Herself's Recipes

I had a dish similar to this at PF Changs, they used honey dew melon and honey crusted walnuts. I prefer it with mangoes and honey crusted pecans.

Sauce:
1 can coconut milk
2 Tablespoons lime juice

Heat over medium heat until reduced and thickened ~ 30 minutes, stir occasionally

Shrimp:
~ 12 good size shrimp ready for cooking
1 Tablespoon lime juice
2 Tablespoons olive oil
minced garlic to taste

Toss it all in a bowl and marinate for an hour before grilling or frying your shrimp

Fruit:
You can use 2 mangoes or ~ 1/3 of a cantaloupe or ~1/3 of a honey dew melon

Cut into 1″ cubes

Nuts:
1 cup honey coated walnuts or pecans

Rice:
1 cup rice + 2 cups water, cook until rice is tender

Combine:
Put rice on plates, top with shrimp, fruit, nuts and then 1/2 of the coconut sauce.

Serves 2
You’ll have enough coconut sauce for two meals.

Coconut trees are in constant bloom, but each coconut takes a year to mature. The Europeans first mention coconuts as food in the mid 1500s. On the Nicobar islands they were used as currency till the early 1900s. So for a while, money really did grow on trees.

The holidays left me with more cheese than I could use in day to day eating.  But  macaroni and cheese is very easy to make from scratch and a great way to use up leftover cheeses.

This time I used two different goat cheeses for about half the cheese and various cheddars for the rest.  Goat cheese is too dry to use alone, swiss cheese also works well, mozarellas are too stringy.

1 pound macaroni cooked until just barely done.
3 cups grated cheeses
1.5 cups of milk or cream
1 large tablespoon of flour
bread crumbs
1/2 stick of butter

Add the flour to the milk and mix well.

Add the milk mix and cheese to a sauce pan and cook over a very low heat until the cheese is melted stirring occasionally.

Drain the cooked noodles well and put them back into the pot.

Add the melted cheese to the noodles and mix really well.

Put the noodles and cheese in a casserole dish. ( 9″x13″x3″ works well )

Melt the butter and add the bread crumbs, a couple of large heaping spoons of grated Paremsan work well in the topping also.

Sprinkle the butter and bread crumbs over the top of the macaroni.

Bake at 350′ about 30-40 minutes until heated through ( shallow pans will cook faster than taller ones.

I also add cut up leftover ham, and or cut up sundried tomatoes and roasted peppers if I have any left in the fridge.

Macaroni and cheese dishes are listed in Italian cookbooks as early as the mid 1200s.  It has a long history in Massachusetts and in Connecticut as cheese pudding.  You’ll often see it listed in older New England cookbooks as cheese pudding.

Later Thomas Jefferson encountered it in Europe and brought it back to Virginia.

Kraft brought us their Kraft dinner macaroni and cheese in 1937. During WWII mac and cheese became a staple in the US diet.