26; May 18; wife, cat mom; foodie, designer, blogger, knitter, yarn junkie, Wordpress guru, geek extreme; Mac connoisseur and Instagram addict.


Learn More About Esther

Get those posts!

Enter your email to get the latest posts sent directly to your inbox!

Tag Archives: recipes

Recipe – Taco Roni

Posted on January 8, 2013 by phillynikongal • 2 Comments

So, I was standing in my kitchen the other night, staring at this pound of ground beef on the counter.

I have a love/hate relationship with ground beef. It’s like, there are so many things I can do with it, but when I have it in my freezer, I don’t always know what to do.

After contemplating it for a while, I embarked on a google search that led me to Pinterest. Either the things that were posted didn’t sound good to me, or I lacked some key ingredient that I couldn’t get away with substituting. In my searching, I came across a taco pasta bake, but the recipe just seemed like it needed something MORE. I went through my pantry to figure out what I could add to it without screwing it up, and I had success! It was definitely the fire roasted diced tomatoes that made the dish. Well, that and the taco flavor. Obviously.

This was actually so delicious that I made it twice in one week. That really NEVER happens in our house. I usually rotate recipes so that we don’t have the same thing all the time, but it was just so good, I couldn’t NOT make it twice within a few days. I will say this though, this dish is best prepared with a larger pasta like ziti or penne. The second time around, I used elbows, but it went too fast and I accidentally cooked the elbows longer than I should have. It was MUCH better the first time when I made it with the ziti.

You can use a packet of ready-made taco seasoning if you’d like, but I really suggest making your own seasoning, using my recipe here. Not only is it better for you because you know what you’re putting into it, but also because the smoked paprika gives it a delicious smoky flavor that you just can’t get with the store-bought taco seasoning. Take my word for it on this one, you’ll love it!

Print
Recipe – Taco Roni

Rating: 51

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 35 minutes

Yield: 4 to 6

Recipe – Taco Roni

This is a delicious spin on Taco Tuesday - a taco pasta bake! All the flavors you want, in a easy to gobble pasta form that even your picky kids (or spouse) will like!

Ingredients

  • 8oz ziti or similarly shaped pasta
  • 1lb ground beef
  • 14.5oz can of diced fire roasted tomatoes, undrained
  • 4oz cream cheese, cubed
  • 1 packet of taco seasoning (or one batch of Homemade Taco Seasoning)
  • 2 cups shredded white cheddar cheese, divided

Directions

  1. Cook pasta according to box directions, making sure it's al dente; preheat oven to 400º. Drain pasta and set aside.
  2. In a skillet, brown ground beef until cooked through. Add diced tomatoes, taco seasoning and cubes of cream cheese. Stir until the cream cheese is melted down and the taco seasoning is mixed throughout. Simmer covered for 10 minutes.
  3. Return cooked pasta to the pot you cooked it in, and add the prepared cheesy meat mixture, as well as a cup of the cheddar cheese. Stir to coat.
  4. Spray an 8x8 casserole dish with cooking spray, and pour in the pasta mixture. Top with remaining cheddar cheese and bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes, or until the cheese starts to brown.
  5. Let stand for 5 minutes before serving.

Notes

You can spruce this up, depending on what flavors you're looking for. Add some corn to get more veggies, jalapeños to get more spice, or maybe even some diced chiles for some added flavor!

http://www.estherfox.com/2013/01/recipe-taco-roni-pasta-ziti-smoky-paprika-bake/

recipe taco roni pasta ziti smoky paprika bake

Filed Under: Esther Eats, Main Dishes, Mexican, Pasta

Recipe – Sweet and Sour Chicken Stir Fry

Posted on August 1, 2012 by phillynikongal • 2 Comments

For those of you who didn’t already know, Mr. Fox and I have been trying out some various meal planning services, to aid us with our busy schedule. Previously, we were using The Fresh 20, which is actually a really great service. It focuses on 5 meals a week, using only 20 ingredients, hence the name. However, the problem with it was that I found myself spending so much time on prepping everything, that by the time it was all ready to go, I just didn’t feel like cooking it anymore. I guess you could say it was a novel concept, but one that I just wasn’t interested in anymore. My love of cooking has become somewhat of an afterthought since Mr. Fox is working a weird schedule, so lately I’ve been wanting simplicity in the kitchen.

That’s when I stumbled upon another meal planning service called The Six O’Clock Scramble. The thing I like about this is that it’s around the same price as The Fresh 20, and you can search the archives and change up your meal plans without paying for a higher subscription. And, the main plus is that a lot of the meals are low prep, or just easy all around. So I jumped at the deal that 100 Days of Real Food was doing and got a discounted subscription right before it ended. Aside from the fact that Mr. Fox and I came into some extra money and went out to eat for the majority of last week and the week before, I’ve been enjoying The Scramble so far! I like the fact that users can rate the recipes, because it really helps to see what other people thought of the dishes.

