easiest enchiladas

enough birthday talk. i am going to share with you the best thing since sliced bread. i found this recipe on an enchilada sauce can, so i can't take any real credit for this. but get out your pen and paper and get ready to take some serious notes cause this is an instant classic . are you ready?



buy some frozen burritos. put them in a baking dish. pour enchilada sauce on it. put it in the oven for however long it says on the frozen burrito package. take out of oven. consume.

tada!

amazing!

easy!

FAST!

and best of all CHEAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

if you want to get fancy, then by all means- do it. add some cheese on top to melt. gotta love melty cheese. shred some lettuce, get some sour cream, salsa, chop up some green onions, throw it all on top of your enchiladas, and now you have a seriously dressed up dinner. this can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be.



i have never been a frozen burrito fan, but drenching the thing in enchilada sauce really works. AND if you are really pressed for time- you can skip the oven and do this in the microwave- still delicious! i have tried every possible method and it is so good.

bueno appetito mi amigos!

miyuk gook aka birthday soup

i got a new niece this week! yeah!!!!!! i will blog about the arrival of my sweet niece after my sister-in-law has a chance to blog about her daughter. but seeing as how she is now the mama of 3 little ones, i will give her a week, and if she hasn't blogged by thursday, i will go ahead and blog for her ;)

my quest to be more culturally legit continues as i did something REALLY korean this week. i made 'miyuk gook', which translates into seaweed soup, which koreans eat on their birthdays. they do this because post-partum mothers are made to consume a lot of this soup. seaweed is very high in iron, calcium, and protein, and so it is thought to be a great way for new mothers to replenish their blood stores. so since mothers eat this when they have babies, those babies celebrate their birth by eating this soup on their birthdays. so i made this soup for my sister-in-law lindsay, in honor of her having given birth on thursday.

the soup is relatively easy to make. though i still managed to mess it up a bit.
i am 30 years old and i have never attempted to make this soup before. my mom's 'recipe' is awesome. i could eat her version of this soup till i am blue in the face. jeehon also makes a great miyuk gook. mine was greasier than it should have been. oopsie. but i know the errors of my ways, so whoever has a baby next will have a less-greasy version of what lindsay and robert ate tonight. (robert texted that he had some too as he wanted to "heal his uterus too".)

here is the general recipe:
-some water
-some kind of meat on bone, or beef soup stock
-garlic
-sesame oil
-soy sauce
-dried seaweed
-salt, pepper, garlic salt to taste

so i put the dried seaweed in a bowl so it could be not-dry. let it sit for about 20-30 minutes.
this is what dried seaweed looks like when it sits in water for a while:

this is what dried seaweed looks like:

this is what dried seaweed looks like in the bag:


then i started a big pot with some water in it with the beef. i put some salt,
pepper, and crushed garlic into the water and let it boil. like crazy. as the beef is boiling, gross stuff will float to the top of the water that looks like white and brown froth. that's fat from the meat. you're supposed to skim that off the top and throw it out. in the sink. i did this. but not enough. thus the greasiness. my bad. so get all that junk off the top. add the seaweed, and some drops of sesame oil and soy sauce and let it keep cooking. add more seasoning as you feel led to do so.

serve with rice.

eat and listen to your body, especially your uterus, thank you.

this may not be something that everyone enjoys, but i am so delighted that i married into this watson clan that is very accepting of my experiments with korean cooking!

congrats to robert and lindsay for having survived my first attempts with miyuk gook, and for having created this piece of squishy beautiful awesomeness:

(what? like i was going to blog about the fact that emma was born and only have pictures of seaweed and NOT add a single picture of her?)

one chicken. three meals.

mondays are busy days in the watson house. i go to work, and chris stays home with the kids. it's awesome. but monday nights we have our small group bible study which means once i get home, things are moving at a frantic pace. dinner needs to be made, eaten, dishes thrown in the general vicinity of the sink (yeah for plastic plates) and then we are out the door again.

i managed to run to costco really quickly between work and going home, and i grabbed a rotisserie chicken, among other things. so that was our dinner. already cooked chicken. perfect. paired with alread-made mashed potatoes, it was a perfect and cheap and quick meal (less than $10. although if i had gotten a bag of spinach, throwing some of that chicken on some spinach with some ranch dressing is another perfect-cheap-quick meal that i love).

we had a lot of leftovers cause chris had a late lunch. which was perfect. so today i took a bunch of meat off the carcass and put it into tupperware for future sandwiches- either straight up(that's what's in the tupperware on the left side of the pic.) or in the form of chicken salad (which means i will just chop the chicken, add some mayo, salt, pepper, and maybe some diced apples.)

