I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
I know it’s only February, but I thought that now would be a good time to discuss nutrition. As you can probably tell from this website, I am not above eating the occasional horrendous meal consisting mostly of empty calories and exorbitant amounts of fat. However, since I cook most of the meals that my family eats, I try to make sure that most of them are nutritious and healthy. I’m not a nutritionist but I’d like to share with you a few of the simple things that I’ve learned where healthy eating is concerned.
Look at your plate.
How colorful is the meal you are about to eat? Is it mostly a beige and brown meal? Believe it or not, by eating a meal that is full of natural (i.e. they occur in the food naturally and not by process) color, you are pretty safe in assuming that you are eating a meal full of essential vitamins and minerals. You want to eat food that is dark and green, dark blue/purple, bright orange, and red. When you are eating processed food and fried food, the colors will tend to be a beige and/or brown color. While this is fine in smaller portions for certain meals, you certainly don’t want it to make up the bulk of your meal.
In general, the avocado is tasteless or very mild in taste. It’s very easy to punch up the flavor with herbs, citrus, and spices. Use simple mashed up avocado in place of mayonnaise on your turkey sandwich. Make a big bowl of creamy guacamole and serve it with pork chops or chicken breasts instead of just tortilla chips. Use it as a way to make a smoothie extra creamy and thick. Add it to a citrus based pasta salad for an extra punch. It’s recommended that you try to consume avocado at least 3 times a week. Since they can be expensive, though, try for a once a week consumption.
FISH FISH FISH FISH.
Fish is good….for the most part. Read this article. I’ll wait.
Fish is super good for you to eat, again for the most part. If you are pregnant or have a frail condition, you certainly want to avoid larger fish such as tuna, shark, swordfish, and other huge fish to avoid mercury poisoning. We like to hear about those lovely Omega 3 Fatty Acids and oily fish are one of the best places to get it. Salmon is good. Sardines are great. Mackerel is divine. The internet is flooded with thousands of recipes for fish.
If you’re still one of those people who hate fish? Look, you really ought to try to get your palate used to it. Start with a very mild fish like flounder and start working your way up. Try different recipes. Use fresh ingredients. Citrus and fresh herbs make almost any fish taste better.
Dark Leafy Greens
I know that I made mention of these above, but this category is seriously one of the most important. It’s a super food. No joke. Here, read this.
I’ll tell you one thing, my freezer ALWAYS has frozen broccoli and spinach. They can sometimes be flat and the taste can get old, so you turn to the internet to spice things up. One of my favorite ways to spice up a bag of frozen spinach is to add a can of stewed tomatoes and about a teaspoon of curry powder along with a pinch of salt and pepper. It makes a great side dish to any week night meal. And honestly, I prefer my broccoli steamed with no flavorings added.
In the summer, when all of those beautiful salad mixes are out, I like to buy some and have side salads with ever meal dressed with a simple lemon vinaigrette ( I almost never buy salad dressing).
Whole Grains
Hugely important in every diet. Here’s a short article.
One of the easiest grains to have access to is brown rice. I’ll be honest with you, I do not care for brown rice and planned to never buy it again. However, I’ve decided to give it another chance. I recently read that, instead of preparing brown rice the way you might prepare white rice, bake it. So, I’m going to give it a whirl.
My favorite whole grain is bulgur wheat. I love Tabbouleh. You can find so many recipes for it online and you can find bulgur wheat quite easily in most supermarkets.
Don’t forget about oatmeal. I try to eat oatmeal for breakfast every day. I get SICK TO DEATH of it, but I still try to eat it. I buy dried fruit and add a little bit every morning to make it more interesting.
Elementary School should have taught you the “elementaries”.
The rest of the important stuff, you should remember from elementary school. Do you remember the food pyramid? We need to remember that. Remember being taught the difference between processed sugars and natural sugars? Here’s a must read on that subject.
