Tempura Batter for Meat or Veg

I try to keep from deep frying anything. Yeah, I live in the South. I'm sure this fried food avoidance puts me on some kind of old school cookery hit list. :) Maybe I'll fry something once a week, usually it's more like once a month.

A single recipe of this is supposed to coat 4 cups of Veg or 1 pound of meat. I'll probably have to double it for what I'm testing tonight. I used an amber lager rather than water for my test batch and was singularly unimpressed.

This batter comes out like Chinese Takeaway Sweet & Sour Chicken/Pork. Kind of bready, kind of crunchy and ready to sop up whatever delicious sauce you've got ready on the side.

Tempura Batter


3/4c Cornstarch
1/4 c Flour (I'll prolly use Whole Wheat)
1 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Adobo (Spanish Garlic Salt with herbs)
1/2 tsp Onion Powder
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
1 slightly beaten egg
1 c Very Cold Water

Mix the dry ingredients together. Take 1/4c out and put in a separate dredge bowl.
Add the wet to the larger amount of dry and beat it well. The batter should be a little thick like waffle batter. A bit thicker than pancake batter but nowhere near as thick as brownie mix. If you need to add a bit more water, don't be scared - just mix it on in there.

Get your oil ready to fry. I prefer to use peanut oil, but I'm broooOooke right now so we're using canola. I'll edit this later with a temperature, but for now - the oil should spit if you throw a couple of drops of water into it. 

Dredge your whatever into the dry mix, shake it off and dip it into the liquid batter. To avoid club hand - use one hand for dredging and the other for dipping. The liquid batter will run off your item. That's ok, just try to keep it in the bowl, Beavis.  You will have some batter that drips into your oil. Yay, crunchies!

Fry your goody until it's a nice golden brown, flip it when you think it's ready. When it's finished, place it on paper towels or a handy brown bag to drain off the excess oil.

Keep the meat chunks to the small side, you want them to cook all the way through without burning the crap out of your batter. Chicken chunks are 1/2" cubes or fingers, Zucchini is 1/4" or 1/2" strips, Fish is 1/4th of a filet. Use your common sense. If you don't have any on hand, maybe you shouldn't be frying stuff anyway...

Pita Summer

The summers here in Florida are beastly hot. I'm not the one to be sweating my na-na's off cooking hot food from after June till about October. This summer, I'm leaning towards flatbread sammies and pitas. Stuff as much veg as you can into a flat breadish food holder, add meat + cheese and top with some handy variant of Ken's Salad Dressing. (The Buttermilk Ranch and Sweet Vidalia Onion are our favourites!)

Whole Wheat Pita Recipe
1 packet Yeast
2/3cup Warm Water
1 Tbsp Molasses or Honey

Mix the molasses, water and yeast in a bowl and let it proof for 10 minutes or so.

2 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1 cup White Flour
1 Tbsp Vital Wheat Gluten
1 tsp Salt
1 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Mix dry ingredients together and add to the foamy yeast. Drizzle olive oil on top and let the mixer do it's job. Once the dough is holding together nicely, turn it onto a floured board and knead until you have a smooth, elastic, happy dough ball. Put it in a greased bowl, covered with a damp towel in a warm room. Let the dough rise for about an hour, till it's doubled. Cut into 6 chunks and hand roll them into balls. Put those on a cookie sheet, covered with wet paper towels until you're ready to roll them into discs.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Roll out the dough balls one at a time to a thickness of between 1/4 and 1/8 inch on a lightly floured board. You don't want the dough to stick to your pin or board, but you don't want them all sandy and floury either. Just a touch of moderation, Grasshopper.

My discs end up about the length of my hand, maybe a little shy of it.

See how many you can fit on one cookie sheet. I'm working with a toaster oven, so I can only do em one at a time. Bake disks for 2-3 minutes. The high heat will steam the dough as it cooks and create the big bubble that becomes your pita pocket when you slice em in half. If you have rolled the dough too thin, they won't inflate properly. See? Nice and puffy!

When you have finished baking your pitas, cover with a damp towel for about 5 minutes, letting them rest.

Slice, stuff and Nom!

Johnnybread, Johnnycakes & Johnnywaffles, oh my!

Coming from the south, my parents taught me all sorts of odd recipes that aren't common yankee fare. Dad loved his johnnycakes. Just simple Jiffy cornbread mix pancakes cooked on the griddle. Johnnybread is the same as Johnnycakes, regional differences cause the name change, I suppose.

A Johnnywaffle is what you get when your stove AND oven are broken or gone, but you do have a waffle iron. :)  Truth enough, I prefer the waffle variant to the cake one. Those little squares hold gravy and/or butter mighty nice!

Just make your standard cornbread recipe or use good ol' Jiffy mix and add a little extra milk to it. You don't want it quite as thin as pancake batter but thinner than the cornbread batter.

Cook em like you cook your standard pancakes or waffles and enjoy!

