This is my first recipe while making an attempt at Weight Watchers along with my wife. There are many oxtail soup recipes out there, this one is extremely easy, and done in less than an hour with a pressure cooker.

Ingredients

• 2-3/4 lb. raw oxtail
• 2 packets Won Ton instant soup mix (Dragonfly brand)
• 1 small head nappa cabbage
• little bunch of cilantro
• A few stalks of green onion
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil

Directions

Put 1 tablespoon of sesame oil in the pressure cooker, and heat up hot. Brown the oxtails.

While the oxtails are browning in the pot, mix a package of won ton instant soup mix into 3 cups of warm water. Pour the soup mix into the pot. Mix up another package of won ton soup mix into 3 more cups of water, and add that in there, too. Chop up the green onion and cilantro and toss that in the pot.

Close up the pressure cooker, and following the usual processes, cook under pressure for 30 minutes. Watch the temperature so that not too much steam escapes. You want the pot to be pressurized, but you do not want all the liquid to steam out.

After 30 minutes, release pressure using the cold water release method. Chop up 1 small head of nappa cabbage, and place it on top of the soup, avoiding the urge to stir it in.

Close the pressure cooker back up, and return to the stove. Cook for an additional 10 minutes under pressure, and cool using the cold water release method.

Now you got some pretty good oxtail soup without too much effort.

Nutritional Info

I don't have much nutritional info for this soup, as getting useful information on oxtail is pretty much impossible. Lots of the oxtail is bone, so weight alone isn't a good measure. Figuring out how much meat comes off the bone isn't easy, either. The Weight Watchers site shows "Oxtail Soup, Hawaiian (1 cup)" as 7 points. So, that's what I'll say for mine.

The other day I wanted to make some arroz con pollo in the ol' pressure cooker, but decided to go about it slightly differently. I started out by working over the Arroz Con Pollo recipe in Pressure Cookers for Dummies, and twisted it a bit. I forgot the specific directions, so that's going to make this more a set of guidelines rather than detailed instructions, but here goes:

Ingredients

• 1 cup or so uncooked long grain rice
• 1 7-oz can El Pato hot tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup red wine
• 10 green olives
• 1 green bell pepper (next time I'd use a red one)
• 1 onion
• Some chicken things. I think I used 5.
• Water. But how much? I think I did 2 cups and a splash.
• Garlic, onion, all that.

Really vauge directions

Cut everything up. I didn't cut up the olives, though, so that complaining children could easily pick 'em out. Next time, they get diced up. Anyhow, brown the chicken off. Toss in diced onion and bell pepper, and brown that up, too. Now pour in the wet stuff, and toss in the olives, too. Pour in the uncooked rice and stir it up to get everything evenly distributed. Close up the lid of the ol' steamer pot, and cook for 10 minutes. For me, with an electric range, this means I use two burners, one on high, the other on half. Once the cooker comes up to pressure, I start the timer, and slide the cooker to the other burner. I aim to keep the pressure up but have just a small amount of steam escaping.

Well, when all was said and done, this came out pretty good. The olives gave it a nice kick, an idea I got from my dad while visiting in Hawaii. He used green olives in the rice and it was great.

I ended serving this up to the kids not directly, but rather, as the filling within burritos, which I then grilled in a hot pan to give 'em a nice crunchy outside. mmmmm.

Last night, I wanted to make a nice batch of oxtail stew. I wanted a spicy flair to it, a slight Mexican influence.

At the store I picked up a 27 oz. can of El Pato tomato sauce, labeled "Hot". I figured it wouldn't be that hot, so I picked up a 7 oz. can of chipotle peppers. These ones.

I went over to the produce section and picked up a nice box of little orange and red peppers in a plastic shell case. I thought those were bell peppers. Some onions, some carrots, and to home I went.

At home I took out a pack of oxtails, and some pearl barley I always intended to use for something. I got out my handy Fagor Splended 6-quart pressure cooker, and browned the oxtail and tossed in some onions, and poured in the El Pato, and added in maybe a half cup of water, just enough to get some liquid in the pot. I put in a half cup of the pearl barley, figuring it would cook up nicely like rice does.

After getting the pot rollin' for 8 minutes, I cooled it down using the cold water release method and opened the lid. The stew was smelling magnificent, if not a bit hot. The barley was looking like gravel, not too good.

