Salmon Croquettes

This is also known as Salmon Patties if you're country. LOL!!

These patties are really really tasty if you do them right and in my humble opinion, this recipe is the right way. :)

I use canned salmon. You have to keep in mind though, that if you use canned salmon you should take the skin off and remove the bones and the best way to accomplish this is to carefully separate the chunks of meat so that you can open it up to remove the bones. Its somewhat hard to explain how in words, but when you open it up and slide it out, you have to just look and see what the best way is to remove those bones. You wont die if you dont get them all and you dont even have to remove them, I just prefer to.

After you "clean" your salmon if you choose to add fresh cut veggies. I used red onion, green pepper, and celery Also add 2 eggs ( if you use 2 cans), old bay, pepper, seasoning salt and bread crumbs. The purpose of the bread crumbs is to make the salmon less watery so it will  be easier to form the patties. The eggs is what makes it watery but you absolutely need the eggs to hold the patties together. You will have to gauge how much bread crumbs to add based on how loose or watery your salmon mixture is so add accordingly. Mix all the above together and season to taste. Now just form them into patties and lay them on an olive oil greased pan and put in the over on 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. After about 15 minutes I flipped them over and let them cook on the other side until they were done. You can either eat them plain or add tarter sauce on the side.

Whiting Fish Chowder

This fish chowder is so good I felt that it needed to be shared with the world. Its healthy, its hearty, and it's freaking DELICIOUS!!!

This is a fish chowder so use the fish of your choice but I recommend whiting. Put 2 pounds of whiting in a pot and cook for about 5 minutes or until it's flakey.  Once done use a wooden spoon/utencil to chop them into medium sized chunks. Meanwhile hopefully you have chopped up your veggies. You can add whatever vegetables you like but these are the veggies I use. Keep in mind, you will need to dice the potatoes so that they will not take long to cook. 

Celery, carrots, red potatoes, onions, red and green peppers

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          So, now you will need to sautee your veggies in olive oil for about 5 minutes or until they begin to soften but don't cook them to death. Sautee them just a bit but not so much until it's soggy. This kills all the vitamins and nutrients.

This is how they should look after sauteeing

After your vegetables are sauteed add it to your pot of fish. Now it's time to add your seasonings. Here are the things I add to mine. I forgot to picture the milk and salt. My bad. Lol!!

 Add the milk, add the seasonings to taste, and now's the time to thicken it up with the flour. Here's how you do that: add a good bit of flour to a bowl and add water. Use a whisk to smooth it out then put it into your soup and stir. You may have to do this a few times to get it to the consistency that works for you. Once you've done that, that's it!!

Eat up!

I'm sure by now you have noticed I didn't quantify anything. 1/2 teaspoon of this, 1 cup of that, ect. I don't measure. You don't really need to measure for cooking. Baking, yeah. Cooking, no. Just season and add stuff until it's right.

Eggplant Burgers- My Substitute for the Beef

I gave up meat the first of this year and right along with it my beloved favorite meal: hamburgers on the charcoal grill made all the way, fries, and a drink. I have been trying like hell to find a substitute for my beloved meat burgers but could find none. None that could live up to my standards that is. Until this. Dey is a Gawd!

The main ingredient of course, is eggplant. I love eggplant anyway so this was right up my alley. And to boot the recipe isnt even that hard! So without further ado here it is.

3 medium eggplant
1 onion
1 green pepper
minced garlic
2-3 egg whites
salt, pepper, whatever other seasonings you like to taste
Liquid Smoke (optional)

First you want to grate the eggplant. Be prepared to put your back into it because that was some hard work. Peeling it makes it easier to do. Then  grate the onion and green pepper and add it to the eggplant along with the minced garlic. Make sure that once you mix all this up, you squeeze out as much liquid as you can. THIS IS IMPORTANT! Next add the egg whites and stir. Again, attempt to squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Add seasonings. Form them into patties. Hint: while you are forming them into patties, squeeze even more of the juice out. From this point you can either bake them or fry them up.

I put mine on the charcoal grill. I have one of those cage-like things that you use to grill veggies and all you have to do is flip the cage to cook them on the other side. This pic is the burgers after I pulled them off the grill. I was so hungry that I didnt take a pic of the finished burger and home made fries. I was ready to eat.

I have to admit that this was excellent. It even passed the taste test of my son who loves burgers more than I do and he was ready to hate it! I am so happy that I finally found a substitute that is equal to the flavor of a regular hamburger. Its on now!!!

Menu planning thats actually doable.

Has menu planning been your nemesis? It certainly has been mine. I could never for the life of me decide what we were going to have for dinner because I didn't like cooking and that was due in part because the whole ordeal seemed to be a chore ESPECIALLY when I didn't know what I was going to be making for dinner that night.

If you were like me, you visited the net for blogs, searched for pre planned menus, or maybe you even called up your girlfriend and asked her what shes having for dinner that night. Yes, I have done all those things and I still ended up clueless and frustrated.

One day I had an epiphany. I use Google Calendar to plan all the things in life that need to be mapped out so I figured why not plan out what we will be eating from day to day?

I felt like I should have been nominated for a Nobel Prize just for the mere IDEA of it all. Not that making a week long menu hasn't been attempted by me and millions of people before, but not to this level that I'm about to get into.

In Google Calendar, you can set up events to reoccur every day, week, every 2 weeks, every 3 weeks, every month, year, ect ect ect. What I decided was to do 31 days of menus, and have them all to reoccur once every month. That way, I will have a menu for everyday of the week henceforth and forever more. Not only that, you can set up each meal and send invitations to the event to whomever you choose ie your always hungry family members. Now your husband and children will never have to ask you that dreaded question: "Whats for dinner???" and you will no longer have to look like this: :-I They will receive an email with that days menu listed.

Here's where the hard work comes in. Now you have got to come up with all these menus. Don't panic though! Take your time. It took me 2 weeks to do it. I went to the library and checked out a grand total of 2 cookbooks. I made sure before I took them home that they were full of recipes that I would want to make that had few ingredients. Added to my arsenal was previous meals I had made that me and my family loved and my crock pot. If I had to have instructions for making a particular meal, I typed in the ingredients as well as the instructions in the note portion of the event on the calendar.

If you don't have a Google account I seriously urge you to get one so that you can use the Calendar. Its a life saver and now it makes cooking somewhat enjoyable because the stress of being ignorant of what we are having is gone. An added bonus to it all is that I can now shop according to whats on the menu for the week and that cuts down on the grocery bill.

Since Google allows you to embed your calendar I'm going to let you benefit from that mind numbing, brain twisting work that I went thru for those two weeks and let you see my menu. If it's possible. Good Luck!