Ingredients:
1 large red bell pepper cored and diced into 3/8 inch squares
1 medium zucchini cubed into 3/8 to 1/2 inch cubes
1 medium yellow squash cubed into 3/8 to 1/2 inch cubes
1 small head of broccoli diced, (florets and stem)
1 medium onion diced into 1/4 to 3/8 inch squares
2 tbsp oil
Salt and pepper
1 can of black beans, drained and rinsed
2 cans of cream of mushroom soup (or you can do it the hard way and make your own.)
1/2 cup milk or milk equivalent
1 small can roasted green chiles
Cheddar cheese
9-10 flour tortillas, ( I used soft taco sized)
Bowl
9x13 pan
frying pan
spoon
350º oven
Sweat the onion and broccoli in the pan with the oil until onion starts to soften. Then increase the heat and dump the squash, zucchini, and bell pepper in. Add the salt and pepper and saute stirring frequently until the squash is tender crisp. DO NOT overcook. If you do the squash will be slimy and soggy and gross! the goal is for the zucchini and squash to still be crisp and provide texture when the dish is served. You don't have to worry so much about the bell pepper and broccoli, they are pretty tough. While this is cooking, stir together the cream of whatever soup, milk, roasted green chiles, black beans, and 2 to 3 cups of cheddar cheese. You could also add a teaspoon of chili powder, cumin, or garlic powder if you wanted to. When to veggies are done dump them into the bowl with the cream of whatever mixture and stir until everything is coated and the cheese is melted. Taste and add more salt as needed. Then take 2/3 to 3/4 of a cup of the mixture, place it on a tortilla, roll it up like an enchilada, and place it in the 9x13 pan. Continue packing them into the pan semi tightly until there is no more room. Dump the rest of the mixture over the top and spread it out. Place in a 350º oven until the edges are bubbling vigorously and then sprinkle another cup of grated cheddar cheese over the top. Return to oven until the cheese is totally melted. Take out, let cool, and eat.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Vegetarian Enchiladas: vegetarian but not necessarily healthy!
Posted by The Highlands Mathis at 1:01 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Ingredients:
Large Flour tortillas
Small corn tostadas (or fried corn tortillas)
1.5 pounds of Ground beef
Taco seasoning (chili powder, cumin, onion (dehydrated or finely chopped and sauteed.), black pepper, salt)
1/3 of a cup of Tomato Sauce
1 to 1.5 cups of water
1 to 2 TBSP of sugar
Sour cream (1 TBSP per Crunchwrap)
One tomato chopped into ¼ inch cubes
Cheddar cheese ( at least a ¼ cup of loose cheese per crunch wrap)
Equipment needed:
You will also need a sandwich press, a waffle press with flat plates, or a skillet and a HEAVY cast iron pan.
Concerns:
First you need to know that I am a guy so I don't typically measure unless I am baking. I did not use all the taco meat since I am planning on making taco salad later this week. I would guess that one and half pounds of G. Beef would make about 6 to 7 Crunchwraps. I fried some corn tortillas to make tostadas but if I had to do it again I would just buy tostadas from the store. You will also need some fairly large flour tortillas or you will need to cut down the tostadas so that the tortilla will wrap all the way around the filling.
Directions:
Cooked and drain the meat, add in the taco seasoning, water, tomato sauce, and sugar and let it reduce until the sauce sticks to the meat. Warm up the flour tortillas, and make sure the meat is hot. Take your warm tortilla and put about a ¼ to a 1/3 cup of taco meat in the center of the flour tortilla, place the tostada on top centered on the tortilla. Put a ¼ to a 1/3 cup of loose cheddar cheese on the tostada along with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of tomatoes. Then fold the flour tortilla around the filling so that it looks like this:
Posted by The Highlands Mathis at 12:08 PM 0 comments
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Free Museum Day!
