Baked Salmon with Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto

 The cool thing about salmon is that it's easy and relatively quick to cook and crammed full of nutrients. Here's a favorite recipe of mine that uses only three ingredients: salmon portions, sun-dred tomato pesto and Italian breadcrumbs. Ifyou can't find sun-dried tomato pesto, you can get the regular basil pesto instead. But trust me, sun-dired tomato pesto really kicks it up a notch or two.

Ingredients:

* 2 to 4 salmon portions (4 to 6 ounces each), fresh or thawed

* 1/2 to 1 tablespoon pesto for each salmon portion

* 1/2 cup of Italian breadcrumbs

Directions:

1) Reheat oven to 425 degrees and line a baking sheet with foil

2) Pat each salmon portion dry with paper towel, and lay each on the baking sheet, skin side down.

3) sread petso generously on the top of each salmon portion with the pesto, and then sprinkle each with the breadcrumbs, ehough to make a thin coat on each portion.

4) Bake the salmon for about 15 to 18 minutes. When done, poke each portionwith a fork to see iif they are done -- they should be flakey. If not, bake for a few minutes more, but not too long, asyou don't want to overcook the salmon.

5) Serve with sides of your choice and enjoy.

* small

Angeli's Special Recipe Tartar Sauce

 I prefer to make my own tartar sauce since store-brought tartar sauces in general aren't very good. One usual issue is that these have a sweetener such as high-fructose corn syrup, added, which makes the sauce taste... wrong. I mean, tartar sauces are supposed to be savory and salty, not sweet. Anyway, this recipe is quick to make, and the secret ingredient that kicks it up a notch is choooped fresh shallots. I usually serve it with fish (such as air-fried Gorton's fish fillets...don't judge me but it's good). The sauce also tastes good with French fries.

Salsa Verde Pork Stew

 As I've mentioned in a previous post, pork stew meat is a great value, and here's another very tasty recipe for pork stew with Mexican flavors, that uses Herdez's salsa verde. In fact, this recipe is based on a similar recipe on Herdez's website with a few tweaks of my own.

Simple Pork Stew in Tomato Broth

 Inflation being what it is these days, meats have become more expensive. However, if you look hard, you'll find some good deals, such as pork stew meat. It goes for less than 3 dollars a pound at my regular food store, which is a darned good bargain, considering that the average pirice for beef stew meat is about 3 times as much as pork stew.

Here's an easy recipe that I serve regularly at home. It's cooked in chicken broth, sherry and tomato sauce and flavored with Worcestershire sauce and paprika. (Note: though I havne't tried this yet, it probably will work with cut-up chicken as well ifyou want a chicken stew instead.)

Roast Pork Tenderloin with Quick Chipotle Cream Sauce

 This is a great, easy recipe that takes only half an hour. One awesome thing about pork tenderloin is that it takes only 20-25 minutes to roast, and you can make the smoky-spicy sauce in a saucepan which takes minutes while the pork is a-cookin' away in the oven. You can use plan pork tenderloin or one of these flavored pork tenderloin like peppercorn-garlic -- I won't judge you. :-)  Note: if you can't find La Costea diced chipotle sauce (Walmart and supermarkets catering to Hispanic customers should have it), you can use canned chipotle instead. Take 2 or 3 peppers out of the can along with some of the sauce and mash them altogether in a small bowl.

Easy Pot Roast

 It is a tradition at our house to cook pot roast instead of turkey for Thanksgving. One reason is I'm not a big fan of turkey -- I like turkey bacon and turkey jerky, but that's aobut it. Another is that turkey would be too much for just two of us. Besides, pot roast is relatively easy to do, and at around 3 hours or so, doens't take as long as turkey. Oh, and you can count on it being juicy and very tasty. (Note: most recipes for pot roast usually calls for 3 to 5 pound chuck roast which is too big for a small household, so this recipe below uses a 2.5 lb chuck roast.

Korean Meatball Soup

 This isn't an authentic Korean recipe, but it has been inspired by spicy Korean tofu soup. In fact, the recipes for both are pretty similar except that you use meatballs instead of chunks of tofu.

Awesome American Goulash

 This suburban-esque one-skillet recipe, which is a home-cooked and zestier twist on Hamburger Helper,  is flexible and easy to make. If you want, you can use ground chicken instead of ground beef, or even Beyond Beef though I haven't tried that yet. And you could use different kinds of pasta like elbow macaroni instead of egg noodles. But there are 2 ingredients that you shouldn't skip on: chopped black olives and the zesty Italian dressing mix. These two items give this dish an extra oomph. Also, you could use hot Rotel in place of regular Rotel if you want it hotter.

