This is Mama Miche and today in My Magic Kitchen: Kitchen Sink Salad with Creamy Avocado Dressing!

The creamy avocado dressing is the star of any salad it tops. I love making it fresh and it’s perfect when you’re doing a fridge purge and need to use the avocados. We started keeping our avocados in water in the fridge and it’s the best hack to keep avocados fresh in the fridge for a month! I was constantly throwing out avocados and let’s face it, food is way too expensive to throw out. We all have some waste but we do our best to use what we buy and not waste food or money.

This is Mama Miche and today in My Magic Kitchen: Taco Salad.
This is the next in our summer salad series, but this is a hit any time of the year.

If you have picky eaters, it can be such a pain in the ass to feed them and I almost became a short-order cook. I realized, right quick, that I was not up to cooking that many meals for a family of four. I wasn’t running a restaurant so I established the same rules I grew up with. My Momster would tell me to try it if you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it. That worked for me. I was an adventurous eater and developed a desire to try new things.

Do you think it worked on my tiddly peeps? Hell no! They wouldn’t even take a “no, thank you bite”, and I was discouraged. So, I always had 2 things I knew they would eat (carrot sticks, watermelon, rice, or pasta) and I knew they wouldn’t starve. Eventually, I wore them down. Now, they try new things. Our son turns 15 soon and like most boys his age, eats his weight in food. He is proud of the fact that he has helped his picky friends try new foods at our home. Now, one of his friends eats more than chicken nuggets, fries, and pizza. Tacos were one of the foods he tried at our home and liked. That and my butter chicken won him over. I’ll share that recipe soon! It’s a winner, too.

We’re doing a series on summer salads starting with this tasty bit of summer sunshine! The perennial pasta salad. This particular pasta salad has a Mediterranean profile and can be adjusted in many ways. Prefer feta? Use feta? Like olives? Add olives! The most essential ingredients are the Twice Stolen Spice™ and love. Make your kitchen magic this summer!

My mom enjoyed cooking and entertaining guests, so clearly the apple didn’t fall far. We had a friend who owned Uncle King’s, a Chinese restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue and he would come to our apt. on days off and teach us how to cook authentic Chinese food. I don’t remember specifics other than whatever we made was delicious. This fried rice is also delicious. I encourage you to make it your own with your veggie choices, if you add meat or keep it plant based. It’s a great refrigerator cleaner outer.

Who knew that adulting meant figuring out what to eat every single day?!? If you’re a parent or caregiver responsible for meal planning and cooking for a family as well as working full-time, you know it’s not always easy to put a healthy meal on the table. Or is it?

Well, sheet! Yes, sheeeeet. Sheet pans covered in foil for easy clean up and your choice of a protein and veggies to roast is the easy answer. So many different options and they’re all delicious and easy and healthy! All you need to add is olive or avocado oil and seasoning! You already know, our Twice Stolen Spice™ is what we use. You can serve it up as is or with a sauce, a side… even noodle salad.

This is Mama Miche and today in My Magic Kitchen: Chicken with Spinach Artichoke Cream Sauce.

I’m gonna share something about my hubster today. He has always claimed that he is not a great writer, but my hubs can write. You should hear the wedding vows he wrote. He’s also a great editor, too. Helps me immeasurably with my own writing.

And he’s funny, and witty, and can turn a phrase. One of my favorites is what he says after I create a new recipe. “Hey hon, did you pull this one outta your ass?” Always fun to hear anything about food and asses in the same sentence. AM I RIGHT??? Anyhoo, this delicious and easy recipe for a quick weeknight meal or a dinner party, is one that came out of my ass. My hubster and kids all love it. It is a great chicken dish and full of flavor.

This is Mama Miche and today in My Magic Kitchen - Sausage and Peppers

Food glorious food! I really love eating. Who doesn’t love good food? I learned my kitchen skills from many teachers. My Momster of blessed memory, of course; cookbooks and the internet have been quite informative, too. An ex-boyfriend, I lived with briefly in Nashville, was a chef and I learned beaucoup from him - especially about presentation. As a singer/songwriter living in Nashville, I worked in bars, restaurants, and catering companies to pay the rent. And I mean 5-star establishments to dive bars and everything in between. There was something to learn in every environment.

Life is best lived like a sponge, soaking up knowledge. I’ve learned you occasionally have to wring that sponge out to get rid of the dirt and grime that come along with that quest. Every situation is a learning opportunity, especially the painful ones, am I right? I know I’m not the only one that looks back on their lives and says, “Oh! So that’s why I went through that mess to learn X, Y, or Z.”

