Holt Cuisine

I’m scheduled to leave in two days to be there for the birth of my 4th grandchild. I will probably be gone a month.  I looked around the kitchen, thinking about the things there and which ones would likely be sitting right there when I got back. So, I checked some dates and decided that I needed to prepare a meal using a couple of things.  A canned Pillsbury crescent sheet, some smoked salmon, some avocados, and a plantain. It was a puzzler for sure.  For the plantain, I ended up just cooking it and serving it as a side dish. I peeled it, sliced it and sauteed it in butter, over medium heat. This browned the outsides and cooked the middle to a lovely tart sweetness.  The Crescent sheet I cut into 6 squares, put on a baking sheet and baked according to the package instructions.  When they were done I spread them with cream cheese, sprinkled some minced onion on top, added a sprinkle of capers and then topped all of that with the smoked salmon. To top off the salm...

In my opinion, cake mixes are one of the greatest advances in food sciences in the last century. I have heard people talk about “nasty cake mixes” and I know they haven’t made a cake from a mix in years.  I think cakes are better from mixes. I said what I said.  Some of that has to do with the reliability of cake mixes. You get a consistently good outcome and this isn’t always the way when cooking from scratch. Also, this doesn’t hold true for store bought icings. They still taste a little like sweetened shortening. (especially when Chocolate Ganache is so simple to make and tastes amazing‼) The other things that are processed magic are Velveeta and Instant Pudding.  Recently I found Velveeta in a usual type box, but instead of one big loaf of Velveeta It was 5 individually packaged portions inside the box. Brilliant‼ Velveeta is creamy magic for savory cheese based sauces. Just a little bit added to other stronger cheeses and you can insure your sauce is uniformly ...

I saw a recipe on Facebook that was the world’s best meatloaf. The story said it was her Mother-in-law’s recipe and the best she’d ever had. Now I can’t find it so I made it up‼ Anyway, being a pescetarian, meatloaf isn’t usually in my diet, but this time I started with a pound of Beyond Meat Ground “meat”. I’m not always a fan of the processed things that are designed to look and taste like meat. If I wanted something that tastes like meat I’d eat meat. But sometimes there are just recipes that call for something that approximates meat. Meatloaf is one of those. There are lots of "ground beef" options on the market now. Here is one that isn't Beyond Meat. I haven't tried it yet, so no promises.  I also had a box of ritz-like crackers that I’d bought for some unknown reason. I decided that this meatloaf would be a good way to use some of them.  Sometimes cooking inspiration is just looking around the kitchen or pantry and saying, I’m just tired of looking at that box ...

Today I’m making a big pot of vegetable soup for a meal at church to celebrate Ash Wednesday. I’m doing it on the stove top, but I have Instant Pot instructions on my website. The recipe also includes instructions on making frozen soup mixes (so you only have the veggies you like). You can check it out here .   Today's plan, though is to make “clean out the freezer” vegetable soup. This means using the ends of bags of frozen vegetables that gather at the bottom of my freezer drawer! I also have two quart jars of vegetable soup I made and froze earlier in the year. These will be my starter.  But if you don’t have vegetable soup in your freezer, don’t worry. Everything else will make a great soup‼ In that case my starter would be broth, either homemade or store bought.  I like to add canned tomatoes to my soup. If you don’t like tomatoes in your soup, just leave this out. Other things you might add are frozen corn, frozen peas, frozen black-eyed-peas, other beans, carr...

Cooking has changed so much in the past 30 years. We wrote our first cookbook in 1993 and we still use many of those recipes today. Most of them have changed over the years, but some are almost the same.  Some changes have been about ingredients and making recipes healthier, but some have been about the tools we use now-days. I remember getting my first microwave oven. Mom gave it to me in the 70's. It had two round dials, one for time and one for power level.  About the time our second child was born our Microwave went out. Apparently you couldn’t clean the front with glass cleaner. We had the realization that we didn’t know how to have a baby without a microwave. So It didn’t take long to become completely dependent! The first time I saw a popcorn setting… a miracle‼ Mom gave us a food processor when she discovered that sometime in the early 80’s. It lived in my cabinet, unused, because I couldn’t imagine what to do with it!?! It didn’t take long to learn, though. Now I have...

Today I decided to make spaghetti sauce for the freezer. It’s not that my freezer needed spaghetti sauce, but because Doug bought some wine he didn’t like and I hate throwing away food that still has use. So…. Spaghetti sauce.  I wanted it to be dark and rich to go with the abundance of red wine. I also wanted to really get full flavor from the tomatoes. This meant I wanted to add Vodka. Vodka really pulls the flavor out of the tomato. Though I don’t always use it because I don’t usually have it, I decided to use it this time.  I started with some tomato sauce I made last summer when cherry tomatoes were coming in. It has been in my freezer and I haven’t used it. I had about a quart of it. If I hadn’t had it I would have doubled the number of roma tomatoes or added 2 boxes of your favorite cherry tomatoes.  Since I wanted dark flavors I roasted 3 onions, 1 cup garlic cloves, 8 fresh roma tomatoes and 2 poblano peppers. The garlic (whole) and onions (roughly diced) got tos...

Today we had leftovers for lunch, but I'm not sure anyone knew that's what it was. The frittata is my favorite stealth leftover dish!  We had leftovers from a couple of restaurant meals. It was veggies in garlic sauce (because I ate all the shrimp!) and some shrimp fajitas and Mexican rice.  Here's what I did: I pulled out all the veggies and only used about half the rice. I ended up using the Mexican rice because it held better and had better flavor.  I probably ended up with about 1 1/2 cups of rice and veggies when I finished getting that all together. All the veggies were nicely chopped so I didn't need to do anything there.  I chopped the shrimp from the fajitas and added them. I also had 5 fresh mushrooms that were really needing to be used so I chopped them and added them in.  Then I cracked 4 eggs in and added shredded or cubed cheese. Probably a good hand full of shredded cheddar and 1/3 cup of mozzarella cubes. After mixing well, I decided not to add a...