How to brew a pot of coffee over a campfire with a special ingredient… eggshells! From the Arizona-Mexico borderlands cookbook author Jackie Alpers.
Paleo, Keto & Low Carb
Spicy Deviled Eggs With Caviar
These spicy, chipotle deviled eggs topped with caviar and capers are fancy yet simple. The perfect party food or indulgent yet healthy snack.
Roast Goose
Recipe for how to defrost and roast a whole goose, and shred the meat for tacos or sandwiches with step-by-step instructions.
Homemade Chile Powder
How to dehydrate and grind chile peppers, with recipes for chili powder and custom spice blends using fresh homegrown and/or exotic store bought chiles. Preserve expensive and/or hard to find chiles.
Chunky Gazpacho
Cold gazpacho recipe with chunky fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions and peppers. The colors in the photo are a bit of an homage to Pedro Almodovar’s wonderful film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), which was the inspiration for me making gazpacho for the very first time, years ago. (Minus the pills and drama.)
Mexican Chicken Salad Tacos
Mexican chicken salad tacos recipe served in lettuce wraps made with rotisserie chicken. Featured in the Glamour.com article, A Week of Delicious Chicken Recipes.
Sonoran-Style Red Pozole
Pozole is a traditional “low-and-slow” braising recipe. It takes about 3½ hours to cook from start to finish because pork shoulder is a fatty cut of meat that takes a while to break down. But the pork fat is what gives this soup its richness. My Sonoran-style version of this dish is topped with lots of fresh vegetables and citrus.
Easy Chile Colorado con Carne
Cubed beef simmered in red chile sauce for enchiladas, tacos, tostadas, salads or burritos. From the Taste of Tucson Cookbook by Jackie Alpers.
Grilled Octopus
Recipe for Mediterranean diet grilled octopus served with scallions, romaine and fresh tomatoes in a light citrus vinaigrette from The Unofficial Yellowstone Cookbook by Jackie Alpers.
Air Fryer or Grilled Super Spicy BBQ Chicken Wings
Super spicy BBQ hot chicken wings recipe either grilled or made in the airfryer. Choose your own eating adventure with spice levels varying from hot to insanely hot.
Green Smoothie Recipe from Yellowstone
This green smoothie recipe is a tribute to a scene in Yellowstone where the villain Roarke drinks a green smoothie after naked yoga. The recipe was developed from carefully analyzing all of the ingredients shown on Roarke’s kitchen counter and my conclusion is that he (or the Yellowstone prop person) can make a pretty decent green smoothie. I even used the same smoothie glass used in the show.
Sheet Pan Garlic-Butter Green Beans
After a hard day’s work at the 6666 Ranch in Texas, Jimmy devoured a plate of Country Fried Steak smothered with gravy and a side of green beans. I’m sharing my recipe for Sheet Pan Roasted Green Beans to whet your appetite… you’ll have to wait for The Unofficial Yellowstone Cookbook for the main course.
Dry-Fried Asparagus
Dry-fried asparagus is charred and crispy on the outside, and tender on the inside. It has direct contact to the pan without oil or butter. Asparagus grows wild in Montana where the Yellowstone TV series is filmed.
BLT Lettuce Wraps | The Perfect Summer Meal
Tomatoes are at their best, and something about the heat and humidity of the Arizona monsoon season makes me almost totally inert and immobile. This is about all I can muster dinner-wise, so I’m lucky that it’s fairly healthy… It turns out that mayo and bacon are better for us than expected, and my versions is also low-carb.
Sunny Parmesan Pepperoni Crisps
Bake a little sunshine into your life with these bright and happy two-ingredient pizza flavored cheese crisps.
Parmesan Crisps with Caviar
Festive enough for New Year’s Eve, this pretty appetizer only takes about 5 minutes to make. Bacon infused caviar adds a unique smokiness that will intrigue your guests and is fairly inexpensive, but any decent quality caviar will do. The one-ingredient parmesan crisps are a savory, no-carb alternative to blini.
Chorizo, Egg and Cheese Sonoran-Style Breakfast Taco
Sonoran-style breakfast taco with a crispy egg fried in chorizo and folded with cheese into a tortilla.
