Simple Fish and Rice

Tools needed: 





a simple, hearty comfort meal

• micom (computerized) rice cooker

Ingredients:

• white rice (or activated brown rice that cooks the same as white)
• chicken broth
• frozen trout (or any fish)
• frozen langoustino tails (aka crayfish, aka crawdads)
• frozen sweet bell peppers
• cajun seasoning



this is an example of a micon rice cooker

• sundried tomatoes packed in oil

Directions:

• put one rice cooker cup rice into rice cooker
• sprinkle cajun seasoning
• add 3-4 sundried tomato pieces
• use about 1/2 water and 1/2 cricken stop to fill to the one cup mark
• add one serving frozen fish and one handful crawdad

  

  These ingredients are cheerful!

• add one handful (about 1/3 cup) frozen peppers
• cook on white rice setting

4 minute, 40 second Jambalaya with packaged rice and Andouille sausage

The finished product

When you're too tired to cook, cook this. It takes 5 minutes. Really 5 minutes, from entering the kitchen to leaving it. So if you're beat, prep this, go rest for an hour, and then enjoy a delicious, healthy meal.

Tools needed:

1. Micom rice cooker

Photo lineup of ingredients

Ingredients:

Ready to go into the rice cooker

1. Packaged Jambalaya rice with spices 
2. Frozen uncooked shrimp
3. Andouille sausage 
4. Chicken broth
5. Cherry tomatoes or frozen sliced sweet peppers

Directions:

You'll need an electronic ("micon") rice cooker

1. Measure one rice cooker cup rice into the rice cooker bowl
2. Add chicken broth to the one-cup line of the rice cooker bowl
3. Use cooking shears to snip 1/2 to 1 Andouille sausage into bowl
4. Put 1-2 handfuls of cherry tomatoes or sweet peppers into bowl
5. Top with 5 or 6 frozen shrimp
6. Cook on white rice setting. It'll take about 1 hour.

4 Minute Home-made Calzone

This assumes you have No-knead Sourdough Bread dough in your fridge. It takes about 5 minutes to make.

Pepperoni Calzone -- 4 minutes hands-on time

Here's a four-minute video

Ingredients:  

• No-knead Sourdough Bread Dough
• Canned tomatoes
• Grated cheese
• Pepperoni

Set out:

• Cutting board
• Flour to make dough less sticky
• Rolling pin
• Baking sheet

 1. 

Put flour on board to reduce sticking, then roll a hunk of dough into a ball

 2.

Use a rolling pin or your hands to flatten it out

 3.

Use a fork to put tomatoes on one half of disk

4.

Sprinkle cheese

 5. 

Separate and lay out pepperoni

 6. 

More cheese if you wish

 7.

Moisten edges of disk with water to make them sticky

 8. 

Fold over disk, press the edges together to make them stick

 9.

Poke holes to let steam escape

10. Bake at 400F for about 20 minutes or until crust is brown. There's no need to preheat oven.

About can openers and easy food storage:

Notice that the can of tomatoes has a lid. This is because I used a "safety"-style can opener. 

These can openers cut along the side of the lid (not the top). They don't leave a sharp edge and you can reuse the lid. Just place the lid over the unused contents of the can and stick the can in the fridge.

Here's a review of the can opener I used.

Quick way to chop up a cantaloupe or honeydew melon

Easiest way to cube a cantaloupe or other melon
(about 3 minutes including clean-up time)

1. Set out the following:

• cantaloupe
• knife
• cutting board
• container
• spoon

2. Cut the melon in half and scoop out seeds

3. Cut off each end of the melon

4. Lay the melon down and cut away the rind

5. Now it's easy to cube the melon

For some reason, I alway used to scoop out the seeds, cut it into wedges, then try to do some fancy work with the knife to get the rind off. This is much easier.

You'll notice I'm wearing a chain mail glove. This can be a real time saver. It would have saved me about 5 hours in the emergency room last year. It was a $119, a bargain compared to what the ER charged. If you want to get this exact same one, click here to buy it on Amazon.

No-knead Sourdough Bread

• No kneading.
• 5 minutes to mix up enough dough for two week's of bread.

The idea is that you whip up a big batch of dough and store it in the fridge. When you want bread, you simply take out a hunk and bake it. 


I adapted this technique from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. It's an excellent book. Following its instructions will take you a tiny bit more time and trouble, but might get you a better result. I find my super-easy variation creates bread that is already far too delicious.

Ingredients

• 6.5 cups (780 grams) flour
• 1.5 tbsp yeast
• 1.5 tbsp sale (optional)
• 3 cups water

Instructions

1. Mix together the dry ingredients
2. Add the water (the temperature of the water doesn't matter)
3. Mix well. You can mix with a spoon, with your bare hands, or with an electric mixer.
4. Store in the refrigerator at least overnight and for up to two weeks. (After two weeks, it will be too watery to use.) Do not store in an airtight container--the gasses will make it explode.

WARNING: DO NOT STORE DOUGH IN AN AIRTIGHT CONTAINER. THE GASSES FROM THE YEAST WILL MAKE IT EXPLODE.

To bake the bread: 

1. Tear out a hunk of the dough
2. Form the hunk into the shape you wish and put it on a parchment-covered or greased cookie sheet. Or you can put it on a piece of foil on the bare oven rack. For best results, use a Silpat (see below) on a cookie sheet.
3. Put it in a cold oven and set the temperature to 450F.
4. Cook until golden brown. A baseball-sized hunk takes about 25 minutes to cook.

Gadgets to make this quicker:


A kitchen scale. This makes measuring for baking so much easier, and you won't have measuring cups to wash. I like the Escali model, but it's expensive. The advantage is that it has a capacity of 15 pounds.


A KitchenAid mixer. I just got one. I wish I'd bought myself one 20 years ago; I'd have saved so much time and aggravation over the years.


An extra KitchenAid mixing bowl so you can store the dough in the fridge rather than transferring it to another container.

A cover for the KitchenAid mixing bowl. Well, here's a mystery. It is not that easy to find the correct sized lid for whatever bowl you have. You might just want to buy the bigger lid and lay it on top of your bowl; you don't want a tight-fitting lid anyway, because the gasses from the yeast could explode if your form an air-tight seal.

More info:

The World's Easiest Sourdough BreadThis is a no-knead sourdough using easily-available ingredients and a simple pain a l'ancienne method.



Storing the dough in the fridge vastly improves the flavor. It draws out more of the flavor from the flour and perhaps reduces phytic acid in the same way that soaking grains does. The Pain a L'Ancienne technique, despite its name, is a very modern technique. 



By the way, this works with whole wheat flour and with einkorn flour.

Here's a post by the Nutrition Diva on the soaking of grains.