Recipe Reviews

CrabNebula

I spent the weekend trying some new recipes to get out of the food rut I've been in the past few months.

Horseradish Cream Sauce

This was a-m-a-z-i-n-g. The only thing I changed was using low fat sour cream instead of regular. But yeah, this was awesome. I used it as the sauce base for a second pizza I made with steak, peppers, mushrooms, and onions. My husband could not stop talking about how good this pizza was because of the sauce. Definitely will make again.

Pizza with NY Strip, Blue Cheese and Balsamic Glaze

Friday nights are cheat/feast nights, so calories? What are those? Hehe. We are now on a rotation of pizza, deep fried and grilled chicken fingers, and poke (yay, my Costco now sells poke!). Pizza is great, but I was in a bit of a rut, been making the same 3-4 pizzas for months and I needed to try something new. I found this recipe and immediately wanted to give it a shot!

So first, I can't read and I put the honey in the balsamic vinegar before it reduced. Yeah, I ended up with burnt balsamic sugar candy. OK, cleaned up that mess and tried again. Reduction is more successful this time. It tastes pretty darn good with this pizza, so worth the cursing at myself first go around.

I did not use NY strip. The reason was only bone-in was on sale, lots of fat that needed to be trimmed, and I didn't want to have to deal with that mess. I instead bought a 2lb tri-tip roast that was on sale - no bones, no fat to trim, and the interwebz said it was a good alternative to NY strip. I cut it in half, froze one half and grilled the other. It was my first time eating tri-tip and my god, was it delicious. My only complaint to myself was that I wanted to cook it medium rare and ended up with medium. Next time, next time, but still, my husband was endangering the pizzas having any steak on them because he was shoving it into his mouth as fast as I could cut it.

I made and used my own dough, so can't comment on that part of it, but I did grill it per instructions and it turned out wonderful.

The watercress was OK, I guess. First time I had ever eaten it and I wasn't really impressed. It didn't taste bad, just unremarkable with a vague bite at the end. You could easily sub out some other green like arugula or spinach.

Overall, I dunno if I would make this again as written, but it did give me a springboard for the next pizza. I might make it with a horseradish cream or garlic butter base, steak, more blue cheese/parmesan, no Monterrey jack (I had no idea why this was on there - it added nothing to the pizza), keep the glaze, maybe sub out the watercress for arugula.

Vegetable Meatloaf

This was really, really good. My daughter refused to eat it because there was no way to pick out the veggies she decided she wasn't going to eat for whatever reason, but my husband and I thought it was incredible. Juicy and packed with flavor. In fact, I am not sure I will make meatloaf any other way now (sorry, kiddo!). I also found a use for the bottle of reduced sugar Heinz ketchup I had sitting in the fridge. It think it is nasty to eat straight, but in this meatloaf, it worked great and I might buy it again only for this purpose. Otherwise, I followed the recipe exactly as written.

Overnight Cinnamon Rolls

Yesterday was Father's Day, so I decided to make my husband some orange rolls. He really likes them, but I rarely make them because they are time consuming calorie bombs. But I decided to give these a shot because you could stick them in the fridge and have them basically ready to go the next morning. I altered these to be orange rolls instead of cinnamon.

Other changes I made (lol...):

3 yolks, one whole egg
I Can't Believe It Is Not Butter Light for butter in dough
Freshly grated orange peel and juice of half a large orange in dough
3c all purpose flour
1c whole wheat bread flour
1 tbls of gluten
Truvia white sugar baking blend subbed for regular sugar
Truvia brown sugar baking blend subbed for brown sugar
Grated orange peel in the filling
Grated orange peel in frosting
Triple Sec and orange juice in frosting instead of milk

I let the dough rise, rolled out, filled, rolled up and cut into 9 rolls. I then put them in a 10 inch cast iron skillet, covered with plastic wrap, and put overnight in the fridge. Next morning, got up and saw that they were huge. There was no reason to go through the oven proofing step. In fact, my main concern was that they may have overproofed! However, that was not the case.

So now you are probably like, b, why are you even reviewing this when you made something completely different? Well, yeah, you have a point. But, I am going to say that this recipe I created based on this one 100% worked. In fact, these were the best batch of sweet rolls I have ever made. I mean, you could not tell AT ALL that I had subbed out much of the fat and sugar in these babies. They were absolutely picture perfect. My husband and I could not stop picking at them in the pan and my daughter was stuffed after one (they were really big).

Grilled Yucatan Chicken Skewers

After having such a heavy breakfast, we wanted something light for dinner, so I decided to make this. The marinade didn't smell too strong like anything special when I made it, so I wasn't initially impressed, but as soon as the chicken hit the grill, OMG the smell was divine. I had serious regrets about not reserving some of the marinade before putting in the chicken as a dipping sauce for later. Everything about this marinade was so good. It did end up a little spicier than I though. Not a bad thing for me and my husband, but I did have to quickly made an alternative main dish for my kid (quesadillas). This is just a perfect thing to make on a warm to hot summer day, with grilled corn on the cob, a good slaw, and a margarita (sadly, no calories available for margaritas last night ).

As a note, it is probably easiest just to throw all the marinade ingredients in the food processor from the get go if you have whole chipoltes in adobo. I got to that step and realized I had just wasted a bowl because I needed to puree the chipoltes. Duh. The marinating time I got on this was about 6 hours.

This is definitely going in the regular rotation. So, so good, as in I would pay for this happily at a restaurant good.

Jicama Slaw

I saw jicama as a basket ingredient on Chopped and was intrigued. I had never heard of or ate one before, but the description they gave it being as if a radish and an apple had a baby, made me want to give it a shot. Peeling it sucks, but I have to say, I am in love with the texture. Very crunchy, like eating an apple, but no apple flavor. Or any real flavor at all, but the crunch is nom. I would definitely buy and use one again for slaw. I could also see just eating it as is because crunch.

Now as for this recipe. It was meh. Neither good nor bad, just eh. I did not use 6tbls of olive oil because I thought that was insane. I used 2 and that was more than enough. I probably would not make this again. I think it is because I am more of a fan of mayo based slaws in general. I think I would use all the same veggies, but reduced or fat free mayo, lime juice, salt, pepper, honey, and more chili powder (maybe chipolte powder?).

Mango Salsa

I made this actually two weeks ago, but thought it was really good. I made to go with some jerk pork loin. I made this exactly as written and can only recommend. I am planning on making it again soon to go with some grilled salmon.

Tonight, I am trying this Light and Spicy Zucchini Casserole. Will review tomorrow.