Easy Recipes

Looking for an easy apple crisp recipe? A while ago I posted a recipe of Pear and Apple Crumble. A big difference between that recipe and this one is that in the crumble I melted butter, and I didn’t melt it in this one. Having tried both ways, I prefer not melting the butter, as doing that produced an even tastier topping.

I love to cook savory foods, but I don’t cook desserts that often, and I thought that this was an extremely simple dessert to make. Try it - it is easy to make, and results are great. Oh, and serve your apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, just like you see in the picture. It is delicious that way!

And here are a few more recipes you will enjoy: Reuben sandwich, Steak Fajitas Recipe, Beet salad.

Ingredients for Apple Crisp

6 large apples
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
1.5 tablespoons of flour
a pinch of cinnamon

For the topping:

3 tablespoons of butter
1 cup of oats
1/2 cup of flour
1/2 cup of brown sugar
1/2 cup of chopped almonds
a pinch of cinnamon

How To Make Apple Crisp

Peel, then core and chop your apples.

Mix together apples, two tablespoons of brown sugar, one tablespoon of flour and a pinch of cinnamon.

Make the topping: Chop the butter into small pieces. In another mixing bowl combine butter, oats, 1/2 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of chopped pecans, a pinch of cinnamon.

Put the apple mixture on the bottom of the 9×13 baking pan. Top with the topping.

Pre-heat the oven to 350F. Bake the apple crisp for 40-50 minutes, until done.

Serve warm, with ice cream.

So many people ask how to make hash, because they think that making hash is extremely complicated and requires a lot of ingredients.

Well, I have great news for you! It is actually easy to make very tasty and great looking corned beef hash, and here is the corned beef hash recipe to prove it!

You can use any color pepper. Red pepper makes it look especially great, though.

Tools You Will Need For Corned Beef Hash Recipe

Knife
Cutting Board
Saute Pan

Ingredients You Need For Corned Beef Hash Recipe

1 Medium Red (or yellow, of green) Pepper
1 Medium Onion
0.5 Pounds Of Cooked Corned Beef
1 Pound Of Cooked Potatoes

Oil for frying

How To Make Corned Beef Hash

Chop onion, pepper, corned beef and potatoes into small pieces.

Heat up the oil in the saute pan.

Add onions and cook for 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add peppers and continue cooking until peppers soften up. Add potatoes and corned beef and cook for 5 more minutes, until everything is cooked through.

Making brunch? Corned beef goes great with eggs, or Caramelized Onions and Goat Cheese Frittata, or just with bread and a very simple salad.

Reuben sandwich is one of my favorite sandwich. Except that I am not a fan of sauerkraut, and I have always used cole slaw in a Reuben sandwich instead of sauerkraut.

Recently I found out that people have been making Reuben sandwich with cole slaw instead of sauerkraut for a while. Apparently, this sandwich is called a Rachel sandwich. So, depending on which one you prefer, cole slaw or sauerkraut in your sandwich, you are making a Reuben sandwich or a Rachel sandwich.

Cheese on the Reuben (or Rachel) sandwich is optional to me. What’s not optional is the Thousand Island dressing, corned beef and cole slaw.

The Reuben Sandwich will go great with Potato Salad Without Mayonnaise or Potato Salad With Mayonnaise, or even with a Greek salad.

Ingredients You Need To Make Reuben Sandwich

2 slices of bread
3 slices of corned beef
1/2 tablespoon of Thousands Islands Dressing
1 slice of cheese (optional)
1 tablespoon of cole slaw
some butter

How To Make A Reuben Sandwich

Pre-heat your grill.

Grill the corned beef for a few minutes on each side, so it is warmed up.

Butter the bread.

Create your sandwich: Put one slice of bread on the grill, buttered side down. Put corned on top of the bread. Put the dressing on top of corned beef, then cole slaw. If you are using cheese on top, if you are using it.

Now, this is important: Put the second slice of bread on top of cheese, buttered side up. Close the grill and grill for 3-5 minutes, until the sandwich turns golden brown.

Is healthy eating one of your resolutions for 2010? Many people give up on the healthy eating resolution very early in the year for many different reasons. One of the reasons so many people give up on it is very simple - they did not have a Healthy Eating Plan.

Creating your Healthy Eating Plan is very simple. Have a plan that helps you put together healthy meals at home, and you will be much more likely to stick with your healthy eating resolution.

Another thing is to not become upset when you eat something that you don’t think is healthy. So what is you had some fast food yesterday or had some chocolate cake at the restaurant? The key is to not make fast food and chocolate cake the main pieces of your diet. If you eat healthy 80% of the time and then eat foods that are not too healthy the other 20% of the time, that is still a reasonably good diet. Don’t go for perfect - eating healthy some of time is still better than not eating healthy at all.

