CHICKEN ENCHILADAS with SOUR CREAM

This is a recipe from one of the Indian reservations that I visited in the States, I change it a little but essentially this is perfect. Enjoy

CHICKEN ENCHILADAS with SOUR CREAM

12 TORTILLAS
2 cups cooked CHICKEN
1 pint SOUR CREAM
3 GREEN ONIONS, chopped
Shredded LETTICE
1/2 pound grated CHEESE

SAUCE for ENCHILADAS

2 cups TOMATO PUREE or SAUCE
2 cups WATER
4 teaspoons DRIED ONIONS
2 BOUILLON CUBES
1 1/2 teaspoons SALT
1 teaspoon GARLIC POWDER

1 teaspoon OREGANO

Combine sauce ingredients and simmer about 5 minutes in pan large enough to hold a tortilla flat. Fry tortilla lightly in a little oil (I avoid this step personally!) Dip tortilla in sauce, remove and fill with cooked chicken or other filling, onions and lettuce. Roll up and put in casserole, seam down. Repeat until all tortillas are filled. Spoon additional sauce over top. Dollop with sour cream and cheese and heat in oven at 350 about 20 minutes (makes 6 servings). (If tomato sauce is used, omit salt.)

Lotion Bars

I found this on http://swiftcraftymonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/lotion-bars.html and am dead keen to give it a try

EVERYMAN’S LOTION BAR RECIPE

1 part vegetable shortening
1 part vegetable oil
1 part beeswax

Melt the shortening and beeswax a double boiler or a little pan in a bigger pan of simmering water. Stir in the vegetable oil. Pour into cups/molds and let cool. Pop out of “mold” and it’s ready to use. The beeswax will fragrance the bars with a nice, light honey smell, or you can stir in a little essential oil before you pour it into the molds.


LOTION BARS!
What exactly are lotion bars? They are solid, oil and butter based (anhydrous) bars made with beeswax, liquid oil, and butter. You melt, fragrance, then pour them into a mold or something like a deodorant container or tin and use them to seal in moisture wherever you need it. I think of them as giant lip balms for your body!


A basic recipe for lotion bars...
33% beeswax
33% liquid oils
33% solid butter
1% fragrance oil


Weigh all three ingredients in equal amounts in a Pyrex jug, then heat until all the solids have melted. Add 1% fragrance oil (by weight) and pour into a mold or deodorant container. Let set. Use. Rejoice.


This is a fairly basic recipe and the lovely thing is that you can tweak it to your heart's content, using a variety of oils and butters. (Check out the posts on oils and butters to see what would work for you!)


For your first bar, try something really basic and use that as an example bar of what you want. Try sunflower, safflower, or soy bean oil (all available at the grocery store) with cocoa butter and beeswax. This will give you a good baseline for what a basic lotion bar feels like.


TWEAKING THE BAR!
The hardness of your butters is important here. If you use all cocoa butter in your lotion bar, you're going to have a very hard bar. If you use all shea butter in your bar, you will have a softer bar. So consider how soft you want your bar to be. A softer bar will be squishier, but will definitely melt at body temperature (great for a massage bar).


For an after bath bar, I'd choose...
sunflower oil - a great emollient (about 20% of the bar)
hempseed oil - I can use this in a lotion bar as I'll be using it quickly, and it is fabulous for my skin (about 13%). I will need to add 1% Vitamin E in this bar for sure!
cocoa butter - it lays down a protective barrier to trap in moisture
For a foot lotion bar....
avocado butter or avocado oil - a heavy oil great for really dry and chapped areas
mango butter - if I use 33% mango butter, it'll be quite soft, but very emollient
avocado butter & mango butter (equal amounts) - a quite soft, but emollient bar
For my lips...
olive oil - a great humectant (draws water from the atmosphere) about 1/2 the oils amount
aloe oil - a great healing oil (not making a claim here, but it is awfully good!)
aloe butter - the goodness of aloe in a butter - but very very soft (about 15%)
cocoa butter - to harden the bar and offer great emolliency
You can add anything you like to a lotion bar recipe, as long as it is oil soluble. So hydrosols, water, aloe vera liquid, and other water soluble ingredients are right out! Hunt around for butters and oils. I've recently picked up aloe butter and aloe oil, so I can have the goodness of aloe in an anhydrous bar.


