Today,  VM features recipe ideas for chronically underweight people. When other blogs zig, we zag – can’t help it. I call it the Arizona Diet.

 

BBQ Chicken, Chorizo and Queso Dip

Adding the BBQ chicken to the mix makes it the perfect diet snack. Delicious and nutritious.  Eat it right out of the pan, hot, while the cheese is gooey, scoop generously with corn chips, or add it to a warm flour tortilla.

The recipe: buy chorizo, cut open the sausage, and lay out the contents in a pan. Cook it until the grease begins to separate from the meat and then add queso (Mexican cheese). I can’t tell you how much. Just until it looks about right in. terms of ratio. You’re going to want a lot of cheese. Cut up 1/4 of a red bell pepper and add the cubed pepper, add green onions cut up very thin & parsley chopped finely. BBQ the chicken separately. Shred the chicken and add it.

Heat it up and mix it,  then let it simmer for a couple of minutes before eating it.  You can also serve it alongside guacamole if that’s your taste preference. It pairs with Negro Modello – which tastes good and is racially correct.

Could you be culturally appropriating? No, the Negro Modello makes everything ok. If you’re unsure, crack open a second one.

You should listen to music while you eat. Can you listen to Arizona Music? You have my permission. Don’t move to Arizona. Nothing personal, but we have enough people now that I live here.  Just listen to the music while eating your Arizona Diet food.

 

More about Food

Food labeling is confusing. But do not be deceived!

When orange juice says it’s non-GMO, recognize that all oranges are non-GMO. The only potential GMO products in the USA are papaya, corn, alfalfa, soybeans, cotton, potatoes, squash, canola, sugar beets, and apples.

When organic milk is labeled antibiotic-free, remember that all dairy products, including milk, are always antibiotic-free. The same applies to meat.

Those bananas advertised as cholesterol-free? That’s because all bananas are cholesterol-free.

When a jar of peanuts says it is made in a plant that processes peanuts just use your common sense (and roll your eyes).

When a bag of apples says it is gluten-free, remember that gluten comes from wheat.

When you see a Facebook post that talks about hormones in beef, please understand that an 8oz serving of beef has 2-3 nanograms of estrogen, an 8 oz serving of white bread has 136,080 nanograms of estrogen, and 8 ounces of soy flour has 342,468,000 nanograms of estrogen. All living things produce estrogen, it’s just science.

When that carton of eggs says that they came from vegetarian-fed chickens, don’t forget that chickens are naturally omnivores. Free-range chickens feast on insects and other scratch. It’s not natural that chickens are vegetarians.

 

No Country Music For Old Men – Bellamy Brothers

They told him to just fade away
His time had past and all his kind would die

But he remembers when Hank played the Opry high as a kite
While Patsy Cline was out walking after midnight
He saw the torch being passed from Lefty to Merle
Now there’s so-called successors
But it’s hard to find a hero in this world.

There ain’t no country music for old men
All of the good ones have died or just packed it in
Now there’s posers and losers and would-be outlaws
Who only know how to pretend
But there ain’t no country music for old men.

 

Back to Food

Is it acceptable to tuck your fried eggs and steak into a flour tortilla and eat it like a burrito?

I say that it is, but add some avocado slices and maybe a little grilled onion on top of the chimichurri. You may have a different opinion.

Would hot sauce be necessary? I think that’s optional.

 

Quesadilla

The common core ingredients are flour tortilla(s) and quality cheese. Beyond that, you can put anything between the tortillas. Green chilis, shredded beef, chicken, and pork are most common. Mexican food is like that – same stuff combined differently.

The key to a great quesadilla is to have sauces to put on it or dip it into. Pizza rules apply. You need to start at the point and eat backward toward the broad end of the slice. Any other eating style is … barbaric.

 

Lemon Chicken Piccata

I don’t eat it every week or anything even close,  but I do enjoy this as a main dish/protein. It’s simple. Chicken breasts, cut into smaller strips, fry them with the same dredge that you’d use for any fried chicken. Fry them in 1/2 butter,  1/2 olive oil. When they’re just about done, add some lemon juice (better if its reduced, but you don’t need to get that exotic), lemon slices, white wine, capers, and spices to taste.

Don’t go too heavy on the wine.  You can overwhelm the dish.

 

French Toast

That’s what we call it in Arizona. In France, it’s just “toast”, I guess. Frankly (yes, that’s a play on words), I’ve never seen French Toast with maple syrup drizzled over it in France. It’s. quite a disappointment.

 

I think that you’re ready for the weekend.

