Hellfire Enchiladas

These Enchiladas Could Be a Two-Ice Cream Cone Meal!

If you’ve ordered enchiladas in your local Mexican restaurant lately, they probably came out topped with some sort of brown gravy glop, especially if the sign over the door says “Tex-Mex” or the word “cantina” appears anywhere on the premises. Some restaurants now give you the choice of red or green sauce -- red is chile colorado, while green is (unfortunately) usually tomatillo-based instead of chile verde. Commercially you can buy both red and green enchilada sauce canned by vendors like Hatch and Old El Paso, most of which tends to be salt-laden.

Here’s a version of enchiladas you can make at home with a tomato-based sauce, a sort of salsa ranchera. You can doctor it to be as hot as you want by adjusting the number of chiles in the sauce…

Red Curry Tilapia with Coconut Sauce Recipe

Spice up Tilapia with Red Curry

When wanting a slightly less healthy, but fragrantly delicious version of tilapia the answer is always easy. Red curry, combined with fresh basil and coconut milk always wins. Reduce the calories by using light coconut milk without sacrificing flavor. Serve over brown rice rather than white rice to experience an interesting combination of flavors. Tilapia with Coconut Red Curry Sauce
Serves 4

Year of the Snake Noodles

Here's a tasty dish made with spaghetti noodles that's not in the least Italian. It comes from a 1989 cookbook published by a Denver-based health company. 1989 was the Year of the Snake, hence the name. We often substitute jerusalem artichoke spaghetti for the whole wheat variety, which reduces the fiber content but improves on whole wheat spaghetti's somewhat lackluster flavor.

Anadama Bread Recipe

There's an old wive's tale about this bread. Seems that one grumpy old New Englander and his old wife, Anna, got into a more contentious squabble than usual; so she went home to mother (or perhaps to their daughter). That left the curmudgeon to fend for himself in the kitchen. When he ran out of bread, the man figured he could do it himself as well as his wife. He scrounged around in the pantry, and devised his own recipe from whatever he found. It turned out to be a recipe that makes some darned good bread. When he tasted his first slice, the old man smacked his lips and chortled, "This is for Anna, damn her!" And that's why we call it Anadama Bread.

The Recipe Rock Rocks!

Architec Recipe Rock

Like many other household cooks, ever-increasing numbers of our recipes come not from cookbooks and magazines but from emails and websites. I don't trust myself to leave my precious laptop next to a hot burner with a pot of boiling water, though, so I print my recipes and keep them in a big folder. That's why many family favorites are covered with burn marks and splatters. A letter-size sheet of paper takes up more counter space than I can spare, though; so I was quite pleased to find an Architec Recipe Rock in my stocking one holiday season.