Day 29 - Mexican Style Corn

Cookbook - Jamie's Food Revolution

Hola amigas and amigos! I'm bringing my hispanic heritage in today, from my Spanish to my recipe.

Nacho Libre is awesome, starring Jack Black. It's about this guy who works at an orphanage, but turns out to be a wrestler. He becomes friends with this homeless guy named Steven. When they get money from wrestling, Steven spends his money on shoes...and corn.

The corn is what I made tonight. My brother went to his friend's house and he was going to make crunchy garlic chicken, but since he wasn't here right now I changed it to Mexican Style Corn.

What you have to do for it is esta comida is shuck the corn, which means tearing off the husks. Then you wash them off and put in salted water for 8-10 minutes and let it boil. Go do something for 8-10 minutes. We made dinner.

Then you drain it, butter it, and roll it in shredded parmesan cheese, though we used romano, which my mother says is pretty much the same. And then you add dried chili on top of that, and then you enjoy. My brother Alex used paprika, and my father, since we didn't actually have dried chili and since my dad is Mexican and likes spicy food, he used chili powder.

So Good!

It tasted like buttered corn with yummy cheese on it, so it was delish!

I thought this was 2 THUMBS UP!

Day 28 - Salsa Verde

Recipe - Best Recipes and Food-Jamie Oliver

Today I have had interesting lesson. No, not lesson. I gained interesting knowledge. I made salsa verde and I was quite surprised by how it tasted. The ingredients I used were green apple, tomatillos (little green tomato things that are really not tomatoes but are part of the berry family), and basil. But before I tell you about that, I have to tell you this:

I don't like tomatillos without the paper covering because when I touched them, after you let go of them, your hands are sticky. So I washed my hands about five times during this whole salsa verde experience.

Now back to what I was going to tell you before. Salsa verde is quite simple. I don't know why we're doing a lot of simple stuff right now. Maybe because I want to relax because school starts a week from Monday and I have summer homework to do. So I think once school starts back up, I won't be doing extremely complex things, but not too simple, either.

To make salsa verde, you cut the tomatillos into fourths, also called quarters, but this isn't a grammar type blog, because no one would read a grammar blog, come on. Core the apple and chunk it. Pick the leaves off the basil (and mint, except we didn't use mint... another thing we didn't have). Put it all into a food processor, turn it on, and let the food processor do its job.

Then you just have to add salt and pepper. That's about all.

No what I said at the beginning was that I was quite surprised by how it tasted. I didn't like it because the apple made it sweet. I don't really like sweet things. Like one time I was at a friend's house and they made a sweet crepe (before I had celiac disease) and I didn't like it because it was just powered sugar loaded with sweet stuff. Not good. The salsa verde was really sweet.

Sophie mixed some of the salsa verde with some regular salsa and that tasted good, but a little bit spicy for me.

A little sweet for me

It's doubtful that I will make this exact recipe again, but I will try another Jamie Oliver salsa verde recipe, and maybe others.

Mom and Sophie liked it

That is all I have to report today. Thank you for your time.

-2 THUMBS UP, 1 THUMB UP from my dad, who's not usually a salsa verde fan,

and 2 THUMBS UP from from my mom.

Day 27 - Strawberries with Gingersnaps and Vanilla Ice, Only We Didn't Have Ice Cream

Cookbook - Jamie's Food Revolution

Today was a very busy. I had friends over and Jared was working at my dad's school getting ready for school to start. Then I had to drop off my friends at their house, go all the way to Joann's to buy fabric for a sewing project I'm doing, then we had to take stuff to my dad's school. I don't need to go into anymore details, but the point is today I made something easy.

One problem with our recipe choice was that we didn't have vanilla ice cream, kind of important to the recipe since it includes strawberries, gingersnaps, and ice cream. "Kind of ironic,: Jared keeps saying.

So we had to use whipped cream (Jamie Oliver, if you are reading this post, don't get mad at us because we didn't have vanilla ice cream).

The ingredients you need for this desert are strawberries, already made gingersnaps (and we used Lucy's Cinnamon Thins which are REALLY good), and ice cream or whipped cream.

Lucy's Cinnamon Thins, pretty close to gingersnaps, purchased at Starbucks!

All you do is smash the gingersnaps, then cut the strawberries into even slices and put them on the crushed gingersnaps (already in a bowl)...

Step two

...and put your ice cream or whipped cream, and you can top it with shredded bittersweet chocolate. In this case I grated chocolate chips by putting the chips against my palm and grating.

Without chocolate

With chocolate

This was good!

2 Bagillion THUMBS UP

Day 26 - Boiled Eggs

Cookbook - Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

I’m really liking doing this. The challenge, I mean. It’s really quite fun. I mean I liked cooking before this, but I never really did it much. So this is super awesome.

Anyway, I was looking at jamieoliver.com, which is cool and you should check it out. So I was looking and I saw a a restaurant called Fifteen and it has a cooking classes.

Cool!! I know, right!!!!

And so I looked up the places where the restaurants are located and I found that there are only 3 in the world. There’s one in Amsterdam, one in Cornwall, and there’s one in Melbourne. When I found that out, I thought that was a bummer because I live in Texas and Texas isn’t near the Netherlands, England, or Australia. So it was a lose-lose situation because I was ready to go to Fifteen and eat there and look at the classes. Check it out, you know what I mean?

I just wanted to mention this because I thought it was pretty interesting and I thought that you guys would think it was pretty interesting.

