Shrimp Tostadas, Another Dump Recipe

This dump recipe got a “This is fun!” rating from my husband!  I’ll be making it again.  Maybe I need to change the name “dump recipe” to “Jerry-rigged recipe”, but that would be disparaging to all the Jerrys in the world, wouldn’t it?  Today I’m going to give you two recipes.  One recipe is my inspiration and the second recipe is my successful, Jerry-rigged recipe (translation: the recipe made with what I had in my cabinets and frig).  The real recipe is from Eat What You Love and Lose from Family Circle magazine.  This is a recipe book that I stole from my mom on my last trip home.  I love recipe books and have finally realized that with each recipe book is the irrational belief that the new book comes with a chef.  It’s not really true, but I fall for the idea with every new book.  So here we go with the real recipe.

The Real Recipe

Corn-Shrimp Tostadas

12 (6 inch) corn tortillas

Nonstick cooking spray

¾ teaspoon salt

1 can corn kernels, drained and rinsed

1 can black beans, drained and rinsed

¾ pound cooked, shelled shrimp, chopped

2 small jalapeno chiles, cored, seeded and chopped

½ small red onion, finely chopped

1 teaspoon grated lime rind

3 tablespoons fresh lime juice

1 tablespoon chopped freish cilantro

1 teaspoon sugar

½ cup reduced-fat mayonnaise dressing

1 tablwespoon water

1/8 teaspoon liquid hot-pepper sauce

1.  Heat oven to 425 degrees.  Place tortillas in single layer on 2 baking sheets.  Coat with cooking spray.  Flip tortillas over, coat with spray.

2.  Bake to 13 to 15 minutes or until lightly browned, flipping tortillas over once.  Transfer to wire rack.  Sprinkle each with pinch of salt, ¼ teaspoon total.  Let cook completely.

3.  Mix corn kernels, beans, chopped shrimp, jalapeno, and onion in large bowl.

4.  Whisk together lime rind, juice, cilantro, sugar, remaining ½ teaspoon salt, mayonnaise, water and pepper sauce in small bowl.  Spoon over corn mixture; stir gently to combine.

5.  Divide corn mixture among baked tortillas, about 1/3 cup each.  Serve immediately.

Whew!  I don’t know what you think about it, but I think that is a long list of items.  I do sometimes make recipes with such a list, but after a long day at work, that does not always interest me.  I did not have a lime, or corn.  While I love onions, I have some onion-haters in my house.  I know.  Sad.  I did have a can of black beans, but I also had black bean and corn salsa.  I had the corn tortillas.  We had never had tostadas before.  Eureka!  

So here’s my version of the above recipe.  To give credit where credit is due, I would not have created my recipe without reading that recipe. 

My Dump Recipe

Salsa Shrimp Tostadas

shredded cheese, probably about 1 cup

12 corn tortillas (I probably had 9)

1 cup cooked, shelled shrimp, chopped

¾ cup of your favorite salsa

1.  Heat oven to 425 degrees.  Place tortillas in single layer on 2 baking sheets.  Coat with cooking spray.  Flip tortillas over, coat with spray.

2.  Bake 6 minutes.  Remove from oven, flip, and lightly sprinkle with shredded cheese.   Bake another 7 minutes or until lightly browned.  Transfer to wire rack. Let cool completely.

3.  Mix salsa and chopped shrimp.

4.  Let people load up their own tortillas at the table. 

How I lowered the sodium level:

1.  Corn tortillas are very low in sodium.

2.  I added no salt to the recipe.

3.  Swiss cheese can be used rather than cheddar.

4.  Fruit-based salsa will be lower in salsa than an all vegetable-salsa.  

Now, I agree, this was a flash of brilliance, but what’s for supper tomorrow?

My World, In Which I am a Rock Star

This week was the week of starting speech therapy at school, a week of scheduling, calling parents, attending meetings, organizing, meeting new students and saying, "Where did I put that?  It was right here on my desk a minute ago!" Crazy.  However, you know that I like my job and one of the most best parts of my job is that I am famous, at least at school and especially among the younger students.  Even older students are amazed when they see me at the grocery store, in public, outside of a school, apparently unsupervised.