To help you eat healthier this year, here are five healthy eating tips:

- Create A Weekly Menu In Advance. Doing this requires some planning, but creating a menu in advance is the best thing you can do to help yourself keep your promise of healthy eating.

Decide on the recipes you will use for your meals, and which ingredients you will use in the recipe. That way you will never have to think about what to cook for dinner - you will have all the ideas and recipes at your fingertips! The key here is to choose easy recipes that will help you make your dinner easily!

Once you decide on what you are going to cook, write a shopping list and include the ingredients for all the dishes that you are planning on making next week.

Double check your list to make sure you include all the ingredients you need. It will be very frustrating when you start cooking dinner and then realize that you are missing an important ingredient.

- Include Salads In Your Menu. When you are creating your menu, make sure to include salads. Salads are easy to make, and they are usually healthy.

A salad made with lots of raw vegetables and a simple oil-vinegar dressing will make your dinner tastier and healthier.

Here are some salads to take a look at: Potato Salad Without Mayonnaise, Beet Salad, Greek Salad, Panzanella Salad.

- Include Soups In Your Menu. Just like with salads, you should add soups to your menu as well. Grains, lean meats, beans and vegetables

Here are a few soups: Vegetable Soup, Beef and Barley Soup.

- Cook A Variety Of Foods. If you cook just one or two different dishes, you will get bored of them really fast and then you will go back to junk food and chocolate cake.

Find recipes that you like and add them to your dinner rotation. Do you like a particular cuisine? Do you like a particular dish you had at a restaurant? Do research and explore how to make it yourself - you will learn something new and you will feel great about cooking your dinner!

Explore different cuisines: Greek recipes, Italian food, Mediterranean recipes.

Have healthy eating tips? Share them in the comments!

I have posted about potato salad before, but both potato salad without eggs and potato salad with eggs contain mayonnaise.

There are people who like their potato salad without mayonnaise, so here is one recipe for that. This potato salad is still very flavorful because of the dressing, and scallions and parsley.

A few more salad recipes: black beans and corn salad, Greek salad, goat cheese and marinated onions salad.

Ingredients For Potato Salad:

2 pounds of potatoes
4 scallions
1 tablespoon of parsley

Ingredients For Potato Salad Dressing:

3 tablespoons of canola oil
1 small white onion
1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
salt
pepper

How To Make Potato Salad Without Mayonnaise

Peel and boil potatoes. Once the potatoes are cooked, wait for them to cool.

Chop scallions. Chop parsley.

Chop the onions. Heat up the oil in the skillet. Add the onions to the skillet and cook until they are golden brown. Turn off the heat, let it cool for a bit and stir in mustard and vinegar.

In a salad bowl combine potatoes, parsley, scallions and dressing. Mix gently to combine.

Here is another great dish where you can wrap all the ingredients into a wrap. Here I am not using fresh vegetables to add to the meat, but rather fried peppers and onions. The fajitas look fun and very colorful with the red bell peppers.

Just like with the steak tacos, you must cut the flank steak thinly, and you must cut it against the grain.

Serve the fajitas with rice, refried beans, black bean and corn salad, or chickpea salad.

More fun dishes with wraps: steak tacos, my take on lamb shawarma, lamb patties with tzatziki sauce.

Ingredients For Steak Fajitas

1.5 Pounds of Flank Steak
Fried Peppers and Onions
Oil for frying
Corn or flour tortillas
salt
pepper

How To Make Steak Fajitas

Prepare the Fried Peppers and Onions.

Heat up oil in a saute pan. Add the flank steak and sear on one side. Turn and sear on the other side.

Pre-heat the oven to 375F. Put the steak in the oven to finish cooking to the desired level of doneness. Depending on your steak, and how you want it cooked, it can take 10-25 minutes. Make sure to check the steak temperature with a meat thermometer, so that you don’t undercook and that you don’t overcook your steak.

Well-done steak is 160F.
Medium-well steak 150-155F.
Medium steak 140-145F, etc.

Once the steak comes out of the oven, don’t cut into it immediately. Let it rest for 10-15 minutes. After it rests put it on a cutting board and cut it thinly, against the grain.

Build the fajitas with steaks, peppers and onions.

Before we talk about peppers and onions, I wanted to tell you about my carrot cake. I wanted to make one, so I have looked at a bunch of recipes, picked what I thought were the best parts of a couple of them and baked the cake. Everything was ok until it was time for the cake to come out of the pan. It got really stuck, and as I was trying to carefully dislodge it from the pan it broke into several parts.