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67 COMMENTS

  1. Someone posted a picture they had taken at a grocery store – the bananas were labeled as gluten free. Rolls eyes….

  2. “There ain’t no country music for old men.”
    Truth there. I’ve always enjoyed the older stuff, the new leaves me cold. I know a DJ who’s also a musician who used to play with Johnny Western, the guy who sang and wrote The Ballad of Paladin. He’s still at the station he’s been for years, though he’s down to a single show where he features bluegrass. He’s rather disappointed in the rest of the fare that’s played there.

  4. Good stuff…all the makings of an epic meal.

    Certified Angus Beef (CIB)- totally a sales and marketing ploy…most cattle are the same on the inside regardless what color they are on the outside. Beef is beef…but people mindlessly pay more for some label…unless you are AOC who might believe brown cows produce chocolate milk.

    “Common Core” ingredient Quesadilla – The new public education math: “Would you like your quesadilla cut in 8 slices or 16?” “Oh, only 8, I can’t eat 16.”

  5. It is perfectly acceptable to wrap steak and eggs in a tortilla. No avocado required by me, as I cannot advice thr taste or flavor, but I won’t criticize anyone else who adds some. Salsa is also acceptable, but totally unnecessary unless the beef has been overcooked.

  6. I have a good friend who I served with while in Germany.
    He now lives in Arizona and has posted some pictures of the food,
    I have to say some very tasty looking dishes that he posted as well as yours.
    I also have to agree about the idea:
    “Don’t move to Arizona. Nothing personal, but we have enough people now that I live here.”
    Because I live in Texas, and it seems that the granola from California are fleeing the ship they at an alarmingly high rate…
    My admonition to them would be much the same as yours with one snide comment added:
    “Don’t move to Texas. Nothing personal, but we have enough people now that I live here.
    If you MUST leave the shithole you created, feel free to stop BEFORE you get to Texas”

    Sorry, aboot tossing any and all states closer to the sewer under the bus…

    MSG Grumpy

  7. I thought it was “no added” hormones to the meat…

    FWIW chickens will eat anything, even each other. If you have some chickens keep the chicken house roof high enough that you won’t smack your head when you go inside, that would be a poor place to knock yourself out. Chickens will eat anything….

      • Anyone who’s kept chickens realizes early on that they really are just dinosaurs with feathers. They really will eat anything. Being way back in the woods ours love to hunt for the tree frogs in the leaf litter and scream with delight as they fight over body parts.

        • Did the T-Rex taste like chicken?

          We may never know, but we can guess that T-Rex Piccada might have been very tasty.

  8. When organic milk is labeled antibiotic-free, remember that all dairy products, including milk, are always antibiotic-free. The same applies to meat.

    Antibiotics are given to beef cattle full-time, without them having an infection, because it makes them gain weight faster.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Growth_stimulation

    It was discovered in the 1940s that feeding subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics improved feed efficiency and accelerated animal growth.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/04/02/707406946/some-in-the-beef-industry-are-bucking-the-widespread-use-of-antibiotics-heres-ho

    One of these micro-ingredients is an antibiotic called tylosin. It’s in there because when cattle eat a high-calorie diet, with lots of grain – which they do in feedlots, to fatten them up quickly during the last four to six months of their life – many will develop abscesses on the liver.

    T. G. Nagaraja, at Kansas State University, has spent most of his life studying this process. Fermenting grain produces acid in the bovine stomach that’s called the rumen, Nagaraja explains. When there’s lots of it, the acids can damage the rumen wall. This lets bacteria escape into the bloodstream and travel to the liver, where they get trapped, multiply, and cause abscesses.

    Liver abscesses don’t usually kill cattle, but they slow the animals’ growth and can make slaughtering operations more complicated.

  9. Who knew? I can actually watch the scale needle move as I look at those pictures.

    If I get some uninvited health advice while enjoying such fare, my standard response is “Yeah, but I’ll be smilin’ when I hit the floor”. Yes, I do moderate. Our first grandchild has arrived, and I’d like to stick around for awhile longer.

  10. I’ve been laughing at the idiocy on food labels for 30 or 40 years. Beer with fiber added. Cholesterol-free bananas. Gluten free fruit that never had gluten to start with.

    Dear Daughter in Law is a chemist who went to work at one of the “Big Pharma” companies in the veterinary biz. She explained to me how they test and verify that if they give an antibiotic or something to an animal that whatever it was clears out of their system, and they always tell the times to allow before slaughter and processing. Nothing on the market in the US has pharmaceuticals in it.

  11. What delicious food! I’ll have to try some that, maybe starting with lemon chicken. And I see a series, “Cooking With LL.” Nice.

    • I don’t have a blue dog waiting to clean up. Thus it’ll never be as good as cooking with LSP.

        • He’s an assertive dog. I’ve seen things in action, remember. I’ve also seen him take what is due him (the Lord helps those who help themselves) particularly when it comes to steak and fried cherry pies.

