Upside-Down Nachos

Upside-Down Nachos
Ready For Chips

 One of my duties here at Mom's is to make her lunch but since I'm usually reading aloud to her while she eats I wait until after she's eaten to fix my lunch.  Nachos are one of the few lunches where we eat the same thing but since I"m not eatinc until as much as an hour and a half later it is still like fixing two separate meals.  So I devised a variation on a theme that makes putting together a nacho plate for a single person quick and easy.

First I paint the plate with refried beans straight out of the can or the fridge.  Then add any other ingredients that are already pre-prepped which also need heating up, including the shredded cheese and heat that in the microwave.

Next I add any uncooked or cold ingredients--salsa, sour cream, olives, green onion, tomato, avocado.  Only the first four are on on this version as the others were unavailable that day.

Upside-Down Nachos
Chips Ahoy!

Last step is to add the chips.  I usually just pile them on but I stopped to take this picture while the bean goop was still visible.  Sometimes for Mom I'll take the time to slide the chips in along the outer edge until the cirle the plate then add a second an third row behind that, pushing the bean goop towards the center.  It looks a bit like a sunflower.  But that takes at least another ten minutes and I seldom have that kind of time to spare.

Because this is a quick and easy way to make single-serving nachos this way of making them is handy on the weekends when Mom is with my brother's family and I'm responsible for all my own meals.

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Toasted

I think we're toast Mate.
Take your woe is me refrain where the sun don't shine Mac.
Already there.
There's always a sunny side.
Not down here there aint.
Not if you refuse to open your eyes and see.

Lunch today was a snafu-o-rama.  One thing after another went wrong.  Toasted cheese sandwiches and soup is a lunch I'm practiced at and have more than once had Mom's tray in her lap in 25 minutes from walking into the kitchen.

Not this time.  First glitch was when the wire on the cheese slicer broke.  Slicing chedder of a brick with a chef's knife takes much longer and no two are the same size or shape so making a sandwich with them is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together.

Then the griddle in the middle of the stove was covered with things my sister left there as task reminders.  I had to find places for 8 empty food supplement bottles, 2 empty serving containers and 1 stirring spoon holder in a room where every surface is covered except the burners on the stove.

Yep.  You guessed it.  I let some items rest their edges on the edge of the top right burner thinking they were safe since I had not intention of using that burner.  Then I promptly turned that burner on instead of the griddle.  The griddle dial is in the middle with the left burner dials to the left of it and the right burner dials to the right of it and the top burners it's immediate neighbors.  It's not the first time which should have been enough to stop me from leaving the cereal server and spoon holder anywhere near the burners or at the very least should have had me double and triple checking I had turned the right dial.

More things when wrong but nothing major like the broken slicer and the melted plastic all over a burner.  They amounted to things like
getting the soup cans out but forgetting to open them and later forgetting to turn the burner on under the soup
stepping on or kicking into my cat Merlin who dogs my feet from sink to fridge to stove to cuttingboard, to cupboard to...
dropping things
spilling things
misplacing things
forgetting to butter the outside of the cheese sandwiches before slapping on the griddle
Mom announcing she needed the bathroom just as I was about to announce I was on the way with her tray.  That's a twenty minute wait so her soup and sandwich weren't exactly hot anymore.  I stuck her sandwich in the microwave for 11 seconds and that remelted the cheese without taking all of the toasted crispiness out.

More such things happened during cleanup.  Thus I was getting back to my desk over two hours after I left it with forty minutes left before I was supposed to go start dinner prep.

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Quick and Easy Chicken Dinner

One time last spring my sister was out of ideas for dinner.  I twas past due for a grocery shop so it seemed every one of our go to meals was either missing a crucial ingredient or the meat was frozen solid.  So I started rummaging in the fridge, freezer and cupboard to get an idea of what was available.  By the time I was done I had a concept.

I'd started with tomato sauce since she had recently bought a large carton of it at Costgo.  Surely there was something I could do with tomato sauce.  We use it to make soup but usually that is a simple tomato soup spiced with one or another of the Mrs Dash seasonings and stretched by adding water 1:1 and then thickened back up with tapioca flour.  But we have made a hearty taco soup with burrito leftovers before.

That was the vague concept I began with but we hadn't had burritos or nachos recently and if we'd had the ingredients for them I wouldn't be foraging for a new idea.  So I began by looking for likely items to put in a hearty soup.  But when I came across the package of frozen chicken breasts a lit up picture as tho in a slide show popped into my head.

I've made this two or three times a month ever since.  It is simple and quick and something I can do without any help.  Tho the first time I had my nephew pull it out of the oven for me.  With my tunnel vision I can't see the oven edges or even the racks when looking at the dish I"m reaching for.  Which makes it nerve wracking to put things in or pull things out of a hot oven.

Step 1:  I've never made it the same twice.  The first time and one other I've steamed the zucchini on the stove while the chicken dish was in the oven.  But the simplest way is to layer the zucchini on the bottom of the shallow backing pan.  I've experimented with different cuts.  The first few times I used the coin shape.