Anyhow, I put in the other vegetables on top, sealed it up and let 'er rip for another 8 minutes. Around 5 minutes into it, I smell the dreaded "cigarette butts" smell of food burning in the pressure cooker. I have no idea how something can burn underwater, but it does, and it did. Ugh. I slid the cooker off the hot burner and over to a cool one, to give the stew a few more minutes to cook under it's own heat.

When the timer went off at 8 minutes, I again cooled the pot down with the cold water release method, and opened it up. The stew smelled pretty good, but it was also clear it was scorched on the bottom. I ladeled up a bowlful on top of some brown rice and let it cool down enough to eat.

It was the Oxtail Stew of Death. Those little peppers weren't bell peppers, they were very hot peppers, sort of like jalapenos, but they wern't exactly those. I did remove all the seeds, but those babies were hot hot. The El Pato and chipotle are fantastic stuff, and I plan on doing this again, but whoo, this stuff I cooked up would melt plastic. It's good but mega spicy. I served it up anyway to Rachel and Justin. Rachel had some, but yeah, it was too hot for her. It was definitely too hot for Justin, but he ended up dipping a tortilla in it and used it as a sort of salsa.

I'll be making this again, just not so deadly.

The photo might look like a disaster on a plate, and it is. I was busy woofing down when I decided to take a pic. This is what I call "Chicken and Pig." While wandering the aisles of New Sagaya after church on Sunday, I was truly inspired. I wanted chicken, I wanted ribs. Why not have both? So it's "Chicken and Pig." This isn't necessarily a total low-carb recipe, but it is a pressure cooker recipe.

Chicken and Pig

• 1 pound of chicken drumsticks
• 1-3/4 pound of pork spareribs
• 1 20-ounce can of pineapple slices
• 2 15-ounce cans of tomato sauce.
• 1 tablespoon shredded ginger
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 10 packets of Splenda
• 4 shallots, peeled and quartered
• 3/4 cup cane vinegar, or white vinegar
• Splash of sesame oil

I have this big ol' Chinese meat cleaver. I love it. Anyhow, I cut a rack of spareribs down into individual pieces, that is, I cut each rib apart. I got about a dozen ribs. The ribs weighted about 1-3/4 pounds. I also got four chicken drumsticks, which were about 1 pound total. Mind you, the specific weights are not that important, just get some chicken and some spareribs.

Get out your trusty Fagor Splendid 6-quart pressure cooker (see sidebar and buy one, okay?). Put the pot on medium-high, and add in sesame oil, some garlic, and some ginger. Brown the chicken and the spare ribs a few at at time. Set the browned pieces aside, and as you remove some, add in a little more sesame oil, garlic, and ginger for the next batch.

After all the chicken and spareribs are browned off, slide the pot off the burner, toss in the shallot and brown those up, too. There will be enough residual heat to do the job. After the shallots look nice, pour in the two cans of tomato sauce and return the pan to the hot burner. Open up the can of pineapple, and pour all the pineapple juice into the pot. Cut the pineapple slices into quarters and toss those in the pot. Put all the other stuff but the meat in, too. Stir it up, oh yeah. The stuff in that pot should start smelling pretty good once it starts warming up. Mmm. Add in the chicken and the pork.

Everything is in the pot now, right? Right. Put the lid on the pot, and turn the burner up to high. Turn an adjacent burner to half-power. Once the pressure cooker comes up to pressure, carefully transfer it to the half-power burner, and allow to cook for 10 minutes. Cool off using the cold-water release method. You now got a fine mess of Chicken and Pig. Dump this mess over some steaming rice and whoo, this is what the local folks (from Hawaii) would call "Ono Grinds". Ho.

While on the Big Island of Hawai'i, we found this incredible white chocolate ginger ice cream, served out of a tiny ice cream shop located in Kawaihae. Was it Kawaihae? Ooh, well, the tiny town next to Hapuna Beach. Anyhow, the white chocolate ginger ice cream was off the scale.

Back in Anchorage, I'm trying to duplicate that delicious ice cream, except in a sugar-free low-carb style. Yes, sugar-free low-carb. I'm trying to recover from the "10 pounds in 11 days" festival of overeating. Ice cream makes perfect sense.

I'm not going to use white chocolate, instead I'll be going with non-sweetened flaked coconut.

Ginger Ice Cream with Flaked Coconut

• 1 pint heavy whipping cream
• 1 cup goat milk
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
• 10 packets of Splenda
• 1 big piece of nice Hawaiian ginger from the Costco in Kona

Combine everything but the ginger in a saucepan. Mix up with a wisk. Heat on low. The idea here is to get the mix up to 160 f. to kill off any bacteria.