Anyway, today I cooked 2 boiled eggs around 10 o’clock this morning. It was the first boiled eggs that I’ve made.

Just my luck, I misread the instructions and I used a frying pan instead of a sauce pan because I couldn’t think since I’d just woken up, so I asked Sophie and she said, “Use a frying pan”, although in her defense she says she was focusing on making scrambled eggs for her dear poor mother who was working hard writing a new book.

Hint: don't use a frying pan to boil an egg

And I cooked them to make them semi-firm and set the timer. After the timer went off, I cut one of them open and found the egg all over my cutting board.

A yolk disaster

That was not good. No way, Jose. It was a spectacular failure, but I got an A for effort, btw.

I figured out how not to use a frying pan to boil an egg but it was too late for the first one. I let the other egg cook in the frying pan for another ten minutes. I decided to risk opening it up. Looking at the picture, I cut off the top of the egg and it worked. It wasn’t semi-firm, it was firm. But it still tasted good. I made some bacon with it, and I ate it and it was good.

Spectacular!

I also made some guacamole around lunch time. I was inspired by Sam the Cooking Guy from Fit TV, a super cool, awesome guy you should check out. I should have used a tomato and the chipotle sauce he uses, but we didn’t have either so I used salsa. I also squeezed a little bit of lime and green onions and it was really good.

Sam the Cooking Guy's Gauc, minus the real tomato and chipotle

It was a very semi-successful cooking day, if I do say so myself, which I can since I’m me.

2 THUMBS UP!

Until next time...

Day 25 - Cilantro and Lime Rice

Cookbook - Jamie's Food Revolution

Today I made cilantro and lime rice! Which by the way, the food critics (in my house--mom and dad) said is amazing.

I thought it was okay. You finely chop cilantro. You wash and zest a lime. I did not know what zest meant before this cooking challenge. Now I know that zest means to grate the skin of a lemon, lime, or orange. I thought zest would taste kind of funky and would be sour, but I found out it's really useful in cooking and you use it a lot. Jamie Oliver uses it a lot.

Jared says it gives it a lot of flavor without using a lot of the fruit itself. You can save the fruit and sometimes the fruit has more sugar, so the zest is good because it gives a lot of flavor using a lot less fruit.

Once you cook your rice, you squeeze the juice of the lime into the rice, add the cilantro, zest, salt and pepper, and, as Jamie says, "one good lug of olive oil". It tastes exactly like Chipotle rice.

So that was a night with Sophie, the cooking girl.

1 1/2 THUMBS UP

Day 24 - Shrimp and Avocado with Old School Marie Rose Sauce

Cookbook - Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

I, Jared, am back from the lake house and back in the kitchen.

I'm baaaacccckkkk

When I cook, it feels pretty cool. It's fun. It's entertaining and you can do so many different things so that you never get bored.

For me, a kid who has celiac disease, it's quite interesting to see how you can make something like this, for instance, that has a coating of flour and it tastes really good with gluten free flour. It's good to see all the different kinds of things that can be made so much healthier, and sometimes even easier.

So far, doing this challenge has opened up different opportunities in cooking for me and has let me experience new things. That's important because I'm out of my comfort zone, which was gluten free chinese and mexican food. I've tried something new almost everyday since we started (which is more than 3 weeks now), and that's quite good for building character (says Calvin's dad to Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes).

Before this challenge I doubt I would have eaten this Shrimp and Avocado food if my mother had made it because I just don't try a lot of new things a lot. It's kind of weird since I'm doing this challenge, but now I'm kind of forced to try new things since I want to try what I made. It's kind of a win-lose situation (because I don't really like to try new things), but if I like what I try then it's a win-win situation.

So far there have been more win-win situations.

Today I made some Shrimp and Avocado with Old School Marie Rose Sauce. I had never heard of this dish or the sauce before.

Squeezing lime

It was really good! I think I put too much ketchup in the sauce, but I really liked the avocado and the shrimp. You just coat some shrimp in some GF flour and cook and toss it (which I just learned how to do this morning--or I knew how to do but never tried).

Flipping, part 1

Flipping, part 2

You cut the avocado in half and take it out of the skin. Then you put some mayonnaise, ketchup, Worchestire sauce, but we didn't have whiskey, so we by-passed that, together and mix it up. That's the sauce.

Then when the shrimp are golden brown, you plate it (which I learned from Iron Chef) by putting the avocado and shrimp on a plate, then sprinkle paprika on the shrimp and put the Marie Rose sauce on the avocado.

Voila!

That's it.

I give it 1 3/4 THUMBS UP. My mom, of course, gives it 5 THUMBS UP.

So, until next time...

Day 23 - Fish Pie

Recipe from Jamie Online

I, Sophie Ramirez, was not in the mood to cook tonight. I felt like I wanted to lay down and take a nap instead.

But I had to cook because I'm doing a 6 month challenge and Jared, still, is not here.

I didn't really want to make the fish pie, but my mom picked it and helped me tonight. I didn't think it looked so great.

It was really easy to make, though. There was practically no chopping at all, just potatoes.

The rest was grated. You grate celery, the carrots, red peppers (which we used instead of chilis), lemon (plus the juice which you squeeze, not grate), and cheese.

Then just layer in the cooker with fish. We used white fish and shrimp.

I didn't love it all that much, but my mom and dad were crazy for it. They give it 2 THUMBS UP. My dad said it was a very filling meal. My mom said 2 THUMBS UP, too. She said it is like Shepherd's Pie, only with fish.

I give it 1/2 THUMB UP. I think I would like it with beef.