Easy Tacos

Here is an easy taco night dish. Left: brown venison (or whatever ground meat you prefer) in a skillet with 1 or 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil. Add chopped yellow peppers and sweet onion and continue to mix until all is done and soft. Game meat won't leave much, if any, grease behind. If you use beef, drain the liquid.

The white tool is a "Chopstir" and is one of my favorite gadgets.

In a smaller skillet (because my daughter is not crazy about mushrooms), I sauteed mushrooms, green chilies, red peppers, garlic and black pepper until soft.

Place ingredients according to who-likes-what on warmed corn tortillas. Top with green chili sauce, tomatoes, lettuce, jalapenos, cilantro or salsa. I like everything except cilantro. I also added prickly pear cactus strips on the far right taco.

Speaking (or, writing) about cilantro: when you buy herbs from the store, you can make them last longer by cutting off the botton half inch of stems then place the bunch in water and keep in the fridge. This bunch has lasted 6 days.

Quick meal: tuna salad

Continuing with the theme of "what is in the house to eat because everyone is hungry and I have not been to the store"--here is what I found for tuna salad.

Two cans of tuna, mustard, Craisins, green chilies, light Italian dressing, chopped garlic, pickles I canned last summer, the tall bottle of hot peppers mixed with olive oil (far left) I made in August, dried tomatoes from summer and a bunch of celery that I perked up by cutting of the end and setting the stalks in cold water.

We don't use mayonnaise. The mustard and Italian dressing add enough flavor and Craisins contribute an interesting sweetness. Eat with celery or crackers. You can also make this with salmon, turkey, pheasant or chicken.

Quick meal: Breakfast Burrito

What do we do at our house in winter when there is no garden and I haven't been to the store in a while? We have to search the fridge and pantry to see what is still edible.

This morning I found some Mission tomato/flour wraps in the produce drawer, cheese in the back of the top shelf, remnants of the romaine lettuce bag, an onion on the apple bowl, a lonely tomato next to a lonely apple on the table, a new jar of salsa in the garage from the last trip I made to Costco, chopped red peppers and hashed brown potatoes from yesterday. The freezer is always filled with venison.

I sauteed the onion, venison and peppers in a skillet, then spooned all that along with the potatoes and salsa onto the burrito and folded it. I placed in the pan to warm it all together and topped with the lone tomato and bagged salad items. Sometimes I also add black beans.

Cooking Wild Turkey

I cooked a wild turkey Josh got a few weeks ago. Since these birds tend to be dry, I soaked it first a large water container (left, with Hank) in a solution of water, orange juice, salt water, brown sugar, black pepper, and vegetable stock.

A good recipe to follow is Alton Brown's (the guy on Iron Chef and host of Good Eats):
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/good-eats-roast-turkey-recipe/index.html

The turkey was much juicier than other birds I have cooked without brining. After we ate the meat, I made what a friend calls "carcass soup," which is actually turkey stock. You can easily make stock and then use it when you need broth for beans, soup, etc. Here are directions on my site:

http://www.aihd.ku.edu/recipes/vegetable_turkey_game_stock.html

Pretty Quick Enchiladas

 My kids' cross country banquet was this weekend and I needed to make something fast. I came up with roasted vegetable enchiladas.

On left is the mixture of black beans, chopped onions, green chilies, yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes, and sweet corn. I sauteed the onions, squashes, jalapenos, and corn, then when done (vegetable are soft  but not mushy), mixed with the other ingredients in a bowl. I also added 3T of chili powder, 1T of garlic powder and 1T of cumin.
Place store-bought corn tortillas in the bottom of a baking dish, then pour one can of canned green chile sauce over the tortillas. Layer the vegetable mix over the tortillas, then add another layer of tortillas and shredded Monterrey Jack cheese, then another layer of vegetables. Top with one more layer of tortillas, cheese and pour a can of chile sauce over the whole thing. Cover with foil and bake in oven at 350 for 15 minutes, then uncover and cook another 10 minutes. Take out and let set for ten minutes before cutting.

Top with salsa.

Back to Regular Eating



Some of my favorite things I can return to: apples, almonds,
dried cherries,
nectarines, pistachios, mango.

A few days have gone by since the end of the Mini Diet Challenge. How did it go?

First, even though I normally consume a great many indigenous foods (corn, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, bananas and squash almost every day), it did require effort to make certain New World foods were available in the house for meals. As much as I like those foods, I felt like my list of foods to chose from was rather short.

Second, it took some real planning on workdays. I couldn't just drop in any restaurant or campus quick cafe and buy some soup, bread or crackers. No sandwiches or wraps. Chinese and Italian food was out, as well as pizza, sushi, and Mexican food that contains cilantro, wheat tortillas, beef, pork and chicken. I made baggies of dried fruit, nuts and seeds, but that mix is high in calories and not particularly filling. Eating a big hunk of turkey from my lunch box was satisfying, but I got tired of that. Water did not satisfy me, either.

Third, this is not a convenient diet. One has to cook a lot of it, unless you like raw vegetables. Sometimes I do, but not all the time.

Fourth, I did feel "lighter" and did not have stomach aches. I am not lactose or gluten intolerant; but, I am sensitive to milk products and especially breads. If you have stomach or intestinal pains, dietitians will tell you to keep a diet log to try and pin-point what it is that is annoying your guts. Now I know for sure.

Fifth, a few people questioned the purpose of the diet. If there are so many healthy choices to chose from today, why limit my diet to only New World foods?

Good question. The purpose of this diet was to show support for Marty and his group. I'm not sure I could do this for an entire year, so I can now certainly empathize with them.

Another goal was to educate ourselves about what our ancestors ate. We can read about the foods in a book, of course, but actually eating the same things (or, as close to the historic foods as we can get) shows how difficult it can be to not only find the food items, but also to combine them in ways our body can best use them. For example, eating only corn for a day is not nutritionally sound. But eating corn combined with other foods such as beans, squash, turkey and fish provides the vitamins and minerals we need.

This also has spurred my interest in how it is very active tribespeople found enough calories. Hunting, gathering, catching/training horses, building homes, moving, playing stickball, running, canoeing, gardening, etc., etc., all required a tremendous amount of energy. If large sources of protein, like buffalo, elk, turkey, salmon, weren't available, what did they eat? Very active men, especially young men, require many calories. Did they instead turn to lots of berries, corn, chia? Or were they very efficient at using every calorie they ingested?
I think that the main goal is to realize that a diet that is comprised of unprocessed and uncontaminated foods, both New and Old World, will provide us with the nutrients we need.

Cherimoya, Corn, Masa

I bought a cherimoya, a fruit native to the Andes, at a local market. It is sometimes referred to as a "custard apple" but it's not related. Just eat the insides (not the seeds) with a spoon.

This looks like goolash, but is a combination of cooked corn meal, ground turkey, zucchini and yellow peppers. I added salt, pepper and onion powder. The longer it cooks in the crock pot, the more the flavors mingle the more desirable the texture.

I made a plate of sauteed yellow squash, zucchini and sweet red peppers, then added some of the last peppers from my garden as a bit of crunch. That long green one is HOT. Underneath is a corn tortilla I made with Maseca corn masa. I don't like white flour tortillas, but love corn ones. My favorite part of a tamale is the corn. Anyway, Maseca flour is sold in most stores and is a mix of pure corn flour and lime. Mix it with water as per instructions. I don't have a tortilla press, so I flattened the flour balls between wax paper by pressing down with a medium sized pan. I cooked them on a pancake griddle for about a minute on each side.