Often, when I enter a PreK or Kindergarten classroom, my regular students are excited to see me.  I’m peppered with questions like, “Do you have me today?” or more often, "You have me today?"  Students, who are not in speech therapy, beg, “Can you see me? Can you see me?”  Of course, my regular students have some kind of speech and language delay and I have no way to explain the difference to the other students, who do not have delays.  I usually just say to them, “Not today!”

So this week, I worked with 3 little ones in their class for the first time this year, all who had been in speech therapy with me last year.  In different ways, they were all excited.  One laughed and laughed, giddy with the reunion.  Another said, “I played this in your room.”  The third was happy when I praised his efforts.  It was a fun session.  I can only hope they will be this pleased with me throughout the whole school year.  (I promise you, there will be a day when the honeymoon/reunion is over). They followed my every direction, completed every task.   I felt like a rock star!  Famous!  And it’s often like this.  I love my job. 

Screech…halt!   Uh oh.  Now I’m remembering the day before with the tiny little one who cried the whole session we were together.  This is very unusual.  Children don’t often cry with me.  After all, the whole session is like a play session, with wonderful toys, new to the child.   Usually, between ignoring crying behavior and my own personal charm, I can engage the most frustrated child and make him or her forget he wants to go see his mama.  Not this time.  Apparently, I had no charm, but this time I was still a rock star.  Alice Cooper…in the middle of a concert…on Halloween night...in front of a four year old.  Not a fun place to be.

Chinese Cabbage Salad

Another dump recipe.  You don't see me posting homemade bread on here, do you?   I call it a dump recipe because I use the bag of pre-chopped cabbage.  Recently, much to my chagrin, there was no bagged cabbage at the store and I surely wasn’t going to stop at another store on a100+ degree-day.  So I chopped a head of cabbage in my food processor.  My life is so hard!

Anyway, here is my dump Chinese Cabbage Salad recipe.  I had the recipe for a long time before I made it, because I just couldn’t imagine putting uncooked Ramien noodles in it, but, boy, was I wrong!  It’s great.  The crunchy noodles work like crunchy croutons.  If you want to make it ahead of time, keep the cabbage/sauce mixture and the noodle mixture separate until just before serving. 

Chinese Cabbage Salad

Mix:  1 bag chopped cabbage

         1 bunch green onions, chopped

Combine and brown:              1 T. canola oil (use more if needed)

                                                1 oz. sesame seeds

                                                2 pkgs. Ramen noodles with seasoning packets

For sauce, combine and cook 1 minute:                         ½ cup sugar

                                                                                    ¼ c. vinegar

                                                                                    ¾ c. canola oil (may use less)

                                                                                    1 Tablespoon soy sauce

Let the noodles and sauce cool.  Mix the cabbage, sauce and noodles, 20 minutes before serving.

Tip for the sesame seeds:  If you buy them in the spice section at a regular grocery store, they are much more expensive than if you buy them in bulk at a health food or specialty store.  I don’t know why.

Excuse me, I have some of this stuff to eat right now in my frig!  Buh-Bye!

I'm a Maven (Kinda)

I’m a fan of the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.    It was an interesting and hopeful book about how our culture can change on a dime.  A tipping point is defined as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point”.   Gladwell points out that it doesn’t always take a mass of people to make important changes in society.  Sometimes just a few key people start an epidemic and turn history on its ear.  He calls this the Law of the Few.  He follows up with examples.  One example is Paul Revere, who, with his midnight ride, changed a revolution.   The people listened to Revere, instead of just thinking he was crazy, because he already had a relationship with those people.  He was a connector, a person with the rare gift of connecting with people.  Another type of key person is a salesman.   Salesmen are a people who can convince you to agree with their concept or cause. 

