Cucumber-Tomato Salad

Good Morning,

Recently, I had been wanting something healthy (and salty :O), so I had been searching around pinterest for anything in that category. I racked my brain for anything I had had in the past and remembered a delightful dish a friend of mine from work had made for a pot luck. It was exactly what I was wanting! Cucumber salad :). So instead of bothering her for the recipe and/or secret ingredient (you know how women can be sometimes about reciepes, lol), I decided to search pinterest for a recipe. The end product was great. The male ate it all, although sometimes I can't tell if he does that because he likes it or because he's polite. Anyway, see below :)

So I started off with some baby cucumbers. I used 3. Sliced them thin, but not too thin. See pic. Also had some heirloom tomatoes from my garden at work :) Aren't they cute! I didn't use heirloom tomatoes only, but I did use a few.

 

Ignore my multiple bowls in the background; I couldn't figure out which bowls to use and was making this harder than it needed to be lol. So anyway, the other things you'll need are:

 

Baby/cherry tomatoes (these are the ones from the store I used)

 

 

Sorry that's turned around. They're called Lip Smacking Grapes. I got them from target.

 

 

The rest of the ingredients:

 

1/4th a cup of red onion, THINLY sliced

3 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar

Dill weed (or just regular dill; I didn't have fresh regular dill on hand)

Salt

Pepper

Lime Juice

 





Directions:

All I did was slice everything and mix it together. Sliced my tomatoes into halves and into 4ths. Took the onion and thinly sliced it. VERY thinly. You don't want huge chunks of onions in it unless you LOVE crunching into them. Plus they can over power the flavor and you don't want that either. Add just enough of them so that you can see them, but not where they're everywhere. *shudder* Added the rice wine vinegar, enough dill weed to cover the tomatoes and cucumbers (I don't have an exact measurement), salt, pepper, and a few squirts of lime.

I was eating this while I was preparing it because it's so good!

 

I didn't say how many tomatoes I used because honestly, I don't remember. Use however many you want. I'm pretty sure I used about 6 or 7, but that was to my liking. You can add just enough to make them even with the cucumbers, or you can add more or less. It just depends on what you like :)

 

 

Here you can see where I added the onions. Didn't want too many of them. Red onions are good, but they are STRONG!

Here you can see where I added everything else. Mixed it all together, covered it, and put it in the fridge for an hour before I got back into it. This makes for a very healthy flavor packed side dish. :) Hope you enjoyed! As usual, feel free to add any comments, tips, or anything else. Have a wonderful wednesday!

Garden Salsa

Hello Again,

So I'm working on two cups of coffee and decided I would do another post. This post is for salsa. So yea, summer is officially over and all, but people eat salsa all year long. So all you expert cooks, don't get technical with me. If you want to explain all about summer and fall veggies in the comments section, please feel free to do so. I would love to learn about what's in season, what's not, etc. So basically, here's a recipe for delicious salsa!! I got the recipe from my mom, and God know's where it came from before that. So don't kill me if this is a recipe from somewhere else. I mean honestly, salsa is pretty easy anyway. They all are basically the same thing with a few tweaks here and there. Here's the recipe:

1 tomato

1 can of rotel diced tomato  (or you can just use two real tomatoes instead of the rotel and one tomato)

1/4^th of a purple onion

½ cup of cilantro

½ a lime

2-3 small jalapeno peppers (depending on how hot you like your salsa)

Take the 1/4^th onion and cut it into blocks. Put in food processor and process until very small, but not to where it’s too small to see it (you don’t want it pasty or watery). Take it out and do the cilantro next. Leave the cilantro in (optional, or you can take it out and put it all in at the end) and cut tomato into blocks. Put blocked tomato in to processor along with can of rotel. Blend until smooth. Add the onion (and the cilantro, if you took it out).

Chop up the jalapeno very small (you can also put this in the food processor beforehand) and add to the mix. Depending on how hot you want it, you can leave the seeds in or take them out. I leave a few in, but take most of them out because the seeds are where the heat comes from.

Take half a lime and squeeze the juice into the salsa. Mix all in food processor. You can add salt and pepper to taste. I didn’t need to add any, so you may not have to. So don't make fun of my mini processor lol. I know it's small :) I'm going to get a larger one here pretty soon. Although it was overflowing, it did the job :)!

