B.L.A.T. Wrap

Here’s a twist on the traditional BLT. Put the bacon, tomato and lettuce on a whole-grain wrap, add some avocado and a little jazzed-up mayo. Then pair this with some creamy coleslaw on the side for a very nice lunch.

I have to admit that avocadoes are just not BeeBop’s thing. As I’ve said before, he’s a meat and potatoes man and, well, avocado just doesn’t fit within that framework. He would even ditch the lettuce in this wrap and add a bunch of cheese. I, on the other hand, would add even more avocado, lettuce and tomatoes. But to each his own.

Make sure you have excellent, fresh tomatoes for this wrap. It really makes all the difference. Our tomato plants are producing faster than we can use them this year. Particularly the yellow ones. And this variety, Yellow Boy, has a great, earthy flavor. So, that’s what I used for these wraps.

To start, cook your bacon. I always cook a full pound whenever I cook bacon. The leftovers keep well in the fridge for several days and you can toss them into a salad or crumble them on a baked potato. Or just sneak one to nibble on while you’re cooking something else. In case you missed it, here’s the link to an earlier post about my easy method for cooking bacon.

While the bacon is cooking, prep all your other ingredients. Make your jazzed up mayo by adding 1/2 tsp. Lawry’s Seasoned Salt to 1/4 cup of mayo. Mix it together well. Slice the tomatoes and avocado. Shred the lettuce if needed. I’m using arugula in this wrap, so no prep was needed. Now you’re ready to assemble the wraps.

By the way, I used a whole-grain rye wrap for these BLATs, but you use whatever you like.

Spread the wrap with about a tablespoon of mayo. Add tomato slices down the center. Sprinkle with pepper (I like a very generous amount of pepper). You probably don’t need any additional salt because of the Lawry’s you already have in the mayo. Add 2-3 slices of avocado and 4-5 slices of bacon.

Top it all with the lettuce of your choice. I used argula on this one because I like the spicy, peppery bite it gives to the wrap.

Roll the whole thing together. Slice it on an angle. And…

Enjoy!

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Easy Cheesy Mac

Isn’t macaroni and cheese just one of the all-time ultimate comfort foods? I know it is for me. All that cheesy, creamy goodness wrapped around soft pasta. What more could you want? Of course, there are a multitude of recipes for mac and cheese. Everything from the ordinary to the sublime. But this is one for days when you’re in a hurry to get dinner on the table. It’s really quick. It can be ready in little more than the time it takes to boil the macaroni and it’s very satisfying.

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Turkey Burgers

What’s better in the summer (or any time for that matter) than a good old hamburger? When cooked to perfection, a burger is one of life’s great All-American pleasures. And as much as I love (and I mean really, really love) beef, I know that it’s not the healthiest thing for me.  So every once in a while we have a turkey burger instead of that good old beef burger. And they’ve been pretty good. Usually somewhat dry, but I just wrote that off to it being turkey with little to no fat. That is until I found this recipe! This has to be the ultimate turkey burger. It’s flavorful and moist. It holds its shape well and is just excellent.

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Chicken Kay

The inspiration for this recipe came from two sources. The first is one of mine and BeeBop’s favorite restaurants for a quick, casual dinner – Carrabba’s Italian Grill. It’s not 5-star dining by any means, but I actually think it’s pretty darned good. I usually have the Spiedino di Mare, shrimp and scallops grilled with a lemon butter sauce. It’s a real favorite of mine. However, the last time we went we both were in the mood to try something new and ordered the Chicken Bryan. It’s a grilled chicken breast topped with goat cheese and a sauce of basil, dried tomato, lemon and butter. We both like it very much, but I knew of something that could take that dish from really good to spectacular. That little something was Kay’s Pesto Rosso. The combination of the idea of Chicken Bryan with Kay’s Pesto Rosso and Chicken Kay was born!

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Orange-Rosemary Grilled Chicken

“Summer time and the living is easy.” Really? Easy, maybe; HOT, yes! Today was the tenth day in a row with high temperatures above 90 degrees and humidity to match. But that’s really just typical for the deep south at this time of year. Hot and humid. So humid that there’s a hazy look in the air. It’s like living in a sauna, but hey, it’s wonderful for your complexion!

