Seasoning Instead of Breading: Pork Chops

03/31/2017 245 lbs

Being part of large Cajun families means that everyone "talks shop" and "talks food". It's the biggest pastime, and honestly, sometimes disputes erupt over who does which dish best. (Seriously, don't look up "man stabs over food louisiana".)

At the last crawfish boil (y'all, I will GAIN weight for crawfish), one of the cousins showed off his new Cajun-made Hibachi grills.  Which is sweet looking, but I won't buy one until I have a proper place to store it. Yes Hibachi conversations in the middle of a Crawfish boil. Our blood, sweat, and tears is food.

But wait, there's more:


He mentioned in passing that frying pork chops in peanut oil and breading it with only the seasoning, not the corn meal, has it fly off the serving table near as fast as you put it out.

And I bought 9 pork chops, on sale. But I wanted to crockpot them.

So, I oiled the inside of the crockpot with peanut oil, and oiled both sides of some wax paper with peanut oil...and then seasoned the heck out of the chops. It takes as much oil as it takes to sufficiently coat it, most likely about 6 tbsp.

Seasoning mix:

Soul seasoning (A salt, sugar, garlic, red pepper, black pepper, paprika blend, so yes, you can make your own, or buy a genuinely Cajun blend): 1 heaping tbsp (close to 1 1/2 tbsp)
Chilli powder: 1 heaping tbsp (close to 1 1/4 tbsp)
Curry powder:  1 heaping tbsp (close to 2 tbsp)
Thyme powder: 1 scant tbsp (means it is just at or just shy of 1 tbsp)

This coats about 3 chops.

Place in Ziploc, seal, shake.
Open, place in pork chop, seal, shake. Make sure it's covered completely.
Take out pork chop, put 2 in bottom of crockpot, place oiled wax paper on top. Repeat until 6 are in the pot.
I covered it with an oiled wax paper, to keep moisture close.
Turn on low for 4-6 hours, and ignore.

For the last 3, I skipped the Thyme and used some Isagenix Greens, which should mellow it out, a bit, because the seasoning is strong, the way I like it. It comes out dark and delicious.

Let's eat!

Avacado Salad Dressing

03/21/17 247.6 lbs 

There is a dearth of creamy yet really healthy options for a salad dressing.  Oil and vinegar is good, don't get me wrong, but these diet ranch or caesar dressings are a joke. Fat free? Let's add sugar! Sugar free? Let's add questionable sources of fat. So many folks are disgusted enough with it to go as far as to make their own dressings.

But I wasn't looking for dressings when I came across this avacado-based dressing. Unfortunately, for me, I am allergic to Cilantro. Very unfortunate, because the best thing to put the soapy tasting green in is avocados, where it adds a crisp snap to the mushy concoction. I love it in guacamole. So, I save the risk of blistering myself for that rare time I am out, not in my daily home recipes.

I chose dill, instead.  Good flavor, love pickles, and the second batch of burgers, frozen for work lunches were already a success with some dilly goodness in them.

My version:

2 small avacados
2 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp dill
2 tsp olive oil
1 serving size container of Chobani plain Greek yogurt
3 tbsp  of fairlife whole milk
3 tbsp lowfat milk
1/2 tsp Tony Zachery's seasoning
1/2 tsp garlic powder

Blended, not cooked.

The consistency is about the same as pudding, like this. More milk, less yogurt works to fix that.

I also can see how buttermilk (the link's modification on a previous verson) would overpower this because I taste that it has milk products in it. But it was pleasant and did not overpower the avacado's taste.

We ate a good 3rd of this over shrimp omelettes on a bed of raw salad greens, on Sunday, and then made chicken salad with the remaining half of a rotisserie chicken and the rest of last week's eggs (about 10). That needed a little more Tony's to balance out the bland of the eggs and was better the second day, than the first. Overall, worth trying another iteration of this, again and again, until I find my ideal must-have.

Yes, the chicken salad is mildly green.

Let's eat!

Guiness Shepard's Pie

03/20/17 249.8 lbs

A Shepherd's pie is a mainstay of the Irish diet. As well as being a quarter Cajun, I have a lot of the British Isles in my ancestry--including Irish. More importantly, I am very fond of potatos, although I don't eat much of them anymore  (high carb, starchy).

But a Shepard's Pie is coated in buttery potatoy goodness...so I have avoided it for years, due to that.

That is, until I came across a Guiness Shepard's Pie. Parsnips and Carrots and Potatoes, oh my! Just mentioning this beast in passing got the demand for it going. And while I eat with some care, it is not best to deny everything, all the time.

And so the search for alternatives began:
and was found in MOAR PARSNIPS! ALL THE PARSNIPS!


