Dinner

Refried beans can be a healthy snack, or a full meal if you want them to be. You can wrap them in a flatbread as I do at the end of these videos and turn them into a burrito, or you can dip corn chips into them for a snack. Or for a full meal of taco salad, lay down a bed of corn chips, then some refried beans, lettuce, tomato, green onion, bell pepper and whatever else you want on top. Then top it off with a bit of sour cream and your favorite hot sauce. Delicious, and nutritious!

Sometimes when we do pizza, we do one big one for the whole family, and vary things a bit by doing parts with some ingredients, and parts with other ingredients - so as to keep everyone happy. Mainly the boys since neither my wife nor I are particularly picky when it comes to pizza. But sometimes it is more fun to do personal pizzas and let everyone build their own from the bottom up. I'll roll out the dough and then let the boys have at it, dressing it up as they see fit. It is only slightly more effort than doing one big one, but it is a whole lot more fun!

For some time now I've wanted to get into sausage making, and finally made the leap today! Actually, I tried it once about 10 years ago but only the once. And now I recall why - that Kitchen Aid sausage stuffer attachment is just terrible! Really difficult to work with, and incredibly slow. The basic problem is that the vertical tube leading into the feeding chamber is tapered when in fact it would be most effective if it were the same diameter the whole way down. The plunger should be perfectly engineered to fit snugly down in there, but it is not. You start plunging down on the mixture and more of it oozes back up the sides than makes it down into the feeding auger. If you take a look at purpose-built stuffers they are exactly as I describe how the Kitchen Aid should be.

Nonetheless, it did get the job done, and the results were really good. But I cannot for the life of me imagine using this thing very often because it would just get way too frustrating. I'm going to buy a proper stuffer for sure.

For quite some time now I've wanted to figure out a way to make my own chicken nuggets, because the boys love them so much, and generally speaking they are not very good for you. Ironically, we did manage to find some vegetarian "chicken" nuggets that do well on the nutrition front, but are pretty expensive. And the boys just won't believe us that they do not have chicken in them :-) Finally I started playing around with things and came up with a really great recipe. Especially because it goes together so easily.

I have received many compliments on my baked bean recipe, so I have decided to share it with the world. It started off as a recipe from a slow cooker recipe book, but I have since played with it so much it's become my own. Enjoy!

Yeah, I know, the proper name is "Goulash", and I already did an article and video on this a few months ago. That does not change the fact that this is one of my all-time favorite meals both for its simplicity and yumminess! It is especially yummy when you use good quality local organic beef like I do, bought directly from a local farmer and good friend. And of course home-canned tomato sauce. I checked my inventory and I still have 3 x 750ml jars from 2005 which are getting to the end of their shelf-life, so I used one of those. And I also only use whole wheat pasta for anything I make, so that it will be as healthy as possible.

This is as easy to do yourself as hamburger helper(tm) ever was, but far more fulfilling. And better for you too.

Here is a great idea for leftover rice that I picked up the other day on one of the blogs I follow - deep fried rice balls! I know, I know, it already sounds awesome, doesn't it?

So I put the bug in my wife's ear for the big container of leftover brown rice in the fridge, and she made it her own with a little twist - in addition to the cube of cheese in the middle she also mixed grated parmesan and asiagio into the rice. Wow they were great, and the kids gobbled them right up. Recipe below.

It is astonishingly easy to make your own pizza - surprising that not more people do it. And in fact it can also be rather healthy when done right. I always make a whole wheat crust - you can find my basic dough recipe here.

Simply roll out your dough, top with your favorite tomato sauce - spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, does not really matter. We don't even add herbs and spices and just go with what is in the sauce and meat. Add your sauce, add your meat, add your grated cheese, then optional items like the few olives we add in this video. This is just a very basic pizza shown here, but obviously you could add whatever you want like green or red peppers, mushrooms, and so forth.

I've been making meat pie for I guess about 2 decades now - learned how from my dear mom who recently passed away. So this is a bit of a tribute to her. It is really easy to make, and like most of my recipes extremely versatile. Use any type of meat you like, in any form you like. Beef, pork, chicken; ground, chunked, or in this case shredded.

Ma's meat pie always had more veggies than meat, and that's the way I like it! Use whatever veggies you like, though potato and carrot are pretty standard, and you need to have a lot of something fairly starchy like that.

This is a yummy “cleaning out the veggie drawer” sort of soup. It’s lentil based, but uses pretty much whatever veggies you happen to have on hand. I’ve made it most often with zucchini because we buy an annual share in a CSA, and what farm doesn’t have too much zucchini in late summer? This is a great one to get going in a slow cooker, too, and reheats really well from leftover.