Homemade Taco Seasoning

I've been meaning to post this taco seasoning recipe for some time now, and since I made up a batch of it the other day, I took a picture or two so I could share! I don't know why exactly, but it's hard for me to share a recipe without a picture.

So without further ado, here is my version of taco seasoning. I love this because I know what's in it, and I know what's *not* in it. No MSG here. :)

Taco Seasoning

Ingredients

2 tablespoons chili powder

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon onion powder

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

1/2 teaspoon minced onion

1 teaspoon paprika

1 tablespoon ground cumin

2 teaspoons unrefined sea salt

2 teaspoons black pepper

Combine all ingredients in a mason jar and shake until combined.

Store in an airtight container.

You can mix it up directly into an empty spice jar, but I make it in a mason jar so I have enough to store after I fill up my little spice jar.

I usually make up a double batch. Sometimes I make it times four, so I don't have to make up another batch as often. Especially as often as we eat tacos. Watch it though - it's pretty potent - so you don't need to use quite as much as that lame, chemical-ridden store bought taco seasoning.

I use this to season my taco meat, but also when I make quesadillas, I sprinkle this seasoning on top of the cheese/chicken/beans (whatever I put in the quesadillas) to give it some really good flavor. So yummy!

Here's my batch, before shaking...

...and after shaking.

Isn't it pretty? 

Now go on and make yourself some of this yummy stuff!

Tangy Tomato Soup

After church today I decided to make one of our go-to easy after-church lunches, grilled cheese and tomato soup. Usually, I keep some of those yummy boxes of Pacific Natural Foods tomato soup in the pantry. I looked in the pantry today, and they were all gone! No tomato soup to be found. So I decided I had better try to make some!

I first thought of diluting some tomato paste for the soup base, since I have a can or two of that sitting around. I looked up several recipes for more ideas. Then I remembered that I had canned some tomatoes in the fall, using a recipe from the Ball Blue Book for Roasted Roma Tomatoes. This recipe uses roasted romas, roasted garlic, onion, oregano, salt, and pepper. It was great too, because I had fresh romas from a friend, a bunch of garlic and onions from my CSA box, and fresh oregano from the garden! I love having these things on hand so I can try new recipes.

So far, I hadn't used any of these canned tomatoes yet, and honestly, wasn't sure how I was going to use them up. So now, I know. Whenever I need tomato soup, I'm going to use up my roasted romas to make this yummy soup recipe!

Because I'm not experienced in making my own recipes, I had to share this one. Try it if you want, and if you find a way to make it better, please share it with me!

Tami's Tangy Tomato Soup

Ingredients:

1 Quart Roasted Roma Tomatoes (recipe from Ball Canning Blue Book)
1 tsp Celtic Sea Salt
1 tsp Better than Bouillon Organic Chicken Base
1 C heavy cream


Method:

Pour tomatoes into blender jar and blend the tomatoes until very smooth. Pour blended tomatoes into a saucepan add cream. While heating to desired temperature, add salt, chicken base and cream. Stir and adjust seasonings to taste.

If desired, add fresh ground pepper, basil, parsley, or any other herbs or seasonings you like! I'll bet this is super yummy with some fresh basil thrown in.


Pour into bowls and serve with grilled cheese sandwiches. Yum!


Enjoy!

Italian Prune Cake

Growing up, we had a few prune trees around the place.

I have since come to realize that they are called Italian Prune Plums, and often used to make the dried prunes that we all know and love (?). When most people think "prune" they think of a shriveled up dried fruit that old people eat. :) Really, a dried prune is a dehydrated (mostly) plum. At least as far as I know. And as many of you already know, that's not all too far.

Back to our prune trees on the Parker Estate: we used to eat prunes right off the tree and loved them! That type of plum is so sweet and tart and yummy. After moving away from home, I sort of forgot about them, until a few years ago when we visited down there and realized that the trees had started bearing fruit again after several prunings that left them barren for some time. We brought a couple flats home with us, and enjoyed them while we had them. I didn't preserve any that time, but the next year, Costco had them! I was so excited. It's almost become a tradition to get some whenever they're in season. And it's a *short* season.

These days, the old prune trees back at home are all gone. So whenever Costco carries these prune plums, I grab at least one container for us to eat. This year, for whatever reason, I decided to see if I could make something out of them.

Enter, the prune cake recipe. Yeah. The recipe. This is why you're here, right? The recipe.

I found this recipe online somewhere and modified a bit. Some call it Prune Coffee Cake, some call it Plum Kuchen (a German coffee cake). If you want to drink coffee with it, knock yourself out. I just call it Italian Prune Cake. And sometimes I drink coffee with it.