With the saucepan going, turn your attention to the ginger. The piece of ginger I'm working with dwarfs the typical wimpy piece of ginger we get in the local supermarket. The piece might weigh almost a pound. It's big. Anyhow, I started by shaving down maybe a quarter of that ginger, peeling it, and squeezing small pieces in a garlic press, squeezing the precious ginger juice into my ice cream mix. After giving it a taste, it wasn't gingery enough, so I took the remaining ginger, peeled it, diced it into little bits, and tossed it all into the ice cream mix.

So now I've got this ice cream mix chock full of ginger. After about 5 minutes to extract the ginger flavor, I strained the mix through a strainer, and returned about a tablespoon of the smallest pieces back to the mix. I put the ice cream mix into the refrigerator to chill prior to going into the ice cream machine.

My 7 Days of Cheesecake was a great success, but after a rather indulgent few weeks, all but three or so pounds have found their way back to me. In our fridge is a rather large jar of Adams no-sugar-added peanut butter. I was inspired. 7 Days of Celery. I would eat celery for seven days, troweling in all the peanut butter I could manage.

So, without further ado, here are the details

Day 1 - Starting weight: 176 lbs
    Breakfast: Celery with peanut butter
    Lunch: Celery with peanut butter
    Dinner: Celery with peanut butter, celery with cream cheese, celery with hot Thai peanut sauce (mmm!)

Day 2 - Starting weight: 174.6 lbs
    Breakfast: Celery with peanut butter
    Lunch: Celery with peanut butter
    Dinner: I decided that eating such a stark diet could subject me to scurvy, which often palgued sailors of days gone by. As a safety precaution, I decided it was in my best interests to eat whatever there was to eat at our weekly Bible study, which often has a fairl amount of not-low-carb goodies. True enough, our pastor and his wife had a wonderful casserole consisting of chicken, rice and water chestnuts, baked with cheese on top. I was happy to hear that it contained cream of celery soup, so I did indeed have celery for dinner. Perhaps I had a bit too much, and perhaps it wasn't actually on a stick of celery, but there was celery in it, right? Right.

Day 3 - Starting weight: 174.4 lbs
    Breakfast: Celery with peanut butter
    Lunch: Cleery with peanut butter
    Dinner: Celery with peanut butter, celery with cream cheese, celery with hot Thai peanut sauce. At the hockey game tonight (Alaska Aces over Fresno Falcons, 3-1) I was concerned about the debilitating effects of Rickets, possibly brought on by a celery diet. In an effort to stave off the dread condition, I sacrificed and ate a cheeseburger. I did remove one of the buns, so I'd call it a low-carb cheeseburger.

Day 4 - Starting weight: 173.6 lbs
    Breakfast: Celery with peanut butter
    Lunch: Did up a stir fry with plenty of celery, and a cheese bratwurst. Used a touch of Chinese five spice and powdered star anise. Very Chinese, except for the bratwurst, of course.
    Dinner: Celery with peanut butter, celery with cream cheese, celery with hot Thai peanut sauce; same dinner as before.

Day 4 - Starting weight: 173.4 lbs
    Breakfast: Skipped breakfast, had a breve instead.
    Lunch: Celery bratwurst stir fry again, this time I added in some sesame seed, too. Quite good.
    Dinner: Out of concern that my celery-heavy diet might put me at risk for contracting Beriberi, I decided to indulge a bit at the hockey game tonight. I had a bag of cashews, coated with that delightfully sugary sweet glazed praline nut stuff. Oh yeah. I can't recall if I had a burrito or what, I just don't recall. For what it was worth, tonight's hockey game, normally an enjoyable affair with the Aces over Phoenix 5-2, was marred by Phoenix player Dave Pszenyczny being seriously injured on ice, requiring emergency surgery. Our friends and I prayed for him right there at the rink, and praise Jesus, the medical reports are that his surgery was a success and he should be able to play by next year's season start. Anyhow, celery didn't factor into dinner too much tonight.

