Spicy Blood Orange Glaze

Tags

1905 Salad, BBQ sauce, blood oranges, GAPS Diet, quick lunch, snowboarding, snowman, snowy hike, snowy mountains, Super Bowl Sunday

It sure has been a great weekend!  We got the snow we were hoping and wishing for.  No sooner had I clicked “publish” on my last post than the snow started coming down hard.  We had enough for a hike in the snow soon after, and a pretty good snowball fight.

I usually see this low-hanging branch in time to swing under it, but with my hood on I couldn’t and it got me right between the eyes. That’s what I get for taking my hiking stick and whacking snowy branches as soon as my husband was below them.

When we woke up this morning, we realized it had snowed all night as the weather man had predicted.  Love that he was right for once!

It was perfect for sledding…for a while.  It started melting very quickly, but not before we were able to build a snowman and slip around a little in the slush.

He’s an angry snowman.

Whoops! Poor kid. He needs a real snowboard and some fluffy snow. He’s totally outgrown that little red thing he’s had for years.

He calls this his “Epic Fail” and says failing is much more fun than succeeding. But seriously, the poor kid had to deal with only a little bit of melting snow. He did manage to have two pretty good runs.

We hurried to dry off, clean up, and warm up so we could take a drive before all the snow melted.

By the time we got home with our Super Bowl Sunday groceries, the snowman was thanking his lucky stars to still be standing.

The boys said this was the most “epic” pose a snowman has ever taken. I agree. He’s the only one I’ve ever seen defy gravity.

We had a quick lunch of 1905 Salad, minus the ham, tomatoes, and worcestershire, with roast chicken.  Then I started marinating pork “ribs”(lean pork loin cut in strips to simulate ribs) for the people in the house who are watching their animal fat intake, along with a rack of beef ribs.

I goofed off for a few hours before putting the ribs in the oven.  While they baked, I tried to make a mock potato salad using cauliflower, but, no surprise, it was awful and I think I’ve gone and wasted an entire head of cauliflower, kind of like the head of cabbage we tossed into the compost this week following the whole sauerkraut making fiasco.  At least my mid afternoon acorn squash snack was perfect, or I’d be thinking that I should steer clear of spherical produce for a while.

The bbq sauce had to be as GAPS friendly as possible, so I stuck to only ingredients we have already been using for a while.  Oranges, mustard, chili powder…

The sauce, which ended up more like a glaze, was just what our ribs and “ribs” needed for us to feel like we were eating something we weren’t supposed to, though it is hard to ignore the bowl of Doritos on the coffee table that our boys are splurging on tonight.  It’s okay.  I can keep pretending they are not sitting in all of their corny cheesiness right behind me as I type, because there is a new package of 90% dark chocolate waiting in the pantry for me.  Not entirely allowed on GAPS, but I held off as long as I could, dadgummit!  A girl NEEDS her chocolate!  Just one square.  I promise.

Ingredients:

The juice and zest of 2 clementine oranges

The juice of one blood orange

1 T spicy brown mustard

1/4 tsp. Himalayan salt

1 T chili powder

1/8 tsp. cinnamon

Method:

Zest and juice the oranges.

Isn’t blood orange juice pretty?

Combine all ingredients.

Simmer to reduce for app. 10 minutes.

Brush on.

Greek Salad with Thyme Vinaigrette

Tags

Asheville pizzeria, cured olives, Frank's Roman Pizza, fresh thyme, Greek salads, low fat cheese, low fat feta cheese, pepperoncini, string cheese, vinaigrette recipes

Low fat cheeses have come a long way since 1993.  That’s probably how long it had been since I had tried them.  It wasn’t until my husband needed to severely cut his fat intake that I went searching through deli after deli for types that he would be able to enjoy.  For the most part, he has been eating a very low fat white cheddar, which he loves, and mozzarella string cheese, the kind they individually wrap for kids, but I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon low fat feta.  What do you do with feta, besides making spanakopita, which I would die for right about now?  Greek salads, of course.

