Spicy Salad Tortilla Wrap Thingie
This very easy recipe was my answer to the leftovers of this weekend’s fatigue combined with the new week’s activities. Take the lost weekend at the soccer tournament, mix in a Middle School orientation for Louisa, toss in a little chauffeuring of Annie to a babysitting job, followed by a heaping portion of grocery shopping and voila! You get a Spicy Salad Tortilla Wrap Thingie that requires no cooking from the Soccer Mombie.
This recipe was easy on me and very exhilarating to the taste buds. It was good, too. Louisa and Joe both wolfed it down. I couldn’t make it through the last few banana pepper rings. And Annie… poor Annie. She began by picking out the chopped tomatoes and pushing them to one side of her plate. That was followed by picking out the banana peppers and pushing them to the other side of her plate. She followed those actions with a very slow choke down of the roast beef and lettuce that was unfortunately spoiled by the adobo/sour cream covered tortilla. Bless her little heart, she barely complains these days. She merely gets up multiple times throughout the ordeal and walks to the refrigerator to pour herself another refill of milk. It’s a good character building experience, don’t you think?
A Delicious Beginning to a Lost Weekend
When you spend your weekend leaving the house by 6:30 each morning, and driving 1.5 hours to sit at a soccer field for a good chunk of both days, it’s officially a lost weekend. We had no time for breakfast at home because it was too early to eat when we left, and so we caught breakfast and lunch, of the worst sort, on the road. There were doughy bagels from Dunkin Donuts and shriveled up hot dogs in mildew-smelling foil for lunch. We were lucky enough to be invited to a friend’s home for a barbecue on Saturday night – otherwise my numb fatigue from the day would have sent me freezer diving that night.
I did cook a surprisingly tasty dinner on Friday night, before I became a soccer mombie. I chose this recipe from Food Network Magazine because it sounded simple enough, although I altered it a bit from the original. For one thing, I was supposed to use turkey breast, but at $33(!!!!!!!) for one of those at Whole Foods, and no time to price it elsewhere, I decided that chicken breasts would do just fine. The breasts were sauteed in olive oil with a generous amount of chopped fresh garlic, fresh thyme (instead of the recommended marjoram which tastes just like soap to me), salt and pepper. Once they’ve become nicely browned in the skillet, I added halved green onions since I couldn’t find spring onions.
After a few more minutes I added the halved carrots and celery,
and finally a pound of mixed white and bella mushrooms, (a 1/4 pound more than required, but what would I do with the extras?).
I liberally salted the vegetables before throwing the whole pan (uncovered) into a hot oven for about 20 minutes, and was pleased to find a fragrant, juicy dinner when I took it out. The vegetables (especially the mushrooms) had released their juices over the chicken imbuing it with an irresistible fragrance, and even better flavor.
Joe’s only complaint was that the carrots weren’t tender enough. Sorry, dear, next time I’ll plan ahead and plant some carrot seeds a few weeks in advance so that I can pick them at the perfect diameter to cook at the same rate as the mushrooms.
Goodbye Raw Cookie Dough
I don’t think many people could have missed the recent news regarding the recall of millions of salmonella contaminated eggs. If you’d like to read more of the details on this recall, you can find them on fellow About.com Guide Vince Ianelli’s Pediatrics Guide site. What I’d like like to share with you are the lessons I’ve learned from this situation:
Lesson 1: Mom, you’re always right. You know it, I know it, and now the world knows it. We should never eat unbaked cookie dough unless we used pasteurized eggs to make it. It doesn’t matter how tempting that chocolate morsel is peeking out of the top of the mound of dough. I used to believe that because I very carefully cracked the egg so that it didn’t come in contact with the shell, the salmonella wouldn’t get into my dough. Wrong, the salmonella is now in the egg, not just on the shell.
Lesson 2: Mom, here’s another point that you’ve been right about. Always wash your hands before, during, and after cooking. If you touch the shells or touch the raw egg and touch something else without washing up, you’ve possibly contaminated your kitchen with bacteria. It seems extreme, but salmonella poisoning is pretty extreme too.
Lesson 3: Don’t eat runny eggs in restaurants. Your eggs should be very cooked. Apparently a lot of the illnesses have been contracted in restaurants. I really don’t want to think about what goes on in restaurant kitchens, but it’s as bad as you might imagine.
Lesson 4: Save your food packaging. If you were one of the many people who transferred your eggs to your refrigerator door, you don’t know whether you have a recalled egg, do you?
Lesson 5: Okay, I’m going to get a little political on this one. There really is such a thing as a company that is too big. From what I’ve been reading on this recall, our country’s egg producers are limited to a very few that produce millions and millions of eggs. For the sake of argument, and to leave PETA out of this one, let’s put aside for a moment the feelings of those poor chickens in their lousy living conditions. On a simply pragmatic level, with all of those chickens living in such close quarters, it’s a no brainer that if one is ill it will be easy for the whole lot of them to be contaminated. Additionally, if one is fed tainted food, many are going to eat tainted food. And if one makes bad eggs, most likely they’re all going to be dropping bad eggs that will be distributed pretty widely through our markets. That’s simply the way industrial farming works. Practically speaking, smaller is better when it limits the potential scale of damages from a problem like this one.