Salad Nachos

Salad Nachos take a snack off the guilt list. | suzerspace.com

Lunch on Sundays at SuzerSpace is just about always nachos. Good on rainy days, good on sunny days. They pair well with sports, or crafts, or even chores.

You can’t really go wrong with melty cheese and chips, and anything else you add is bonus.

Because I top these with arugula and southwestern salad dressing, I call them “Salad Nachos” and then I feel less guilty about them. Although as long as you keep the fatty items off, and be tight on portion control, nachos don’t necessarily have to be on the bad list anyway.

A quick word about my feature photo – this isn’t a food blog, so I’m showing them exactly how we eat them. I lift them off the baking sheet by the foil, and then wrap that foil around the serving plate.

Classy? Not really. Easy cleanup? You betcha 🙂

Salad Nachos

Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 15 minutes
Total Time 20 minutes
Servings 2

Ingredients

  • Tortilla Chips
  • 1/4 cup Shredded Cheese
  • 1/4 - 1/2 cup Black Beans rinsed and drained
  • Salsa
  • Arugula
  • Southwestern Style Ranch Salad Dressing

Instructions

  1. Line a small baking pan with foil
  2. Place a single layer of chips on the foil, keeping them close together so very little foil shows through.
  3. Add a light layer of black beans, and top that with salsa.
  4. Sprinkle with shredded cheese evenly so everything gets a little.
  5. Place this dish in a cold oven, and turn oven to Bake, 350 degrees. *See first note below
  6. Bake until oven hits preheated temperature, switch to broil. *See second note below.
  7. Remove from oven when cheese and chips are browned and crispy.
  8. Top generously with arugula, sparingly with Southwestern style ranch dressing.

Recipe Notes

  1. I call this cooking method "Two-Stage" cooking, which is I'm using the pre-heating of the oven to warm all the ingredients and then switching over to broil to blast them at the last second. I find if I just broil the nachos, the tops are good, but the beans are cold.
  2. When the nachos are in the first stage of cooking, you've got freedom to do something else, since the oven will beep (or in our case play a song) when it's at 350 degrees. However, when you switch to broil, DO NOT LEAVE the oven, not even for a second. These go from "almost there" to carbon in as long as it takes you to look up that just one more thing on the computer.

 

Show and Tell: Paper Swallows

A string of paper swallows made from a patten found at the krokotak website

Three dimensional paper projects are high on my list of fun things to make. Often I don’t even have an intended use for them, I just want to see how they go together.

Pinterest is on to me, and early last week a pin for these paper swallows landed in my feed. Originally, I ignored it because they looked a little scary. But I liked how quick they appeared to come together, and I figured if I cut them from colorful paper, they’d be much happier looking.

And I was right on all counts.

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Miniature Paper Hyacinths

My obsession with making easy paper flower crafts continues with Hyacinths.
It doesn't matter if Spring is looking like Winter still - bring your own bouquet to the front door | suzerspace.com

MAKE A PAPER FLOWER BOUQUET FOR YOUR FRONT DOOR!

I have actually tried to grow these more than once, but between the squirrels that kept digging up the bulbs, and our well intended but big-footed hound dog that squashed them like King Kong, they never fared well in the SuzerSpace yard.

I’ve seen a couple of posts on how to craft these up, and Pinterest is swarming with them, so I’ve course, I’m going to step in with my version as well.

This craft is super low tech – you need scissors, construction paper and glue.

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Sunday Scrolling: April 9, 2017

Today is the last day in the regular NHL season – the Stanley Cup Playoffs (which are practically a full season themselves) start on Wednesday. While waiting for the playoffs to start, you can entertain yourself with this great noisy site.

Several parks in our area have installed these cool Bicycle repair stations that have a rack, tools and QR codes you can scan to see videos of common bike issues that you can fix. I’m not sure how many manufacturers there are for these, but here’s a map from one of them to see if there are any where you ride.

Via FiveThirtyEight – Apparently there is a Vigilante Grammarian roaming England, correcting apostrophe mistakes in signage. Sometimes I’m tempted to bring my own Sharpie/White Out kit to the grocery store and correct all those misplaced possessives myself.

None of the links in this post are affiliate – they are all just things that caught my interest this week.

Stencil Painted T-Shirt

When I created my personalized bike license plate, I realized that the weeded part of the vinyl letters from my name would be a perfect stencil for a T-shirt.

I’ve painted T-shirts before, but not since I bought my Silhouette Cameo. Blogs abound with the instructions for cutting vinyl for a stencil and then painting either fabric or wood signs, and I definitely wanted to try this technique.

And it turns out it’s pretty easy and fun.

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