then i boiled the carcass down in a pot with about two cups of water, some minced garlic, some garlic salt (i heart garlic), and some salt and pepper. there was still some skin on the chicken which added another layer of wonderful flavor, and after about twenty minutes or so, i had the best tasting chicken broth in the world. (did i over-sell that? it's pictured in the tupperware on the right side of the pic.) i have some carrots and leftover noodles in the fridge. i will probably boil that in the broth to make some yummy soup. wish i had more leftover vegetables in the fridge...

so, there you have it. one rotisserie chicken- three meals. one dinner, two lunches. all for $5. thank you costco. thank you.

be a superstar korean chef

i guess from the sounds of my title, i am saying that i am a superstar chef and that i can teach you how to become like me. sorry if that's the impression you got. i am no superstar chef, especially not a korean one. ( i do have the awesome caucasian people i cook for fooled though.)  BUT i do hold the most basic of all korean recipes, from which millions of korean dishes are born.

the picture up top is your secret to korean cooking success. it's red pepper paste. every korean family has one of these in their fridge. my little tub is 1kg. (2.2 lbs) and i'm pretty sure the one in my mom's fridge is 5kg. that's a lot of fermented soybean, rice, and mashed up red peppers. this can be bought at any asian/international food store. for those in the east valley: pretty much anywhere along dobson rd.

also to be found in every korean household are the following ingredients:

sesame oil, soy sauce, crushed garlic, and of course the red pepper paste. and some sugar (the brown stuff int he middle.) these are the 5 ingredients you need to make the sauce for the million aformentioned korean dishes.

all you have to do is scoop and pour out as you please. i usually do about 1-2 heaping tablespoons of the paste. a teaspoon of garlic. a tablespoon of sugar (white suage is fine). a good drizzle of the soy sauce and sesame oil. mix it all together and give it a taste. it should kinda look like this:

you can add a bit of water to make the sauce spread out more. and add more sugar or other ingrdient that you feel is kinda lacking. more paste if you need more bite. more sugar if you have too much bite. more soy sauce if you need a bit more tartness. you get the picture. you kinda can't go wrong with these five ingredients.

then you add your meat.

here i used chicken leg quarters. you can add ANYTHING. i really love ribs in this sauce. you can do pork, beef, squid, or octopus. (i know i lost some of you land-locked arizonites just now. but that's what we korean-surrounded-by-water folk like to eat. and it's cause it's DELICIOUS!) you can also add 'rice cakes' (not the 'Quaker' kind you buy at the store. i mean korean sticky rice 'cakes'), potatoes, carrots, zucchini, even some old kimchi if you got it (which i had so i did.) 

cook your meat till it's done. with my chicken i did about 15 minutes on one side and 10-15 on the other. covered. but my chicken pieces were pretty big and not completely thawed out.

when you're done, get your rice, throw your meat on top, and voila! a korean meal! 

i make mine pretty not-too-spicy cause the kids eat it too. i'm so proud of my little half-korean babies and their ever-expanding palette for different foods!

this may have seemed like a complicated recipe but i assure you it's not! otherwise i wouldn't use it. ever. the sauce takes one minute to make if you have all the ingredients on the counter with you. the only thing that is time consuming is the cooking of the meat itself. this is sersiously so very easy. try it. and love it. and tell your friends you are a superstar korean chef.

salads!

we are not the healthiest eaters in the world. i am a big fan of food in boxes- like rice a roni, and hamburger helper, kraft macaroni and cheese, etc.  but lately i have a been a big fan of salads, so here is a quick look (sans pictures. sorry) at some salads we've been eating lately as i have been seriously lazy from this horrendous heat.

southwest salad-
-chicken, get the rotisserie one that they make for you at the store and shred it up. so easy! or grill, roast your own
-vegetables of your choice, bag salads are also a lazy favorite of mine
-crushed tortilla chips
-shredded cheese
-southwest ranch dressing (either mix some salsa or taco sauce with some ranch dressing)

some variations:
-brown ground beef with taco seasoning
-chicken marinaded in buffalo wing sauce mixed with dry ranch dressing. put this in the crock pot until chicken is cooked through. change dressing to blue cheese (if that's your thing. it's not mine.)

if you are not a big 'bagged salad' fan- give it a shot! they have a couple of different options- caesar, asian sesame, southwest, and once you try one and like it, you can just copy all the things that you find in their kit. (which is what i did with the above salad recipe)

especially for you moms out there- do what you have to do to feed your family and make it as easy as possible for yourself. ready-to-make meals are all around!

