recipe – Peacock Orchard

Eggtastic Tuesday- Crustless Asiago, Parmesan and Asparagus Quiche

This recipe is simple, easy and delicious. It is also amazingly healthful. The Asparagus was picked moments before from the garden. The eggs were from our chicken flock and scarce hours old. Exactly what the Dr. ordered. Dr. Mark Nyman I mean.

I have a secret, I’m fat, kind of. I consider not being able to fit in my pants close to the end of the world. So, time to get healthier. I’ve always figured we ate well. I cook almost all of our meals from scratch. We do eat a lot of grain products though. From Meuseli in the morning to home made pasta and bread. We are a grain loving family. Vegetable loving, not so much. I love them but no one else does. It makes cooking them a trial.

Back to what I was saying, we are modifying our diet. No more gluten. No processed foods (how the kids will live without peanut butter and nutella sandwiches I don’t know). No dairy. No refined sugars. No alcohol. I keep telling my husband we are on a veggie and meat diet. He’s ok with the meat part, the veggie part might kill him. His body will go into complete shock and I could see him keeling straight over. So, 20lbs is my goal and meals like this are what will get us there. Simple, delicious and free of our long list of don’ts.

For those on the Paleo diet or those who cannot consume gluten or dairy, this is amazing!

Crustless Asiago, Parmesan and Asparagus Quiche

Ingredients:

5 eggs
5-6 Asparagus spears- chopped
¼ cup Asiago Cheese- shredded
¼ cup parmesan cheese- shredded
½ tsp paprika
Salt and Pepper (to taste)

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Mix all ingredients but asparagus in a bowl with a whisk and pour into a pie pan. Add the chopped asparagus spears. Cook for 20 minutes. Enjoy.

Eggtastic Tuesday- Migas

Migas is a Mexican egg dish with tortilla chips. First introduced to me by my father-in-law it has become a frequently prepared breakfast dish at our house.

I like that it’s few ingredients, lots of eggs and is quick to prepare.

Begin by cutting the tortillas into strips and frying until crispy in an oiled skillet.

I suffer from an abundance of help while cooking.

Season and beat the eggs and add to the tortillas.

I used garlic and onion powder, chili powder and paprika as well as salt and pepper.

So easy a toddler can do it!

Serve with your favorite salsa or hot sauce. Enjoy!

Migas

Ingredients:

8 eggs
6 corn tortillas, cut into strips
3 Tablespoons oil
Seasonings of your choosing
Salt and Pepper to taste
Salsa (optional garnish)

Directions:

Heat the oil in a large cast iron skillet, add the tortillas and cook until crunchy, stirring frequently. Beat the eggs with preferred seasonings and add to skillet. Cook until eggs are no longer runny. Serve with salsa or hot sauce.

Spinach and Caramelized Onion Frittata

It’s egg season. We are currently getting 10 chicken eggs a day. Duck eggs depend on whether we beat the pigs to them or not. We waste a lot of these eggs. A lot are fed back to the dogs or pigs. So, I’m making an effort to learn egg heavy recipes and I’m going to share them with you.

This recipe is a big hit. Delicious and easy, it requires 9 eggs.

I also love this recipe because it reheats extremely well. Husband and I are the only real big egg eaters so we had a lot of this left over. We were able to eat it for breakfast another day and it tasted almost as good as fresh made.

Spinach and Caramelized Onion Frittata

Ingredients:

9 eggs

1 handful spinach, chopped

½ large onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1tsp Paprika

Salt and Pepper to taste

Green onions (optional garnish)

Directions:

In a large cast iron skillet add the onions and cook on low about 5-10 minutes. Add fresh chopped spinach and garlic. Stir until the spinach has wilted.

Meanwhile in a small bowl beat the 9 eggs with the paprika and salt and pepper. Add to the onion and spinach and use your spatula to make sure the mixture is flat. Cook on the stove top until the edges are beginning to stiffen. Then transfer to the onion and broil on low an additional 10-15 minutes.

Prepping onions and spinach

Adding the eggs to the pan. I didn’t realize before this picture just how colored our eggs are.

