Arugula Pesto with grilled fish or chicken

This is largely a Rachael Ray recipe. Make the pesto, put it on fish or chicken before cooking. OR, you can just make the pesto and stir it into a nice angel hair pasta. To make it semi-healthy, we make a whole grain angel hair and then toss the pesto and the cooked pasta into a frying pan for a minute over medium heat. Pan cooking the fish or chicken works well too, if you don’t have a grill running. We don’t use a food processor, a small magic bullet or hand held Cooks food chopper works great. It will make enough for dinner for 4. Ingredients 1/4 cup pistachios 1 cup packed fresh arugula leaves 1/2 cup packed fresh basil leaves 1/2 lemon, juiced. Lime works too. 1 clove garlic, grated or minced Freshly ground black pepper 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive...

A Foleyisland Thanksgiving feast

Editor’s note: This is going to take a while. Over the next couple weeks we’ll rebuild our 2010 Thanksgiving feast. Usually we just dig out our usual recipes, but we’ve never put them online. Almost all of the following include our traditional Thanksgiving feast. But this year we did our turkey different. So we’re going to start there, and edit the rest in when time allows. Don is in charge of the Turkey, Gravy and Rice as well as the Green Beans, and since he writes all of this stuff on the blog, these are the first things we’ll cover. The girls handle the hard stuff, which include foods from our travels such as corn pudding from Tangier Islands and popovers from Mt. Desert Island. Of course, it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving...

Hiccup cure

I was just going through an hour-long hiccup session, and I finally decided to do the classic Foley hiccup cure. And it worked like a charm. We’ve been doing this for years. Pour an 8 ounce glass of water. Put a pencil, or pen across your mouth, like you were biting it. Drink the whole glass of water. I have never had this fail, including my hiccup session a few minutes ago. We didn’t invent this, but I can’t remember where I heard it from. Perhaps a ‘Dear Helloise” column from the 70’s. But it works.

Painless Chicken

This almost isn’t even a recipe, but it tastes great and we use it all the time. Good on its own, and fantastic as a sandwich. They key is to cook it so once the chicken is done, pull it off. Overcooked, dried chicken would kill this easy recipe. Note, we’re cooking for 2 these days, so volume can be expanded as needed. Future Note on volume Since we’re cooking for 2, and the origin of this site was to carry on some of our favorite recipes to our children, it actually  makes sense that this new round of recipes would apply to college students cooking for themselves and not a big group. So we now have a new focus and energy for these postings. While both girls are currently in dorms, in the near future they may find some recipes that will apply...

Parmesan Crusted Chicken

Don started cooking this this after the kids head off to college, mostly because he usually has some chicken breasts around and always has some sort of parmesan cheese. It’s an easy meal to make for one or two. The Kraft grated stuff is expensive at Publix, but is pretty good for most of our recipes. Just don’t try it with that yucky dried stuff we all grew up on. This is the worlds’ easiest great tasting chicken, quick, involves 4 ingredients and tastes great. We will just cook this up and serve it with some steamed broccoli for dinner. You can use a whole, skinless breast, or you can plop the breast down on a cutting board, and with a sharp knife, cut it in half horizontally. This cooks faster and is actually all the protein we probably need....

Don’s clam fiesta

We had a hankering for clams today, so Don worked up this off-the-cuff recipe and it was a feast! Some of the ingredients were just things we had around and could be dropped out if needed. Less than half an hour from start to finish. You can prep stuff while the first items go into the skillet and then keep it moving. This will work with little necks, top necks and mussels as well. We just like middle necks for cooking. While it was a fantastic dish, Don’s only thought was that he wished he had some red bell pepper in here, some nice long slices for flavor, color and contrast. They would have gone in with the sausage. Key thing to make this work is remember, it’s all about the clams. Once they go in… you have 7 minutes and all your pasta and...