MY FAVOURITE LOTION BAR RECIPE
28% beeswax - to harden the bar
10% fractionated coconut oil - this is a very light oil, very emollient
25% sunflower oil - conditioning for the skin
3% rice bran oil - high in Vitamin E
30% mango butter - creamy and emollient
2% IPM - (an ester) IPM helps greasy things feel less greasy and sinks in quickly
2% cyclomethicone - this silicone helps with the glide
2% vitamin E - to prevent rancidity and good for my skin
1% FO



Melt all but the cyclomethicone and fragrance oil in a heat proof container in your double boiler. When all the ingredients have melted, add the cyclomethicone and fragrance oil, then pour into a mold or twist up deodorant container. Let set. Use!


This is a bar intended to start melting at your body temperature, that's why I used all mango butter.


SOME TIPS
Packaging: Wrap them in foil and label them, then present in a nice cellophane bag.
Chocolate molds and silicone ice cube trays are great for molding lotion bars!
Packaging: Find some nice tins for portability!
Make sure you label your lotion bars so you know which one you loved best or so your giftee knows what they are getting! Please note on your labels that these are NOT EDIBLE even if they are adorable and smell great. (A co-worker tried to eat one I scented with pecan praline!)
Lotion bars are incredibly easy to make and wonderful to use. They're portable and non-liquid, so they're great for long flights or camping trips. Play with the butters and oils to find a recipe your skin loves!


This is the first in a series of posts about anhydrous products. What are anhydrous products? It means "without water", and they are products made with oil soluble ingredients. Because they don't contain water you don't need to use a preservative (although I suggest 0.5% to 1% Vitamin E to keep the oils from going rancid), and you can usually package them in something other than a bottle (like a chocolate foil, bag, or tin). You also don't have to worry about emulsification (bringing oil and water together) because all your ingredients are in one phase (oil being one phase, water being another).


Oil based ingredients are pretty obvious - oils, butters, essential oils, fragrance oils - and include silicones, as well. When buying an ingredient, check the INCI or the information from the supplier to see if it is oil soluble. Water based ingredients would be things like water, glycerin, aloe vera, hydrosols, and surfactants. So you can't include those things in your anhydrous products. (Again, you can find oil based aloe vera oil or butters, so that's not to say you can't find things that might work well with an oil based product.)


What happens if you mix a water based thing into an oil based thing? You will get separation. Oil and water don't like each other (check your salad dressing to see this in action). If you add a water based thing - glycerin - to an oil based thing - shea butter - it will eventually seep out as the water and oil repel each other (this isn't exactly true, but it's easier to explain it this way...)


As I've noted above, you can include essential and fragrance oils into your anhydrous products without effort, but colouring can be a pain. (I'm doing a post on colouring in the future, but you will need to use oil based or powdered colours. Food colouring or icing colouring is right out!) So if you use water based colours, they will sit there in little watery balls in amongst your whipped butter or lotion bar - it's not pleasant to look at, and when the watery ball touches someone's skin, it's going to leave a big mark.

Homemade Toothpaste

I am curious to try this one from LuSa Organics

Homemade Toothpaste

2 tsp Natural Liquid Soap (try unscented Dr. Bronner's or similar. We've used our bar soap grated into water but it makes too thick of a toothpaste for my squeeze bottle.)

4 Tb Coconut Oil

1 Tb Water

2 Tb Xylitol (optional)

1/2 tsp Stevia powder

10-20 drops Peppermint Essential Oil

5-10 drops Spearmint or Sweet Orange Essential Oil

Boil a small pan of water. Measure out 1 Tb and stir into it Xylitol (optional). Stir to dissolve. Melt coconut oil and add to water mixture. Measure in soap and stevia and blend (a stick blender works well if you have one. Otherwise use your regular blender or whisk by hand like mad). Blend while the formula cools enough to stay combined. Add essential oils and transfer to a clean squeeze or pump bottle. Cool completely, shake well.

Braised Radish

Just love this recipe by Rachel Ray on Food Network. I reckon even Jason will try it, despite not having radish before, simply because it's from Rachel Ray's website :)


2 bunches radishes, about 1 pound, trimmed of tops and roots
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
2 tablespoons butter, cut into bits
1 large shallot, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper


Place radishes in a skillet with stock, butter bits, shallots, sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper. Cover the pan and bring to a boil. Uncover the pan and reduce heat to medium. Cook radishes 10 to 12 minutes and if the stock has not cooked away, remove radishes and cook down to 1/2 cup, about 2 minutes.