I wasn’t happy about that somewhat unfortunate event, but after making the cream cheese frosting and frosting each of the parts separately, I felt better. The cake was still there and with the
frosting, it tasted fine.

Lesson learned: everything is better with frosting.

Now that we discussed that, let’s talk about fried peppers and onions. They are very easy to make and they are great in steak fajitas, or as a side dish.

Tools You Will Need To Make Peppers and Onions

Knife
Cutting Board
Saute Pan

Ingredients To Make Peppers and Onions

3 Medium Red Bell Peppers
2 Medium Onions

Oil for frying

How To Make Peppers and Onions

Peel and chop the onions. Cut peppers in halves, clean from seeds and membranes.

Heat the oil in the aaute pan. Add peppers and onions and saute, stirring frequently, until the desired doneness.

Here is another beet salad. The dressing here is different from another Beet salad I posted about.

Here, pecans add a nice crunch and the lemony dressing adds an additional dimension to the salad.

Ingredients To Make Beet Salad

2 medium beets
a handful of pecans
a few handfuls of mesclun greens, arugula, lettuce
1/4 of a small onion

Dressing:

1 Tablespoon of fresh Lemon Juice
1 Tablespoon of Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper

Make Beet Salad

Wash the beets. Boil or roast the beets until done. I boiled them for this recipe, just like I boiled them for the other Beet salad.

Once the beets are cooked, cool them, peel them and cut them into thin pieces.

Chop and roast pecans.

Cut onions into thin pieces.

Make the dressing by combining lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.

Now is time to put the salad together. On the bottom of a serving platter put your mesclun greens/lettuce/arugula.

Put the onions on top of lettuce. Put the beets on top of the onions. Pour the dressing on the beets. Put very thin slices of Pecorino Romano on top of the beets and top those with chopped pecans.
Pecorino Romano - just a few of small thin pieces

I thought I would share with you some of the best recipes of 2009. This is not a complete list by any means, just something I am putting together to share with you a few food pictures and recipes I really liked. Enjoy!

Pear And Apple Crumble I have been cooking savory foods for a very long time, and am good at it. It is a completely different story when it comes to baking, though. Usually I would just buy dessert when I want it, and be done with it. But this year I decided to do more baking on my own, because I like the idea of knowing exactly which ingredients I put in my food.

So here is my pear and apple crumble, which turned out quite well. After I made this crumble, I decided that I really like making crumbles, as they are VERY EASY to make (remember, this is coming from someone who doesn’t bake, so it’s very easy), and I can change and substitute ingredients and it still comes out great.

One thing that I don’t like about baking is that you usually must measure out all the ingredients, or your dough will not rise or it will be taste horribly. Not so with the crumble - changing/substituting ingredients still makes for a very tasty crumble. And it’s great with ice cream on top!

So if you need a tasty dessert that goes GREAT with ice-cream, this is it!

Watermelon Feta Salad. For this one, it is the combination of how it looks and how it tastes and how easy it is to make it. Even if you have never cooked in your life, you can cut small pieces of watermelon, feta and onion, put them on a platter and sprinkle with some black pepper.

It looks great too - check out the full size picture.

Couscous Salad With Eggplants, Feta and Red Onions. Another new recipe this year. I LOVE everything with eggplant, especially fried eggplant, so I was brainstorming about where else I can add some fried eggplant.

This side dish is a winner - the combination of couscous, salty feta, red onions and tomatoes just works. And the colors are spectacular together, just see the full size picture!

So, what are your bests of 2009? Share links to food pictures and recipes in the comments, and tell us why they are great!

A lot of people are not sure what to make with beets. There are a ton of good recipes for beets, and here is an extremely simple one.

Lettuce, beets, Pecorino and onions work great together. This salad is very simple to prepare, and it looks and tastes great! And it looks very elegant on a plate!

And just like the Watermelon Feta Salad, you don’t even have to mix this one!

Tools You Will Need To Make Beet Salad

Knife
Cutting Board
Serving Platter

Ingredients To Make Beet Salad

2 medium beets
a few handfuls of mesclun greens, arugula, lettuce
1/4 of a small onion
Pecorino Romano - just a few of small thin pieces

Dressing:

1 Tablespoon of Apple Cider Vinegar
1 Tablespoon of Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper

Make Beet Salad

Wash the beets. Boil or roast the beets until done. I boiled them for this recipe.

Once the beets are done, cool them, peel them and cut into thin pieces.

Cut onions into thin pieces.

Make the dressing by combining all the dressing ingredients and mixing them.

Put the salad together - on the bottom of a serving platter put your mesclun greens/lettuce. Then scatter onions. Put the beets on top of the onions. Pour the dressing on the beets and scatter very thin slices of Pecorino Romano on top.