For some strange reason, I actually like greens, and when I was looking for something to go with our New Year jambalaya, it had to be collard greens. The key to good, Southern-style greens is lots and lots of fatty pork, and we all know bacon is the world’s best fatty pork.

I needed a side dish filler to go with various Mexican dishes I serve at home (so that I can get away with serving less of the expensive stuff), and this fits the bill. Some of my kids really love it, while others just ignore it and focus on the expensive dishes. I’ve listed it here with Instant Pot instructions, since that’s how I now prepare it, but it’s easy enough to adapt to a regular stove top.

I love Chile Rellenos, but the level of effort is just too high to make at home. This casserole, on the the other hand, is simple enough to serve occasionally. We’ve been making this for a few years now, but when I had to go digging through a box of loose recipes in order to make it for Christmas Eve the other night, I realized I’d better get it online.

For our church Christmas dinner this year, we were invited to dress up in biblical costumes and imagine that we were in Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth. Unfortunately, we were one of only two families that actually dressed up, and the meal served was ham and potatoes. That was fine, but it put my wife and I in the mood to go a little bit further at home. So when Christmas Eve came, we decided to serve a meal closer to what might have been eaten in Bethlehem during that time period. It’s certainly not accurate, but it did give a better feel for what it might have been like to be there and gave us things to talk about that centered more on the birth of Jesus instead of presents and Santa Clause.

My wife has been a big fan of this type of soup for a long time, but this is only the first or second time I’ve attempted to make it for her myself. Fortunately, it turned out so well that I had to record the recipe for the future. To make it fancier, you can garnish it with sour cream, grated cheese, diced avocado, tortilla chips, and/or chopped fresh cilantro.

Since I can no longer eat pita bread or gyros meat (because it contains breadcrumbs), this is the best I can do for a Greek food fix. Luckily, this combination is fabulous.

One Monday evening my kids were begging for a sweet treat, but there wasn’t anything readily available. It sounded like too much effort to mix and bake cookies or cupcakes (even if my daughter did it), and I didn’t feel like driving everybody through the McDonald’s drive through for a 59 cent ice cream cone.

I published my award-winning chili recipe mostly because I sometimes forgot how to make it between the infrequent competitions I participated in. That, and I doubted anybody would bother compete with me using my own recipe. It’s a reasonably high level of effort.

I’m a big fan of enchiladas, but none of the canned sauces I’ve tried came anywhere close to what I can get in local restaurants. When I researched how to make my own, I learned that enchilada sauce isn’t really native to Mexico, it’s Tex-Mex. It’s what happens when you take Southern-style gravy and add chili powder to it. It’s chili gravy!

Most of the kids at my house love to douse every Mexican meal with taco sauce, but at $2.50 and up for a 7 ounce bottle, I just couldn’t keep us supplied. A little googling uncovered a few recipes for inspiration, and this is what I settled on. It makes about a quart, which lasts us two weeks or so.

I think this is one of the few salads that Rachel and I both really like. The combination of both sweet and savory elements is simply divine.

Chimichurri is a marinade and/or sauce for beef, originally from Argentina, although I’m sure my recipe is not authentic. I actually made this a couple months back, but never got around to posting the recipe. Luckily, I saved the scrap of paper that I made up the recipe on, since it was a distillation of what I liked about a number of recipes. You can use it to marinade steaks (or other meat) or serve it at the table as a condiment.

I got tired of buying small bottles of marinade for $3+ every time I wanted teriyaki chicken or beef, so I went Googling to find how to make it myself. As usual, I found a wide variety of recipes with different ingredients, so I cherry-picked what I liked from each. This is the result, suitable for 1 – 2 pounds of meat. This could also be thickened with arrowroot powder or cornstarch and served over vegetables.

This “eggplant dip” is vaguely similar to hummus and is used in the same way, but the texture is quite different.

I was feeling creative this weekend. I wanted chicken pizza, but I also wanted Greek food, so I just decided to mix the two. Since I’m still following a slow-carb diet, I used a whole wheat low-carb tortilla instead of the pita, which wasn’t bad. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Now that I’ve pretty much switched to a “slow-carb-style” diet, I’ve wanted something to give raw vegetables some flavor. I’ve enjoyed hummus for years, but usually on pita bread, which I’m not eating right now. Like most of my recipes, I arrived at this one by combining the aspects I liked from a number of recipes found while searching Google.

It was reported at telegraph.co.uk (as well as a number of other sites) that when scientists fed an extract of kimchi (a spicy Korean lacto-fermented cabbage dish similar to sauerkraut) to 13 chickens infected with avian flu, 11 of the birds showed signs of recovery at the end of 1 week.