Garlic Preserves

Courtesy of The Great Garlic Cookbook - by Sophie Hale


Garlic Puree or (crushed garlic alternative)

Takes away the acrid flavours that crushed garlic can have. Delicious spread on toast under eggs.

4 heads of garlic (50 cloves)
2T olive oil
salt and pepper

Simmer the unpeeled garlic cloves in lightly salted water for about 20 to 25 minutes, until soft. Drain and cool.
Peel or squeeze the garlic cloves out, cutting off the tough root end and any discoloured patches
Mash to a smooth paste with a fork (I did it in the blender)
Pack into a glass jar and cover securely

This puree will keep in the fridge for 4-5 days and can be frozen in cubes, using an ice-cube tray reserved for this purpose.


Garlic Pepper Essence

10 garlic cloves
5 small chilli peppers
Cooking Sherry

Peel and halve the garlic and prick the peppers all over
Mix them together and pack into a wine bottle.
Cover with the sherry and fill the bottle leaving room for th ecork.
Cork the bottle securely and leave, undisturbed, for a couple of weeks
the sherry can be topped up from time to time.

A few drops really perk up soups and stews, but because it is very intense, it should be used with caution.


Garlic Vinegar

8-10 Cloves garlic
coarse salt
2.5c / 550ml white wine or tarragon vinegar

Crush the garlic finely with the salt and put into a large, heat-proof jar.
Bring the vinegar to th boil and pour over the garlic
Allow to cool and then cover. Leave to infuse for 2 to 3 weeks.
Strain and bottle for use.

Variations - red wine garlic vinegar, for use in strongly flavoured marinades like those for stewing beef, pot roasts and game is made by saving red wine bottle ends and letting them 'turn. Use 10 cloves of garlic to 2.5 c of liquid, and warm the vinegar until hand hot before pouring over the crushed garlic.


Garlic Honey

30 cloves of garlic
2 cups clear honey

Put the garlic cloves in a large, screw-top jar an dpour the honey over them. There should be about 2.5 cm in between the honey and the top of the jar.
Cover the jar tightly and leave in a warm place for at least a week, turning upside down occasionally.
The juices released by the garlic will begin to turn the honey syrupy, and the goodness - not to mention the flavour of the garlic will pass to the honey.

This is great in salad dressings and marinades. Also a traditional remedy for coughs, cold sores and acne. Or try it over ice cream?!@#

BEST EVER BROCCOLI RECIPE

Broccoli is a favourite in my family, we usually have it simply boiled with cheese sauce. However, here is a REAL DELISH way - I doubt we will ever have it just boiled again.

Two large heads of broccoli, cut into largest florets. (make sure they are dry, if you feel you must rinse them first make sure you dry them really, really well) Pop them in roasting pan and drizzle over about 5 T Olive oil, 1 big teaspoon salt, and half teaspoon black pepper, and 4 cloves peeled slice garlic. Now give them a good old stir up so they are evenly coated, then make sure they are pretty much singe layer and pop in preheated oven of 425. Roast them for about 20 minutes (they will caramelise and tips start to brown) When you bring them out, add the zest and juice of a lemon, another couple tablespoons Olive oil, and about a third of a cup of parmesan cheese. You can also add a wee handful of toasted pine nuts if you have them, and a ltlle fresh basil is good too, but still delicious without them.

Dog Food

After feeding our dog dry biscuits for years and watching her age has made her teeth 'soft' and getting overweight she has developed arthritis etc. we decided to try dog roll and she got eczema, and of course fleas are always a problem in the country. So after dog roll and dog tins didn't do anything for her, we decided to make home made dog food. Here is roughly what we do and it lasts almost 2 weeks. Not only has the eczema gone and she's lost weight but she is excited about being fed nowadays too :)

Chicken frames or necks - 3-4 (keep the ones from your roasts or cheap ones from the supermarket)
Any giblets if you are inclined
Veges (onions, left overs, tops of carrots, celery leaves)as much as you can
Rice 5 cups
Garlic powder reasonable quantity

Boil up the chicken, veges and garlic powder for hours
When you are close to finished throw in the rice

pack it in small containers and freeze until needed