I will be doing a more in-depth review of The Scramble, but in the mean time, I wanted to share the recipe that I made for dinner last night. I am always a fan of Asian-inspired dishes, but I generally hate making them at home. However, Mr. Fox recently bought me a fabulous wok from IKEA, and so I took it out to use for the first time last night. I love it!

So last night’s dinner was Sweet and Sour Chicken Stir-Fry, served over white rice. I was supposed to make an Asian cucumber salad to go with it, but the cucumbers that I bought didn’t last, so it was just the chicken dish over rice. Very delicious, if I do say so myself!

recipe dinner sweet sour chicken six oclock scramble meal planning

Print
Recipe – Sweet and Sour Chicken Stir Fry

Rating: 51

Prep Time: 13 minutes

Cook Time: 12 minutes

Total Time: 25 minutes

Yield: 6

Recipe – Sweet and Sour Chicken Stir Fry

From The Scramble website: This Asian stir-fry is a little sweet, a little sour and just a tad spicy, though you can definitely crank up the heat with extra chilies.

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
  • 1/4 cup Asian sweet chili sauce (also called Mae Ploy)
  • 1 tbsp cornstarch
  • 1 tbsp rice vinegar
  • 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper or Asian chili garlic sauce (optional)
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1-1.5lb boneless skinless chicken breasts, diced into 1" pieces
  • 1 carrot, sliced
  • 1/2 yellow or white onion, diced
  • 2 red bell peppers, seeded and diced
  • 1.5-2 cups prepared white or brown rice

Directions

  1. In a measuring cup or medium bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, cornstarch, rice vinegar and crushed red pepper. Set aside.
  2. In a large nonstick skillet or wok, heat the oil over medium to medium high heat. Add the chicken and carrots and stir-fry them for about 3 minutes until the outside of the chicken turns white.
  3. Add the onions and peppers and continue to stir-fry the mixture for about 3 more minutes until the peppers are tender crisp and the onions start to turn translucent.
  4. Add the reserved sauce and cook for 1-2 minutes until it is heated through and the chicken and vegetables are coated.
  5. Serve over prepared rice.

Notes

If you're short on time and want to do something even simpler, you could use a frozen pepper and onion blend in place of the 1/2 onion and 2 bell peppers.

This recipe is posted with permission from Aviva at The Six O'Clock Scramble.

http://www.estherfox.com/2012/08/recipe-dinner-sweet-sour-chicken-six-oclock-scramble-meal-planning/

Want more? Subscribe to my cooking posts!

recipe dinner sweet sour chicken six oclock scramble meal planning

Filed Under: Chicken, Esther Eats, Main Dishes

amazon knows me too well

Posted on June 27, 2012 by phillynikongal • 0 Comments

Earlier this morning, I received an email from Amazon.com. In it included their “personalized recommendations” based on my search history on the website. I am thinking they know me a bit too well.

amazon books cooking burgers rachael ray delicious omnomnom

A while ago, I was watching Rachael Ray‘s daytime show and saw she was devoting a week to burgers to promote her new book “The Book of Burger.” I decided right then that I wanted that book. Sometime after that, my friend Katie invited me to go up to NYC with her and her mom to go be in the audience of “The Talk,” where Rachael Ray was going to be a guest. We both hoped that we would get a copy of the book for being in the audience, but no, of course not. AND THEN, at our new local Wegmans store, she was going to be there signing her burger book, so I got tickets for Mr. Fox and I. However, if you’re native to the area, you’ll know that trying to get to King of Prussia from Northeast Philly during rush hour is a total nightmare. That being said, I never did get my burger book.

amazon books cooking burgers rachael ray delicious omnomnom

So thank you Amazon.com for reminding me that my efforts thus far have failed epically. I will get the book eventually, and when I do, I plan to make most of the recipes in it, because I am a big burger person. Like, I could eat them all the time, as long as they’re different. And I am always looking for new ways to make them. One recipe in the book caught my eye, the Chili Mac n Cheese Burger. Oh lord. Definitely not diet friendly, but it looks amazing.  So I am going to eventually go on a quest for burger amazingness. Because I love ground beef on a bun. I may decide to be spiffy and branch out, but that’ll be a while. I won’t do turkey burgers, because the taste just doesn’t compare. I’ve heard black bean burgers are delicious with some avocado, but I don’t think I can do a straight black bean burger. I may have to mix some black beans with the ground beef.

amazon books cooking burgers rachael ray delicious omnomnom

amazon books cooking burgers rachael ray delicious omnomnom

Filed Under: Esther Eats, Just Me

Look Before You Pin – Why I’m Leaving Pinterest

Posted on April 25, 2012 by phillynikongal • 6 Comments

So I started off this morning with my normal routine, which included checking my email, reading through some blogs in my feed reader and having my morning coffee. I decided to visit Pinterest for a change, because I wanted to pad my recipe bookmarks and I haven’t done that in a while.