Make em Gluten free if that's what works for you.
Add chopped onions, jalapenos or kernel corn to make em funky.
Cheese tends to overcook and may be hard to get off your waffle iron or griddle... go ahead if you want to, you were warned. :)
 

Another Banana Bread Recipe

Banana bread. We've all got a recipe somewhere for it. Everybody swears theirs is moist and wonderful...blah, banana, blah blah. Here's mine to throw into the ring. Special points : no oil plus whole wheat flour, flax and honey peanut butter.

It go like this here it go:

Banana Bread with Peanut Butter

3-4 Elderly Bananas
3/4 c Brown Sugar
1 Tbsp Molasses
1/2 c Honey Peanut Butter
1/4 tsp Salt
1.5 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 c Ground Flax Seed
2/3 c White Flour
1 c Whole Wheat Flour
1 tsp Almond or Walnut Extract

Mash bananas, add sugar & mix. Beat 2 eggs & mix them in as well. Add salt, baking soda, molasses and flax beating after each addition. Add flour and stir until it's well combined. Not too much, but do get the floury lumps out.

Spray grease loaf pan then pour batter in. Bake at 350 degrees for an hour or so. Check with a toothpick - nothing is worse than half baked gloppy banana bread. Let it rest 10-15 mins then turn it out onto a plate.

A loaf rarely makes it past three days over here. Hehehe.

Note: Why no vanilla? Cheap vanilla might contain the juice of a beaver butt gland. I'll be making my own vanilla here in the not so distant future - without the butt goo.
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Flatbread craziness

I had a moment and decided to make some flatbread, using my standard bread recipe. I did switch it up a little and used 1 cup of semolina rather than whole wheat flour. What I ended up with was 16 dinner plate sized flatbreads. They were on the thin side, but that's so they will handle better as a folded sandwich.

What the hell do you do with 16 big flatbreads and a family of 3?

The first one gets eaten straight off the griddle... shared with the pups, of course. Taste tester seems to be a hobby around here.

I made pizza for two days as lunch for my daughter and m'self. One round was just the right size for us to share with a side of fresh fruit. A light slather of tomato paste, a bit of thin sliced ham, some shredded spinach, italian spices, garlic, a dust of parmesan and some shredded jack = YUM!

Warm flatbread to dip into gravy with dinner the first night.

A turkey & veg sandwich for Mr. Man's lunch for two days.

One to give to a chum to test out.

Turkey & Bacon Flatbread Dagwoods for dinner on night two.

Ham & Cheese & Veg Foldover Sandwiches on night three.

....and that's all of them. 3 dinners and 2 lunches.


Cheap? Pshaw yeahhh

Milk = 20 cents
Egg =  8 cents
Oil = 15 cents
Flax = 40 cents
Sugar = 20 cents
Flour =  50 cents
Salt = 2 cents
Yeast = 67 cents

Total is $2.22 - however call it a simple $3. I prefer to round up as you can't always catch a good sale.

No preservatives. Better for you ingredients than store bought. More expensive than cheap white bread but less than packaged flatbread. Oh yeah, it tasted mighty fine as well. :)

Yam and Pineapple Breakfast Bread

I recently found myself in possession of a half dozen giant sized sweet potatoes. These suckers are about two fists big. Yeah. I've tried my hand at baked sweet potato fries a good dozen times and have never gotten them to cook properly. Around Thanksgiving, I buy one of these and make both candied sweet potatoes and a pie with it - more than enough for three adults and a child.  My brain got locked in a war between "WTF do I do with all these fonging yams??" and "Yams are a great source of vitamins - Hooray for fresh veg!"

Necessity breeds invention and all that, I guess. I ran to the Google and found a recipe for Yam Brownies.  *rant* Brownies have cocoa powder in them. Blondies do not. If you're gonna call something a brownie and that treat is lacking any form of chocolate, I'm gonna bust your balls over it. As a devoted Chocolate Whore, I say - tease the beast at your own peril.  *end rant*

The recipe I found was very sugar heavy. What good is it to use a vegetable to make a special something and then put SO much sugar in that you lose all the benefits? It's that Diet Coke and a Snickers lunch idea. They don't balance each other and you'll never convince me they do. (SO there! Pbbbth) 

This is what I came up with:

Yam and Pineapple Breakfast Bread

1 Huge Sweet Potato

1 can crushed Pineapple

1 tbsp Orange Juice Concentrate

1.5 tsp Almond Extract

 4 Large Eggs

1/2c ground Flax Seed

1 c All Purpose Flour

1 c Whole Wheat Flour

1 + 1/3 c Brown Sugar

2 tsp Cinnamon

1/2 tsp Allspice or Nutmeg

1 c Butter

1 tsp Salt

1.5 tsp Baking Powder

Peel and grate the yam. Use the small grater holes instead of the large ones if you can. It took me about 40 minutes to do one by hand. 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, mix the raw grated yam with the can of crushed pineapple and it's juice. Add the OJ concentrate, Almond extract, allspice and cinnamon. Fold it all together then stick it in the fridge.

