Chilaquiles

Chilaquiles are so good. It's like Mexican Lasagna in a way. You just layer sauce of your choice, tortillas, and really anything else you can think of. Its common to have them for breakfast and add eggs to them. We eat them for dinner. I can make them ahead of time and put them in the fridge and then put them in the oven and set the timer to have them done when I get home.

I use a basic red sauce. I buy the sauce from the store and then add to it. I start with Mexican Chocolate. It's delicious. It's like half semi-sweet, half unsweetened chocolate but with other "stuff" added. I don't know exactly what's in there but I know there are some cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. You should buy it and save it. Use it for hot chocolate. It's so good. I melt the chocolate in the bottom of a heavy pan (I use my Le Creuset pot) with a little butter.

Then I add in the Las Palmas Mild or Medium Enchilada sauce and bring it to a simmer for however long it takes me to crisp the tortillas.Crisping the tortillas is where the controversy starts. Some people use tortilla chips. My husband doesn't like that. He says it makes the chips just soggy. K. Some people just cut up strips of tortillas, which is fine if I'm in a hurry. I try to crisp the corn tortillas in a hot pan before layering them in the dish. I start off with a layer of sauce in the bottom of the caserole dish, then I just toss in the tortillas. I don't cut them into strips. I then add another layer of sauce, a layer of cheese and repeat until I'm out of cheese :) Sometimes I add in some green onions and chopped black olives. It just depends what I have on hand.

We top it with sour creme and if my husband had his way I'd make rice with it but I'm going through one of my rice oversions again (sorry dude).

Ok, so it's not a "pretty meal" and no, these aren't the plates I use. This is my daughters plate but the beans looked less offensive on this, than on my white plate :)

Cost Breakdown:
Red Sauce: $2.49 (19 ounce can)
Chocolate: $1.00 (a box is about $5 and there are 6 chocolate rounds in a box)
Tortillas: $1.00 (I buy a bag of 30 and use half a bag)
Cheese: $2.99 (Ralphs usually has a special for $2.99/half pound you just sometimes have to walk all over the store between the deli and the dairy dept.)
Beans: $1.00 (I use Rosarita non-fat green chili and lime)
T0tal: $7.48 for 6 servings


Nutrition breakdown:
Fat: 21g (I have to estimate that there are 2 (1oz) servings of cheese so 18 of the fat grams are from cheese)
Calories: 445 (220 in the cheese, 110 in the tortillas, 100 in the beans, 15 in the sauce)
Fiber: 11g (7 in beans, 3 in tortillas, 1 in the sauce)

It's been a while

I've had so much junk going on this summer!!! I'm glad my daughter started school again today and I can get back to a routine, including blogging!

Part of the junk going on is that I'm poorer than ever, but being a foodie, I can't give up good food and cooking. But, I can do it on a budget. So, tonight I made a pork brisket grillers. I saw them at costco. I've never had them but I thought I'd give it a try.

They come in a four pack that looks like this. My four pack was $13.45 (3.36/package) Although, since I had never had them before I had no idea what was going to be inside. I opened it, put on a little bit of rub. I make my own rub, but grillmates is fine. I cooked it up on the grill and this is what it looked like. I was shocked how much food was in there!!!


Each of these is about 6-7 inches at it's largest point. It's similar or a little bigger than a decent size boneless skinless chicken breast. It is plenty for my family (2 adults and a 4 year old) with left overs for 2 servings (so enough for 3-4 adults or 1 teenager).


I made it with rice-a-roni which is 4 for $5 at my grocery store so $1.25/box. I did use 2 boxes. My husband LOVES rice.

Cost breakdown:
Pork: $3.36
Rice: $1.25
Total: $4.61

So even if there are only 3 servings in a package that is $1.54 serving!!!

Even better the nutritional value/serving (per the packages):
3.5 grams of fat (2 in the pork and 1.5 in the rice)
420 calories (110 in the pork and 310 in the rice)
There is a lot of sodium in the rice, but other than that, it's all pretty good! Now if I could only get the husband to eat veggies!

Ice Cream

I love ice cream but, not as much as my mom. My mom LOVES ice cream, so since I'm poor, I decided I'd make her ice cream for Mother's Day. I used an Alton Brown Recipe. I'm not gonna lie, I don't know what the heck Vanilla Sugar is, and I'm sure I could google it, but whatever. I used regular sugar and I love vanilla so I probably added about another tablespoon of Mexican vanilla. I swear that I think the secret to vanilla is Mexican vanilla. I don't know why it's better. I don't think its processed or artificial. So next time you go to Mexico, do yourself a favor and stock up on vanilla. I let the liquid ice cream mixture chill in the fridge overnight and then I put it in the freezer the next morning for about 30 minutes. Only then did I put it in the Ice Cream attachment to my mixer. It turned out great.

I also had gone strawberry picking with Stella 2 days before this so I folded in some fresh strawberry puree. Sooooo, good. My mom liked it too. Next time I need more strawberrys. The ice cream itself was delicious! My favorite thing in my kitchen is my lime green Kitchen Aid mixer!

Quiche X 2

I've never made quiche so when my mom asked me to make some for Mother's Day, I said sure. You can't turn down your mom on Mother's Day, right? My husband however HATES quiche. Ok, so how am I going to make both mom and hubby happy?

