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.