Food & recipes | Hip to be Mom

Simple weekday meals

May 232012

On school days, our meals are pretty simple. I typically don’t like to spend a lot of time in the kitchen when the weather is this hot.

Monday was meatless Monday and the girls’ request was for scalloped potatoes (oops, forgot to take a pic) while I had myself a sweet soup of red beans, green peas and horse beans slow-cooked to yumminess. I couldn’t resist tossing in a few ice cubes.

After a meatless day, we’re like a pack of hungry wolves. For lunch, I cooked salmon shrimp linguine with broccoli, plum tomatoes in creamy red sauce (again forgot to take a pic). So so good we licked the platter clean. For dinner, I made 14 buffalo wings for the 3 of us. Mmm.

Of course there were leftovers. Enough to go nicely with homemade spaghetti marinara with carrots, broccoli and plum tomatoes.

What am I cooking tomorrow? I don’t know, we’ll see.

Dinner on Mother’s Day

Posted by Clairity 2 Responses »

May 142012

So how did your Mother’s Day go? I came down with a chronic migraine shortly after breakfast and cradling my head, dived back into bed before lunch. With that and the blazing 90+ temperatures, I was eager to avoid the kitchen at all cost. Dinner out sounded like a great idea. It wasn’t meant to be a Mother’s Day dinner per se, more of a regular Sunday dinner.

We were trying to beat the crowd and thought if we got there early, we might be able to snag a table. As expected, the crowds had beat us to it and there were long lines everywhere. So we decided to try Chicago Ribs, a restaurant that’s new to us. We were in luck because they weren’t even offering a Mother’s Day menu and we got a table right away. No waiting.

For starters, we had Buffalo Wings which were okay but not nearly spicy enough for us. The girls still prefer my homemade Buffalo Wings, I think.

Their Nachos were scrumptious. As Raine says, topping the nachos with pulled pork is pure genius. When something is this good, you can bet the next I’m going to be doing is to replicate this at home.

This is the Rattle Snake Chicken Pasta. Interesting name but the rattle snake somehow failed to jump out at us. The chicken was toasty but flavorless but we didn’t mind that. But then the pasta didn’t exactly ss-sing out with flavor either.

The Pork Tenderloin with Cinnamon Applesauce, well, the meat was dry and bland, the veggies soft and overcooked and that plain old baked potato would’ve done a lot better with a handful of bacon bits and a ton more chives.

Skye’s choice of Fish and Fries turned out great. The portion of fish was generous, crispy and not greasy. And my potato lover somehow 2 potato sides.

Their food definitely could use a lot more flavor, more toppings and bigger portions for the price they charge. Most places go crazy with their salt and fat. This is probably one of the few places I’ve dined at that’s low-sodium, and that’s really great.

What I’d like to be eating right now

Posted by Clairity 8 Responses »

May 112012

Can you believe I haven’t published a single post about food this week? Strange, I know. I find writing recipe posts a bit of a drag but food posts are okay. So let’s drool over some of my favorite foods.

I love, love, love this Cranberry, Apple, Walnut Grilled Chicken Salad. The minute I grab this off the counter at Carl’s Jr, my fingers are going crazy ripping open the little bags of dried cranberries and glazed walnuts. Once when I couldn’t crack them fast enough, I brought them back to the counter to have the guy cut the bags open for me.

When it comes to In-and-Out burgers, I’m usually quite conservative and never go beyond a single. I look across at the folks having double and triple burgers and I’m wondering how to even start eating it. Do you eat it one layer at a time, or try to cram all 3 layers in at once ?! It’d be interesting to watch me try it!

And Cheesecake Factory, I absolutely love. I don’t care how many thousand calories my order is. I really don’t. I don’t count calories so what do I care?!! I just want to get at my pasta. OMG, this is so rich and so so so ~~fattening~~ good! I can usually only get through half my serving with no room left for cheesecake. But then next day, I can’t wait to get to the leftovers. Yums.

Ack, I’m super hungry just looking at these pictures.

Our everyday dishes

Posted by Clairity 5 Responses »

May 022012

The most asked question in the Hip household is “what’s for dinner?”. But you already knew that… from all the food posts and less-than-glamorous food photos I’ve been posting. Brace yourself, here come more photos of (as my post title says) our everyday dishes.

