3 posts tagged “food”

Below is an e-mail message I tried to send through the George Foreman web site relay my experience with one of their products. The message came back as undelierable. I'll try one of their other web sites, but found the irony of getting this back yumerous.

One of my very dear friends asked me to post some of my diabetic friendly recipes and food ideas.

Hopefully, these ideas are friendly to non-diabetics as well.

And lastly, I always encourage my diabetic friends to test their blood sugar levels after trying something new. Different people react differently.

One of the first things I started making for my self instead of buying was salsa. I did this not so much for my diabetes, but because home made salsa is easy to make, healthy, better tasting and cheaper than the stuff you get in the store.

Rick’s Salsa

Ingredients:

1 - 14.5 oz. can Mexican style stewed tomatoes, coarsely chopped (sometimes you can find the Mexican style canned tomatoes in the diced variety. Also, regular diced canned tomatoes work fine since you’re going to add some flavor anyway. If you live someplace where you get good fresh tomatoes, do it up. Here in Hawaii we get junk fresh tomatoes, so I opt for the canned ones.)

1/4 cup Chinese parsley, stemmed and chopped

1-2 cloves garlic, minced (1/4 tsp garlic powder = 1 clove real garlic)

1/2 small Maui, or other sweet onion, chopped

1/2 small lime, juiced (1-2 Tbs lime juice from the plastic lime)

½ teaspoon salt

½ tsp black pepper

½ tsp Coriander (optional)

½ tsp Cumin (optional)

¼ tsp cayenne pepper (optional)

1 fresh jalapeño pepper, seeded, cored, and chopped (optional)

In lieu of the fresh jalapeño pepper, you can use chopped jalapeño nacho rings, or 1-2 canned chipoltle peppers. Different peppers will give you different and interesting variations.

Drain the liquid from the tomatoes, but keep it in case you want to adjust the consistency of your salsa.

Chop (or food process) the tomatoes to desired consistency and combine with all other ingredients.

Adding the coriander and cumin give the salsa a real southwest flavor. The hot stuff adds heat. Leave out the coriander, cumin and hot stuff for a very good mild, neutral salsa.

I eat this with tortilla chips, whole grain Tostitos, slathered over home made burritos, or as a topping for a Mexican style salad. I’m sure you’ll come up with other uses.

This may seem like a lot for some salsa, but you’ll realize once you whittle down your options, you’re left with a pretty quick and easy recipe, and maybe the only thing you’ll need to out and get will be some fresh Chinese parsley.

Enjoy!

When I think of VOX, I think of the Beatles' amplifiers, Dave Clarke Five's compact organ and the guitar that guy in The Byrds played, but I guess I can get used to it as a place to blog. (I left out Bono on purpose. I like U2, but he already gets too much ink.)

Today's offering is a first time getting-my-feet-wet kind of thing. All too often I get caught between too much to say and nothing to say.

Today is a cooking day for me. I'm gonna make turkey beef-a-roni a little later. It almost sounds involved, but it's just spaghetti sauce (home made, thank you very much) made with ground turkey along with cooked macaroni folded in at the end. It stores easy, plus it's easy to eat. Big spoon, big napkin. Good meal.

I'll make it later when I can have the initial serving fresh, although it's one of those things that tends to get more flavorful after a day or two in the fridge.

For those of you keeping score, it was home made burritos for b-fast, and it'll be Chinese style chicken and veggie stir-fry for lunch. My delicate medical condition requires I eat reasonably healthy most of the time, plus I live on a fixed income, so I have had to become one with my kitchen. I like my cooking, so it's okay. Nobody else ever eats it, so that means everybody likes it.

My latest computer quandary is how to wean myself off the Microsoft teat. I have been using Microsoft Office applications for years. A decision made people who were supposed to know better back when I was working. I'm all for web-based application and I've made peace with stuff like G-mail and even Google Docs to an acceptable degree.

If not web-based, then I'm all about free software. Legitimately free, of course. Piracy is for people like Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. So, I'd particularly love to find something that could take the place of Outlook's Journal applet. I use it extensively to keep track of all the insignificant things in my world. I remember the significant stuff.

There are, of course, all kinds of manual logs that can be kept in word processing, or spreadsheet programs, but I'm looking for something a bit more automated. We are talking about a computer, after all.

Google searches introduce me to all kinds of programs like Vox (I can't believer "Vox" is not in the Vox spell check dictionary. If I built a dictionary, "Rick" would be the first entry. And yes, I had the presence of mind to add Vox to the dictionary. Thanks for checking.) Anyway, I suppose if I blogged every little thing I did, I'd have a journal-type listing, wouldn't I?

For me, the money feature of Outlook's Journal is being able to tag, or assign each Journal entry to any number of contacts in one's address book. Cherry. Categories are nice, and I certainly use them, but you can often find programs that will offer categorization.

Since I haven't been able to find an alternative to Outlook's Journal in a couple of years of searching, I'm guessing this project will continue to keep me out of trouble for some time to come.

Just to be fair, Act! performs a similar function quite nicely, but it's a long way from free. I even built an application in Access that kinda sorta does the same thing, but I'm not savvy enough to re-create the contact tagging thing in Access. I can easily do it for one contact, but not if I want to attach an entry to multiple contacts and have a reference appear in each of their records. Plus, Access is Microsoft and I'm trying to move on with my life.

Of course, in the time I've spent looking for a free alternative to Journal, I could have learned how to program and I could have written my own program except the books and programming software aren't cheap, much less free. I'm generally not a cheap guy, but I am living on a meager fixed income and food is more important than computer stuff on most days.

Speaking of food, if you're coming for dinner, bring your own spoon and drink. Actually, bring beer for us, and I'll let you use one of my spoons, or throw-away chopsticks if you prefer.