Check out Sunny's sweet and sour ribs

I love sweet and sour dishes, and this one sounds really yummy and simple too. I like adding the sliced ginger to the boiling water. I'll bet that adds tons of flavor. I also like the little pouch that she put her spices in. Would love to have some of those.

Just did a bit of research on the spice bags. The thing to shop for is refillable tea bags or spice bags or loose leaf tea bags. Anything for handling loose leaf tea would also work for your cooking spices as well. I've even seen some metal devices for loose tea that would work for cooking spices too. They're called tea balls.

In fact, here's a video that shows how you can make a very simple spice bag for your cooking spices.



Hope you enjoyed this post,
happy cooking. -- jd --

No recipe cooking -- green beans

Hey there everyone! How are you doing?
I was just sitting here at my computer, and decided to put up a blog post here. It's the beginning of a series of posts that I've been thinking about for a while.

No recipe cooking

My mom cooked this way, and my grandmothers cooked this way; but I'm wondering - How many people still cook this way? Or know how?

So this is the first of a (hopefully) series of posts sharing my knowledge of no recipe cooking.

This is how my mom put meals on the table 7 days a week. And they were very tasty meals too. Stuff like vegetable soup, spaghetti, ribs, pork chops, chili, etc. About the only times we used recipes was on holidays when we wanted to make something special, and then it would only be about 1-3 recipes. Speaking of recipes, here's your first lesson in no recipe cooking:

green beans

Now for green beans, I like canned green beans the best. Frozen green beans just don't taste that good to me. So,

Take 2 cans of green beans and open them, then drain off all the liquid. You do not want to cook the green beans in the liquid they were canned in. For cooking liquid, add some water. I prefer bottled spring water, but tap water will be okay too.

Put your drained green beans in a pan, add enough water to barely cover the beans. Now for the seasonings:

salt
pepper
chopped ham

Stir this to mix in the seasonings, then add 2-3 pats of butter to the pan. Put it on low heat, and cook for 30-45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Other seasonings ideas are:
your favorite spice,
your vinegar,
bacon bits,
ketchup,
mustard,
steak sauce,
sweet and sour sauce,
lemon juice.

And no, I didn't give any measurements for the seasonings. That's part of no recipe cooking. You don't measure much, but know just from looking or tasting, what is just right.

In closing, I leave you with this thought:
Err on the side of too little seasoning rather than too much. You can add more, but you can't take too much out.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Till my next one.
If you have a request for my next no recipe post, just comment below.