Apple blossoms!!! You know what that means!!!

Why?

I have traditionally NOT given scraps to my pets. When I was a girl, all out cats ate were scraps, but when I was on my own with my own animals, I fed them pet food. But I have been having my doubts about the pet foods these days, especially after the scares with the melamine and other toxins from Chinese-manufactured foods.

WHY do we still import anything from China, I’d like to know? I think most Americans, given the choice, would prefer domestically-grown and made foods. I have yet to heard from anyone who wants their foods from China. I’d rather get ALL my domestic products from the USA, too. I like USA-made car leather cleaner, USA-made technology, USA-made clothing, everything. I’m willing to pay a bit more for it, too. And I especially want USA-made foods and pet products.

We’re starting to give scraps to our pets. We even cook for them more often now. One of our favorites is “dog rice.” It’s inexpensive rice boiled with chicken or beef broth, with chicken or beef scraps cooked in. The dogs love it, and I think it’s better for them than the Chinese-made dry foods.

What do you think?

OK, I admit I’m not a fan of casseroles, anyway. They almost always have pasta or rice in them, and I actually don’t like rice and pasta very much. When I have a meal with either, I like to add more vegetables, meat or sauce and less pasta or rice. I also am not a fan of ground beef. It tends to be dry and tasteless to me. I like beef– give me a filet mignon and I’m happy as a clam! Ground beef is meh.

But the kids like casseroles and ground beef and they like easy meals. Here’s the recipe:

Cheeseburger Casserole

3/4-pound extra-lean ground beef
1 cup oats
1 onion, chopped
1 large red bell pepper
1 large carrot, grated
1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon garlic powder
salt and pepper
8 ounces spinach egg noddles
1 cup low-fat Cheddar cheese

Basically cook the beef, rain it, cook the vegetables and spices. Cook the noodles. Throw it all into a casserole dish, sprinkle with cheese, and bake.

The recipe is very simple to make and makes use of typical ingredients in the kitchen. I’m sure younger kids would love it, but it has too few veggies and too many starches and heavy ingredients for us older folks. The recipe, in my opinion, was a bit tasteless except for the cheddar cheese. I think it could use some vegetables like spinach or broccoli or something, to give it a bit more kick.

You may like it. Give it a try!

Check out this article at News With Views.

There’s so much more in the American death parade, but just when you think you’ve heard it all, we find aborted baby fetal cells in our food. Lifenews.com states: Dozens of pro-life groups are calling on pro-life Americans to boycott PepsiCo because it has contracted with a company that uses fetal cells from babies victimized by abortions to test and produce artificial flavor enhancers. Obama’s Security and Exchange Commission rules PepsiCo cannibalizing aborted babies is “Ordinary Business.”

Debi Vinnedge, the director of the group Children of God for Life is calling for a public boycott of major food companies partnering with Senomyx. Vinnedge states, “What they don’t tell the public is that they are using HEK 293 – human embryonic kidney cells taken from an electively aborted baby…”

Related to the supply of the fetus, is the supply of fresh and more mature fetuses. The timing of abortion becomes an important consideration to the researchers and medical community who benefit from a more matured and developed fetus. The majority of abortion procedures are performed between the sixth and eleventh weeks of pregnancy, however delaying until the fourteenth to sixteenth weeks will yield fetal tissue that is usable in pancreatic transplants. Simply put, the older the fetus the more valuable!

After exposing the practice, Vinnedge’s group called for pro-life people to contact the companies using Senomyx to test their products. While some companies stopped contracting with it, others did not. The original list of companies contracted with Senomyx included PepsiCo, Nestle, Kraft, Starbucks, Campbell’s and Nestea. Here is the list of all aborted fetal products.

See the article for all the source links. Check this list for all companies that partner with Senomyx.

I’m going to be sick.

I think I failed on both counts.

My mango was mostly green with some red. I see now that should have waiting until it was more red. (No wonder it tasted ikky). The flesh, however, was quite squishy so I can’t say I’m 100% sure if I got it right. ?? Who can tell, lol.

And getting the thing open– OH MY WORD. I first had to peel the skin off. The durn thing was so slippery it was like trying to whittle a sloppy bar of soap while taking a shower.

The there’s this weirdly-shaped nut in the center. hackhackhack I finally did manage to pry the flesh away from the nut, but half of the fruit was not squished between my fingers. My fault from treating the thing like one of our good ol’ American apples.

SO i served it for dinner with some strawberries and biscuits.

YUK. Me no likely mangoes. They are bland and mealy.

Good thing I had strawberries on the table! What would I do without my luscious American fruit?!

Well, lesson learned. And guys, if you every wonder what kind of foods to get your gal: skip the mango. Instead, surprise her with chocolate strawberries. They rock.

So I’ve been looking into non-stick appliances these days. Wow, they are very difficult to find. Stainless steel rice cookers are quite expensive, and some users complain that the rice sticks to the bottom. Well, yeah, lol. I can see the usefulness of non-stick coating, but I’m very concerned about the toxicity of it. There’s a growing movement to get away from all these chemicals and get back to nature. I am 100% in favor of getting back to nature, but there’s no way I’m going to cook my rice on a bamboo pot over a tepee of matchsticks. You betcha I’m a nature-lovin’ gal, and I’m happy to post political lawn signs and all…. but I still think we can make technology work for us. I mean, we can send a robot to MARS but we can’t make a pot that doesn’t make our rice still and give us cancer? Come on!