On one of our date nights last week, we were lucky enough to have two thanks to the fact that our boys’ social functions have increased with their ages, we went searching for something to make the following night that would remind us of dishes we would have enjoyed together before the big change in our eating habits.  When I found the cheese, we knew exactly what we wanted.

Our favorite local pizzeria, Frank’s, offers a family meal deal that comes with two Greek salads and a large pizza with drinks for four.  My husband and I usually share the salads with the kids, if they are in the mood, and sit laughing while they try to have a “who can hold the pepperoncini in their mouth longer contest.”  We love Greek salads and it is the feta and olives that make them so delicious.

So off we went around the store gathering the items we needed to make them just right.  Cured olives were out of the question if we wanted to keep the salads low sodium as well as low fat, so we went with good old canned black olives.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions were all we needed to make the salads satisfactory.  Pepperoncinis are also too salty for my husband, so we didn’t bother looking for them.

The next evening I threw the salads together and made a simple vinaigrette to dress them with and we were off to the races.

Yes, we did miss the pizza, but there was feta cheese!   My glass was half full.  🙂

Thyme Vinaigrette:

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 tsp. dried thyme.  Fresh would have been better but my window garden planter full of thyme is still recovering from being over-nipped the weekend I made Middle Eastern food.

1/2 c. red wine vinegar

3 T extra virgin olive oil

Salt & pepper to taste, optional.

 

 

Crunchy Fennel and Pak Choi Slaw with Citrus Mustard Vinaigrette

Tags

citrus vinaigrette, fennel salad, German mustard, green slaw, mustard vinaigrette, pak choi salad, whole seed mustard

I’m on the hunt to see which grainy foods and raw crunchy vegetables bother my husband’s digestive system.  I was all gung ho on the coconut milk I thought we had switched to but he has informed me that he tried it twice this past week and both times it made him sick.  Back to the drawing board, or creamery.

This light version of cole slaw was crunchy, zesty, and delicious but I do love the old cabbage and carrot slaw that swims in a sea of mayo.  Mayo. is on my don’t buy list simply because my husband will ruin a perfectly good sandwich by using spoonful after spoonful and I’m afraid that won’t help his system either.  I have made aioli’s over the past few weeks when we needed a mayonnaise for certain dishes.  He prefers mustard anyway, to mayo. on a sandwich so I have stocked the refrigerator with the sour American squirt bottles of mustard he loves and the German whole seed mustards I grew up with that he forgets he loves until I plunk a bottle of it on the table or use it as a sauce for fish to disguise the taste he despises.

On that track, I made the dressing for this slaw with whole mustard.

Ingredients:

1/2 medium head of fennel, cleaned and sliced

3 c. sliced pak choi with green tops

3 green onions, sliced

1 c. celery, sliced

Citrus Mustard Vinaigrette:

2 T whole seed mustard

1/4 c. fresh squeezed orange juice

1 tsp. lemon juice

2 T minced fennel greens

1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil

Method:

Combine all of the salad ingredients.

Mix together all of the dressing ingredients but the oil.  Drizzle in the oil while whisking to emulsify.

Toss the salad with the dressing.

8 servings.

Garden Vegetable Spread

Tags

arugula, crostini toppers, cucumber sandwiches with tea, open face sandwiches, pimiento cheese loaf, pimiento cheese spread, red bell pepper, the Earl of Sandwich, vegetables high in antioxidants, zucchini brownies

“Technically, they’re not sandwiches if they are open-face.”, my teenage boy, who is very technical, corrected me when I called these open-face sandwiches.  He’s right.  To sandwich something is to put it between two other things, right?  But which came first, the noun or the verb?  Hold, please, while I look it up…

Oh my!  Apparently it was the proper noun that came first.  Both are named for the Earl of Sandwich.  So technically…

Open or closed, this was our favorite topper of the open-faced sandwich trio the boys and I shared for lunch today.  Don’t tell my younger that it was the red bell pepper that gave it the fresh, pungent flavor he supremely enjoyed.  He won’t touch them if he knows they’re in a dish.  Sometimes a mom needs to be a little sneaky to get those vitamins into her kids.