A third type of person is a maven.  A maven is a person who likes to collect information and wants to share it with others.  A maven is the person you think of to call with that puzzling question.  There is a difference in a maven and a salesman.  A maven is not necessarily interested in convincing you to believe the information, as is a saleman.  The maven has the information, loves the information, and loves to share the information.  A salesman is expert in convincing other people to agree. 

I’m a maven or a wanna-be maven. While Gladwell gives mavens credit for being great experts, I will not put myself in that category, but I do love my information.  And I can’t help myself; I have to share it.  I get brief glimpses that some people are not as interested in my information as I am.  Ha!  But they have still listened to me.  My apologies and thanks to them.   Some people love to listen to my information.  But it doesn’t matter to me either way.  I love to collect and share my information no matter what the reaction.  I love to share info about books, recipes, experiences, restaurants.  Information is fun.  Information sharing makes me feel joyful.

Why does the book The Tipping Point give me hope?  History is full of examples where critical people in critical places make change happen.  Systems can change and they can change because of the input of these key people.  Schools can change, governments can change, and organizations can change.  In spite of the pessimism of our culture (or is it the pessimism of our media) these days, I have hope.   I have no expectation that I will impact change in a huge system.  However, maybe I can be an expert at my job, at my church and with my friends and encourage change in a positive direction.   Maybe I can be a little voice who says, “It’s possible that we could…” If you’re a salesman or a connector and think I have some good information, help me.  If you think I’m wrong, feel free to ignore. 

You Cannot Dial-A-Child

 One thing I’ve learned, in watching AT grow up, is that you cannot Dial-A-Child.  This was brought to the forefront this week when we went to a museum.   When I was a child, we always hit the museums, given the opportunity, and my dad liked taking the role of a teacher, saying, “What do you think that is?”  Often, I knew the information and I also knew that he was pleased when I had the answer.  He probably doesn’t even realize it to this day how much I saw him as a teacher when I was a child.  Now as an adult, I enjoy the role of being a teacher and I give him credit for my being a teacher now.

So, with my own child, I harbored fantasies that I would be teaching facts, that she would be a voracious reader (as am I), that we would share information, that we would share books to read.   When she was little, I promise I read to her constantly.  I imagined that when she was a preteen, I would read wonderful young adult books and pass them on to her.  We would go to the museum and she would be amazed and interested in the information I found.  I, in turn, would be amazed at her prior knowledge. 

Ha!  I repeat….Ha!

That’s not the child of my household, and, at the museum this week, I had a twinge.  Where was this mini-me that I had dreamt of?   Why was she dancing and prancing, instead of looking at the excellent exhibits?  Instead, I have a child who is intense, imaginative, and determined to manage her own ship. She loves her family and friends intensely.   She wants to read for information, not pleasure.  She wants to write her own books, not read the books of others.  She wants to draw, to create.  I’ve learned her creative soul does not want the 5 steps to a project, starting at step one (which is the way my mind works).  Her creative soul wants to create and ask for help only when there is a problem.  She may check in with me for the first time at step four.  Her conversations are peppered with “What would you do if….?” and I’m not even going to fill in that blank because her questions are so far out there and crazy and funny.   When she was younger, her imagination would get her in trouble, because she would ask herself “what-if” questions until she stirred herself up into a frenzy of worry.  We would even say, “No more ‘what-if’ questions.”  She’s matured out of that, thank goodness.

She is socially adept, not shy, like I was as a preteen and teen.  She didn’t want to be out of school this summer because of all the new friends she made at her new school last year. I watched her as a three-year-old, initiate conversation with the leader of the band. As an 11-year-old, she appropriately inserted herself into the conversation with the dad of a child star, so well so that the dad later came to retrieve her to meet the star.   

She is determined to be the master of her own ship.  She knows what she wants, what she approves of, and where she wants to go.  She has firm boundaries around her.  And, in the end, she will be the master of her own ship, as all our children are, and I’ll be left on the shore, holding my breath, whispering “Diligence, diligence!” and waving goodbye.  I did not have the opportunity to Dial-A-Child, but I think God knew what he was doing.  

