.  While they have their limitations (I would never serve them over a salad) with a little bit of prep you have, in my opinion, the tastiest part of the chicken.  I will be posting plenty of recipes that make use of chicken legs.
• Don't be afraid to try new things.  Either a new way to make an old favorite or food that you have never tried before, but is dirt cheap when you get to the store.  

Lunch Stuffed Peppers

There are infinite variations of what you could do with this recipe, and there is really no wrong way to make it.  A lot of what you put in will probably depend on what's in your fridge.  This is what I did today:

Ingredients:

1 red bell pepper

filling
1 can of chicken
1 spoonful mayonaise
2 spoonfuls plain yogurt
kosher, salt to taste
fresh cracked pepper, to taste
garlic powder, to taste
red pepper flakes, to taste

garnish
basil, small handful of fresh chopped
cucumber, sliced

1. Cut the bell pepper in half and seed
2. Mix the filling ingredients together in a bowl
3. Fill the pepper with the filling
4. Garnish, with the garnish

Substitutes and variations:

1. Use fresh chicken
2. Before you garnish put cheese on top and broil for a warm version
3. Go veg with hummus or baba ganoush instead of the chicken
4. Roughly chop and saute mushrooms and onions as the filling and top with tomatoes and pesto for a completely different take on it.   

The possibilities are endless, post your tasty version in the comment box so others can give them a try!

Musing on oils

In the past ten years olive oil has really taken center stage.  Any cooking show you watch, and virtually every recipe you find online uses it.  I love it, I think it adds a whole other dimension of flavor to any savory dish you add it too.  However, I don't think it's the all purpose oil that everyone is claiming it to be, and you have to know when is the appropriate time to use this sometimes very pricey oil.

Luckily there is something other canola and vegetable oils that can serve the same purposes.  I want to tell you about a healthy, wonderfully tasty oil you may not have heard of before.  Grapeseed oil.  It imbues the dishes you cook in it with a mild nutty flavor and is rich in vitamin E.  Unlike olive oil, which has a somewhat low smoke point, grapeseed oil's smoke point is 421 degrees fahrenheit.  I've found food will actually cook slightly faster using grapeseed oil.  Although I'm not a baker (Monica is much better at that than I am), grapeseed oil can replace canola or vegetable oil in any cake or cookie.  I also seal my cast iron skillets with it, works great!

Now I understand sometimes you have to have that olive taste that good olive oil gives a dish, what I do in that case is use slightly less grapeseed oil when I sauté or bake, then when the dish is off the heat I add just enough olive oil to get the flavor I want.  If I plan on using an oil raw, like for a salad dressing, I prefer to use olive oil every time, the flavor is just too good.

If you get the chance I hope you try cooking with grapeseed oil, while not a life changing experience I know I enjoy it!

A Palate Cleanser

I have been trying to get Monica to update her blog for about 6 months now, and she finally decided to give in to my nagging... on one condition:  that I start writing about the recipes I cook for our family.  As some of you may have gathered from previous posts we try to eat as grain-free as possible, which presented some very interesting culinary challenges when we started.  For instance:  what do we do with all these wonderful pasta recipe's we have accumulated, how is this even remotely affordable, what if I don't have an hour+ to prep and cook dinner, and other such nagging issues.  Luckily, a year in and we have tackled most of these dilemma's.  My coming posts will hopefully reflect how we have overcome some of these issues and include some of my recipes (I promise to only include the ones that turned out).

Vinegar...

So we have started using vinegar for killing germs around the house and thought...if this salad seasoning power house can squash sammy & ella, what else could it squash? What about those pesky weeds that crop up between the bricks in our paver patio? I can spray those....

It worked! Those pesky greens went the way of the dinosaurs. Between the midday heat and the vinegar they had completely wilted and were easy to pull right from between the bricks. I shouldn't get too proud of myself...a quick google search soon taught me that this trick has been around awhile...and not my one brilliant moment (which I trust is coming). Although I hope that when that moment comes it is more amazing an obscure use for vinegar.

Good thing I didn't go with the urge to use it in my lawn...the results could be devastating (bye bye lush lawn!).