I successfully tried this method with zucchini brownies one summer when my garden was giving us an overabundance of near baseball bat sized squash fruits.  That went over fine, even after I told the boys what they were made of, until their friends came over unexpectedly and that was all we had to offer them for dessert.  It wasn’t too cool, I think, to be the kids of the mom with the zucchini-based desserts.

This recipe I’ll hang on to so I can pull it out when we need a little antioxidant boost, as we did today fighting the end of a 48 hour bug.  Well, I hope it’s only 48.  Their lingering sore throats are making me think that we may be rolling over to another day.  At least the fevers are down and the nausea over so that they could sit in the sunny breakfast room and enjoy their “sandwiches” with a cup of tea.

Our other two sandwich toppers were butter and cucumber for one and an arugula and edamame spread for the other.  This garden vegetable was slightly reminiscent of that old pimento cheese spread people were so fond of in the 70’s.  Makes me wonder what would happen if I added more cream cheese and some sharp cheddar.  I’ll bet it would turn into something like that pimento cheese spread from the 70’s that I wasn’t so fond of.  Guess I’ll never be willing to find out.

Ingredients:

2 T sweet onion

1 clove of garlic

1/8 c. carrot pieces

1 T red bell pepper pieces

4 grape tomatoes

1 T butter

1 T cream cheese

1/4 tsp. salt or salt to taste

Freshly ground black pepper

1/4 tsp. paprika

1/4 tsp. dried thyme

I just blended all the ingredients in a little chopper I have, an off-brand of the Magic Bullet, and spread it on thin slices of  French bread.  It would have been good made in the food processor, all whirred to a pulp, but I wanted it just roughly blended on this occasion.

Makes 4 to 5 ounces of spread or around 1/2 c.

Lemony White Bean Hummus

Tags

hummus with lemon juice, Meyer lemon, Middle Eastern cuisine, vegetarian dishes, white bean hummus

Mmmm…If you don’t like hummus you may like this recipe.  I made this for vegetarian night with a few other dishes.  It was much creamier than hummus made with chickpeas and has opened my mind to possibly using other types of legumes to make this fabulous, healthy dipping sauce.  In fact, just this morning I saw a hummus recipe that called for edamame.  What a great idea!

Homemade pita go great with hummus and are really easy to make.

Ingredients:

2 c. cooked Navy beans

1/2 to 1 tsp. salt depending on your tastes

Water

1 T extra virgin olive oil

The juice of one Meyer lemon

Method:

In the bowl of a food processor, blend the beans until they are pureed.  Blend in the lemon juice and oil.   With the processor running, drizzle in water, between 1/4 and a 1/2 cup, until the hummus is as thin or thick in consistency as you like.  Season with salt to taste.

Makes approximately  20 oz.

And I don’t have a picture.  Not a one.  I got busy with the other dishes that night and forgot to take pics. of the hummus.  I do have some in the freezer, so I guess I can add a photo of a bowl of this white goo the next time we have it.

Indonesian Pork Satay

Tags

cooking with ginger, Indonesian food, pork ideas, satay, satay dipping sauce, skewered meat, Southeast Asian cuisine

With pork prices still rock bottom, for the most part, and skinless, boneless chicken breast sky high, I end up buying a couple of pork loins a month.  I cut off the fat and trim the edges, using the scraps to make breakfast sausage which we eat on Sundays far too often, and the lean pork meat gets turned into all kinds of things.  This has been going on for months now, with a little pork hiatus around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

My favorite way to eat it is roasted or grilled with fruit of some sort but I’m starting to get really bored with the whole idea and am running out of fruit.  I have made pork with muscadines, grilled peaches, and one with apples and cider, another stuffed with plums and have posted all but the apple cider pork on the blog.  Marmalade glazed loin?  The idea just popped into my head.  Okay, maybe I’m not all done but we really needed a break from pork cooked with fruit, especially since both of my boys do not care much for simultaneously sweet and savory dishes.