the sauce lady commeth

lately i have heard lots of grief, sighs, complaints about the same thing: cooking. and women- i hear ya! sometimes i love to cook, and sometimes i loathe it. but when you're on a tight budget- you gotta do what you gotta do. so i am going to try to post some supereasy recipes to hopefully inspire you, whether from my own ideas or cause you think you can do much better than me. and i bet you could.

the secret to my success in the kitchen is to have a lot of different sauces and marinades. it makes the exact same meal (say chicken and rice) so different, depending on the 'sauce' you use.
here's what i'm talking about:
one day- chicken in cream of mushroom soup, with cubed potatoes and carrots, and rice
another day- chicken in terriyaki sauce (i like 'yoshidas'), with added cabbage and onions, and rice
another day- chicken curry (i get these packages from the asian food store. so easy and seriously delicous. try vermonts, or... the one that i always buy and cannot remember the name of...) with frozen veggies, and rice
yet another day- chicken in spicy korean sauce (i will have a seperate post on this later), with mushrooms, zucchini, and rice
another day still- bread and fry chicken pieces, buy or make sweet and sour sauce, eat with rice

that's 5 days of meals, using the same two basic staples, and adding vegetables as you/if you please. and these meals do not require any sweat or tears or time. start your rice, do up the chicken so there's no pink (cause no one likes salmonella), and dinner is done!

and then here's the twist- you switch out the chicken for beef, or pork, and you've got ten more meals. switch out the rice for pasta, or even fix different kinds of rice (most of the time i use korean rice, but i have a big place in my heart for Rice-a-roni long grain rice) and you have EVEN MORE meal choices!

cans of soup are pretty cheap, and if you buy a couple bottles of marinaes that you really like, those will last you a good 4-8 meals, depending on how many people you are feeding and how much marinade you use every time. stock up your pantry with these supereasy meal boosters and you will be good to go!

be on the look our for more detailed recipes over the next few days.

happy cooking, and more importantly- happy eating!!!

Super Simple Recipe- Shepherd's Pie

Today I would like to start throwing out some supereasy recipes that your whole family will love. I will not commit to doing it once a week, cause coming up with a 'Thursday's Thing' every Thursday is already too much stress for me! (Dang it! That's tomorrow!) But if you have any easy family faves, please feel free to share!

This is Chris' favorite right now. Cause it has meat and potatos in it. You can make this as easy, or as complicated as you would like. Depending on what you have in the fridge, and pantry.

Basic Ingredients-
1 lb of ground beef
3-4 potatos
1 cup of frozen mixed veggies
1 can of gravy

This should feed 4-6 normal human beings, but here it only feed Chris, me, and Lily and Topher (and Lily eats about the same amount of food as a regular 4 month old. Not a lot.)

Step 1- Preheat your oven to about 350.
Brown the beef in a pan. Drain the fat. Add as much or as little of the frozen veggies. You can get creative here. If you have mushrooms, celery, green peppers, add those too. We are in a recession folks- veggies are cheaper than meat. This would work especially well if you only had a 1/2 pound of meat. Then add the gravy. I like the Campbells gravy, cause it was pretty flavorful. Then I made it with no-name stuff a few days ago, and it wasn't nearly as flavorful. So taste your meat concoction. You might need to add some salt and pepper here.



Step 2- Make mashed potatos however you normally make mashed potatos. Some milk/cream, butter, a little salt and pepper to taste, sour cream, mayo, whatever you got. My mashed potato top comes out REAL thick. I usually use about 5-6 potatos. Mainly cause I am feeding Chris and he is a pig. And again- cause we are in a recession and potatos are dirt cheap.

Step 3- Throw the meat mixture in the bottom of a pan that can go in the oven. Then put the mashed potatos on top. If you have cheese and you like cheese, then you can throw a layer of it between the meat and potatos, or just cover the top for looks, or both.



Step 4- Put your beautiful pie in the oven for about 15 minutes. If you are making everything right before dinner, then all the ingredients should still be warm/hot, so it's just going in the oven for the cheese to melt, and for the layers to become intimate with one another in the heat of the oven. If you make this a day or two ahead, then you are obviously going to want this to be in the oven for about 30 minutes, or longer, so that your scrumptious meal is warm.

Step 5- Let it sit for a second or two before serving, and enjoy!


(not the best pic. i'm working on it. again- giant potato layer during the recession. maybe there will be a giant meat layer in times of plenty. whenever that day comes...)