Let’s start with what we ate today. Spaghetti olio e aglio with Bratwurst sausages and grilled zucchinis, carrots, onions and peppers. Best darned thing ever! Judging from all the rave reviews today, I predict this will become our new favorite pasta dish.

Our current favorite is Cajun-style spinach fettucine with greens and grilled salmon. If it’s pasta, we’ll basically eat it (with a few exceptions, of course!)

Potatoes are also a staple on our daily menu. Raine, my Chief of Russets, takes it upon herself to ensure we never run out of potatoes. If we ever move, it’d likely be to Idaho .

Roast chicken, any style, is always a yay on our menu.

Then there’s all those funky salads the girls love throwing together.

And Skye, our Chief of Fresh Fruit, personally picks out our fruit selection every weekend. She usually makes a beeline for the Dole bananas . She’s also been known to crack the whip on us if we forget to eat our fruits *shudder*.

What are your family’s everyday dishes?

Table for one

Posted by Clairity 1 Response »

Apr 202012

It feels strange to be eating alone today without my kids. Skye is in school and I’ve just dropped Raine off at college, and am sticking around to wait for her to be done with her one class today. The traffic has been insane this week so instead of driving all the way home and back, I parked myself at a nearby McD’s.

McD’s was often my savior when the kids were younger but we’ve moved on. We haven’t set foot in a McD’s for like 2 or 3 years now. So it feels strange to be sitting there, without the kids, having my second breakfast of the day – a muffin sandwich which isn’t half bad actually and a cup of Arabica coffee which I used to affectionately call dishwater coffee .

I am reminded that I somewhat enjoy eating alone. Sitting backed against the wall and letting my eyes travel the room freely gives me a sense of an undercover detective in a movie. Back when I was working in Corporate Tower, I used to do that. a lot. I would leave for lunch an hour early, sometimes earlier even. Because I could.

There’s no squeezing into crowded elevators, waiting for my food and rushing through my lunch. I like walking into a food place and feeling like I own it. Somehow when a restaurant is busy, it rushes me into wanting to gobble up everything and leave. Today was nice. A quiet bit of me time to sit and watch the world go by. I do enjoy eating alone sometimes, do you?

French onion topping for baked potatoes

Posted by Clairity Comments Off

Apr 162012

I have a couple of baked potato fans in the house. There was a time when we would pay the price of a plasma TV stand a baked potato at a place called Oliver’s. Okay, I’m exaggerating just a little. We’d been there only a couple of times before I decided, heck, if my kids love this stuff so much, I might as well make this at home. I mean, how hard can it be, right?

So it was bye-bye, Oliver’s and hello, Hip to be Baked Potatoes.

My kids haven’t stopped loving baked potatoes since. I typically top ours with bacon, chives and sour cream. Which is great except that we find it hard to finish a whole tub of sour cream in one meal and any leftover usually goes bad by the time we make another round of baked potatoes.

That’s what happened the other day. I’d promised the girls that I’d have baked potatoes when they got back from school/college. My leftover sour cream had gone rancid and I didn’t want to disappoint them. But I had some plain yogurt on hand. So I concocted my own version of baked potato topping ala French onion dip .

I was almost afraid my picky eaters would be on to me. Turns out even after I confessed to trying to pass this off as primped-up sour cream, they still thought it tasted pretty good. Not to mention that yogurt is a healthier option and less fattening than sour cream, so I’m thrilled they love this new concoction of mine .

You only need a few ingredients for this:

1/2 cup plain yogurt
a dollop of Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon sugar
1 small onion, diced
drizzle of olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Lightly saute the diced onion in olive oil on medium heat till caramelized. Let cool. Add to yogurt and rest of ingredients. Mix everything together well. Chill and serve.

It’s not your conventional topping for baked potatoes, I don’t think, but for days when I don’t have all the ingredients on hand, I just have to make do. As you can see, it has a rich creamy texture, just like sour cream. It’s sweet yet tangy with a light crunch of onion bits. Pretty sure this will make a good dip for chips too.