I tried to veer into another direction with this dish, but alas, it was pork and it was sweet thanks to the peanut butter in the marinade and dipping sauce.  No one complained, however.  I guess the fact that peanuts are not in the fruit family made it alright.

This poor recipe has  been back-burnered for several weeks for one reason or another.  High time I get it posted. If I had planned to make it rather than pulling what I could find out of the fridge and pantry to get dinner on the table one night I would have used fresh ginger and some lemongrass, maybe.  I totally forgot about my jar of coconut oil that sits in the vitamin cabinet for daily doses or I would have used a little to stir fry the sesame vegetables that I made to go with our skewered meat.  Banana wedges, something I always serve with Southeast Asian dishes, would have been divvied up among the plates had there been any hanging from my pot rack at the time I made this meal.  Oh well.  It was yummy, nonetheless.

Ingredients:

3 lb. pork loin, trimmed

Marinade:

2 cloves minced garlic

1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes

1/2 tsp. ginger, ground

1/2 c. soy sauce

2 tsp. lemon juice

1 T peanut butter

2 tsp. grated onion

Dipping Sauce:

6 T peanut butter

1/4 c. roasted peanuts, chopped

1 clove minced garlic

2 T soy sauce

1 tsp. honey

6 T chicken stock

1/2 tsp. ground ginger

Method:

Thinly slice pork.

Isn't that a pretty cutting board my husband gave me for Christmas? He's such a sweety.

Combine marinade ingredients.

Add pork slices to marinade and toss to coat.  Refrigerate covered for app. 45 minutes (because that’s how long it took me to get my veggies prepped and stir-fried, brown rice made, and dipping sauce prepared 😉  ).

Prepare dipping sauce.  I whipped mine up in the food processor by chopping the onion and peanuts, then adding the other ingredients.

Thread marinated pork slices onto bamboo skewers.

Cook on a hot griddle or grill a minute or two on each side.

Serve with dipping sauce.

Roasted Beet Salad with Pomegranate Vinaigrette

Tags

beet and bleu cheese salad, beet salad, bleu cheese, bleu cheese and walnuts, homeschooling tips, making lesson plans, medieval foods, POM pomegranate juice, pomegranate vinaigrette, roasted beets

Sometimes careful planning and scheduling everything down to the month, week, day, and almost the hour can backfire on you.  I have just experienced this and a small oversight has put me into double time panic mode.

I had the school year and lesson plan worked out beautifully on big desk calendars that hang below each of my boys’ very own bulletin boards; a system that I’ve used for years to keep our lesson work on track.  But I have been so complacent about checking the schedule this month, knowing it was all mapped out and that the majority of the work that we were to do together would be cooking a medieval dish every day.

The boys do their math, language arts, German, spelling, and writing on their own and have been bringing me the medieval lesson which we quickly work out in the kitchen and rate at the end as something we would or would not like to eat at another time.  It’s been so carefree from my end that I have been enjoying cooking and blogging, spring cleaning, planning my garden and starting seedlings, then making whatever is scheduled for that day from their medieval food lessons.  I’ve become so lazy, in fact, about looking ahead at the calendar and just checking their finished work that I forgot that the entire month of January did not end up being devoted to food as I’d hoped over the summer when setting up our lesson plan.  There had been a timing glitch and unless we wanted to do an extra week of school, some subjects needed to be consolidated.  I really didn’t remember until this morning when I had my son bring today’s lessons from his file.  He said, “It (the calendar/lesson plan below his board) says all subjects are for the medieval feast.”