Day 5 - Starting weight: 173.6 lbs (yes, that's a gain)
    Breakfast: Okay, this one was a pure blow-out. We ate breakfast at the Hogg Brothers Cafe. Celery was not on the menu. They did have a vegetarian omelette which had celery in it, but that ain't what I ordered. I had a giant omelette with link sausage and Polish sausage in it, absolutely fantatic. Our kids each had one pancake. Thing is, each pancake is the diameter of a medium pizza! Giant. Of course, I had to have a tiny sample of those pancakes, you know, just to be sure they wern't too spicy. Oh, yeah, I followed up breakfast with a breve, too.
    Lunch: Didn't need lunch, probably couldn't even have fit it in if I wanted to. I did swing by Charlie's Bakery for a bubble tea.
    Dinner: Okay, another night at the rink. No celery. Instead, I had a hotdog covered in chili, cheese, and yellow peppers. I didn't eat the bun, however, so I'm sure that made it all okay. Aces won 6-1 over Phoenix, again, and happily, no injuries tonight. I did, however, eat a stick of celery with peanut butter at home, so there was celery eaten today; keeping my theme of 7 Days of Celery on track.
    Ooh, I know tomorrow's weigh-in will not be kind. Too much non-celery in there, oh yeah, way too much.

Day 6 - Starting weight: 175.0 lbs (argh.)
    Breakfast: Celery, Bacon and Cheese omelette, which I made at home. I must admit, today's weigh-in was a bummer. Although it would be easy to blame yesterday's overindulgences, I suspect that instead, maybe the celery in the refrigerator has lost some of it's potency due to aging. Anyhow, I've only got two days to go, so we'll see. If I continue to gain back weight, that must prove that the celery went bad, right? Right?
    Lunch: Didn't have lunch.
    Dinner: Three tamales. I doubt they had celery in 'em, though. Good thing I had that celery omelette.
    And at 9:30 p.m., I had a bowl of cereal and a banana. I had to do a 12-hour fast for some annual blood work.

Day 7 - Starting weight: Did not weigh. (I knew that scale would be hating on me)
    Breakfast: Well, that didn't happen until after the doc's office, I had a 12-oz. breve.
    Lunch: I had a Vanilla Creme protein bar, one of those South Beach Diet ones. They're not that great tasting, but they're filling.
    Dinner: This was sort of the fireworks at the end of the show. Ending my "7 Days of Celery" with a bang, I did up a stir-fry that probably should have served three, and I ate it all.
     
    Celery Leup Cheung Stir-Fry

• 4 stalks celery, diced as you see fit
• a few stalks green onion, diced diagonally
  
• 4 leup cheung sausage, diced diagonally (it's a Chinese sausage with a waxy look and a slightly sweet taste)
• 1/2 onion, chopped, but not too fine. I like big slices
• garlic-chili hot oil paste (another of those Asian grocery items, this stuff is fantastic)
• Hot oil (Sun Luck brand works fine)
• Steamed brown rice (that's what I used, anyway. You want white rice, go for it)
• Oyster sauce (can't cook Chinese without oyster sauce, for sure.)

I heated my wok up good and hot, and slapped in a spoonful of the garlic chili hot oil paste. That stuff immediately made the house fill up with a near toxic cloud of eye-burning vapor. To this I added in a generous splash of hot oil. Now this is a serious cauldron o' oil going. Since this is hot oil, I carefully added in the leup cheung. Once the leup cheung looks right, add in the other ingredients, and shake on a good glob of oyster sauce. Stir it up good, put the wok lid on for a few minutes, stir it a bit, and toss the whole mess on a plate of steamed rice.

This was serioulsy good. Hot, too. Oh, and it had celery.

Final weight: 173.6 lbs. I figured with such a restrictive diet, I would have lost far more. Well, I suppose losing 2.4 pounds over a week is pretty reasonable. I feel like I haven't lost too much muscle mass, and oddly enough, that celery was filling.

First off, I havent' made any of this yet. There is currently no such thing as "Low-Carb Char Siu Bao". I hope to create it, though.

I dug up a bunch of char siu recipies, and blurred them all together to make what I hope works out to be something decent. Here is what I'm going to do for Char Siu mix:

Low Carb Char Siu

• 1-1/2 lb pork roast or some basic slab o' pig
• 1/2 tsp five spice
• 2 tbsp sherry
• 2 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1/2 tsp star anise
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 4pks Splenda

Cube the pork roast (or other basic cut of pork) into small cubes, oh, maybe 3/4" to 1" cube. Doesn't need to be exact. Place aside. Combine remaining ingredients in a 9" round casserole dish and mix well, Add in the cubed pork and stir about to coat the pork evenly. Place in a 300 ° F. oven for 2 hours (use a meat thermometer to be sure pork is fully cooked). Take out of the oven and set aside. Once sufficiently cooled, drain off excess liquid.

