We are dogsitting in Boulder City for a few days, and I miss our kitchen and having my days revolve around cooking and eating. I’m a bit hung over from staying up far too late last night watching Planet Earth and drinking wine with Carlo, so looking at these pictures of the Smoked Salmon and Leek Scramble with Meyer Lemon Sour Cream that I made last week are just killing me. I wish I could eat some of this right now rather than the cheese on stale toast that I had for breakfast. This recipe feeds 6 people at $1.23 per serving.

I love egg recipes because most of them are so simple and quick to make. This recipe is no exception. The “hardest” part of the recipe is to zest a lemon and mix it with the sour cream. We used one of the Meyer lemons that my brother-in-law had given us, but I think the sour cream would taste just as delightful with regular lemons. I ended up squeezing some lemon juice into the mix for an extra bit of tang.

Whisk the eggs and heavy whipping cream together. I made this recipe twice, once using 2% milk and the next time using cream. Both tasted good, but Carlo commented that the one made with cream was really good–even though he had no idea that I had used some leftover cream. As with pretty much any recipe, cream makes everything taste better.

Slice the leeks and saute them covered over low heat. Don’t rush this step because leeks taste a lot better when they have been delicately cooked rather than when they have been cooked at too high of a temperature and get crispy.

Increase the heat to medium-high and stir in the eggs. I was hesitant to cook the eggs at this high a temperature, but it made them fluffier. You just need to make sure that you stir like crazy and don’t let the egg mixture get stuck on the bottom of the pan.

Plate up the eggs and serve with a side of smoked salmon. Top everything off with a large dollop of Meyer lemon sour cream. Another way to serve this dish is to cut up the smoked salmon and throw it in the pan at the last minute and stir it into the eggs. Whatever way will taste great, it just depends on what tickles your fancy that morning.

We picked up some pork loin on sale a little while ago, and tossed it in the freezer. We had a hankering for some green chile stew, so Alex found a good recipe from Emeril Lagasse online. As an added bonus, it had no references to BAM! or Essence, which was great. It feeds 4 people at $3.48 per serving.

Start off by roasting your chiles. You can do this over the gas flame of your stove, but since it calls for 2 pounds of peppers, I think it’s a lot easier to do on the grill. Once they’ve blackened, put them in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, or put them in a bowl with a lid, and let them sit for 15-20 minutes to loosen the skins. Then take them out, scrape off the blackened skin, and remove the stems and seeds.

Then you toss the chopped chiles into a pot with a mess of other ingredients, and stew them to make your chile verde. This sauce could be used for lots of things — I’m tempted to use it on the avocado enchiladas some time.

Meanwhile, get your pork ready. The recipe says to simmer it in water with some spices and onions, then shred it. This is fine, but I think you could cook the pork pretty much however you wanted to, then get it into small pieces and cook it in the sauce, and things would be fine.

After the chile verde and the pork are done, mix them together and heat through for a bit.

Then serve with some chopped cilantro, diced tomatoes, sour cream, and if you want, some cheese. Enjoy!

I like eggplant, but I do get pretty bored with it sometimes. Grilled eggplant, ratatouille and my few other ideas for preparing it get worn out pretty quickly. And forget anything that asks for it to be sauteed or cooked in oil, since I can never manage to prevent the eggplant from soaking up the oil like a sponge. So when I saw a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s site for steamed eggplant, I thought I’d give it a whirl, and it turned out pretty well. The recipe feeds four people at 97 cents per serving.

Start with some small eggplant, or if you can only find large ones, quarter the eggplants instead of only cutting them in half. Also, the recipe specifies cooking them in your steamer cut side up, but we tried it both ways, and it didn’t seem to make any difference at all. Just toss ‘em in and get them cooking.

Next, make your dressing. It’s straightforward: cut and mix. I think you could mess around with this a little bit, too. The recipe is a good starting point, but I think you could, for instance, leave out the celery leaves and chili sauce, or use some different herbs. For me, the key ingredients are the soy sauce and the heat, for the saltiness/umami and, well, the heat. The basil is always a good choice for eggplant, too. Like I said, this recipe is great, and a good start, but I think you can adapt the method of the steamed eggplant, then dressing it while it’s hot so they soak up flavors, to all sorts of dressings.