“Medieval feast?!”  I told him to go look again, that the feast was the last full week of January which is next week not this week.  We would spend Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday planning, shopping, cooking, doing recipe conversions, getting ready for the feast which we would enjoy Saturday afternoon when their father got home from work.  Even though I was certain that he was mistaken I still followed him into the lesson room to see for myself.  Guess who was wrong.  Guess what today is.  Wednesday.  So, not only am I a week behind but hours behind schedule.

In addition to that, the boys meet with their group tonight, I planned a visit with a friend for Thursday afternoon and my husband has planned that, since they have so much brainstorming to do, the team of engineers he has gathered to develop for a contract he’s working on for his own business will meet at our house rather than the library on Saturday afternoon since the library closes early.  I volunteered to cook dinner for the crew.  So, unless they want to wear cardboard crowns and eat braised oxtail, I can move the medieval feast to Sunday.  He has yet to tell me if that is on or not, but I think takeout pizza for his teammates will suffice if they do need to work at the house, and the boys and I will hide out in the kitchen doing what we can for Sunday’s dinner.  I guess that would give me a whole other day to prep and it’s just the four of us, so if anything else goes awry, no biggy.  Still kicking myself, however, for such an enormous oversight.

This will be my last post until next week.  Coincidentally, I was eating the leftovers for my late lunch as I typed.  It’s even great the next day…if I do say so myself.  It was a perfect rainy day winter blues chaser last night during,  yet another, torrential thunderstorm.

Ingredients:

3 medium sized beets, or a full can if using canned

1 head of romaine lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces

2 cups baby spinach leaves

1/2 to 3/4 c. walnuts, broken, but not chopped

3 oz. bleu cheese crumbles

Pomegranate Vinaigrette:

1 clove garlic, minced

1/4 c. pomegranate juice

2 T red wine vinegar

Salt to taste, a pinch or two

1/3 c. extra virgin olive oil

Method:

Thoroughly scrub the beets.  Trim them.

Place in a baking dish.  Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.

Roast in a 350 degree oven until tender about  1/1/4 hours.  Cool and pull the skins off with a paring knife.

Chill.  Medium dice.

Ahhhhh!! No. I didn't cut myself. That's not funny...

Make the vinaigrette by combining all of the ingredients but the oil.

Whisk vigorously while drizzling in the olive oil to emulsify.

Mix together the greens and portion on four dinner plates.  Add bleu cheese, walnuts, and the diced beets to each.  Douse each with vinaigrette and serve.

I served this with some girdle bread the boys and I made for their medieval lesson and Lemony White Bean Hummus for a fab. vegetarian night dinner.

Makes 4 dinner salads or 6 to 8 side salads.

 

Pasilla Negro Grilled Pork with Cilantro Aioli

Tags

aioli, boneless pork chops, cilantro, grilled pork loin, internal temperature of pork, Jimmy Buffett, margaritas, pasilla negro chile recipes, wintertime blues, zombies

The winter funk has set in as it usually does once the Christmas festivities and New Year excitement has worn off and I realize gardening and warm weather are still months away.  A childhood friend, who is now a witty, fabulous writer, posted her views on the wintertime blues on her blog just when I was beginning to wonder if our ongoing cloudy weather would ever break.  Homesickness for the sunny peninsula we both grew up sweltering upon has yet to rear its ugly head in my direction this year, but I was able, for the most part, to relate to Misty’s account of the cold weather doldrums she’s experiencing at the edge of the mountains in which I live with my family.

Simply wishing that, in the least, the moisture in the air would turn to snow rather than running ceaselessly through the gutter pipes so it would feel more like winter and less like the gloomy summer of last year, was bringing no results.  It has now reached the point in which every morning I wake up and think that if I were looking at a movie screen rather than out my bedroom window, at any moment, the lurid faces of a herd of zombies will become visible as they move in a stiff legged march from the leafless treeline into the misty open.  The haze doesn’t seem to dissipate but, like the torrential rains and alternating cold fronts, continues to roll in over the mountain tops to settle on my front porch.

When I perused the list of the few recipes I have posted over the past weeks, most of them as dull as a foggy, gray, winter morning, I realized that my creativity was being affected by the seasonal melancholy as well as my mood.  Misty Barrere’s post, The Itch,  had me digging through the pantry, throwing open shutters, and pining for a change of scenery all around.  Jimmy Buffett’s book, Swine Not?: A Novel Pig Tail, which was given to my husband by a relative for Christmas, called to me from where it waited on the bedside table for me to finish the other nine or so books that I’m reading at the moment, but no, there was work to be done.  Some spunk was required to deal with this funk and if it hadn’t been raining I would have taken my pork loin to the outdoor grill to create this dish.

In a further attempt to spice up my life and the blog a bit, I have allowed it to jump in line ahead of a list of not so interesting recipes that I haven’t gotten around to blogging.  Forgive me my procrastination and, as always, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart to those who take the time to read the ramblings I have been posting for the last year.

Ingredients:

3 to 4 lb. pork loin, trimmed…or not

Marinade:

2 to 4 dried pasilla negro chiles, soaked in boiling water, cleaned of seeds and finely minced

1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil

1/4 c. finely minced green bell pepper

1/4 grated or pureed onion

2 large cloves of garlic, minced

1/4 c. red wine vinegar

1/4 tsp. salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1/4 tsp. cumin

1/8 tsp. coriander

Cilantro Aioli:

1/2 c. fresh cilantro leaves

1 egg yolk

1 to 1 1/2 tsp. lime juice

1/2 c. extra virgin olive oil

1/4 tsp. salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Prepare marinade.  Slice pork loin into 3/4 inch portions.  Place in marinade, turning to coat well on all sides, and marinate in the refrigerator for one hour.

Prepare aioli by placing the cilantro in a food processor to puree.

Add the egg yolk, salt and pepper.  Drizzle in a little lime juice and whir until thickened.  Alternate drizzling in the remaining lime juice and the oil until a thick mayonnaise is created.  The finished aioli was a bit bitter at first, so I contemplated adding a touch of honey, but by the time dinner was served, the flavors had melded and the mellowed.   We ended up using a little on our salads.  YUM.

Grill the pork until almost cooked through then finish to an internal temperature of at least 145 in a 350 degree oven for very tender and juicy boneless chops.

Serve with the cilantro aioli.

Grilled polenta and a salad were great side dishes to this.  If you need more spunk to beat your wintertime funk, consider adding hot sauce or cayenne to the marinade and even to the aioli.  Margaritas would take it all the way to Mistyland.  😉

Backyard Barbeque!!

Tags

backyard bbq, cole slaw, corn on the cob, fire roasted, honey bbq sauce, Jack Daniel's, potato salad, rotisserie chicken, strawberry shortcake, whiskey bbq sauce

It’s Labor Day weekend and like all other Labor Day weekends since we purchased our little farm, we are camping out in the backyard.  One year we made the mistake of trying to travel on the interstate to get to another town on Labor Day and there was so much traffic that we sat at a dead stand-still at several different points.  It was ridiculous and we have yet to venture out on such a crazy weekend again.

This year, in addition to camping, we are rigging a spit to roast two whole chickens over our campfire.  My dad called yesterday wanting to know what we were doing.  I could picture him rubbing his hands together conspiratorially like he does when we are together and he excitedly asks me what my plans are for “such and such.”  “You bbqing a chicken?”  I told him yes, two of them.  He laughed and laughed.  I told him I was rigging a spit to cook them over the fire and that we were camping in the backyard to avoid overcrowded campgrounds and because our property has the best mountain view anyway.  He laughed again and agreed that it does.  Before I could tell him that I was roasting them over the fire like we used to do with cornish game hens when he would take us backpacking in Florida when I was a kid, he asked,  “Did I ever tell you what I used to do?”  I knew where he was going.  I mentioned the cornish hens.   He continued, telling me how he would do it.  While everyone else was packing in cans of SPAM, he would pack frozen cornish game hens and during a day of hiking in the Florida heat, by the time camp was set up and a fire was going, the hens would be defrosted.  We got onto another subject before I had the chance to tell him that my memories of those roasted hens was precisely why we were cooking our chickens the same way.