So after searching the internet and foodnetwork.com I found a recipe to make hubby happy from Paula Dean (aka, everything is made with straight butter and heavy cream). Low and behold, girlfriend didn't disappoint. She had a hash brown crust quiche instead of a traditional crust that got rave reviews. I substituted half and half for 2% milk. The cooking time on the hash browns was longer (I had to bake it for about 50 minutes instead of the 25 she said) but otherwise I followed the recipe. My suggestion is to do all the prep work the day before (grate cheese, cut onions, cut ham, bake hash browns) then assemble the morning of your brunch. The combining of ingredients is the easy part...it's all the prep that takes forever. I thought it was good, but my husband actually liked it! Yay.

I also wanted to do something with a traditional crust, but with less traditional breakfast ingredients. So I found this Emeril recipe. I don't trust the Emeril. I have made many recipes of his and I swear a cook time or an ingredient always seems to be missing. I bought pre-made Marie Calendar pie crust from the frozen foods isle. Again, prep work is everything. Caramelizing onions are like low riders, they need to cook low and slow. These onions are not even close to being done. It probably took about 30-40 minutes to do it right.


Next step is to sautee the mushrooms. You want to do this so that the mushrooms don't release all their juice inside the quiche. That would make the crust all mushy and disgusting.

I used the Gruyere cheese, it was soooooooooooo good. So savory. I will make this again!

The key to quiche is patience, and a little of this:

Taste of Ladera

So I work on Saturdays. It sucks! I've tried many times to hire, reschedule....everything to get Saturday's off. It just never works. I own my own business, I need to make it happen right? However, if I'm done by 1pm I try to do stuff with my family. Yesterday, I texted my husband and said "taste of ladera tomorrow?" he replied "sure". So today I got home at 1, got small child and the husband in the car and headed to Liberty Park in Ladera Ranch for good food and walking around. I actually had completely forgotten about Taste of Ladera until I got an email from workout lady at boogie box saying they were going to have a booth there (more on boogie box later).

I'm torn by Taste of Ladera. Keep in mind that I'm an expert on EVERYTHING! They had food vendors, some random vendors and some kiddie stuff to do but it was just horribly organized. Liberty park is HUGE! The food vendors and the regular vendors were mixed in with one another. So to decide what we wanted we had to walk around a ginormous park. I'm fat, lazy and hungry and they made me walk a lot. I finally decided on Beachfire which had the option for skirt steak or jerk chicken with rice and black beans. We walked around and let our daughter go on some bounce house thing. Walked around some more, and had a hot dog from Jerry's hot dogs on the way out. HOT DOGS ARE GOOOOOOOD there. I recommend everyone add celery salt to their dogs and check out Jerry's! The food was good, the organization was not.

Also, for those who put on A Taste of Ladera, I understand about your entrance fees. I understand about having to pay for food. I do, I completely get it. But A Taste is just that... a taste, not a whole meal. I think you should do tierd wrist bands and have an entrance fee plus 5 kids rides, plus 5 taste/drink tickets for $30, or entrance plus kids rides plus 10 tastes for $50, etc. The taste should be like a Costco sized taste, not a whole meal. I wanted to taste all of Ladera but my tummy can't hold a whole meal for all the restaurants represented (despite my size which I'm desperately trying to boogie box away)

Boogie box rocks! I try to work out twice a week. I really haven't changed how I eat (in fact it's probably gotten worse since First Class Pizza opened). I've lost 10 pounds and 4 inches in my bust, waist and hips in a month. So go boogie box people. It's fun and even uncoordinated people can do it! They have a free trial so go try before you committ!

Sun Dried Tomato

We went to Sun Dried Tomato's new location in San Clemente. We went on opening night, April 7th. We sat outside. It was cold but they had heaters out there. It was completely spur of the moment so I didn't take pictures. Sorry!

I had a cold and all I wanted was their super decadent Sun Dried Tomato soup. It didn't disappoint. It is so good. It is creamy and delicious! They serve all their meals with a bread bowl and a sun dried tomato butter.

My husband had a sirloin burger which is served with shoestring french fries. My husband likes to call them frittes so that it sounds fancy. He's funny! His burger was great and the fries are something special!

We took dessert home. It was cinnamon apple beignets which were ok. They were good, but I probably won't get them again. They are not at all like the Cafe du Monde beignets...they are more like doughnut holes. The flavor was fine, the texture was a little off, in my opinion.

I have since been back for a take out lunch. I got the 1/2 and 1/2 lunch with the apple salad and cream of jalapeno soup. I loved the flavor of the soup but I thought it needed to be thicker. The salad was delicious like always with the fantastic dijon viniagrette!

You need to go...NOW!

How many Stacey's does it take to screw in a light bulb?

This has nothing to do with food, just me being me. If you know me you'll say "ya, I can see how she did that". So we have this stairwell at our house that is sooooo tall. We have lived here 4.5 years and I've just been waiting for THE light bulb to go out. But I made a mental note that my dad has one of these light bulb extension thingies:

Awesome right!!! No, that little thing at the top screws on. It is not permanently attached to the handle. I don't know why. If I ever meet the inventor...we are going to have words because LOOK what happened!
FRICK! How am I going to get that down from 18 feet! Seriously.

Please ignore the bad photoshop. I just wanted you to see how big the stairwell is. Also, clearly the light is on so I fixed it. But I was freaking out. If that light which was hanging on by about 1/4 turn had fallen, little tiny shards of light bulb glass would have gone EVERYWHERE! The light bulb was wobbly so it was quite cumbersome to screw the pole in without unscrewing the light bulb. But alas, after about 20 minutes of messing around, I now know that it only takes 1 Stacey to screw in a light bulb!