Because of the heat I was looking for something fabulous for dinner that wouldn’t heat up the kitchen and I found it in this delicious grilled recipe from Real Simple (www.realsimple.com). This chicken is marinated in a wonderful citrus and rosemary mixture, grilled and then served with a salad of romaine, orange sections and grilled onions.

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Ham and Cheese Stuffed Potatoes

I don’t know about you, but I really hate to throw away food. I mean I really, really dislike it. When I have to throw away something out of the fridge, all I can see is dollars and cents going into the trash can. BeeBop and I work pretty darn hard for the money that we (okay, I) spend at the grocery store every week so when I see it being thrown away like that, it just makes me mad.

I had a group of neighborhood ladies over for bunco last Tuesday and one of the things I served was ham biscuits. Little tiny tea biscuits sliced in half with ham inside. Now, if we’d been having ham and biscuits for breakfast I would have just cut the ham into pieces, slapped it inside some biscuits and called it good. But since it was a party and since it was the first time I’d been hostess, I wanted to make sure those ham biscuits were nice and pretty. So, I used my smallest biscuit cutter to cut out little rounds of ham the same size as the biscuits. So cute. So good. So wasteful. I had so many leftover odd-shaped pieces of ham! So, I started looking online for an idea of what to do with all that ham. I knew it could be diced up and used in something and then I came across a recipe on Cooking Light’s web site for these ham and cheese stuffed potatoes. I changed the recipe so much that it really isn’t the same recipe any more, but it sure is good!

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Egg Muffins

Look familiar? If you’ve ever grabbed a quick breakfast from America’s most popular fast food chain, you’ll probably recognize these. They’re my version of one of that chain’s lower-fat, least offensive breakfast options. Actually, they’re not bad. The canadian bacon is pretty low fat, the muffin is good for you, the egg is not cooked in loads of fat. The cheese…well, you could use a lower-fat option I suppose. I use the regular American type because that’s what the original sandwich has. These are quick to prepare and when served with a nice fruit on the side, they make a pretty substantial breakfast.

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Shrimp Creole

Another old favorite, Shrimp Creole. This recipe for Shrimp Creole has, naturally, been tweaked somewhat by me, but it originally came from Craig Claiborne’s “Southern Cooking.” Craig Claiborne was a food writer for the New York Times, but he was born and raised in Mississippi. He had a lifetime appreciation for southern cuisine which grew throughout his childhood and youth in the kitchen of his mother’s boardinghouse. Over the years he wrote several cookbooks, but my favorite was his Southern Cooking. He included many of his mother’s original recipes in that cookbook, and they are all so familiar to me from my own childhood. Throughout the book he writes about his memories of classic southern food such as fried catfish, fried chicken, field peas, greens (collards, turnips and mustard), cornbread and a huge variety of desserts. Any time I need inspiration for something to cook, I know I can find it in Southern Cooking.

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Pimiento Cheese

Pimiento cheese. Everybody knows pimiento cheese. Right?

Wrong.  Not long after BeeBop and I got married and were immediately exiled to the cold, cold Northeastern United States by the U. S. Navy, I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that there were actually people in the world who had never even heard of pimiento cheese.  I found this unbelievable, being as it was that pimiento cheese was a staple in every southern household that I knew anything about. Pimiento cheese sandwiches were as common to our childhood as peanut butter is to most. It was something that our moms could make up quickly, spread between two pieces of soft white bread, feed us lunch and be back to the hundreds of tasks they still had to complete that day. It also made appearances as hors d’oeuvres when stuffed in a stalk of celery or spread on a cracker.

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Real Simple Fried Chicken

Since I’m in the frame of mind to get back to my culinary roots, what could be more representative of southern farmhouse cooking than fried chicken? It’s a standard. It’s a staple. It’s just classic. And, most of all it’s quick and easy. That’s right, I said “quick and easy.” Making simple fried chicken is not a production. It does not require overnight marinades or special equipment or any kind of fancy preparation whatsoever. If it did, do you think millions of southern women would have cooked it for lunch every day for years and years? I can tell you without hesitation that they would not have. For our southern grandmothers, it was something they could whip up in a few minutes.

I’ve seen the recipes and the demonstrations where chefs put the chicken in milk or buttermilk or yogurt and let it stand overnight in the refrigerator. Then they coat it in all kinds of seasonings and shake it all up together in a paper bag. Well, that’s fine if you really want to do that, but what you get from that is a big mass of fried flour with a little bit of chicken in the middle of it. 

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