It wasn’t until my husband came home from work and I was telling him about my phone conversation with Dad that I realized, with my husband’s help, that Dad was probably referring to our pet chickens when he asked if we were cooking a chicken this weekend and that’s why he laughed so hard when I said “two”.   That still has me giggling when I think about it.  He knows how much I love those stupid birds.

These barbeque sauces I came up with for the 4th of July weekend picnic we had.  I used one for our ribs and one for chicken.  I was never able to post them because my laptop with the photos of that bbq died before I could post the recipes.  I decided that Labor Day weekend was a good time to get them up and added to my recipe index, sans photos.  I don’t think a couple of shots of bowls of a redish brown sauce would be that exciting anyway.

The chicken in the photo is glazed with Roasted Scallion and Tomato BBQ Sauce.

Tennessee Whiskey BBQ Sauce

2/3 c. tomato paste

1/3 c. soy sauce

1 3/4 tsp. chilli powder

1/2 tsp. granulated garlic

2 T Jack Daniel’s whiskey

1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1/4 tsp. dry mustard powder.

Combine all ingredients and slowly heat over medium to low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Sweet Carolina BBQ Sauce

1 c. catsup

1/8 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1/4 c. honey

1/2 tsp. smoked paprika

1/2 tsp. granulated garlic

1 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. prepared yellow mustard

3 T red wine vinegar

1/2 tsp. chilli powder

Combine all ingredients and slowly heat over low to medium heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Additional Backyard BBQ recipe ideas:

Roasted Scallion and Tomato BBQ Sauce

Zesty Barbeque Sauce

All American Potato Salad

Confetti Slaw

Grilled Corn on the Cob with Chive Butter

Green Goddess Roasted Red Potato Salad

Buttermilk Biscuits

Sweet Southern Cornbread

Picnic Devilled Eggs

Chewy Peanut Butter Cookies

Peach Bread Pudding with Molten Praline Sauce

Strawberry Shortcake

Mango Black Bean Salsa

Tags

black beans, Chef Kusuma Cooray, Honolulu chefs, Julia Child, mango salsa, mangos

I walked into the office of one of my chef instructors in my second semester of culinary school and there was a picture on her desk of herself with Julia Child.  I looked at her and asked, “You KNOW Julia Child?!!”  With her awesome Sri Lankan accent she replied, sounding a bit offended that I should have to ask, “But of course!  She’s my good friend!”  I felt like curtsying or asking for her autograph.  This little woman whom I had been working alongside in awe of for her obvious culinary abilities had suddenly jumped to near celebrity status in the eyes of one of her young students.  And being one of only three mainland students that I knew in the entire culinary program, I had no idea that she did, in fact, hold a celebrity status with the local students and community.

She was the genius behind the interesting combination of mango and black beans as a salsa that won my heart all those years ago along with her kind and patient instruction.  I was happy to discover, recently, that she has her own line of spice mixes for sale.  If they are anything like the woman who creates them, they have to be simply amazing!

Check them out at CoorayProducts.com

Ingredients:

1 c. mango, medium dice

1/4 c. yellow onion,  diced

1 c. cooked black beans

1/4 c. poblano peppers, minced

1/4 tsp. salt

2 T lime juice

1/4 tsp. cumin

Combine all ingredients.

This was a mild version.  Perfect with our Fish Tacos.   I think it would have been prettier with some red bell pepper and fresh cilantro, not to mention tastier.  Next time…