Between the lifestyle choices I made in my youth, various traumas, and good ol’ genetics, I’m dealing with a myriad of health challenges in middle age. So I’ve made changes in every room in my life, including the kitchen. I have changed many recipes I grew up with in order to be able to still enjoy them without causing inflammation, pain, and gastrointestinal issues. I try to use whole foods and fresh herbs and spices that are healing.

Today, in Mama Miche’s Magic Kitchen, we are making breakfast burritos for Mother’s Day Brunch.

Mother’s Day is this coming Sunday and it is a bittersweet day for the motherless daughters with children of their own.

I remember one Mother’s Day after my parents divorced. Immediately after, my Momster and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment for a couple of years and it wasn’t a nice place. It wasn’t a clean building, so keeping critters out was hard.

My grandmother didn’t like us living in those conditions so she helped us move across the street to a new building. She had already moved into a place of her own in the building and offered to help my mom with the rent for our apartment so we could be safer. She wanted us to be in a clean apartment in a building with a doorman. And I had a bedroom all to myself again.

I cooked them Mother’s Day dinner for the first time in that apartment. I was around 10. My grandmother could be a nasty piece of work and she quickly tore apart the menu. She didn’t like this or didn’t like that about the meal. My Momster said she loved it, just like Moms do. My mom was often caught in the middle of disagreements between my grandma and me. I don’t think I ever cooked anything for my grandmother again.

This is Mama Miche and today in My Magic Kitchen, we are making a meal from one of the many food delivery services out there - Green Chef. Today’s meal kit is Southwest Turkey Stuffed Peppers. We’ve tried a couple of other similar services but this was by far our favorite. Green Chef offers recipes with GF or vegan or paleo, or whatever! It is the most versatile service to accommodate our lifestyle.

Green Chef has a diverse menu to keep mealtime interesting and new every time. The recipes are flavorful and delicious and even the kids love almost everything we prepare. They allow me to have a wonderful meal and not have to worry about feeling bad afterward. It’s a great addition to my repertoire of dishes to serve during the week.

Today in My Magic Kitchen we are making a popular treat that we serve at our parties. There are many recipes for bacon-wrapped smokies and they’re all very simple. You can just wrap the smoky with the bacon and leave it at that. I mean it’s bacon for God's sake! It’s perfect as it is, right? The Memphis Mojo Rub™ can be used in so many ways, it’s not just for smoking meats, and it really adds so much to this recipe. You can have a touch of maple syrup for your favorite barbecue sauce, which will soon be Jeffro’s own sauce when we bring it to a store near you.

We started calling this crowd-pleasing appetizer favorite “Sin In Damnation” because it is an artery clogger and it’s definitely not kosher. They are so cute, bite-sized, and tasty so it’s easy to overindulge. Never do I recommend doing that. With anything this addictive, exercise caution and moderation. That old expression “too much is never enough” does not apply here! In my experience, it never applies. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. A little bit of sin in damnation is good for the soul, but too much is bad for the butt! 

Today in the Magic Kitchen we’re making wings with our Memphis Mojo Rub™. My hubster, Jeff, was born in Detroit, but grew up in Memphis and he called it home for almost 40 years. His late father, John, bought him his first grill - a Webber Kettle - when he was about 20. His love of cooking over an open flame was born. Over the years, he tried many excellent rubs, and from all of these he was inspired to make his own unique blend. But unlike almost every other dry rub, this organic blend does not contain any sugar. We prefer the subtle sweetness of honey mixed with mustard to help the rub stick to the meat. The result is Papa Jeffro’s Memphis Mojo Rub™, available soon in the Magic Pantry™. It’s good dry or with sauce on anything you put on the grill or in the smoker. The result is some slap yo’ mama good barbeque! But don’t slap this mama! I hit back!

Today in my magic kitchen we are making a delicious breakfast for the Passover holiday week - Matzo Brei.

No need to say God bless you! It may sound like a sneeze for those who don’t know what a matzo brei is, but it is a delicious breakfast. It makes a great use of matzo and is similar to French toast or huevos rancheros. I substitute the bread or tortilla chips with... you guessed it, Matzo.

After a couple of days of eating cardboard, which is how my Momster would describe matzo, you do need to find different ways of cooking with the ingredients that are “kosher for Passover” and matzo is key to the week long holiday. It’s so important to the story of Passover which is why it is one of the four questions that the youngest child must ask at a Seder dinner, why do we eat matzo? We are Jews. We suffer. That is why.