And the Cajun noticed this one with a roux.


So, what did I actually do for my blend?

1 lb lean ground beef
1 lb button mushrooms, quartered
3 medium carrots, chopped
3 large stalks celery, chopped
1 bellpepper,chopped
3 medium parsnips, chopped
2 medium onions, chopped
1 tsp powdered thyme
1 tsp Tony Czachary's
1/2 tap garlic powder
1 bay leaf
1 bottle Guinness
2 teaspoons of garlic, minced

Soak all but the beef in the beer overnight. Partially cook the beef before tossing in the veggies, and cook down a bit. Add in 1 scoop (2-3 tbsp) browned coconut flour, for a "roux", right after pulling out the bay leaf, before layering in a rectangular pan. (Of course, somwthing to prevent sticking.)

Topping:

2 large, 1 medium Russet, peeled,  and halved
2 medium parsnips
Shake or two of Tony's
Bottle of water

Boil it, then:

8 tablespoons butter
Splash of milk (3 tbsp?)
1 bundle of scallions, green only.

Mix, then:

Light sprinkle of shreaded cheddar...maybe an 8th of a cup.

Over a regular rectangular pan, the potato covers the top of the rest about an average depth of 1/2 an inch.

The flavor was perfect. The only problem is that there was a hair too much liquid in the end result, but that would be easily remedied by dehydrating the veggies the day before, no more than 8 hours. I prefer the full bottle of beer, and do not want to cut that down. That cuts out the flavor.


Putting it in Lose It!, dividing it into 6 servings (because folks overeat), it still only comes in at 520 calories. That's reasonable for the main meal. Calories are offset by decent root veggie fibers.

And it is decently blanced: carbs, fats, and protein.  We don't need to cut out all carbs, but cut back on the overdoing the carbs.

Let's eat!

03/19/17 251.6 lbs

This week, gastronomically, was a hellish week. Had an increase in calories for a head cold that wouldn't quit, but in spite of that, I was down to 245.8 lbs by Friday morning.  That is until 2 birthday parties, a wedding, and a crawfish boil all popped up on the same weekend.

So, as you can see, I weighed in at 251.6. That was AFTER "the morning constitutional". Some of this is water weight, due to high salt content. Some of it is excess food. But it is possible that some will become fat stored. Let's see how long it takes to get it back off.

The "healthiest" things I ate was one, just one of my shakes. I missed the other 3, dearly. The other was this baby:

(raaspberry tea with chia seeds)

It's not quite food or drink. It's a quick snack on a busy day. The ingredients  are decent.

Of course, the sugar content is a hair higher than I want regularly, but on a totally messed up week, this is fine.

Zucchini...Butter....Wha?

03/16/17 248.2 lbs.

A typica breakfast has a lot of carbs in it, and if you are going to eat carbs, that's the best time to eat them. But, honestly, Americans eat too much carbs, and not enough proteins.

Cajuns are worse: they double down on both.

Now, breakfast isn't what we are known for. It's not where we sparkle. But then, the glitter is best left for Butbon Street. Don't want it sticking to every conceivable surface in my house. Today, breakfast is a must. I miss hash browns: oily, greasy, frankly-no-flavor-hash-browns. In order to eat healthier, some forms of fats and easy high-volume carbs need to go the way of the Dodo, so either sacrifices or substitutions must be made.

Cheese is not out,  yet. Nor is butter. But pretty much any conventional deep frying oil is: it tastes like crud in large amounts (adding little tastebud-value to a plain potato that sucks too much of it in).

Something also had to replace the potato. And then I stumbled into this gem: things to do with zuchhini butter.


A lot to do with one base, no? But still no hashbrown recipe, so I will have to wing it, a bit. That, and I never follow the actual recipe anyway.

So, a comparison:
Calories in 1 medium zucchini, vs. 1 small potato. That is a 2 inch diameter potato. A medium zucchini is about 2 inches in diameter, but 2-3 times that size. Both veggies are full of fluid, but a potato gives up it's liquid a little more easily than a zucchini does, so you are eating far more potato, ounce vs. ounce.

But let's go ahead and do the math:

134×2.5=335 calories, or nearly 10x the calories of the zucchini! It leaves you no room for other foods added especially in a side or a snack.


So, what did I use to season the 4 shreaded zucchini?

Before cooking it down:
3 tbsp Balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp thyme
1 tsp dill
1 tsp "Soul Seasoning" (specific brand from Save-a-lot, you can use any pepper/salt blend you like)
1 whole stick of butter.

Then I cooked it down and strained it.  4 zucchinis comes out to about 3-3 1/2 cups.

Got 2 small mason jars of juice out if it, in a strainer, which was more than half the butter, right back out.