But I discovered that cutting it lengthwise in quarter inch strips was faster.  But this time the zucchini was very long and I should have cut those strips in half to make it possible to lift out a serving by sliding a spatula under the zucchini under the chicken piece.

Step 2:  Lay the chicken pieces on top.  I've done this with several cuts and sizes of chicken breasts.  These were called chicken tenders and were smallish and thin and many of them had broken in two while frozen.

Several times I've come close to frostbite on my fingers after handling the frozen piece to put the jigsaw puzzle together.

Step 3:  Usually, for a meal intended for 4-6 (or 4 plus leftovers for 2) I use two of the 15oz cans of tomato sauce.  But this time I had only one can and I tried to stretch it by adding water but was too impatient to bring it to a boil to add the tapioca flour to thicken it back up so I ended up with real soupy sauce this time.

Last night I seasoned it with Mrs Dash Tomato, Basil, Garlic which makes it taste much like spaghetti sauce.  But my favorite seasoning is the pizza flakes which are primarily crushed and dried red peppers.  That makes it taste like pizza but is quite spicy.  Another way I like is to use Mexican flavors--chili, jalapeno, cilantro, onion, garlic.

Step 4:  I thought I'd got a picture of this step too but either I forgot or it didn't take for some reason.  But the last step before putting it into an oven preheated to 375 is to spread cheese across the top.  You could use any of the cheeses or even combine them.  And you can use either shredded or sliced.  We usually use shredded mozzarella but we have used shredded Colby and shredded cheddar and the Mexican yellow and white blend which I believe is mozzarella and cheddar.

Last night I used the shredded mozzarella and was quite generous with it spreading over a cup of it on, hoping to compensate for the over sauce.

Step 5:  Bake for 50 minutes to an hour depending on the thickness of the frozen chicken pieces.  I usually set the timer for 45 and then check it, estimating how much longer it might need.  One time when using quite large chicken breast that were nearly half an inch thick and so big that only five would fit it took an hour and 15 minutes.  The sauce should be boiling and the cheese melted and starting to brown on top.  And the fork should slide easily into and back out of the thickest piece of chicken so I try to remember to place that one in one of the front corners.

The first time I described this dish to my husband he told me that I'd just made Chicken Cacciatore substituting the zucchini.

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Frozen Assets

Oh. Did you think this was about cold, hard cash?

Sorry to disappoint you. But this is about a cook book and the adventures of two kitchen-challenged sisters.

The cookbook?

Frozen Assets: Cook for a Day, Eat for a Month
by Deborah Taylor-Hough
(c) 1998
Published by Champion Press Ltd
209 p.

I took ten photos of the front of the book but none of them turned out--too much glare from the flash. So I resorted to using the scanner I've been using for the family photo scan project. Took a scan of the back too as I'm short on time for explaining this tonight. My brother's family are coming up from Portland to take us all out to brunch. We are to leave about the time my alarm usually goes off.

And it's been a long day. So this is primarily a photo essay.

For more detail about the book and the concept you can explore Deborah's web site.


The idea is to stock up their freezer with meals that need only to be thawed and heated so the first month or two after I go back to Phoenix OR will be easier on them. If Mom's recovery continues apace I'll probably be back home by the end of March.

My sister did a massive grocery shop over the weekend. We are going to do what Deborah calls 'mini-sessions' instead of making all of the recipes in a single day we are going to do a separate session for each of: pork, tuna, chicken, beef & vegetarian.

Today was the pork session. We made up five recipes each of which was big enough for two meals for the three of them. Though one was frozen down as one by accident--the Sweet Sour Pork--so we'll probably go ahead and use it while I'm still here. Yay.


Here's my sister's workstation when things were in full swing. She was the vegetable preparer. Also the meat preparer. And also the one who put pieces of the separate meals together and prepared them for the freezer.

See the crock pot? Had nothing to do with the project. That was tonight's dinner--a pork roast. My sister was especially proud of thinking of putting the meal for today in the crock pot before we got started on the big project.

I just had to take a close-up of that platter. Isn't it pretty?


This was my workstation for most of the time. I was the stirrer. My first task was to prepare two boxed rice dishes that were later combined with the pork in some fashion.

This was the cubed-pork for the Sweet Sour Pork waiting for the skillet to heat. I stirred it until it was browned and heated through and then emptied it onto a plate so my sister could dump the vegetables and sauce ingredients into the skillet for me to stir until the sauce thickened.



Up close picture of the Sweet Sour Pork sauce just before we took it off the heat. I'm not one bit sorry my sister goofed and put the whole thing in a single freezer bag. It was all I could do not to drool in it while I stirred.

This was another of my roles. Clean up. Or at least loading the dishwasher. I didn't take this picture today though. I took it a few days after I banged my shin into its lowered door on New Year's Eve. Kept meaning to post it with one of the posts about that incident or the resulting ER visit six days later but never seemed to think about it. It's hard to think about updating posts when it is so hard just to get each day's post up.

I wore my shin pads all day. Kept meaning to get a picture of them but it was never a good time. They are actually my sister's gardening knee pads. They attach with a velcro strap and I wear them just above my ankles instead of on my knees. It's definitely not a fashion statement.

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