The Duck's Nest: online home of mizducky

Budget holiday recipe: simple sweet potato/apple casserole with hint of maple syrup

via www.examiner.com

Just finished making this dish--and now the super-simple recipe is up on Examiner.com--just click the above link. Enjoy!

Another Examiner.com salvo: Halloween Peep Treats recipe

Budget recipe: Halloween Peep Treats are silly spooky fun for all ages

You know Marshmallow Treats, those gooey squares of marshmallow-drenched puffed rice cereal, so simple and yet so addictively good? Now imagine substituting the regular marshmallows with Peeps, so that the finished product turns various Peep colors. Now imagine ghoulishly decorating those Treats with "severed" Peep heads and other bits of Peep body parts--optionally augmented with suggestive squirts of red cake-decorating gel. It's tacky, it's twisted, it's even maybe a little transgressive--in other words, it's what Halloween is all about! Follow the link and see how easy it is to make these goofy (and inexpensive) goodies!

My latest on Examiner.com: Smoked turkey parts give beans great flavor

Budget cooking tip: smoked turkey parts give beans great flavor.

They're comparable in price to ham hocks and other traditional beans-cooking meat, but significantly lower in calories and fat-grams -- and they make beans taste yum. Follow the link to read more (and to give my Examiner.com article some luv).

Examiner.com Fall Cookbook -- over 300 pages of yum (including two of mine)

Examiner.com Fall Cookbook recipe index.

Yes, there are teeming hordes of people writing for Examiner.com, but when it comes to food and recipes, that's a strength! Witness this growing compendium of recipes from Food and Drink Examiners across the country (there should be over 300 of them, once the Examiner.com tech elves fully populate the index; there's already well over 150 right now). I already have one of mine in the index, and the other should be showing up by Monday. But you should check out all these other folks too--there are a lot of damn fine cooks in this bunch.

Chinese soy-sauce braised pork belly recipe on Examiner.com

Fall recipes: Chinese soy-sauce braised pork belly.

Pork belly is better known to Americans as the cut from which bacon is made, but in recent years fresh (i.e. uncured) pork belly has become all the rage among foodies. No surprise to Asians, who have been enjoying pork belly for literally centuries. While there's no way to pretend this is diet food, the long braising in this recipe renders out a lot of the fat and turns it, and the skin, into a wonderful mouth-feel experience. Enjoy in small portions with lots of rice to soak up all the wonderful juices. (Note: for those of you who remember some of my First UU Church Dining for Dollars Asian feast extravaganzas, this dish was one of the major hits.)

Crock pot / crockpot carnitas revisited -- whoa, that SEO stuff really works!

Click here to go directly to the crock pot carnitas recipe

I wonder if y'all would humor me a moment and do a little experiment. Go over to Google, and plug in the search phrase "crock pot carnitas" (make sure you spell it as two words, "crock pot," not one word, i.e. "crockpot," or else the magic won't work). What's the number one link that comes up as of today (Sunday, October 11, 2009)?

Allow me to indulge in a little chortling and victory-dancing. At least for this brief moment in time, until some other entry comes along to knock my humble little recipe out of that top slot, this SEO (Search Engine Optimization) stuff really seems to be working for me.

Oh yeah--if you don't feel like going over to Google, you can click this link to go directly to the recipe on Examiner.com. It really is a darn good recipe, if I do say so myself. Though it's hard to go wrong with pork and beer.

Another Examiner.com salvo--my organo-groovy beet-and-beet-green borscht recipe

Fall recipes: Beet and beet-green borscht.

Here you go, folks, another mizducky standby. This is not your mama's borscht recipe--this is a chunky bowl of colorful veggie goodness. Just click through to the Examiner.com page for the recipe--and enjoy!

The Tightwad Gourmand strikes again: lentil salad, super fast/easy/versatile

Lentil Salad Recipe

So here's my latest article posted to Examiner.com, for my dead-simple lentil salad. And I not only write about these things, folks, I eat 'em! Took some of the batch I cooked up for my little photo shoot to school with me for lunch. I feel so virtuous.

Break from work to blog and eat

Been slogging away all day on the computer, while a mini-batch of my crock-pot carnitas simmered away in the kitchen, tantalizing me with the promise of reward for my labors.

When I last stopped in at a local Food 4 Less, I saw they had pork stew meat on special in reasonable single-householder-sized packages -- and they were even labeled as "por carnitas." So I figured "why the heck not," and got some, plus the required beer and limes.

My housemate has the dearest little mini-crock-pot, so I didn't have to haul out the big mothuh to make my scaled-down mini-batch. Soon the house was smelling pleasantly of garlic and beer, and my housemate's would not stop lurking hopefully underfoot.

By the time I got to my dinner break just now, I didn't even bother with the final crispy-bits-making step--too hungry. Mmmmmm ... pork, garlic, and beer, three great flavors that belong together. Now I feel fueled up for the next round of mano a mano with the work pile.

Another Examiner.com article: "Better Than Bouillon" perks up beans, meatless recipes

Here I am again with another article I wrote for my San Diego Budget Meal Examiner gig, this time touting a product I use all the time for putting some zip in my beans and such. It's really pretty darned good! Anyway, please to be checking the article out--thanks!

Budget cooking tip: "Better Than Bouillon" perks up beans, meatless recipes.