 This is only the halfway mark.  As the original recipe shows, and the link of ideas as well, this stuff is versatile and can be put away, to use another day, but I wanted this done in 1 shot.

I remember from childhood watching some Jewish family make Latkes for Passover Seder. I think I saw it on Reading Rainbow, of all things. (Hey, I was young.) What I remeber is that they used eggs in these hashbrowns, along with some Mediterranean seasonings.

So, with 2 eggs and half a cup of cheese mixed in, time to put them on the panini grill, with a spritz of coconut oil, to grease the metal plates.

First ones weren't easy to keep together. You need the top to reach a dark caramel color before flipping them over, and take them off once done with the second, on my machine around 2 minutes each side.

This made 8 zucchini hashbrowns, calories around 114 apiece. And guys, this was extremely rich, with a hashbrown style crust and an ooey gooey center, and oh, so decadent. Well worth scraping zucchini against a grater for 10-15 minutes.  If you have a processor, use it. Wrists were tired after this.

But if that takes too long, use spaghetti squash.  In fact, I intend to try this next. I expect it to come out in between potatos and zucchini, as it is more fiberous.

Let's eat!

Combatting Burger Shrinkage

3/12/17 249.6 lbs

When we eat burgers, they are overwhelmingly not something we cook.  Most fast food and even many resturaunt burgers use wheat or soy as a binder. Heck, you cannot 100% trust grocer's ground meat, in many cases.

The safest way to fix this is to buy a solid chunk of meat, and make "grind meat" yourself. I eventually will, once I find my old meat grinder (packed away). The next best is to choose a grocer that grinds their own meat, that you trust (mostly local).

Yeah, it's disturbing, but let's be realistic: hot dogs, chicken nuggets,  vienna sausage, potted meat, they are no different, and that's the staple of the emergency diet. So many things to avoid, that it makes your head spin.

But other than foreign objects, the next biggest thing is fat content. Even if you are not worried about counting claories,  or overeating, high fat content in burger meat shrinks the the burgers down. It sucks.

So, what to do with 73% ground meat sale and nearly 2 pounds of dehydrated carrots?

Test the shrink rate with a panini-style grill. That, or a grill iron, something to keep the meat at least as flat as the shape you choose for it because homemade burgers like to become domed hockeypucks.

So:

2 lbs carrot shreads, dehydrated, ground
5 lbs ground meat
2 Tbsp. steak seasoning
4 Tbsp. curry powder

I made oval shaped patties, to better fit nice, fiberously dense loaf bread (in this case Ezekiel bread, to avoid wheat), and my tiny grill.

So, comparison time:

5 burgers

fits the space of 4 raw.

A little less than an inch thick

was once about 1&1/4 inch thick.

From the picture up at the top, the diameter stays about the same, cooked or raw.

The curry and steak seasoning made for great flavor. The carrots are definitely good at avoding overshrink.

Personally, I prefer a 3 or 4 parts lean ground beef to 1 part ground pork for hamburgers, not fatty beef. But they worked well, overall...and the extra sugar from carrots helped with the headcold I caught from the daughter.

Let's eat!

Experimenting with dehydrated veggies: Meatballs and Meatloaf

03/10/17 249.8 lbs

 (The scaling is nonfat juices that cook in a similar way to egg yolk, like blood. A frequent product of boiled meats.)

In previous posts, I showed what ground up  dried spinach and carrot looks like.

There's several reasons why:

1. I have a dehydrator. I should use it.

2. The health and wellnes company I get my shakes from put corriander/cilantro (same plant) in their powdered greens, which I am allergic to--not hives, but contact blisters. (More a Poison Ivy reaction than bee sting.) Unfortunately, the worst of the blistering starts in my kidneys on down. Small amounts, while sometimes causing pain, are still tolerable, so I don't make a concerted effort to avoid it, but I cannot eat it daily.  The health benefits from it are worth adding it for mass markets. And if you have ever had: cola, rye bread, flaky greens at a resturaunt that taste a tad like soap, then yes, you have had this seasoning.

3. But everyone needs to eat more veggies, and one of the easiest ways to get them in is by dehydrating them to get rid of the excess water. So, I feel the need to experiment.

I added the spinach to a meatloaf and meatballs, and the carrots to just the meatloaf. Whe I am not getting rid of all bread, I do want to get rid of most sources, because of thyroid issues.

There's been a meat sale, all on high fatty grinds (73%), which is not conductive to healthy eating, but there are ways around it.

Meatloaf:
First bake your meatloaf, then put it in the fridge to cool. After the fat solidifies, you then crack the fat off and toss away.

(Yes, all that yellow gunk is the fat.)