 

 

 

So that's all. Here's a tip: Heirloom tomatoes (the funny colored ones) would probably be DELICIOUS instead of rotel and just regular tomatoes. Also, if you can get tomatoes you know came from a garden instead of ones at like, walmart, you may notice a huge difference. Tomatoes from a garden have so much flavor, unlike many of those you find at huge chains :\.

Baked Chicken and Potatoes

I would say good morning, but it is monday, and there isn't anything good about those. I'm sitting here chugging coffee because a certain black and white furrball kept me up all night with his atrocious snoring. I will not name his name because I don't want to embarrass him. But I am tired and cranky!! Not to mention, the weather change has been playing games with my sinuses. If there is some good to be taken from this, it would be that I am happy (not right now, just in general), healthy (not right now, just in general), and it's fall!

So let's get started shall we? I have a meeting in 2 hours (UGH! why do people schedule meetings on Monday mornings??) so I need to get this show on the road.

This is not the first thing I have cooked since starting this blog, but it's probably going to be the easiest post. I'm still working my way through this whole blogging thing, so I need to start simple.

So sunday, I decided I wanted to bake a chicken. I went to the store and grabbed a whole, thawed out chicken. I could have cut the chicken up, but out of sheer laziness, decided not to. I will say though, for someone who is borderline vegetarian (I play with the idea all the time going from no meat and back), it was difficult for me to make prepare this chicken. Not because it was hard but because it was just sad :( I've only prepared a whole chicken my entire life and it had issues with it then. Just holding it in my hands, taking out it's "stuffings" (ew), touching it, etc.  So beyond my issues; here's basically what I did.

I took three regular potatoes and cut them up into blocks. Not large blocks, not small blocks, just medium sized blocks. I halfway peeled them. You can either peel them or not. I like skin on my potatoes, so I only took some of the skin off. After that I washed them really good. Make sure that if you're going to leave some of the skin on, you wash them really well. Plain water will do.

After I chopped the potatoes, I covered them in olive oil and spread them out into a pan. I took one tablespoon of butter and cut it into quarters and spread them out into the pan. I also took half a yellow onion and chopped it (not finely, just into rectangles, see the picture below). This gives it a good flavor and the onions taste pretty good after they've been baked with the potatoes :)

If you're like me and you love garlic, take 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, chop it, and also put it in the pan. Season the potatoes with rosemary, and whatever other spices you happen to like.

For the chicken:

Make sure it's thawed out. Reach inside its cavity and take the innards (ew) out. I just toss them out. I'm not advanced enough to actually do anything with them, (I don't even know what they are. I just know that they're gross) nor do I want to.

Here is what I used to season my chicken: Rosemary, chopped garlic, lemon slices, Roasted Garlic and Herb seasoning, olive oil, garlic salt, and pepper. Smother the chicken in whatever spices you want, just make sure it's covered good. What I learned from this is that you have to get seasoning in ever nook and stinking cranny. If you don't, your chicken will be bland and that makes everyone sad.

I squeezed lemon juice from half a lemon onto the chicken and put the rest of the lemon on, inside, and around the chicken. I baked it just like that.

So here's what it ended up looking like before I baked it:

 

About halfway through it's cooking, feel free to smother it with more lemon juice and garlic. I didn't do this, so my chicken turned out a little on the bland side.

 

I pre heated the oven to 400 and put the chicken on the bottom rack. I baked for about an hour and a half. I am weird about chicken so I wanted to make sure it was done! It turned out brown and crispy and juicy. The potatoes were great. The only thing I would have done differently was season my chicken more. This was the finishing product:

 

 

See how pretty it is? Even better, it's a cheap meal that's not fattening, and it's very filling. It's so incredibly easy. Have fun with it; i'm just here telling you my experience and to give you some ideas on what to do (or not do ;)). Thanks for reading!!! Please leave any questions in the comments.

 

 

Welcome!

Learn how to cook with me, here at Foodie Newbie. I love food, and I love to cook, and I am just getting started good. A lot of my recipes will come from around the web, pinterest, and Cook's Illustrated. Any recipes I use will be cited fully.

Beautiful pictures will be added to help you along the way. I created this blog because I am pretty new to cooking, and I wanted to create a place for all newbies to get together.

I hope you enjoy my blog, and please feel free to add anything, including tips, pointers, and questions.

Jae