Cooking the edges

Enjoy!

It’s beautiful!

How to grow and use lemongrass with a recipe

Lemongrass is such a wonderful plant. It can be used in cooking, to deter bugs, to make tea and medicinally. WebMD even has a page on it:

Lemongrass is a plant. The leaves and the oil are used to make medicine.

Lemongrass is used for treating digestive tract spasms, stomachache, high blood pressure, convulsions, pain, vomiting, cough, achy joints (rheumatism), fever, the common cold, and exhaustion. It is also used to kill germs and as a mild astringent.

Some people apply lemongrass and its essential oil directly to the skin for headache, stomachache, abdominal pain, and muscle pain.

By inhalation, the essential oil of lemongrass is used as aromatherapy for muscle pain.

In food and beverages, lemongrass is used as a flavoring. For example, lemongrass leaves are commonly used as “lemon” flavoring in herbal teas.

In manufacturing, lemongrass is used as a fragrance in soaps and cosmetics. Lemongrass is also used in making vitamin A and natural citral.

How does it work?

Lemongrass might help prevent the growth of some bacteria and yeast. Lemongrass also contains substances that are thought to relieve pain, reduce fever, stimulate the uterus and menstrual flow, and have antioxidant properties.

Source

I wanted to grow lemongrass for a different reason, the oil attracts bees. As you know we built our own beehives. I do not want to buy a package of bees, I’d rather attract a swarm. To do that I needed lemongrass essential oil. Husband has been wanting to try his hand at making essential oil, so I just needed the lemongrass. I went to our local oriental market and bought all the lemongrass they had. I put them in a jar of water until they’d sprouted roots, then I planted them out to the kitchen herb garden. They have really taken off. I’ve harvested some for lemongrass chicken and loved it.

Lemongrass

Thai Basil

Here is Daughter helping me prep the lemongrass. Ok, she’s just chewing on it. She informed me she didn’t like eating grass.

Such a cute face!

Stripped of stalk.

All I did to prep the lemongrass was strip off the base leaves, cut the white base of the stalk off, wash it and chop it up to be added to dinner. The recipe I gathered inspiration from is this one. As usual, I didn’t follow the directions and modified as I saw fit. I used bean noodles, sliced chicken breasts, carrots, and green onions. I did not use fish sauce, cuz yuck! O let me just tell you my recipe:

Lemongrass Chicken with Bean Noodles

Ingredients

1 serving bean noodles
Olive Oil- enough to coat bottom of pan
2 large lemongrass stalks or 5 small ones.
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried ginger
10 leaves fresh thai basil
1 carrot sliced thinly
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 TB brown sugar

Directions

Cook bean noodles as directed on the package.

Add lemongrass, ginger, oil and garlic to a medium skillet and sauté until fragrant. Add the sliced chicken and cook through. Add lemon juice, basil and brown sugar and coat chicken. Next add the noodles and warm through. Remove and serve in a bowl with carrot curls and green onions.

Add spice, to taste with sriracha or red pepper flakes. My children do not like spice and so we kept it optional.

I think bean sprouts would be great in this dish but I didn’t have any when I first made it and it was still great.

Cooking noodles

Cooking the lemongrass, garlic and ginger.

Browning the chicken.

Delicious!

Crock Pot Beef Bourguignon with updated review of Chateau Maine D’Arman 2010 wine

One very energetic winter day I looked up Julia Child’s recipe for beef bourguignon. It was a very labor intensive meal taking a long period of time to complete. It was also out of this world delicious! I couldn’t see doing it often though, a shame since it is so tasty. I decided to attempt to modify the recipe. I’ve done so twice, both worked very well. The first was simply taking out some of the prep steps, using only a single pan; the second was using my previous modified version and doing the cooking in the crock pot.