Check it out: The Smithsonian is offering a free pass for 2 to any participating museum in your area on September 26th. You can look up participating museums under "venues" and get your pass under "admission card." I'm going to the zoo, are you?
http://microsite.smithsonianmag.com/museumday/about.html
Posted by The Highlands Mathis at 10:13 AM 3 comments
Thursday, January 22, 2009
There has been an offer
So it turns out that when we chose our real estate agent/loan officer Wife/Husband duo, we picked one of a few agents and loan officers that were certified to work with the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. (That was a long sentence, feel free to comment upon the construction of said sentence.) After looking at 15 homes and finally deciding to put in an offer on 1 out of the bunch, we got word that the house had closed with another offer. Back. to. square. one.
I am so ancy about finding a house. We barely started looking in October and now we want to move into one THIS WEEK. This month would be alright, too. But we're so ready to have our own space that is bigger than 500 square feet! So after this house disappeared off the radar, all other houses were nothing compared to it. Until our SHRA-certified agent found these houses through the program that were meant for low to moderate income families just like us! The SHRA takes foreclosed houses in not the best neighborhoods and re-does them entirely. New drywall, paint, carpet, HVAC, appliances, electricity, sewer lines, siding, cabinets, and front lawn landscaping.
They have special financing, too. 65% of the purchase price is what our down-payment and monthy payment is based on, thus creating a 1st and 2nd mortgage with the remaining 35% comprising the 2nd. The first is paid over 30 years and the 2nd is due at that time with the option to negotiate payments. So our payment would about $700 on 85,000 for a 3 bed, 1 bath house on .16 acres. And the neighborhood is north of (by several miles) the not-the-best neighborhoods but still in the same zip codes.
So we put in an offer yesterday. We're the only offer so far. They might review it today, or Monday, or Next Friday, who knows? It's a government agency and they take their time doing things. And a 60-day escrow is required. That's going to do wonders for the ancy-ness.
Wish us luck!
Posted by The Highlands Mathis at 8:03 PM 2 comments
Friday, November 14, 2008
House (Loan) Hunting
So we are embarking on our first attempt to buy a home. I remember when I was buying my car and the loan officer (who was wonderful and made the whole thing nearly easy) remarked that the only experience worse than buying a car is buying a house. Then I thought "Well, gee, this has been pretty easy, so buying a house can't be that bad....." Enter the loan pre-approval nightmare of looking everywhere for a home loan that is affordable and reasonable, not to mention looking for the actual structure that will be my abode for years to come: I hope the FHA comes through for us and I hope that we can find a house we can afford in a neighborhood that does not necessitate me carrying a bright pink tazer just to walk to my car.
So we start the loan finding process. Calling lenders and brokers to see who has the best programs and rates for us takes a lot of time! And then they tell others that you're looking for a loan and it's like a swarm of locusts coming to eat all your time away as they try to make the most off you by making it sound that they are doing you the biggest favor.
Then there are the realtors who have their own areas of expertise, be it in locations of houses or type of bank loans! If we have a wide area to search for a house, one real estate agent might not know all the areas well and so we might get a good house in a bad area: we don't know the area, either!
And then there are the questions you must answer and everyone is trying to educate you on how to buy a house. Do you know that FHA loans are only for houses that do not have exposed wiring or toilet trouble (a non-habitable house)? I didn't! Or that you could buy a non-habitable house but between escrow and closing there is another loan that you could apply for to get the house to "habitable"-ness before closing the deal? I didn't!
Holy Moly that loan officer was right, this IS the biggest maelstrom of confusion and craziness that just might end up in the biggest purchase of my as-yet financially unblemished life!
Posted by The Highlands Mathis at 9:26 AM 2 comments
Monday, October 13, 2008
The Big Read
The Big Read
Here's how it works:
The Big Read says that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Reprint this list on your own blog.
And now..... THE BIG READ TOP 100
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (this isn’t really fair!)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The
74. Notes From A
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Read: 30
Want to read: 8
Books I started to read but put down and will never pick up again for various reasons: 12
30+12= 42!
I've had contact with almost half of the list! I added the orange just for your enjoyment.
Posted by The Highlands Mathis at 9:06 AM 5 comments