It’s still pretty simple. Eat your fruits and vegetables. Drink lots of water. You need calcium (either through dairy or other means). Beans are good for you. You don’t need more than 4 oz. of lean meat at your evening meal. Dessert is nice, but not needed. Snacks are recommended but should consist of nuts and fruit instead of candy bars and potato chips.
As I said before, I am not a nutritionist. I’m just a mom and a housewife who has learned these very simple facts concerning nutrition. The most unfortunate thing about eating healthy is that it is so much more expensive than eating junk.
A few things that I always keep on hand to help me with this are frozen fruits and vegetables (not as perishable and more affordable in the long run), canned tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, and diced tomatoes. Don’t buy premade tomato sauce as it can contain a lot of unhealthy ingredients that you don’t want…and it’s way more expensive. I try to buy whole grain pasta (but read the labels on those. They aren’t always really whole grain). And I’ve always got both green and black tea on hand. Oh, did I forget to mention tea? Ok, here:
Drink Tea.
Green tea is thought to be great, but is lacking real world evidence. So what? It’s loaded with antioxidants! Read this.
Although it isn’t praised as much as green tea, black tea is super too! Read this.
As you know, I like to make homemade (i.e. not made from a pre-sweetened powder) iced tea. I also like to make iced green tea. We love it and drink it by the gallon!
There. That about covers all of my personal knowledge concerning nutrition. I’m by no means a professional and I’m sure I still have a thing or two to learn. I hope someone out there finds this helpful.
When I was little, I used to spend my summer vacations going to a nearby lake and swimming all day. When we would come home, my brother and I would eat those individual frozen microwavable pizzas. My favorite was the cheeseburger pizza. It was complete grubbing food and I loved it after a full day of swimming and horse-play.
Then last week I noticed that all of the internet was abuzz about superbowl parties and the food served at these parties. A superbowl party is nothing more than an excuse to be completely hedonistic food-wise. Nobody is going to a superbowl party and having a mesclun salad with a slight squeeze of lemon. People go to superbowl parties to eat chili, chips, 40 different kinds of dips, wings, burgers, hot dogs, and pizza. Now, I didn’t attend a superbowl party. I stayed home and cleaned house. The next day, I got on the internet and Googled, “Who won the superbowl?” However, I was thinking that if I were to attend one next year or some unassuming internet surfer should be looking for an interesting recipe to take to a superbowl party, then this cheeseburger pizza would be a great thing to share.
When thinking about how to formulate a recipe for a cheeseburger pizza, I first asked myself what I like to eat on cheeseburgers. I like gooey cheese. I like bacon. I like onions. I like tomato. And I like perfectly cooked, juicy meat. That is how this recipe came to be.
A while back, I wrote another post about a homemade pizza. Contained in that post are recipes for both homemade pizza sauce (it couldn’t be easier…don’t buy it. Make it.) and pizza crust. Check it out.
Cheeseburger Pizza
(My Recipe)
-1 recipe prepared pizza crusts (if you use the recipe I provide, it makes 2 thin crust pizzas)
-1 recipe pizza sauce
-1 lb. ground beef
-6 strips bacon, cut into small pieces
-2 cups thinly sliced onions
-1 large jar of yellow cheese product (Cheez Whiz)
Preheat oven to 500 degrees F.
Roll out pizza dough and place it on either a pizza stone or a pizza baking sheet.
Spread pizza sauce on the dough.
Add uncooked hamburger and bacon. I used thick sliced peppercorn bacon, but any bacon will do fine.
Add onions. As you can see here, I add quite a lot of onions. Keep in mind that they cook down, but you can absolutely cut back on the onions on this pizza if that is your taste.
Glob on the “cheese” product. Look, when it comes to a pizza like this, you want a cheese that is smooth, savory, and completely unlike any real cheese. This stuff works perfectly and, trust me, it is really shamefully delicious.
Bake the pizza for 15-17 minutes.
This recipe yeilds 2 medium pizzas. It’s an easy recipe to double if you have a lot of people or big eaters to feed.