Crock Pot Beef Bourguignon

Ingredients:

1 beef roast of desired size and cut (I prefer tri-tip)
4 slices bacon- cut into 1” pieces
1 medium onion- sliced, or 1 lb broiler onions
2 cloves garlic- minced
8 oz bella crimini mushrooms- sliced
2 large carrots- cut into large pieces
6 potatoes- halved
1 cup red wine (I like to use Chateau Maine D’Arman 2010)
3 cups beef broth
2 sticks butter
3 bay leaves
Flour for dusting

Seasoning mix:

1 tsp sea salt
¼ tsp black pepper
¼ tsp white pepper
¼ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp caraway
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp thyme

Directions:

In a medium skillet heat 1 stick of butter over low heat. Add the onion and garlic and saute until the onion is caramelized, about 40 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook until golden brown.

While the onion is cooking add the potatoes to the bottom of your crock pot, then add the carrots.

Add the caramelized onion and mushroom mixture to the crock pot. Do not mix up. You want the potatoes to remain on the bottom.

Slice the beef roast into large chunks, pat each chunk dry with a towel. Coat the beef in a mixture of flour and the seasoning mix, set aside.

In the same skillet you caramelized the onions in, brown the bacon. Remove the bacon pieces to the crock pot but leave the fat in the bottom of the pan. Add the beef and brown on each side. If needed add more butter to the pan.

When the beef is browned move it to the crock pot and de-glaze the skillet with ½ a cup of wine and add to the crock pot with the rest of the wine and the broth. At this time also add the bay leaves and any remaining butter.

Cook on low 8 hours.

To serve remove the potatoes and mash them with some garlic, onion powder and sour cream. If you prefer you do not have to mash the potatoes. You can also take some of the liquid from the crock pot and make a thicker gravy with it at this time. I do this by adding butter and flour to a saucepan and then adding the liquid, whisking until the proper thickness.

If you do not want to do the cooking in a crock pot I would advise getting a pan like This. Then you can do all the steps in the same pan and cook it in the oven for 5 hours at 325 degrees.

I get a lot of hits for This wine review. It seems a lot of people want to know if this is a good wine and I do not know if my previous review covered it all. So I am going to give a few more thoughts after having tried this wine a few more times.

The wine does have good flavor. We had a glass while eating this dinner and it went very well, quite enjoyable. What I did not like, and I’m not sure it was like this last time, was that it was grainy. You could see little bits of red stuff floating around in the wine and they had an awful texture in our mouths. It was really bad at the bottom of the bottle and I actually just threw that out. I don’t want to have to try to chew my wine. If our previous bottle had been like that I am not sure we would have purchased a second. I am unsure if we will give this wine another try after this experience or not. It’s still amazing in this recipe but, that graininess…..yuck!

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Zucchini Tian- An amazing way to use squash

My husband and I stopped at Safeway to pick up a few things on Monday. A few things turned into me spending our entire lunch in the produce aisle picking over the vegetables. I had no real idea how I was going to cook anything, just that I wanted to try it all. Husband just shook his head as I loaded up our basket and told him I’d look online for recipes later. That is why I love Pinterest. I find some of the best recipes and ideas there.

Zuchini Tian — This is one of my favorite finds now.

This Recipe from feastingathome.com is absolutely amazing. I’d never made anything like this before and I didn’t have high expectations. The recipe was easy to follow and thanks to my nifty Mandoline,
prep was quick. Just make sure you wear these gloves. I’ve harmed myself pretty severely with the mandoline before. We made it in our fairly new cast iron skilletas suggested and it worked pretty well. I think I might slowly transition all of my cooking pots and pans to cast iron. The cast iron dutch oven I have is a dream! I also really love just going from the stove top to the oven.

I used 2 small yellow squash, 1 zuchinni, 1 super large black krim tomato, 1 yellow onion and parsley picked from the new planter box. My quantities didn’t match with the recipe exactly. I don’t tend to be great about following recipes to the T. Still, turned out amazingly well!

The squash was served with grilled pork tenderloin and wine, of course. I got distracted looking at all the peppers I have growing and the pork got overcooked. It was pretty darn dry actually. My husband should be sainted for eating all of the food I forget I’m cooking.

We are all about making enough dinner to have leftovers for lunch at work. This packed up beautifully and reheated really well. I did under cook the squash slightly so it would not be too soggy when microwaved. I will be doing this again for sure!

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