If you don't have Italian Prunes, then just use some other plums. Whatever works!

Here's what you need:

Cake:
1/2 C butter (one stick)
1 C sugar (I used raw sugar)
2 large eggs
1 C flour (I used wheat pastry flour)
1 tsp baking powder
6 or 7 Italian prunes, pitted and quartered (or more to your liking)
1 Tbsp lemon or lime juice

Topping:
1-1/2 Tbsp Sugar (again I used raw sugar)
1/4 tsp Cinnamon (or just make up some general cinnamon sugar, to your taste)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°. Butter a 9-inch springform pan.

Cream together the butter and sugar until well blended. Beat in eggs, followed by flour and baking powder. Beat to mix will and spread into the prepared pan (it's a thick batter). Place plum quarters on top of the batter, close together in circles, covering the batter. Make designs if you want! Sprinkle with lemon juice.

Mix up the cinnamon sugar topping and sprinkle over the top of the plums and batter. Bake on center rack of oven for one hour or until a cake tester or toothpick comes out clean and the top of the cake is golden brown.

Serve warm or cool, preferably with home made sweetened whipped cream (see recipe below).

This is a super yummy cake! The prunes bake down and combine into the batter and are nice and sweet but then you also have the slight tartness of the skin with it -- this is so good. I never thought it would be, but was delightfully surprised.

Here's what the cake looked like before I put it in the oven. I used about 6 prunes on this cake and made little flower patterns. But the last one I made I used 7 or maybe even 8 and put the prunes on in a circular fashion, just around the perimeter and then made circles inside of that big one. I wanted to put on as many as would fit, because when these are cooked into the cake, they are *so* good!

Here's what it looked like after I baked it -- but also after we dug into it. I sort-of forgot to take a shot of what it looked like right out of the oven. So just pretend all the pieces are there.

Since making this recipe twice now, I've frozen a bunch of prunes so that I can make this cake whever I want until they are in season again. (Or until I run out of prunes...)

Hope you have a chance to enjoy this cake! If not, come over to my house and I'll make you some.


:-)


p.s. Here is the whipped cream recipe:

Whipped Cream:
1 C heavy whipping cream
1/4 C powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla


Combine ingredients in a cold mixing bowl (or blender).
Mix until blended and peaks form.
If you prefer unsweetened whipped cream, just whip the cream by itself, or don't add as much sugar. It's up to you to make it how you like it!

Homemade "Lawry's" Seasoning Salt

I've been making my seasoning salt from scratch lately. I've mainly switched my kitchen to  unrefined sea salt, which is way better for your body than regular table salt. There are lots of reasons, which I will address at the bottom of this post. :) First, here's the recipe.

Homemade "Lawry's" seasoning salt

(this recipe times 4 makes about enough to fit into a typical sized spice bottle)

2 Tbsp Unrefined sea salt

1 tsp paprika

1/4 tsp Turmeric

1/4 tsp Onion powder

1/4 tsp Garlic powder

1/4 tsp Arrowroot Powder
1 pinch Cinnamon

Combine all ingredients into a small bowl and mix well.

When I make this I put everything into a pint jar with a lid and shake.

Pour the blend into a spice jar for storage.

I've been making this recipe for months now, and my family loves it. Lawry's was a staple in my kitchen, and this is a great replacement. We even think it tastes better than the stuff you buy in the store! Now *that's* grrrrrreat!


Ok, now here's my soap box about salt. I guess you could call this my "salt box". :)

Salt is not a bad thing. In fact, our bodies need salt. It's the way God made us. The problem is, the refined salt that we usually use on our tables has chemical anti-caking agents and it no longer has the trace minerals that unrefined salt has. For these and other reasons, refined salt prevents the human body's ability to regulate hydration. We are led to think that salt is the bad guy - which is only partly true. *Refined* salt *is* a bad guy.

But the good guy is just around the corner. Unrefined salt has no chemicals, contains naturally occurring essential trace minerals, and our bodies recognize this salt as something it's designed to use. Unrefined sea salt, Himalayan salt, Celtic Sea Salt, are all good salts. Unfortunately, much of the "sea salt" you see in stores is still refined, unless the package is labeled as "unrefined". This is also true for Kosher salt! It still has anti-caking agents. I don't want that in my salt, as much as I enjoy Kosher salt. And I don't really care if my salt cakes up a little bit in the shaker or the salt crock. It doesn't bother me at all, actually. Especially when I know that it's better for me.