You’ve also got lots of choices on how you serve this. It works well warm as a side dish, it could be a good cold salad, and I think it would be a great tapa or appetizer on top of some toasted crusty bread (reminding me of escalivada).

Last week when Carlo and I met his family in Carlsbad, his brother gave us some more Meyer Lemons from his garden in Tucson. Last time he gave us some, I made the delicious Lemon Curdy Pudding. However this time I wanted to make something savory with the lemons, so I made Moroccan Chicken with Green Olives and Lemon. This recipe feeds four people at $1.89 per serving.

The recipe says that you can use either Meyer lemons or regular lemons. The Meyer lemon is a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange, so it is sweeter and more fragrant than a regular lemon, plus it has much thinner skinner too. If you don’t have a Meyer lemon hook up like we do or a tree growing in your yard, you can use regular lemons but I would suggest cutting them up into thinner slices than the recipe calls for so they can caramelize a bit easier while cooking. The recipe reviews also suggest different ways to make the dish with regular lemons too.

Once again we used Mary’s Free Range leg quarters from Whole Foods to make the dish, and they tasted great. They hold up really well while braising or grilling because they are air chilled and aren’t injected with lots of water that makes them shrink when they cook. I highly recommend checking out the Whole Foods meat department and picking up a few packages, even though when we went to Whole Foods over the weekend, they were out.

The Moroccan Chicken with Green Olives and Lemon turned out great and was really easy to make. All of the sweet spices in the sauce paired nicely with the tartness of the lemon and the briny olives. The Meyer lemons totally cooked down and you could eat them whole with pieces of chicken. We just ate the dish on its own with a green salad, but next time, I will cook up some couscous to soak up that good sauce.

I love summer because it brings sweet and juicy tomatoes, and tons of basil. Both seasonal ingredients are a perfect match for each other and often end up together in a Caprese Salad. Here is an updated version of this classic Tomato and Mozzarella Salad, but instead of whole basil leaves and a simple dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, I made a wonderful Basil Vinaigrette that melded the flavours of the fresh tomatoes and the silky mozzarella. This salad is going to be a staple in our house this summer, especially when our tomatoes in the garden ripen and my awesome mozzarella cheese making kit arrives next week!

This Tomato and Mozzarella Salad with Basil Vinaigrette made enough for 4 lunch servings at $1.74 per serving.

The most important component of this recipe is great tomatoes. I don’t think it matters what kind of tomatoes you buy, as long as they are freshest and most ripe tomatoes that you can buy. I bought a great mix of different kinds of cherry tomatoes from the Farmers’ Market and they were incredible. Cut up the tomatoes and mix them with some chopped fresh mozzarella.

The Basil Vinaigrette was really easy to make and would make a nice addition to any other kind of salad you are making this summer. Buy, or in my case pick, one cup of packed sweet basil leaves and whiz them in the food processor with a clove of garlic. I always like to add a ton of extra garlic to every recipe I make, but be sure to only use 1 clove so you don’t overwhelm the taste of fresh basil. After the basil and garlic are finely chopped, add 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil, 1 1/2 tablespoons of Champagne or white wine vinegar, and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Whiz again until the vinaigrette is smooth and then season with salt and pepper.

Put the Tomato and Mozzarella Salad on a platter and then drizzle with the Basil Vinaigrette. If your basil plants are flowering, cut off the edible flowers and place them on the salad for a pretty finishing touch. This salad can only be made better by adding a glass of cold white wine.

It’s summer, at least in Vegas, so it’s time to fire up the grill and get out of the heat of the kitchen (and into the heat outside!). The latest issue of Food & Wine magazine has lots of great grilling recipes, including these two. The Chicken Legs with Roasted Garlic-Ancho Sauce feeds four people at $1.22 per serving. The Creamy Feta Vinaigrette makes around 3/4 of a cup and can be used to top whatever vegetables you grill for around 25 cents per serving plus the cost of the veggies.