Things looked completely normal. All the food pr0n, pages of deliciousness in the form of lovely photographed food. I did what I normally do, which is start clicking on things that looked/sounded delicious so I could bookmark it. I clicked on one thing, a steak marinade I believe, and it took me to this site that was obviously a spam/phishing site made to look like Pinterest, telling me that they’ve successfully verified the authenticity of my account, and that I should choose one of the vouchers below as a thank you for contributing to Pinterest.

pinterest phishing scam website user authentication bullshit

Pins with "pinlove.info" in the link will redirect to this website.

I went through about 10 pins of 10 different “recipes” that all redirected to this obvious spam site. Really? I mean, the photos of the food may look delicious that you feel the need to repin it, but PLEASE check that the links you’re repinning are actually linking back to the original recipes! I only frequent the Food and Drink pins, but I’ve read that the same things are happening on other parts of Pinterest. I’ve read things like people pinning things and then they’re repinned with affiliate links attached to them.

Also in my Pinterest quest this morning, I happened upon some more photos of food that looked delicious. I saw that they linked to “erins-recipes.blogspot.com”, but when you clicked into the photo, it actually linked to a website called YummyTastyRecipes. It’s a tumblr (as evidenced by its favicon, though it could be another phish) that slurps photos from food bloggers and then pins them to Pinterest, without linking back to the original recipe. Instead, you get sent to this “blog” that says:

Hey everyone, I find these really tasty foods all the time on the web, this one looks really cool don’t you think?

Im always asked where people can find recipes and how to make them, I use something called TotalRecipeSearch

You can download TotalRecipeSearch and find thousands of recipes to make similar to what I post on my blog.

Conveniently, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s a link to “Report This Blog”. When you click on it, you’re taken to a blah generic form that asks for your email address and “comment”, saying “Share your feedback, suggestions, problems. Report unusual activity with this blog, the more specific you can be, the faster we can act.” I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that Tumblr doesn’t ask for your email address when they give you the option to report a blog. So I went to the main URL of the site, and all that’s there is a link to Report This Blog. I then went to erins-recipes.blogspot.com, and there are no posts there.

pinterest phishing scam website user authentication bullshit

What you see after clicking on a link to "erins-recipes.blogspot.com".

What astounds me is the number of people who’re blindly repinning spam and scams. Seriously people! It’s really not that hard. Some people have talked about losing business or credibility with their online shops because their original links are getting repinned with affiliate links and spam attached to them. I’ve maybe found 2 actual recipes to repin and bookmark, but even still, I can’t help but wonder, if I were to pin a recipe for my own blog, would some bot repin it with some bullshit attached to it?

So this is why I’ve made the decision to leave Pinterest. The whole copyright issue that happened (and in turn made Pinterest change their terms of service) was bad enough, but this just takes the cake, for me.

All I wanted to do was pin and bookmark tasty recipes. Was that too much to ask?

pinterest phishing scam website user authentication bullshit

pinterest phishing scam website user authentication bullshit

Additional resources:

http://llsocial.com/2012/03/pinterest-hacked-hundreds-thousands-users-unknowing-posting-spam-pins/

http://www.business2community.com/pinterest/spammers-have-finally-joined-the-pinterest-party-0161458

pinterest phishing scam website user authentication bullshit

Filed Under: Just Me, Random Rants

it’s been a while

Posted on April 18, 2012 by phillynikongal • 2 Comments

Well.

I certainly didn’t expect to be gone that long. I apologize! After #scintilla, I was kinda feeling detached from my blog, so I took a break.

But I’ve returned. Not sure if I am going to do daily bloggings though. You’d think I would, since I basically have all the time in the world.

Anyway!

Things haven’t changed much around here. Mr. Fox is thriving at his new job, the cats are all still little (and big) stinkers, and I am still milling about the house during my down time. My knitting progress is slow, because I’ve finally learned that it is in fact very important to swatch for proper gauge, and therefore I’ve had to rip out and restart the same hat a couple times. It’s an annoying process, but I suppose I’ll get used to doing it since I’d rather not rip out projects due to lazy knitting.

I am also sorry I haven’t been putting up any recipes. It’s getting warmer and we haven’t put in our window AC yet, so putting the oven on in an already hot-ass kitchen can be bothersome, so I’ve been cooking less new things in favor of quick and easy. Shortly though, I will have some new recipes to put up.

I kinda broke my streak of not having soda a while ago, but I am happy to say that I’ve been soda free for 17 days now. Almost to 21 (because it takes 21 days to break a habit, as they say). I am working on a healthier me. It’s a work in progress, and a slow one at that, but I’m getting there. Just going to try and take it one day at a time.

New, big things are coming. I am just impatiently waiting for them.

long time update life knitting healthy soda water exercise

Filed Under: Just Me