Note: The Low Carb Char Siu came out excellent. If you want a low carb char siu without the huge dose of sugar and red dye, this works great.

Char Siu Bao dough

• 1 box MiniCarb Parmesan Herb Pizza Crust Mix*
  

First off, let it be said, the reason I went with Parmesan Herb is because that was what was on the kitchen shelf when I went looking. Mix the low-carb pizza dough per manufacturer's instructions. After mixed, knead the dough for a few minutes, adding water as necessary to keep dough moist and pliable. Knead into a ball and place in a large bowl. Cover with a damp cloth and set aside for two hours to allow dough to rise. Note that the two hours here coincides nicely with the two hours cooking time for the char siu.

At the end of the two hours, the dough will have risen. Punch down the dough and knead it some more. Divide the dough into eight pieces.

With each of the eight pieces, roll out to a decent flat size, and add in a nice fat spoon of char siu. Pinch up the bottom of the dough and, well, google up a char siu bao recipe for better instructions. Anyhow, I steamed mine for 15 minutes.

The net result? Those things steamed up huge, but the split second I opened up the steamer, they collapsed into shriveled up prune things. I have no idea as of now how they taste. I'm not sure that "Char Siu meets Parmesan Herb" is a great idea, but once they cool, I'll have a taste.

Carb count? The pizza dough shows 12 servings per box, 5g total carb, 3g dietary fiber per serving. So, I've made 12 servings of pizza dough into 8 servings of char siu bao, so my math comes up with 7.5g total carb, 4.5g dietary fiber per serving. The char siu mix, well, that depends on how much char siu you decide to cram into each bao, right? I've listed the ingredients, so you can do the calculations if you wish. Me, I'm arbitrarily declaring the char siu filling to come in at 6g per bun, 0g dietary fiber (well, it is meat you know).

And the results
Taste? Let me walk over and try one. {eating} Well, I need to find a plain low-carb dough mix and try again. The parmesan herb is totally overpowering the char siu. The bun texture is very elastic, it's the bun that snaps back! I suspect they would have been much better baked instead of steamed.

* To be fair to the MiniCarb company, they never suggested using their pizza dough for char siu bao dough. They never even suggested using it for a char siu pizza. I'm sure it would have made an excellent pizza crust.

Overall, I'll give these 2 stars out of 5. Or as they might say in Chinese, bu hao bao.

My two-tray bamboo steamer cookin' up the bao.

Four fine bao.

Char Siu Bao, steamed pork bun, manapua, call it what you want. It's good!

I decided to cook up some manapua, or Char Siu Bao for the Chinese folks out there. I dug up a recipe from the Honolulu Star Bulletin (hint, google for "char siu bao") and did up a half order (12 buns). It was my first time ever cooking char siu bao. I didn't have cake flour, I didn't use enough sugar, but other than that, I'd say the results were a great success!

I will often cook up teri burgers for myself and the kids.  I had two burger patties left over from a previous night, and decided to do a cheesecake up with 'em. True, this is not something you would serve up for dessert, but you could serve it up as a lunch or even a dinner.

Ingredients

• Two 1/4 lb Teri Burger patties, cooked.
• 12 oz. cream cheese, softened
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/4 tsp ground onion
• 1 tbsp black pepper
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 2 slices American cheese
• paprika

Directions
Get your 5" springform pan and butter it up. Dust the insides with paprika. Dice up one of the teri burger patties into small cubes and place into the bottom of the cheesecake pan. Dice up the other teri burger patty into smal cubes, and set aside.

Beat the softened cream cheese, and carefully add in the beaten egg.  Add in the other ingredients, and continue to mix until ingredients are mixed in. Mix, but do not beat into a froth.

Pour the batter into the cheesecake pan, and smack the pan down a couple times if the mixture is thick and won't settle. Lay two slices of American cheese on the top of the cake, and wrap with foil; first on the bottom to prevent water seepage into the pan, and then on the top to prevent condensation from settling on top of the cheesecake.

I follow my typical pressure cooker cheesecake preparation directions, cooking for 25 minutes, cooling for 10 minutes, refrigerate overnight. Serve heated. I will typically cut a slice and microwave it for a minute or so to warm it up. I wouldn't be eating this cold.