For the chicken, we used some leg quarters we found at Whole Foods the other day that were a steal. Check out your local WF’s meat department, and see if you can find the packaged Mary’s Free Range leg quarters. It’s really good chicken, and at $1.69 per pound, it’s also an awesome deal. You can get two leg quarters for about $2. I’m not sure if this was a sale, but I’ll definitely go back and see if they have some more, since this cut of chicken is great for the grill as it’s got a nice bit of fat to keep the meat moist and add flavor. When we lived in Austin, I used to buy the Buddy’s All-Natural chicken leg quarters, and they were cheap, too. Perhaps the people who generally go for the high-end chicken don’t like leg quarters? I dunno, but I digress…

This recipe’s pretty straightforward, you just make the sauce then grill your chicken. One shortcut: it says to cook your garlic in the oven for an hour and 20 minutes, but since you’re using the grill, just do it there and save yourself an hour or so. Do it the same way by putting the garlic in foil and drizzling in some olive oil, then toss it on the grill. Give it a squeeze after about 20 minutes and see where things stand. If it’s firm, leave it on a bit longer; if it’s squishy, you’re good to go. Then dump it into the blender with the other ingredients, whizz it up, and slowly add the oil. You want the sauce to emulsify, but I think maybe I got mine over-emulsified and a bit thick.

Then put your chicken on to grill. The recipe says to rub some oil on the chicken, then sprinkle with salt and pepper. I like the salt and pepper, but I’m not so sure about the oil. I tend to think that with leg quarters, there’s enough fat, and using the oil just makes it more likely you’re going to get flame-ups and burn the skin. Anyway, get your vegetables ready, and once the chicken’s a bit cooked, throw them on. We used whatever was in the fridge — we had broccoli, red peppers, some onion, tomatoes and even some chard.

When the chicken was nearly done, I brushed some sauce on it to glaze. Don’t do this too early, or it will burn.

While everything’s cooking, make your Feta Vinaigrette. Again, it’s easy: everything in the food processor and whizz. My only change to the recipe is, as usual, keep an eye on the amount of oil, I think you can use less than the recipe calls for, but do whatever tastes best for you. Once everything’s done, put some over the vegetables and enjoy!

Ever since we watched the inspiring documentary Spirit of the Marathon last year, in which the awesome runner Deena Kastor makes her favourite training meal, I’ve wanted to make her Avocado Enchiladas. I’m a Deena Kastor fan, not only because she is an incredible athlete, but because she sounds like a big foodie. She totally won me over when in a Runner’s World interview, she said she liked to celebrate a big race by drinking a bottle or two of great red wine–now that is a runner to which I can relate!

Carlo had bought a bag of 8 avocados last week when they were on sale at Fresh & Easy for $3.48, but we went to meet his family in Carlsbad, California over the weekend and needed to use them up before they became too soft upon our return home. So it was the perfect time to test out Deena’s Avocado Enchiladas.

Deena Kastor’s Avocado Enchiladas easily feed 8 very hungry people at $1.36 per serving.

Deena’s recipe calls for frying the corn tortillas in a bunch of oil. Instead, I coated the frying pan with a light spray of olive oil in between “frying” each tortilla and that worked really well. You might have to cook it a little bit longer, but the tortillas will still get soft and be able to be rolled, but just with a bit less oil.

Since I love spicy food, I threw in a bunch a chipotle flakes to increase the heat of the enchilada sauce. The secret ingredient that Deena Kastor refers to in her recipe is balsamic vinegar, but I totally forgot what it was until I just googled it, so I didn’t add any. Regardless, the sauce still tasted great even though I was a quite dubious at first about the huge amount of cumin that the recipe required.

We had some chicken legs in the fridge that needed to be used before we went out of town too, so Carlo put some chipotle rub on them and grilled them on the bbq. He then shredded the chicken and put the meat in the avocado filling. When we were eating the enchiladas, we both agreed that some rinsed black beans would taste incredible in the enchilada filling to provide a nice contrast to the texture of the avocados.

I ended up using less than the 20 corn tortillas that the recipe suggests, but that may be because I stuffed my tortillas too full so I ran out of room in my baking dish. The frying and the stuffing of the tortillas was a tad time intensive, but the results were worth the effort and the recipe made so much food that you will definitely have some leftovers!

Bake and enjoy.

In addition to being an awesome runner, Deena Kastor has got a great palate–these enchiladas were really tasty, even though people who don’t regularly run 140+ miles a week might not want to indulge in them as frequently as she does. Now, I’m only hoping that her enchiladas will somehow make me run as fast as her since Carlo and I are resuming our running this week after a too long hiatus.