Meatballs:
For meatballs boiled in a crockpot, there's a couple choices:
Skimming, where you gently place the spoon barely under the liquid's surface,  and only take the top layer off, or remove the meatballs from the liquid, and place in a strainer. They cannot stay out for long, or they will dry out.

So, for the meatloaf, I put garlic salt and nearly a pound of dehydrated carrots, from chips, some of the dehydrated spinach. I used no breadcrumbs or eggs, as I was testing out the dehydrated carrot's worth. It was topped with a large can of diced tomatoes.

The meatballs just had the spinnach and garlic salt...with extra spinach powder dusting the outside.

(Yes, more like moss covered rocks than food, but certainly not something I am chasing after my kid, to take out of her mouth, once cooked.)

Anyway, I found that carrot is acceptable filler for a meatloaf and that neither carrots nor spinnach detracts from the flavor of the meat...which means I just need to find a recipee to tear apart with it...and do this agian.

Let's eat!

Makin' Da Veggie Chips

 03/10/17 249.8 lbs 

When dehydrators were a big fad that first got cheap (I was little), my father started to make his own jerky. I only remember it being a a month or two that he did this  (kids have no sense of time),  but I do remember he decided to do his own seasoning blend...and made the strips too salty. I think they used it as salt meat (often too poor to easily throw away food).

In spite of having this "negative experience" (y'all, it was nasty), it was probably about one of the first kitchen gadgets I bought for myself some 20 years later. That experience did stick with me: still haven't tried to do jerkey because I am not buying the seasoning for it, and I may oversalt it, as well. I do slice up random sausages and dehydrate them to the leather phase: but that is pre-seasoned. No work, really.

Where I really get my use out of this gadget is in dehydrating veggies. I have made about powdered spinnach and powdered carrots, mosty for volume comparisons.

Other things I dehydrate, so far, are sweet potatoes and yams, eggplant, squash (yellow crookneck and zucchini), kale, and and collard greens.

For the sweet potatoes and yams,  I toast the slices in the toaster until they brown (usually 4x through on highest setting), and then dehydrate them to leathers, somewhere between 6-8 hours. No seasoning. I tend to eat them when my stomach doesn't like what I put in it, 1-2 at a time, to settle it.

Everything other than the sweet leathers and flours is dried into a seasoned chip.

The soak:

For the non-absorbant veggies, I use:
2 Tbsp. "Bone chicken broth" or stock.
2 Tbsp. Soy Aminos
2 Tbsp. Balsamic vinegar
1 tsp. Paprika

Everything other than the sweet leathers and flours is dried into a seasoned chip.

The soak:

For the absorbant veggies, like eggplant, I use:
1/2 cup "Bone chicken broth" or stock.
2 Tbsp. Soy Aminos
1/3 cup Balsamic vinegar
1 tsp. Paprika

I put this in a gallon ziplock overnight, flipping it a couple of times, to evenly coat the contents.  Then I lay it out on the dehydrator's grating, and sprinkle  parmesean cheese on it. I set the dehydrator to it's proper setting, and let it dry until it is crisp, usually no longer than it takes for the sweet potatoes.

Most of the calories are in the cheese. The eggplant, since it absorbs most of the broth and vinegar, is worth counting the calories on the other ingredients, but that's it.

The squash (without the cheese, this last time, but yes, all the rest of the seasoning), I used in a crockpot stew. The problem with both squash varieties is that they totally go to mush if you overcook them--which is what usually happens in a crockpot. I find that a dehydrated, then "cooked to mush" squash actually holds up better than if I had cut it up fresh or frozen. That stew, my husband insists is the best one he has ever tasted. Good luck on me getting that right, again. I don't even know where to start to write a post on it. Ah, well, next time.

Let's eat!

Dehydrating Carrots

03/3/17 250.2 lbs

Carrots are a staple ignored by everyone, for some reason. You eat the shreads as filler, the chips as dip, the babies as munchies, hurl insults at the sugary content, remind yourself of the beta-keratine.

But no one really wants to chop their own carrots up. Heck, first time I cut up one as a child I nicked my finger deep enough to quit playing with mama's knives for half a decade-still have the scar:

This ain't one of those times. I am highly unlikely to cut up carrots to this day.

But I did dehydrate some chips and gound them, as well as some shreads (julienned).

This one?

This is what one pound of chips comes out to. The grind is really coarse.

This one?

This is what 2 pounds of shreads comes out to. The grind is much less coarse. The difference in color was due to partially cooking the previous batch before it was dehydrated. So, if color is important, nuke it before dehydrating.

Conclusion? Dehydrate the shreads, eat the chips.

Be lazy. Be a good Couillon.