Basic Caesar Salad

Unless you just want to eat lettuce all by itself and without any dressing, you can't get much simpler than your basic Caesar salad.

Sort-of Caesar dressing

In the summertime we eat a lot of salads, and often those are Caesar salads, which means that we go through a lot of Caesar dressing. Now, for health reasons, I've been forced to cut back on my sugar intake, and most commercial salad dressings - including Caesar dressings - contain significant amounts of sugar; ergo, if I want to continue eating lots of salads, I have to find alternatives to commercially-produced dressings.

Blue cheese salad dressing

This recipe is inspired by Bill's Blue Cheese Dressing at allrecipes.com. The main differences are minor variations in the amounts of ingredients, as well as a difference the preparation method. I suspect that Bill's dressing tastes pretty good; mine does!

Creamy Italian Dressing

I decided a few days ago to make my own creamy Italian dressing. It's one of my favorites, but I'd never before tried to make it at home. A quick search on Yahoo yielded between 758,000 and 6,820,000 returns, depending on how you phrase the question. Obviously, I'm not going to review every possible recipe, or even all of the minimum number offered, but I do examine the top dozen or so for common elements.

Gumbo!

Never having lived in or near Louisiana, I can’t claim a heritage with, or even long familiarity with the defining Cajun dish, to wit: gumbo. Like most denizens of the Southern East Coast, my early experience with anything called gumbo came from a commercial soup can, and while it could be considered marginally edible, it was nowhere near the top of my list of favorite foods.

Greek-style (gyro) meat loaf

In a city about 30 miles West of our home there is a locally-famous Greek restaurant. The restaurant prepares and serves fine examples of the kinds of Greek dishes you might expect, but the best things on their menu - in my humble opinion - are their specialty Greek pizzas.

Smoked Gouda/Pimento Spread

We buy a lot of our staple goods from a well-known warehouse-style big box store; but occasionally, we also find oddities there, and we often try them out. We found a tasty smoked Gouda cheese and pimento spread there a couple of years back, and liked it well enough to have repeated the purchase several times since then. There is a problem, however: the packaging.

Copycat "D's sauce"

I like fish. Fried, baked, blackened, or broiled. Never had any just plain boiled or grilled. I also like some of the sauces that go with fish. One of the sauces I like comes from a certain well-known fast-food fish restaurant.

Uncle Henry's Hot Legs

Now, I'm pretty sure that everybody has been exposed at one time or another to hot wings, sometimes known as Buffalo wings, and most have probably enjoyed their spicy heat. I'm just as sure that everyone who prepares these... er... delicacies on any regular basis has a favorite recipé, which may or may not diverge from either the traditional one - or even common sense...

Parmesan Pepper Salad Dressing

A long time ago (more than 20 years, anyhow) in a land far away (not really, but it makes a good intro), one could find a very special salad dressing in local grocery stores, to wit: Parmesan-Pepper!

Mariners Vegetable-Beef Soup, Revisited

Well, last month the doc told me he was concerned about my blood sugar, and that we needed to bring it down. His advice was to go back on a low-carbohydrate diet until the next scheduled exam. Having no desire to become another diabetes statistic in our family (we have several!), I decided to make the effort.

Cheater's Chicken & Dumplings

It had been a while since I had the pleasure of a meal of chicken and dumplings, and I'd never made them myself, before today; so I decided to hit the Internet and see if there was any inspiration there.

Grandma's Pickles

So I’ve been making pickles for a while now – mostly fermented dill pickles, which Mom doesn’t care for. I tried making “Bread ‘N’ Butter” pickles, which are not fermented, and for a while she seemed to like them, but eventually she decided they were too sweet. They weren't the pickles she had grown up with, made by her mother!

Barbecue Ribs, Take Two

As cuts of meat go, ribs aren't a really good deal. You usually end up paying steak prices for a lot of bone. Recently, however, while shopping with My Honey, we spotted some baby-back ribs at a really good price, and they were really meaty, too. We were able to scarf several racks to bring home.

Mariner's Onion Sandwich Rolls

I learned to hate onions at an early age. When I was about 5 years old, I was victimized by an older, male family member, who thought that it would be funny to give a child a raw onion, saying that it was just a different kind of apple. Being a naïve and trusting child, I accepted the gift of the “different apple”, and took a bite. To put it mildly, I was disappointed, and almost thirty years passed before I would again voluntarily eat anything with onion in it.

Mariner's Smoked Pork Meat Stock

I have frequent need of pork stock in my cooking, and it's not often available on the store shelves. Sometimes, as an afterthought to crock-cooking a large piece of pork, I make my own, by simply covering any bones left after deboning the pork with water, and cooking all of the meat off. This can yield significant amounts of broth, but is somewhat haphazard in terms of the flavor and amount.

Mariner's Cabbage Soup

I don't often make this one, because afterwards, the First Mate usually bans me from the galley (I apparently make a terrible mess!). I particularly like this soup on a cold or rainy day - or a cold and rainy day (like today). There's nothing fancy here, just plain, good food.

Mariner's Seafood Cocktail Sauce

We don't use a lot of cocktail sauce; in fact we've probably used less than four or five tablespoons of commercial cocktail sauce in our home in all 48 years of our marriage. Once in a great while, however, we buy or make something (usually a seafood dish) that just demands to be complemented by that piquant combination of flavors.

Mariner's Low-Country Boil

Some years ago, my Honey and I decided to be spontaneous, and on the spur of the moment hit the road to spend the weekend in Savannah, Georgia - without having made hotel reservations! Big mistake...

Bread-N-Butter Pickles

So this past Friday I started another (40 lb) batch of my fermented dill pickles. Most of my relatives seem to like my pickles (at least that's what they say!) but my Mom is not a big fan them... in fact, Mom isn't particularly fond of dill at all, nor does she particularly like most sour foods, . In discussing that fact yesterday, she allowed as how she does like what she calls (and my Grandma used to call) bread-n-butter pickles.

Beef Stew

There is a well-known and revered brand of shelf-stable (canned) beef stew, recognized by its red plaid label. Many people like it, and on occasion, I've enjoyed it myself. The problem is, like most other ready-to-eat canned meals, I find it to be expensive for the amount of food you get, and a single can doesn't usually go very far.

Slow Cooker Boiled Peanuts!

Well, our fabulous Thanksgiving Day feast and Family Reunion is well past, and I have almost a year to recover. Good thing... I'm getting pretty old now, and the preparation for that event is becoming real work!

Hot Sauce

Ever since I got into fermenting my own sauerkraut and pickles, I've wanted to try my hand at making my own hot pepper sauce. I'm particularly fond of Texas Pete® Original Hot Sauce, using it on a lot of different foods. I'm not vain enough to think I could duplicate that flavor and texture - I don't plan to use the additives that make that possible! - but I hope that I can produce a product that will make an acceptable substitute.

Mom's Pound Cake

Pound cake is widely-known for both its taste and its simplicity. I think Mom began making her own version of this cake about the time of my senior year in highschool.

Mariner's Home-style Vegetable-Beef Soup

I've been making this soup, on rare occasion, ever since I retired, at which time I temporarily assumed some of the cooking chores for which my Honey would otherwise have been responsible. I don't know why I haven't already posted it, because we really like it, and so has everyone who has had any of it. Anyway, I had a need to make some today, so I decided it was time to share my recipé. If you decide to re-create this, you'll need the following: