Faux Sweet Tomatoes Broccoli Salad

I love me some Sweet Tomatoes. No, not the actual tomatoes, the restaurant called Sweet Tomatoes. In some areas it's called Souplantation. Why do I love this restaurant? It's a soup and salad buffet, and you can't go wrong with that combo in my book. Mrblocko and Blockette enjoy going there. I usually dine there when I'm out on a girl's night though. My friend's husbands are pure carnivores and would squeal like a stuck pig if someone suggested that a vegetable pass their lips.

Anyhow, Sweet Tomatoes carries this awesome broccoli salad. Last spring I came across a recipe for Mock Sweet Tomatoes Broccoli Salad from The Homesteading Housewife. Somehow it migrated to the back of my recipe binder. It resurfaced and I am so sad that I didn't try it sooner! The combo from the crunch of the broccoli and cashews, paired with the sweetness of the raisins and red onion and the saltiness of the bacon was just what I was craving!
As I was making this salad I wondered if there was an actual recipe for this salad put out by Sweet Tomatoes itself. I did a search and found Joan's Broccoli Madness Salad on Sweet tomatoes blog. The recipes are nearly identical. The "Real" recipe contains more sugar. I think I like the fake one better. The next time I make this I'm going to tweak the recipe and use a bit less mayo. There was just a tad bit too much. Oh, I also used more bacon. You can never have too much bacon.

I'm wondering how this salad would taste with pecans and craisins in place of the cashews and raisins. The craisins might be just a bit too tart for the combination. Maybe the next time I get a wild hair I'll test that idea out. Right now I'm content with the current ingredients.

There is one caveat to this salad, after day 2, the cashews loose their crunch. This is a sad sad thing. There are 2 solutions to this problem:
1. Gobble the salad up before this happens.
2. Put the cashews on your individual portion before consumption.


Dana's Best Broccoli Salad (inspired by Sweet Tomato) from the Homesteading Housewife
Salad
3-4 heads worth of broccoli florets , cut into bite-sized pieces
1 medium red onion, diced finely
3/4 cup salted cashew halves, broken
3/4 cup raisins
6 slices bacon, crisp-cooked & crumbled

Dressing
1 cup mayonnaise (or 1/2 cup mayo & 1/2 cup plain yogurt)
5 Tablespoons vinegar (I like salad vinegar)
3 Tablespoons sugar
Dash of freshly ground black pepper

Combine all the salad ingredients together in a large bowl. In a small bowl, whisk together the dressing ingredients. Pour dressing over salad, mix to coat. Refrigerate for a few hours to develop flavors. It's best when made the day before!

A Fairy Good Weekend

Friday, I was talking to a friend, over email, and discussing our plans for the weekend. She said she was thinking of taking her kids to the Field Museum in Chicago and going to a park that had a Japanese Tea Garden. Well, I thought all that sounded like a lot more fun than the wicked exciting plans that consisted of... Laundry. So I did a bit of Googling and found out that there was a Fairy Festival going on about a hour from where we live. And it was el cheapo too. ($20 for the 3 of us.)

Blockette had so much fun. There was someone blowing huge bubbles. Bubbles as big as Blockette. (It was so sunny out there was a huge glare on the view screen of the camera. I couldn't tell exactly what I was taking a picture of. So, sadly I didn't get any pictures of the actual bubbles, just Blockette running around like a fairy on fire.)

They had a living statue. Blockette was scared of her first. We told her that her fairy magic made the statue come alive! Then she didn't want to leave the statue alone.

Driving to the Fairy Festival, we pretty much followed the Fox River. We decided that we'd have a picnic dinner at one of the parks along the river. Guess what one of the parks we passed was???! The same park with the Japanese Tea Garden in it. What luck!

The park had this cool ivy covered walkway. The whole thing was teaming with butterflies and bumblebees. I mean they weren't really butterflies, they were fairies that were enchanted to look like butterflies to us clumsies (humans.) We couldn't walk through the tea garden. It's only open on Wednesdays and Sundays. This garden is closed most of the time because people like to reserve it for special photo shoots. In fact, as we were leaving we saw a wedding party walking toward the garden with a photographer. We debated watching them get their pictures taken, but we thought Blockette might be upset she wasn't in the pictures, so we decided against it. I did snap this cool shot through the fence.
The part itself is on both sides of the river. On the other side of the river is this windmill. There are tours for the windmill, but they weren't going on when we were there. Why was there a windmill? I have no idea, but it was pretty cool to see one in the middle of no where for no apparent reason.
I guess there is a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the park as well, but we were tired and decided to call it a night. Blockette was very tired from her fliteriffic day of fairy fun.

Thankful Thursday 22

I realized this morning that I had completely forgotten to keep track of the things I've been thankful for during the week. It hasn't been the best week. Nothing majorly awful has happened, it's just the everyday grind that is bringing me down. (You know like paying bills and dealing with a sassy, almost 5 year old mouth, etc. etc) When I sat down to think of what I was thankful for all that kept repeating in my head were these four things:
1. A roof over my head
2. Food in my belly
3. A healthy, happy little girl
4. A family that loves me

Maybe they are overly basic and hokey, but I really am very thankful for these things. I don't think I stop and recognize that nearly often enough.

Shhhh!!!!

The other day I came across this Chinese poem. I played it for Blockette and she got the biggest kick out of it. I'm pretty sure that she is going to talk in Shhh's for the rest of the day.


In case you are wondering, here is the English translation (per Wiki):

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
In a stone den was a poet Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

Firehall Marinade

This weekend I consumed...are you ready for it??? Steak. I haven't had steak in at least 10 years. I know it's been longer than that but my memory is only 10 years long. (If I've met you more than 10 years ago and I haven't seen you in the mean time, I'm not ignoring you, I just have no idea who you are.)

Why so long with no steak? Steak and I have not gotten along. I enjoy not having digestive problems, so I just steered clear of it. (Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.) I have never had any trouble with ground beef. Maybe since it was ground up, it was easier to digest.

Mrblocko has been begging and pleading to grill a steak on his fancy shmancy grill. Since he has not grilled steak in the time that I've known him, I got him a cheapo cut of meat. This was a boneless top round. I figured if he messed it up we wouldn't be throwing a bunch of money out the window. I bet some of you that know me are wondering why I risked it and tried the grilled beef. The answer is this marinade: Fire hall marinade from Tasty Kitchen. We tried it on grilled chicken and wowzers was it gooood. So good I was convinced it would be even more spectacular on a Steak. It was.Now, I only had the teeniest of pieces of the beef. Luckily, there were no negative side effects. I think this means the next cut of beef, which will be a higher quality one, I can have a slightly larger portion. Yay!

The only bad thing I have to say about the marinade itself is that it was quite salty, particularly with the chicken. (Even Mrblocko thought it was on the salty side and that is saying something!)My solution to this problem is to either use less steak seasoning, low sodium teriyaki sauce, or substitute half the teriyaki in the recipe for water.

Other than the salt, this marinade has a great balance of flavor: spicy, tart, sweet, tangy and even umami (if you believe in that sort of thing.) This is my favorite marinade to date. I like this, dare I say it...more than I like Peking sauce. Ok, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but do I like it as much as a Peking sauce marinade.

Firehall Marinade from Tasty Kitchen
½ cups Olive Oil
¼ cups Brown Sugar
4 cloves Garlic, Peeled And Halved
3 Tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar
3 teaspoons Montreal Steak Spice
1 teaspoon Dried Mustard
1 teaspoon Fresh Ginger, Grated
½ cups Teriyaki Sauce (I Use Kikkoman)
4 whole Steaks (strip Loins, Flank Or Other)

Combine ingredients in a large Ziploc bag (don’t be like me—make sure there are no holes in the bag!), close bag and squeeze to mix the ingredients. Add 4 medium striploin steaks (or your choice of beef steak) to the bag and seal. Place in the refrigerator for 1 hour or even overnight to marinate and then grill the steaks as you normally would. Steaks can be frozen in the marinade as well, just defrost them in the refrigerator and grill. Recipe can also be doubled to increase the amount of marinade

Turkey Bean Taco Burgers

These burgers were delish. I thought they tasted just like a big burrito on a bun. I liked that they were so inexpensive to make too. Ground turkey is a $1 a pound on sale near me, and the meat gets stretched out further by adding rice and beans.
Blockette and Mrblocko didn't like this nearly as much as I did. That's ok. More for me! At one point Blockette started to pick the beans out of her burger, but once she realized she would have to eat the beans plain if she did that, the picking stopped. Surprisingly, she ate the rest of the burger without complaints. Ok. So it was not so surprisingly since we told her if she kept complaining about the beans she wouldn't get any ice cream for dessert.

We ate these burgers with salsa and sour cream on top. If I had guacamole or an avocado it would have been even tastier. The original recipe does in fact call for an avocado as a topping ingredient, but I forgot to pick one up at the store.

I made quite a few changes to the recipe so I'm going to post all my changes below. Here is a link to the original recipe for Black Bean Turkey Burrito Burgers from the Rachael Ray Show. One word of warning, don't put these guys on the grill. They will make a huge mess. They are meant to be cooked on a pan. Besides, if you cook them on the grill, the cheese in the patties will melt out. If the burgers are cooked on a pan, the cheese will get nice and crusty. Trust me, you want that. Your taste buds will thank you.

Turkey Bean Taco Burgers (Adapted from The Rachael Ray Show)
1 lb ground turkey
1 c cooked leftover rice
1 can black beans drained and rinsed
1 4oz chunk Colby jack, cut into 1/4 in dice
1/4 c cilantro, chopped
1 small red onion, minced
2 tablespoon chili powder
2 tablespoon grill seasoning
4 teaspoons ground cumin
2 tablespoon hot sauce (optional)
2 tablespoons EVOO – Extra Virgin Olive Oil

In a bowl, combine the ground turkey, cooked rice, beans, cheese, cilantro, red onion, chili powder, grill seasoning, cumin and hot sauce. I made my burgers into 7 regular sized patties, and 2 Kid size patties. Preheat a large, nonstick skillet over medium-high heat with 2 turns of the pan of EVOO, about 2 tablespoons. Cook patties 6-7 minutes on each side, until cooked through. Serve with salsa, sour cream, tomatoes and avocados.

Thankful Thursday 21

1. no major flooding after a huge rainstorm.
2. The possibility of doing something impossible.
3. Blockette's piano fun time
4. Blockette entertaining herself while I am shopping.
5. The summer is starting to feel like it isn't moving at a snails pace.
6. Birthday month is near.
7. Getting both old man cats to play like they were kittens again.
8. Finding 2 movies at the library that were girly movies
9. Finding time to watch said movies when no there is no one around to comment on the fact that I am crying over a movie.
10. realizing Blockette doesn't need as many new clothes as I thought.