Cooking for One, Part Two

If you enjoy eating your meals or snacks, as I do, by dipping a variety of rigid finger foods into some type of sauce, then the idea below may be for you.

I've found that I really enjoy consuming potato chips and dip, tortilla chips and salsa (or cheese dip), vegetable sticks and dressing, and so forth. Even though I try to stick to reduced fat potato chips and low fat dip, I know that chips and dip are not my healthiest choices. So I'm trying to lean toward carrot and celery sticks and broccoli and cauliflower branches. They can be a bit dull, so: Amateur Tip (I know, the idiom is "Pro Tip", but I'm an amateur when it comes to cooking. I have worked at three restaurants in my life (bonus points to anyone who can name the establishments), but the closest I ever came to food prep was filling water glasses, foil wrapping potatoes for baking, and restocking a bottled beer cooler.): try Kraft Lite Thousand Island dressing. It's already tangy (says so right on the bottle in my fridge), and give it some extra zing by dicing up 3 or four pickled jalapeno slices.

Very tasty. Happy munching.

Jicama, Can You?

I recently attended a convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. It's pretty plush, with it's 9 acres of indoor gardens and all; and the convention was swell. But my best off-topic takeaway was Wednesday's lunch salad. The lunch had a southwestern theme from mexican rice with chayote squash to cilantro basted chicken enchiladas. Also of note was their ability to feed well over 1,000 people almost instantly -- they had about 6 double sided buffet lines plus separate areas for soup and dessert. One more aside before we get back to the salad: another neat idea was tented placards placed on the round 10-seater lunch tables indicating a sub-area of conventioneers that should congregate at that table. If you paid attention to them you ended up sitting with other folks that you might not know but that you had something pretty specific in common with; not exactly Dave Winer's "unconference", but a good chance for ad hoc networking.

Remembering the Southwest theme and keeping an open mind, here's the salad, which I found surprisingly pleasing. I'm guessing at the proportions -- I made a batch yesterday and it came out pretty good:

Jicama Salad

10 parts julienned jicama (about 1 medium jicama)
3 parts tomatoes, sliced and quartered (about 2 medium tomatoes)
1 part sweet onion strips (1/3 of a medium Vidalia onion)
1 part mixed pepper pieces (canned chilis, jalepeno rings, green pepper strips)

Add oil and vinegar dressing, chill and marinate.

Pretty good, pretty healthy.