32 Years of Speech-Language Pathology

Next week, I’ll start back to school, working as a speech-language pathologist in an elementary school.  I have been in this field for 32 years now.  I am so blessed to have a job that I love so much.  When I was in my second year of college, I had never met a speech-language pathologist (SLP).  I was running out of classes and electives to take without  declaring my major and I was loosing steam.  Why was I in college if I didn’t even know what I wanted to do?  Then, one day, it clicked.  I don’t know why.  There was no SLP major at the college I was attending.  I remember a photograph of a child in speech therapy and I had a friend who was majoring in deaf education, but I remember no other connections to the SLP world. 

Once I decided, though, I was sure.  I would have to transfer to a college out of state, but it still close to my home.  The plant where my dad worked was in the process of shutting down.  My dad was very serious about never promising anything if he couldn’t follow though.  One day, he would say he thought I might be able to go; then next, he would say that he wasn’t sure.  He found work successfully and I was able to transfer.

My first semester at my new school, I started my SLP classes and loved them.   I could not wait to finish and use my new skills.  A few years ago, when I was at a workshop and walking across a college campus, I had a flashback to all those steps I walked across my old campus and all those hours I worked.  I thought that I really did give it my best during those years.  It was a good feeling.  And 32 years later, the field still fits my personality.  There have been moments when I was frustrated with a job site, but I have never wanted to leave the field.  Being an SLP, requires problem solving, organization, behavior-management, and continual learning.   It demands that you give to others.  I have worked in hospitals, nursing homes, and in private practice.  I have taught at the university level.  For the past 11 years, I have been in the public schools (working only 9 months a year is great fun also).   I work with a wonderful administration now and have a certain amount of autonomy.  Our school is very inclusive, i.e., students with special needs are in the regular classroom as much as possible, and watching the students’ progress is amazing.  Since I’ve been at one school for so long, I’ve started evaluating the nieces and nephews of former students.  I’m seeing the next generation!

Some people my age are thinking about retirement.  There are moments that it sounds like a good idea.  But I can easily imagine myself working for many more years.   Over the years, when I’ve heard of an SLP retiring, or changing careers, I’ve always wondered why.  What a lucky SLP I am!

Mexican Fiesta Dinner

This is not to be confused with my previous post.  It is just a coincidence that the word “fiesta” is in each recipe.  The previous recipe is expensive and, these days, expensive is not usually what you need.   It also takes much preparation time on the stove, which equals heat in the kitchen.   This recipe is great for hot days, because the only heat is from the microwave chili recipe I will include at the end.  Even though it is made in the microwave, it is one of the best I have tasted.  It is great for a potluck at your house where you make the chili and your guests each bring an item on the list following.  You’ll understand by the end of the post.  Just bear with me….

Oh, and yes, we really do not eat much meat at home.  I save it for company!  Does that make us flexitarians?  That really is a term being used these days – people who eat mostly vegetarian, but will eat meat on occasion.  If you are vegetarian, you can easily change to a veggie chili.

OK, here’s the Mexican Fiesta Dinner.  If you decide to do it potluck, people each bring one or two items on the list below.  Here’s a tip – don’t assign a critical item to a person who is always late!  I did that once.

 

Arrange this meal buffet style and let people pile up their plates as they wish.

Lay out food in this order on the buffet:

Fritos or Doritos chips

Rice

Chili

Grated cheese

Lettuce

Chopped tomatoes

Chopped onions

Green olives

Black olives

Pecans

Shredded coconut

Salsa

Sour cream

Microwave Chili

1 lb. very lean ground beef

1 chopped onion

1 chopped green pepper

1 or 2 cans kidney beans

1 14 oz. can tomatoes

1 6 oz. can tomato paste

Crushed garlic clove or powder

1 t. salt (I omit)

½ teaspoon cumin

2 tablespoons chili powder

Put all ingredients in one microwave-safe bowl and microwave for 5 minutes.  Stir.  Microwave for 10 minutes.  Stir.  Microwave for 10 minutes and it’s done!