I purchase mainly Celtic Sea Salt, (www.celticseasalt.com) which you can get from their site or on Amazon. Many times it's cheaper on Amazon. I usually buy the finer-ground salt for table use, and then the coarse gray salt for use in cooking where I have used Kosher salt in the past. Another good one is Redmond Real Salt. I find that has some fine grit in it, which we don't like as well for eating, but I do like to use it when I'm using it for veggie soaks or something when I have to use salt and then rinse (like when preparing eggplant). I can find that one in my local grocery store and I think it's a bit less expensive than the other kind. But it's still good stuff to be using on my food. With all of these unrefined salts, I know I'm feeding my family good whole-food seasoning instead of chemicals.

As a bonus, I don't worry about salting my food or my dishes when cooking!! Of course you should always use salt in moderation (as with everything in life). But this is a way healthier alternative to the "pretty", "profit-making", "easy-pouring" refined salt that I once simply thought was the *only* alternative. It's not.

And there you have my salt rant. It's over now. There's lots of info on the internet about salt and the benefits of unrefined salt. Don't take my word for it. Have a look!

Try it, and you won't feel guilty when salting your food.

Zucchini Bread

So, I've had a bountiful harvest of fruits and vegetables this summer due to our CSA - Community Supported Agriculture - box of goodies each week. We've gotten to try many new things, some good and some not-so-good.

This week I got 3 round zucchini squash-y things. They basically looked on the outside like typical green zucchini, but they were round instead. As it turns out, they look pretty much like zucchini on the inside too. I didn't know how I wanted to use them so I obviously turned to Pioneer Woman's website for ideas. I love her. If I lived by her or if she lived by me we would most certainly be very good friends.

I first searched her site, and thought about trying the zucchini cakes that came up when I searched for zucchini, but really had bread in mind so I turned to her Tasty Kitchen website and found this recipe. It's not one she personally posted, but it looked good, and with a title of "The Best Zucchini Bread EVER!", how could I pass it up?!?

So here's a link to the recipe. It's filled with yummy goodness and a lot of cinnamon, which, for picky eaters, hides the look of the zucchini quite well. It tastes great. My family liked it, which means it's a keeper.

The only thing I will do differently next time is to split one recipe up into two loaf pans. I think it will cook better and be less dense. My loaves were huge (almost ran over the pan) and I don't think they cooked as well as they could have if they weren't as full. Of course I will want to watch the cooking time if the pan isn't as full. A little kitchen logic there for ya.

 When you make this recipe, don't forget the tall jar of iced tea. It's just a necessary part of life.

Who doesn't like a nice closeup?

Give this one a try! It's yummy!

Oven baked rice

I've made the switch to brown rice; it's so much better for you. The only problem (if you want to call it that) is that it takes a while to cook compared to traditional white rice. So I've been looking around for recipes to find different ways to cook it. I have a tendency to either burn things or boil things over when cooking on the stove top especially. So crock pot and oven are great alternatives. Last week I made a pork chops and rice recipe in the crock pot, it was yummy. But the rice was - well - rice-y. You know, how it kind of sticks together sometimes? I love it when my rice isn't gummy and sticky. Even though it tastes great, it's nice sometimes to have it not stick together.

I found a different way to cook it tonight. It sounded strange to me at first, but this recipe for oven baked rice is so super yummy. It takes a good 50 minutes or more to cook brown rice, so why not put it in the oven and forget about it? (Until the timer rings, of course. Don't forget to set the timer.)

Usually when I try a recipe I try to follow the recipe exactly. The only changes I made were the pan (I used stoneware, my square baker, although I think my deep covered baker will also work great). Also I used light gray Celtic sea salt instead of Kosher salt. I boiled water in my tea kettle, then just measured the rice, butter, and salt into the stone - why mix it in another pan if I don't have to? I just poured the measured amount of water into the stone, and stirred until the butter was melted.

This rice was fantastic. I also made up some stir fry veggies and chicken to eat with it.

This recipe came from Food Network.com.

Baked Brown Rice

*Cook Time: 1 hr 5 min
*Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients
* 1 1/2 cups brown rice, medium or short grain
* 2 1/2 cups water
* 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
* 1 teaspoon kosher salt

Directions
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Place the rice into an 8-inch square glass baking dish.

Bring the water, butter, and salt just to a boil in a kettle or covered saucepan. Once the water boils, pour it over the rice, stir to combine, and cover the dish tightly with heavy-duty aluminum foil. Bake on the middle rack of the oven for 1 hour.

After 1 hour, remove cover and fluff the rice with a fork. Serve immediately.



Try it sometime! I'd love to hear how it turns out for you.


How do you cook *your* rice?

[Something I forgot to add when I posted this the first time is that I usually cook my rice in chicken broth, so it gives more flavor. So add some bouillon to the water and away you go!]