In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs and mix until well combined. Add the salt and baking powder, keep mixing. Add the flax, white flour and wheat flour. Mix until combined. Add the yam mixture and mix it some more. 

Spray grease a 13 x 9 baking pan and scrape the batter into it. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes or until it springs back lightly at the touch. 

Dust it with powdered sugar and cinnamon or hit it with some cream cheese frosting or eat it as is. 

Nom on, my friend. Nom on.

Kids and the Kinect

We've had our Kinect for the xbox 360 for about 6 months and have been through the wringer with this sucker. It's neat. Absolutely! Pain in the buttocks? Mmhm. I'm gonna break this down into sections...

Gaming Issues
While the Kinect is a groovy idea, sometimes the idea and the reality don't quite jive. Before you shell our your heard earned schekels take the time and read some reviews. I lurves me some Raving Rabbids, oh yes I do. The main reviewed complaint about the Kinect game with those bwah happy little critters is that the games are super short and you spend more time getting to the game than playing the game. Which makes it a no-dice for me and thanks for helping a sister out, reviewers!

Tech Problems
My man is basketball tall and my daughter only reaches his waist. The kinect will snap to him every time when they're trying to play together. Doesn't matter what I do - and believe me, the plenty I tried was WAY above and beyond your average Wiley Coyote measures. - it's just like that. When my daughter plays with friends who are of similar height, we have no problems with multiplayer games. She does have some problems with the Kinect "hearing" her, but that seems to be with one game so far. She LOVES bossing the Netflix around using the Kinect voice commands.

You MUST have good lighting to make the kinect work properly and try not to Goth out or Chameleon yourself with the background color. We had to hang our Kinect really high so that it could see my man from Head to Feets.We bought a Zoom attachment to see if that fixed our spacing issues and nope it didn't. I can see where it would, it just didn't do the trick for us.

My kid is too engrossed with the screen to worry about such boring things as where her feet happen to be at the time. She'd get mad that the game wasn't working because she'd wandered out of the camera "sweet spot".  I bought a rubber bottom bathrug and throw that down on the floor when she's going to play. If she's on the rug, she's in The Zone. It gives her a tactile reminder of where she should be to best play the games. It's not as effective as I'd hoped, but she knows where to return to when problems start happening in the gameplay.

Nickels and Dimes
This is pretty much my mantra for anything... I want to get it for 50% off list retail and 30% or less is my supergoal. I take a look at what Gamestop is charging, then I go take a peek at their used selection. (Generally perusing the reviews as I pass by) Then I wander over to Ebay and Amazon to see what used are going for on those  planets.  Can it be found within my price parameters or should I wait 3 months or try the pawn shop? Ebay will not only show you what current bids are for items, you can also see what they have been selling for during the last month, so you have a better idea of their usual target price.

Can I buy it as a download or just a disc? Download codes are WAY cheaper than buying the disc, usually. We got Fruit Ninja Kinect download card for free by asking the clerk at GameStop about it. (Pure luck) I picked up another game or two from Ebay for $5 per code. The Xbox Game Site wanted $10, $25 or $30 bucks for these games. They also had some games recently for $1 to download. Not all games have codes, sometimes you get lucky.

How long ago was the game released? If it was released less than 6 months ago, the only way you might get it for less than 80% of list is to get lucky in a pawn shop. Unless it sucks, then you'll find em scattered for bargain prices. 

Games that Rock for Kids - Mostly
Kinect Adventures -
This one isn't a bad starter for the system. It teaches the kids how to move and how to interact with the Kinect properly.

Kinect Star Wars - 
If you like candy, you'll dig this. It's not meant to be anything more than it is - a fun and odd romp through different SW games and environments. Not too easy for the little kids. I'd wait till 8 or so to let em give it a whack.

Kinect Party -
This is a game that has no rules or scores. It's great for the little ones. It really shows off the capabilities of the Kinect itself. Our problem with it is that the Kinect can't "hear" my daughter, so we're always having to yell at the system to change the games for her. She loves it and will wear herself out playing with these little games. 

Kinect Carnival - 
Harder than it looks and not worth much money, to be honest. There are very limited games within the Carnival and it doesn't look like it is a game that has long time play options. I'd say if you really wanna try it, go ahead but I wouldn't spend more than $4 on it, if that.

The Gunstringer - 
Not for little kids. It's a bit graphic about some things - but the gameplay is smooth and it's a fun character to play. It's built for adults and only involves using your arms - no jumping or dodging or any of that action.

Kinect Fruit Ninja - 
If your kid keeps jacking your tablet to play Fruit Ninja, this will get em outta your hair for hours.

Kinect Mini Ninja - 
Decent little game. Monk is digging being a ninja. It's not for the eensy tykes, but it is pretty cool to watch em make choices and analyze different areas of the screen.

Kinect FreeFall Racers - 
A flying race game where you get to be a flying squirrel. Fun! My kid isn't so into the race games, but Daddy seems to dig this one. :)