I have the same problem with my frying pans. Oooo I detest the non-stick coating on those! It peels off after a few weeks. I have looked into the “nano ceramic” stuff, but these get terrible reviews, saying the ceramic coating is so thin that it evaporates off!

Since I have a glass top stove, I cannot use glass pans. And cast iron, as much as I love it, will scratch the glass. So I’m stuck.

Do any of you have any ideas?? Have you heard of any new non-non-stick technology that works?! I have to get a new rice cooker and frying pan and I’m clueless right now…

I digress.

This is a food blog. *ahem*

While you dine (lol), do you listen to music? Watch television? Do you even dine with the family, all together?

Dinner is a difficult meal in our modern age. I think so, anyway. It comes at the end of a long day. I’ve been working and running around, and the LAST thing I want to do is stand for hours in a hot kitchen, serving food. And then cleaning up afterwards. Ugh. But in our culture, dinner is the main meal. I think the other countries have it correct– their main meal is breakfast or lunch, and then they all rest for a while after. As I get older, I am finding t increasingly difficult to cook and clean at the end of a long day. No wonder all those fancy British folks had servants. Wow.

When we eat together, we sometimes watch a DVD. Most of the time, they are educational. I love Drive Thru History, which is both fun, educational, and perfect for short attention spans. We have been currently watching war documentaries, though. The guys like them. I must say, my meal loses its flavor somewhat when you’re watching World War I footage. … I don’t need to elaborate.

Dear Dave Stotts: Please make some more Drive Thur History DVDs, and FAST!!!

We don’t often listen to music, though. I’ve heard that classical music while dining aids the digestive process. But then again, I’ve heard that ANYTHING related to classical music makes things better: babies smarter, childbirth easier, commuting more relaxing, etc etc. Who needs vitamins and supplements when you’ve got classical music???

Well, I’m not a BIG fan of classical music. I don’t listen to it for classical music’s sake. I love Bach and I will tolerate Mozart, but the others are merely “OK.” I wouldn’t mind listening to an indie group chug out some tunes with a Fernandes Bass and all… but I don’t know what that would do to our digestion…

So how do you eat dinner? Do you have any traditions or regular routine?

I searched the web for a while, looking for recipes. Even though everyone had to have their own “secret ingredient,” they all looked the same to me: tons of rice, chopped onion, some ground beef, spices.

ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I decided to do it MY way. These days, MY ways are usually looking Italian. I figure you can never go wrong if you default to tomato, basil, and mozzarella cheese, right?!

Now, mind you, I didn’t measure ingredients at all. I’m kinda notorious for that. I drive myself nutty because I don’t do it– I can never make the same thing twice! But measuring is so…. blase. Anyway, I’ve tried my best to approximate my measurements.

Stuffed Red Peppers
Makes a big 6-person dinner

6 red peppers
2 pounds very lean ground beef
1 pound medium-spicy ground Italian sausage
1 minced onion (optional)
2 cups cooked Jasmine rice
1/2 to 1 cup spaghetti sauce
Minced garlic or garlic powder
3 tablespoons dried basil (I like basil, ok?)
Half a bag of Baby spinach leaves
1 tablespoon dried parsley
Mozzarella cheese

Cut out the stems and seeds of each pepper. Lob off the top so it’s open. I saved the extra pepper pieces for salad, later. Smart, huh?

Place the peppers in a big glass dish. Already, everything is looking pretty.

Cook the ground beef and sausage. If you are using the onion, throw it in and cook it, too. I didn’t need to drain my beef because it was so lean.

Add the garlic and the rice and the spaghetti sauce. Add the basil. Cook until warm.

Stuff the peppers fully. I had extra meat, so I mixed in the baby spinach leaves and created a “bed” in the casserole dish. The peppers were nestled in the bed. Cook for 30 minutes in a 350-degree oven, or until the peppers are wimpy and so that a fork can poke through easily.

Sprinkle a generous amount of mozz cheese over the peppers and broil for 3 or 4 minutes until the cheese is melted.

Sprinkle parsley flakes over the cheese.

Does that look good or what?

Serve with a fruit salad. GOOD STUFF.

Well, I still have a bit of a problem with green peppers. I’ll eat them in smaller portions, but I don’t think I could ever hack into a whole one and chow it down. I do kinda like red peppers, so for the first time in my life, I made stuffed peppers.

I did a little searching online to see what recipes others have. I mean, I had NO IDEA how to make these suckers. Where do you begin? My mom used to stuff them with a ton of rice and a little hamburger (*shudder*). I don’t know how I got through childhood, I just don’t know how…

Well, most people were saying the same thing, except now they were suggesting the fashionable brown rice. Well, rice is rice. The only rice that is set apart from the others is Jasmine rice– everything else tastes rather bland and pasty (I was SUCH a fussy eater as a kid!).

It so happened that I had some leftover Jasmine rice!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! And I dug out some hamburger, too. But I couldn’t BEAR to make the recipe this simple. I just HAVE to add other things to it!

Well, stay tuned and I’ll tell you all about my recipe! LOL… I don’t have time to jot it down now and this post is already huge. I’ll have the recipe and fixings coming up!

P.S. It tasted GOOD.