Zesty Steak Marinade

I came up with this marinade for sirloin steak tips purchased from Trader Joe, but I believe it should work great on certain other kinds of beef such as flank steak. These packets of Good Season Zesty Italian dressing mix are like magic -- they make many things taste great. For example, I heard that a college I attended which served some of the yummiest Buffalo wings in its dining halls used that dressig mix to flavor the wing sauce.

Curried Tuna Caaserole

In the last blog, I posted a recipe for jalapeno tuna casserole. I do have another, one with curry spices. It's not really an Indian dish at all, just an American dish with some curry spices added. Also, rice is used in place of noodles. In fact, it's probably a good recipe to use up leftover rice (plain or biryani) from your last visit to an Indian restaurant. Also, be sure to select plain tuna or some flavor of tuna that won't conflict with the taste of curry spices. Jalapeno or even ranch might be a good choice. But I'm not so sure about, say, BBQ or Thai spice. :-)

Jalapeno Tuna Casserole

 I imagine everyone has their own tuna casserole, and here is mine, which is a bit spicy. It's Swhat 

I call a pantry recipe, meaning you could make this dish with almost everything from a pantry and not having to run to a food store, with the exception of the vegetables which you can omit if need be. If you're going low-carb, you could omit the noddles (add another packet of tuna, though).

Baked Blackened Salmon

Serving per filet or portion of fish

 This probably sounds like an oxymoron, a blackened fish being baked, but the oven will do the blackening for you. Also, one advantage of the blackening is that the fish will come out moist, since the blackening creates a crust during the cooking process to seal the moisture. Oh, and best of all, it's a very easy recipe to do and should take less than half an hour to do.

Angeli's Sichuan Hot Pot

Sometimes we'd make Sichuan hot pot at home, which is like the Chinese version of fondue where you cook veggies and thinly sliced meats in a boiling spiced broth. Traditionally, we use Sichuan hot pot base mixed that we buy at Asian supermarkets. But one day, we didn't have any, and Steve had thought some thinly slicked Wagyu beef and pork belly specially for hot pot. Since I didn't feel like going to Houston's Asiatown (which is waaay west in Houston), I decided to make my own mix since I did have some ground Szechuan peppercorns (if it doesn't have lip-numbing Szechuan peppercorns and chili pappers in it, it ain't Sichuan :-)  ). It turned out to be pretty decent and probably healthy since it doesn't contain so much fat like these Sichuan hot pot mixes. Here's the recipe that I made (note: since I couldn't find star anise at the neighborhood HEB store, I had to make do with fennel which kind of came close.) Also, the level of spiciness was on target -- just enough spiciness and lip-numbing but not TOO hot. (To be fair, we love spicy and have been known to devour things that would make a grown-up man cry quiet tears of desparation. But sometimes there is such a thing to being too spicy.)

Orange-Cumin Chicken

This is a very tasty dish that you can cook in a wok or saucier. I usually use Licor 43, a Spanish orange liquor, but since this can be hard to find, you can use any orange liquor. However, I'm not sure I'd recommend blue curacao unless you want a blue chicken dish. :-) Also, please don't use bottled orange juice in place of squeezed oranges since most orange juices are often high-processed and may contain additives that may not react well to boiling.

Angeli's London Broil

Here's my version of the London Broil, simple and quick to cook, after marinating overnight. Note: if you have a blacktop grill at home as I do, you could use that instead -- just grill it for 7 minues or so on each side.

Lamb Larb

Granted, this isn't an authentic Thai dish, but it's very tasty if you love lamb and Thai flavors. Lime juice, fish sauce and mint leaves do wonders for this dish. Also, while the traditional larb is served cold as a sort of salad, this dish is served warm with rice.

Spicy Thai Lime Dressing

Here's a Thai-inspired dressing that I make all the time, to use in a cucumber salad, or as a flavoring base for larb. Note: please use real limes for the lime juice -- no bottled juices like "realLime" as these don't taste quite right.

Angeli's Buffalo Wings

 This dish is relatively healthier than wings at restaurants since the wings are baked rather than fried, and just as good as long as you have a good wing sauce. The secret is to bake the wings until their skins become crisp before applying the sauce to the wings. Also, you need a pot with a round bottom like a saucier or small wok for the sauce. By the way, the wing sauce doesn't have to be Buffalo style; for example, you could use barbecue sauce or any good glaze sauce. The sauce just needs to be thick and will stick to the wings.

Tarragon Sauteed Squash

2 servings

This rather summer-y dish brings out the taste of tarragon, so tarragon lovers might love this. Note: you can use dill instead of tarragon in this recipe. But the herb gotta be fresh, though -- that makes a big difference.

Lemon Pepper Rack of Lamb

Here's an easy and simple, yet very tasteful recipe for a rack of lamb. It involves marinating the lamb with a spice rub and then roasting the lamb in the oven.