Gooey. Savory. Delicious. Totally worthy of a kickass football game. Or any televised sporting event, for that matter. I hope you try this recipe. It’s really delicious.
My husband has been griping for the past few days about wanting a chocolate cake. I kept deflecting his belly-achings and going about my business. Today, however, I decided to humor him and make a chocolate cake.
At any given time, I always have the ingredients handy to make several different baked goods. It’s a nice way to put a peaceful note on a stressful day and, hey, sometimes you just want some warm cookies. So I was very not worried when I went online to look for recipes on how to make a wonderful chocolate cake and chocolate icing. What I came upon was a recipe that, at first glace, appeared to be the recipe for your average run-of-the-mill cake. I had all of the ingredients on hand and decided to try it anyhow. Besides, I trust Hershey. It’s the only chocolate (Besides Ghirardelli and Neuhaus) that I really like.
The recipe was super easy. The icing was super easy to make. When we had finished our dinner and I served this, my husband looked at me after his first bite and said, “I hope you’re keeping this recipe.”
I took a bite and WOW. It’s a REALLY good cake. It’s almost like brownies but in cake form. VERY chocolate-y and VERY moist. Give it a try.
No, there are no pictures of this. I had no intention of making a blog post about a simple Hershey’s chocolate cake, but after eating it, I knew I had to share it. Seriously. If you like chocolate, try that sucker. You will thank me.
I took this from TW at Retro-Food. It looked fun so I’m taking part (since this blog is nearly dead).
1. Which expensive electronic device do you or your children most admire? Right now, it’s definitely the Wii.
2. Do you ever use your computer in the kitchen? Yes.
3. What ratio of new recipes cooked in your home come from the Internet vs from a cookbook you own? Only a very small amount come from the internet. Out of ten new recipes that I try, usually only 2 come from the internet.
4. Does your family regard a recipe as something printed from the computer, on a handwritten card or something on the kitchen netbook? That doesn’t really apply to me. Recipes in my kitchen come from cookbooks, a Word doc. on my computer, or a web page. A recipe is a recipe.
5. Do you have a television or other electronic entertainment in the kitchen? I have a radio/CD player.
6. What is the eating in front of the computer rule in your house? I do it. A lot. And get crumbs in my keyboard all of the time.
7. How many places can you order dinner online from in your area? I still use the phone to order out.
8. What is the BEST recipe you have ever made from the Internet? Probably Italian Bread. I don’t remember where I found it, but I was born and raised in a small Italian town (in WV, no less) and I missed perfect warm Italian bread and this recipe was very close.
9. What’s the least used kitchen gadget in your home? My Fondue pot. I love it, I just rarely make fondue.
10. What is the oddest recipe your family has tried after seeing it on the Internet? I don’t know. I’m boring and usually steer clear of the weird stuff.
I get in trouble a lot for all of the crumbs in the keyboard
Hello everybody! My posts on this site have been deplorable, haven’t they? I’m not updating and when I do, it is cheap and not very well put together. My deepest apologies.
Things around here have been crazy, to say the least. We are busy trying to get settled into our new house, working on fixing up a few rooms, and my laptop is broken. Why should this have any effect on this site? Well, allow me to vent/complain/explain.
There’s not much time to create any fabulous meals here. We’re eating your basic pork chops and chicken breasts quite a lot. And with my laptop being broken, I no longer have access to a lot of the recipes that I had set aside to try out specifically for this site. So I’m a little grumpy about all of this.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. 1) It would appear that my laptop is not broken beyond repair and I am hoping to have it back up and running soon. 2) Sometime in late spring we will begin the renovations on the itty bitty teeny tiny kitchen. Since it is kitchen-related, I will be sharing the experience right here on this site. It will be lots of fun for you all to read even though it won’t be much fun for me to be doing…but we all love to watch a renovation take place, especially when we aren’t having to do the work. That will be fun, won’t it?
Until then, my friends, I will try to remember to get on here and leave the occasional food post with my sub-par photographs. Until then, Ciao.
I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
