Cilantro Dip

This. Dip. Is. Amazing. You will never want to use Ranch again! Tzatziki sauce either. It's great with veggies, all kinds of meat, over rice, with chips... pretty much anything you can think of. And if you just add some vinegar it would make a wonderfully creamy salad dressing. You will be eating this by the spoonful and licking the bowl (both of which have been done)!

I made this dip for the first time this weekend, in a gigantic sized batch. This recipe should give you similar results on a smaller scale!

*Please note that this dip is best if made at least one day before serving. The first time I made it I kept adding lime juice and salt, trying to get it to taste like something other then mayo. I put it in the fridge without really being happy with the flavor - but the next day it was wonderful!

1/2 c mayonnaise
1/4 c sour cream
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp lime juice
1 garlic cloves, minced
6 Tbsp chopped fresh cilantro (you can never have to much cilantro, so feel free to add more than this)
S&P to taste

Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Adjust the lime juice and salt if needed to get some kind of flavor. Refrigerate over night. Allow dip to become your new addiction!

Peanut Sauce!

This peanut sauce is wonderful as a dip with veggies, added to rice, used to marinade chicken and rolled into sushi! It can also be thinned out with a little water and used as a salad dressing. It is so good you'll want to eat it by the spoonful!

1/2 c natural-style peanut butter
2 Tbsp Hoisin sauce
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 small garlic clove, mashed to a paste
1 tsp chili-garlic paste
1 Tbsp dark sesame oil
2 Tbsp fresh lime juice
1/4 c sugar
1/4 c rice vinegar
1/4 tsp salt

Dissolve sugar and salt in rice vinegar and mix together with remaining ingredients. Taste and adjust salt or sugar as needed.

Fish Sauce

From Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon – on fish sauce in soup

“Another excellent addition to soup is fish sauce. You can make this yourself (see below), or buy a Thai or Vietnamese variety (called nam pla or nuoc mam). These clear brown fermented sauces, made from small whole fish including the head and organs, are rich in iodine and other substances that benefit the thyroid gland. On heating the fishy taste disappears but the nutrients remain. You may add fish sauce to any heated soup instead of salt.”

Fermented Fish Sauce – makes about 2 cups

1½ lbs small fish, including heads, cut up (sardines work well)

3 Tbsp sea salt

2 c. filtered water

2 cloves garlic, mashed

2 bay leaves, crumbled

1 tsp peppercorns

several pieces lemon rind

1 Tbsp tamarind paste (optional)

2 Tbsp whey

Toss fish pieces in salt and place in a wide-mouth, quart-sized mason jar. Press down with a wooden pounder or meat hammer. Mix remaining ingredients and pour over fish. Add additional water to cover fish thoroughly. The top of the liquid should be at least 1 inch below the top of the jar. Cover tightly and leave at room temperature for about three days. Transfer to refrigerator for several weeks. Drain liquid through a strainer and store fish sauce in the refrigerator.

Tomato Sauce and Broken Sinks

Today I spent a large portion of the morning and afternoon cutting bad spots out of tomatoes, dicing the good parts up, and cooking them down into a yummy tomato sauce. Well - at least that's what I was doing until some tomatoes got stuck to the bottom of the pan and burnt. And then the pipes under my kitchen sink decided to start spewing water everywhere.
So right now I have a sink full of dishes, a pan that I can't clean, a trashed kitchen for my landlord to enjoy and bowls full of half cooked tomato sauce sitting on both counters! Pretty soon though - I'll have lots and lots of home made tomato sauce sitting up in my cupboard!

Plum BBQ Sauce

I had a bunch of plums to use up and I didn't really want to just make jam with them. My solution? BBQ Sauce! I made this recipe up as I went along and it needs a bit of tweaking - but here is the rough draft to start with.

In order to get the 12 cups of plum "juice" that I ended up using - I simply washed and de-stemmed the plums, piled them in a big pot with a couple of cups of water and then cooked and mashed them until I could strain the seeds, skins and the majority of the pulp out with a pasta strainer. I'm sure there is an easier, more sophisticated way to do this but it worked for me!

12 c. plum juice (very pulpy)
1 c. Worcestershire sauce
1 c. Apple Cider vinegar
3 c. white sugar
3 c. brown sugar
1/3 c. plus 1/8 c. salt (even though it tasted fine when I pulled it off the stove, it got saltier as it sat so I would cut this amount back)
1 Tbsp black pepper
1 Tbsp ground dry mustard
2 Tbsp granulated garlic
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp celery seed
3 fresh garlic cloves - finely chopped

Put everything in a big pot and cook on a medium heat, stirring occasionally to reduce. Reduce to about 2/3 amount - or desired consistency. Taste as it is reducing and adjust flavoring accordingly. Bottle and refrigerate until needed.

Enjoy with chicken or pork or anything else you can come up with!