Cajun Chef Ryan

This is the height of summer time tomato crops in back yard gardens, decks and patio containers across the Americas. We got a hold of some fresh backyard garden tomatoes and I immediately put together this summertime tomato salad using some fresh basil from our herb garden. Tomatoes pare well with soft cheese and fresh basil like a match made in heaven, well a match made in my kitchen too! This is a really quick recipe, on takes about 5 or 10 minutes to prepare and it is a great cool side dish to any meal. We ate this along side some roasted lemon and herb chicken leg quarters last night.

Ingredients

4          medium            Tomatoes

½         cup                   Red onion, julienne

½         cup                   Monterey Jack cheese, sliced into ¼” thin strips

½         Tbsp                Italian seasoning mix

1          Tsp                  Garlic salt

½         Tsp                  Black pepper

½         Cup                  Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing

2          Tbsp                Basil, fresh leaves

Procedure Steps

1. Slice the tomatoes into 8 wedges each and place in a stainless steel mixing bowl.
2. Add the red onion and the jack cheese and toss well.
3. Add the Italian seasoning, garlic salt, black pepper and toss well. Then add the dressing and the fresh basil leaves and toss well.
4. Chill well before serving.

So check this out! I’m trying to be good and limit my calories but I had not pre-planned my lunch meal. After spending about 4 hours at the dentist having a porcelain inlay restoration on one of my molars I then drove the truck to the local oil change place for the annual inspection.

Now, it’s around 1:00 pm and I’m getting hungry so I head home and open up a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup condensed. A quick glance at the nutritional label and seems to be okay, only 100 calories per serving. So I heat up a pot of this soup with skim milk and look at the label again, the serving size is ½ cup.

Who are they kidding, 4 fluid ounces of this soup is ONE SERVING! I broke out laughing because it seems to be another marketing trick to sell their supposedly healthy product. I can hear the marketing and sales reps…. “We have to keep the calories per serving below or at 100 so people will buy it.” Also, based on this portion size the can yields 2 ½ servings. Now how many of you are going to eat a half serving, or 2 fluid ounces of this soup, do you know that 2 ounces is only 4 tablespoons.

The real headache was that I wanted to eat half the soup, so I had to run some manual calculations to convert the nutritional values based on 2.5 servings per can to 2 servings per can. What a mess! Get real Campbell’s (CSC Brands), you really are not that concerned with our nutritional needs. 

Funny too, my son bought a bakery item of two large muffins from the store the other day. I looked on the nutritional label and it stated there were 6 servings in the container, so let’s see, 2 muffins = 6 servings, right! And get this, each serving was 265 calories, so each muffing weighted in at almost 800 calories EACH! This is just another marketing ploy of the grocery store to get their calories per serving way below the actual realistic serving. Many consumers are getting fooled, but many of us are not, and in the process are getting weary of the irresponsible nature of the food marketing techniques. There seems to be no set standard on portion sizes and what constitutes a healthy portion.

Do any of you have the same issues with servings or portions on product nutritional labels? If so, share your story, I’d love to hear them!

It was a fairly quiet weekend for us with a few hints of some foodie activity sprinkled in-between here, there, nowhere and elsewhere.

Went on our weekly grocery store jaunt on Friday night and feeling a little adventurous at the banana section we decided to try out the little Dole baby bananas, they are so cute! Got one bunch of those and then decided to get a bunch of the red baby bananas and a bunch of the Burro bananas, both from Costa Rica. Inspired by the NPR Hidden Kitchens story from earlier in the day, I found the Rice-A-Roni section and never knew there were so many verities these days, so I decided to get two boxes each of four different flavors, rice pilaf, chicken, beef, and parmesan. Also picked up the usual from the grocery list, our usual items include milk, bread and OJ, these are our staples that are always a given.

Once home I tried one of the baby bananas and they really are sweeter then your typical banana, nice little bite size too, not too much, just rite for a little snack.

Monique made her famous smothered pork chops with onions on Saturday and I made a double batch of the Rice-A-Roni Rice Pilaf since my craving was highlighted from the airing on Friday. The pork chops were good with the exception that they were a variety cut and had bones all over the place.

Sunday we watched the new episode of “Big Daddy’s House” with Aaron McCargo on the Food Network, he is the New Food Network Star. His first show may have been a little rushed to production as he was just crowned last week, to me there was way too much oil used on everything. It all looked great as he demonstrated a “Fried Chicken Tender Salad”, “Pork Sandwich with Broccoli Rabe”, and some “Oven Fried French Fries”. Everything was prepared with grape seed oil, the chicken tenders were fried in an inch of the oil, the pork loin was seared in the oil, the sandwich was grilled with what looked like the oil, and the French Fries were covered in oil. He also used the same spice mix throughout every dish. It was a mixture of smoky paprika, garlic powder, kosher salt, and seasoning salt.  He stated and it was a focus of the show on many occasions how the sandwich and salad recipes were inspired by his two sons Jake and Josh, and that he named the sandwich after his son at his restaurant. Funny that he mentioned a restaurant because in the “Next Food Network Star” reality show it was promoted that he was a Hospital Catering Chef, I never once remember them mentioning a restaurant that he owned, but maybe I missed that detail.

We also watched a segment of Food Detectives with Ted Allen and they de-bunked the old theory of the “5-second rule”, where food left on the floor for just a few seconds is still okay to eat. This version of the scientific study was a better than the one “Mythbusters” ran awhile back, as they tested two different foods on multiple surfaces. They used shrimp and hard candy and tested them both on the food lab floor, a desk top, and outside on a sidewalk. The experiment also included a control sample of each item that was not exposed to surface contamination. Each of the three surface locations was sampled for under 5-seconds, 5-seconds, one minute, and then for an hour. Of course and not surprising the one hour duration showed the most bacteria growth, but more bacteria growth also was obtained from the samples that were exposed to the food lab floor, and not the outside sidewalk as one would think. In conclusion, it is not recommended that you eat any food that is exposed to the floor or unsanitary surfaces for any length of time.

For lunch on Sunday I made ham and Swiss sandwiches with English Muffins. I toasted the English Muffins and spread some mayonnaise and brown mustard then layered some thin sliced ham and topped that with some Swiss cheese, then melted that before putting on the top of the muffin. It kind of reminded me of an Egg McMuffin without the egg.  Then for dinner we ate leftover pork chops and rice on Sunday evening, nothing really special, just good food prepared well.

I listen to NPR on the way to work every morning and also in the afternoon drive home and each month they have a segment known as “Hidden Kitchens” by the Kitchen Sisters. The sisters are Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson, and are produced in collaboration with Laura Folger, Nathan Dalton, and interns, Alessandra Wollner and Eloise Melzer and the segments are mixed by Jim McKee.

Always a treat listening to each new segment of Hidden Kitchens, and the one that aired this morning entitled Birth Of Rice-a-Roni: The Armenian-Italian Treat, really interested me. Of course they all interest me because I have always been enamored with food history. The story goes back to the 1940’s and an Armenian woman Pailadzo Captanian, also known as “Grandma Cap” in San Francisco who made a rice and pasta pilaf and turned over her recipe to a local pasta company, who in turn gave it a name and a new boxed side dish for American consumers.

The online story also has the original recipe that Mrs. Cap made as well as a Baklava recipe.