Grill The Perfect Cowboy Steak
Making authentic cowboy steaks is really easy. When I asked Bryan Keith, the Grill Master from Pinnacle Peak Steak House if he had any additional tips he said, “Put some love in it!”
Buffalo Chicken “Rumaki” Bites
Whatever happened to Rumaki, the Polynesian appetizer served at tiki parties in the 70s? Maybe buffalo-style rumaki will help bring it back.
Sonoran Marinated Flank Steak
I marinated myself a flank steak using my mom’s recipe from the 80s, adding in some Mexican oregano and extra citrus to #sonoranize it a bit so now it’s an Ohio meets Tucson recipe.
Keto Arizona Cheese Crisp
The cheese crisp is the perfect comfort food. A cross between a Mexican pizza an an open-faced quesadilla, Southern Arizona restaurants started selling the dish more than 50 years ago and it’s become a staple of our local Sonoran style cuisine.
Cauliflower Coconut Fried Rice
Riced Cauliflower Coconut Fried Rice recipe is vegetarian yet high in protein and keto friendly.
Vegan Cocktail Pups recipe With A SECRET INGREDIENT!
These vegan, slow-cooker barbecue flavored cocktail pups are made with baby carrots instead of little smokies.
Dark Chocolate Chia Pudding
This dessert has it all, Omega 3 packed chia seeds, antioxidant rich frozen berries and dark chocolate, and a 5-minute prep time.
Thai Grilled Chicken Thighs
Thai Grilled Chicken Thighs recipe. This recipe was developed and photographed for Today.com
Sausage, Egg & Cheese Muffin Cups
Learn the secret to making no-flour sausage, egg and cheese breakfast muffin cups that are still light and fluffy!
Monster Eggs!
These monsterized pesto-fried eggs are green and frightening looking, but delicious and monstrously easy to make.
Sweet and Spicy Grilled Chicken Wings
These Sonoran grilled chicken wings are more spicy-hot that sweet. The heat index will vary greatly from the chili flakes and bbq sauce used.
Keto Hot Dog Buns
made this low-carb bread replacement (often called “Oopsie Bread”) out of eggs and cream cheese from a recipe I’ve seen all over the internet. It turned out great. It smells like cheesy-bread while it’s cooking, and it’s very light, and well, bread-like. Often hot dogs are too much about the bun, so this turned out to be a perfect alternative housing for the Sonoran hot dogs in my Taste of Tucson cookbook.
Italian Style Marinated Baby Artichokes
Recipe for roasted baby artichokes in an easy Italian style marinate. Food photography by Jackie Alpers.
Greek Country Salad
A classic Greek Salad of chunky vegetables and feta tossed in a light vinaigrette will prove that you can indeed win friends with salad.
Johnny Marzetti Three Ways
Three Johnny Marzetti recipes, including the original recipe for the pasta dish, low carb, and Paleo versions.
Brussels Sprouts Braised in Cream with Bacon
Brussels sprouts, cream and bacon compliment each other so perfectly that this may be my favorite food of all time.
Chicken Parmesan in Spicy Arrabbiata Sauce
This grain-free chicken parmesan in spicy Arrabbiata sauce takes about 10 minutes to make using store bought sauce and rotisserie chicken.
Mini Pumpkin Goat Cheese Cheesecakes
A can of pumpkin’s been staring at me from the counter top for two weeks now.The internet recipe sites are all screaming at me that it’s pumpkin season, and I am indeed ready for fall. So today I finally got to work and invented something to celebrate the beginning of my favorite time of the year.
Salsa Scrambled Eggs With Gorgonzola
Eggs scrambled with Gorgonzola and Salsa. A salty, spicy twist on a traditional breakfast dish.
Mini Peppers Stuffed with Cheese
Miniature sweet peppers are adorable and perfect for little snacks and appetizers.
Frittata with Lox, Cream Cheese, Fresh Tomato and Red Onion
This lox and cream cheese frittata with fresh tomato and red onion is a healthy low-carb breakfast. You won’t even miss the bagel.
Thai Cabbage Salad
Here in Tucson it can be hard to get fresh green papaya, so I use packaged coleslaw mix instead in this spicy Thai cabbage salad inspired by Som Tum.
















