  12. And… Organic Food. Mother F’ing DUH! All food is organic. So are a lot of toxins, poisons and such. VIRUSES ARE ORGANIC. Bacteria is organic. Gasoline is organic.

    If it contains Carbon, Nitrogen, Hydrogen and Oxygen, it’s organic. BENZENE is technically organic depending on what’s attached to it.

    And, really, ‘Organic Food’ means it’s fertilized by SHIT. Hopefully cooked shit, so all the parasites are killed, but… Of all the food recalls for parasites and contaminates in the last 20 years, most of them are from ‘organic’ farms because they didn’t cook their shit enough, or even enough.

    Stupid dumb-arsed idiots.

    But…

    Using a tortilla, flour or corn, is a handy way to make a Mexican sammich. Wooo… Something wrapped in a bread mixture. Pert near every culture has a version of it. Why? Because it WORKS!!!

    And quesadillas? Great breakfast food. Tortillas, cheese slices, something else if necessary, a little red sauce for flavor, and ya got breakfast. Or, well, go Euro and melt cheese on toast. So damned simple, so damned tasty. Beans has one or the other for breakfast pert near every day. Because easy to fix and tasty and filling and nutritious. Mmmmm.

    Other good breakfast food is… egg salad. Made with freshly boiled eggs, so the mixture is still warm. Yummy.

    • It’s been a while since I had an egg salad sandwich, but I add HB eggs to tuna and crumble them on salad.

  13. re — tortillas
    I get lung/sinus congestion with wheat, so I look for alternatives for wraps.
    (A ‘wrap’ is similar to a sandwich, but roundish and long instead of square.)
    Sometimes I wrap with romaine, sometimes with these:
    * Sana Organic Coconut Flour Tortillas
    The very simple ingredients include cassava, a well-regarded prebiotic.
    (A prebiotic feeds our healthy gut.)
    My favorite wrap ingredients include a tangy chile verde with:
    * So Delicious Cheddar Style Shreds
    …made from coconut.
    In fact, this is today’s breakfast.
    Messy, so the supervision of three RedHeelers is mandatory.

  14. I learned recently, as a result of taking some binge watching advice here, that French Toast should be laid in a plate of syrup instead of drizzling it over.

  15. It’s amazing how many comments you get with a food post. SLW and I are going to try Young’s Vietnamese Saturday night, and then settle down to a movie, as yet TBD. The “Arizona Diet” looks pretty tasty, but would plug my aerteries and put weight on me, something I have to be careful about. And I love good chorizo as much as I love good old “American” pork breakfast sausage.

    I read the food labels and and laugh. We had something from the store proudly proclaiming it’s freeness from the evil DR. Gluten, and it was one of those things that never had any gluten to begin with. Hmmm…no wonder TPTB are pushing for young men to kick the meat habit. That much estrogen, and most youn “men” would be looking at Playtex catalogs, and NOT to get their jollies like in Dayse of Olde…..

    Know any good recipes for Chicken Mole? Out of the three places here we’ve tried, only one was passable. They just don’t get the balance of spices like Abuela did back in SoCal.

    • MRSLL makes a good chicken mole, and one of the keys is to use bitter Mexican chocolate in the sauce and to grate your cinnamon fresh (tree bark). I realize that may sound strange but the secret to authenticity is often in those ingredients. You can come close without doing it all the way, but you can’t nail the recipe. People like you and I who have tasted the real thing have a difficult time accepting second best as “good enough”.

      It’s the same with the sauce for Chile Relleno. It’s like an 8 step process to get it right. MRSLL makes them for me, and my daughter, Heather, wanted to learn how about two weeks ago when I was in SoCal. After watching, she said, “That’s a lot of work, I don’t think that I’ll ever make them.”

      • Yes, it’s not only the balance between the ingredients, but the actual ingredients. Most of the moles I’ve had here almost had a “burnt” taste to them, and I prefer it a bit sweeter.

        • “Mole” just means sauce (evolved from when the French ruled Mexico), and most chicken (or baby t-rex) mole does have a slightly burnt taste.

          • Hmmmm…then maybe the stuff from our favorite little Mexican restaurant in Long Beach wasn’t “real” mole, then…..

    • Thanks for the backchannel advice, WSF. Always appreciated.

      It’s difficult to enjoy food on your own.

  17. Saw a meme showing a gal holding up some salad dish and saying “This tastes like I’d rather be fat”.

  18. As to “French Toast,” with my Cajun dad it was “Lost Bread,” and you mixed a sprinkle of cinnamon and nutmeg into the egg and milk mixture. Best with stale French bread. Sprinkle powdered sugar on top.

    Can’t stand what most people call French Toast. It’s a bland half-cousin to Lost Bread.

    Dammit. Now I want some. You, LL, are a bad influence.

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