Some Ninja Foodi Grill Recipes

Steak

Follow this recipe or the simpler recipe below.

Ingredients

  • NY steak from Costco
  • Canola oil
  • Coarse salt
  • Black pepper

Instructions

  1. Push Grill button
  2. Set doneness to “Medium Rare”
  3. While unit is preheating, pat steaks with paper towel to remove oils, rub canola oil over steaks and sprinkle on salt and pepper
  4. Insert thermometer from the side into thickest part of steak
  5. When unit beeps, add the steaks
  6. When unit beeps again, flip steaks
  7. When unit beeps again, remove steaks and allow to rest for 5 minutes

Grilled Barbecue Chicken Legs

Ingredients

  • Chicken legs or breast
  • Kinders Mild BBQ Sauce
  • Canola oil
  • Salt
  • Black pepper

Instructions

  1. Push Grill button
  2. Set temperature to “MED”
  3. Set time to 25 minutes
  4. While unit is preheating, rub canola oil over chicken and sprinkle on salt and pepper
  5. When unit beeps, add chicken and set timer for 10 minutes
  6. After 10 minutes, flip chicken and set timer for 5 minutes
  7. After 5 minutes, liberally baste both sides of chicken with bbq sauce then set timer for 5 minutes
  8. After 5 minutes, repeat previous step and cook for another 2 minutes.
  9. If internal temperature is below 160 F, keep cooking until it reaches 160 F.
  10. When internal temperature reaches 160 F, remove chicken and let rest for 5 minutes

Air Fried Chicken Legs

Ingredients

  • 6 chicken legs
  • 1.5 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp ground black pepper
  • 1 tsp ground mustard
  • 1 tsp smoked paprika
  • ¼ tsp cayenne pepper
  • 1 tbs vegetable oil

Instructions

  1. Add all dry ingredients to a large zip top bag and shake to mix well.
  2. Massage oil on each chicken leg
  3. Add all chicken to bag and shake until all chicken is coated
  4. Let chicken marinate in refrigerator for at least 1 hour. The longer the better. Overnight is best!
  5. Preheat air fryer for 5 minutes at 380 degrees (F). Add chicken to air fryer and use “air fry” setting at 380 degrees (F) for 18-20 minutes, turning chicken halfway through. Internal temperature of chicken should be at least 165 degrees (F).

Grilled Corn

Follow this recipe.

Grilled Vegetables

Ingredients

  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes (from Costco)
  • Onions
  • Bell pepper
  • Jalapeno peppers
  • Tomatillo peppers
  • Broccoli
  • Baby corn
  • Coarse salt
  • Black pepper

To save time, you can also buy prepackaged cut vegetables

Instructions

  1. Cut vegetables in half or in slices.
  2. Remove spicy seeds from peppers.
  3. Spray olive oil over vegetables
  4. Sprinkle coarse salt and pepper.
  5. Turn on Ninja grill
  6. Push grill button
  7. Push right up/down to set the time to 8 minutes
  8. Put veggies in grill
  9. The grill will beep when done.

French Fries

Crinkle-cut fries and hummus

Turns out baking french fries in the Ninja Foodi produces good results.

Ingredients

  • Frozen pre-cut french fries (I like the crinkle cut fries from Smart n Final)
  • Olive oil
  • Coarse salt
  • Black pepper

Instructions

  1. Push the Air Crisp button and allow unit to preheat
  2. For 1 lb of fries, set the temperature to 350 F and time to 20 minutes
  3. For 2 lbs of fries, set the temperature to 360 F and time to 27minutes
  4. Spray olive oil over fries and sprinkle with salt and pepper

As a healthier alternative to ketchup, eat fries with hummus.

Remove Rust and Paint Easily Using a Polycarbide Abrasive Wheel

You’re probably thinking you should buy some chemicals to remove rust or even soak rusty items in Coca Cola, if they’ll fit in your container. These methods only partially work and take forever. Instead, just pick up a polycarbide abrasive wheel at Harbor Freight ($5) and attach it to an angle grinder ($15 at Harbor Freight) and get rid of dust with ease. You might be able to use it to clean your barbecue grill grates.

It’s also good for removing paint.

Web Paint: Simple Chrome Extension to Annotate on Screen

Have you ever needed to make notes on screen like a web page to then share with others. You might first take a screenshot and then edit it in some program or buy an app like TechSmith SnagIt. A simpler option would be to install the Web Paint extension in Chrome. When you click on the extension, it opens this panel

Then, you can type, draw, add arrows, and so on then take a screen capture and share with others, e.g.

Quick JSON-based Web Forms

Many, if not most, web forms are backed by a database. But what if you just need a simple data store, like a JSON file, and you want to quickly and easily provide users with a user-friendly web form to make updates to the JSON data. JSON Editor takes a JSON Schema and uses it to generate an HTML form.

The generated JSON output can then be used by a templating language like Handlebars for building a web page.

JSON Editor supports many options including the ability to quickly style a form using CSS frameworks like Bootstrap.

For example, the following JSON schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "title": "Car",
  "properties": {
    "make": {
      "type": "string",
      "enum": [
        "Toyota",
        "BMW",
        "Honda",
        "Ford",
        "Chevy",
        "VW"
      ]
    },
    "model": {
      "type": "string"
    },
    "year": {
      "type": "integer",
      "enum": [
        1995,
        1996,
        1997,
        1998,
        1999,
      ],
      "default": 2008
    },
    "safety": {
      "type": "integer",
      "format": "rating",
      "maximum": "5",
      "exclusiveMaximum": false,
      "readonly": false
    }
  }
}

using the Bootstrap 4 CSS framework produces the following web form.

You can see a live demo in the JSON Editor interactive playground.

JSON Schema also supports validation so you can ensure your users are not submitting invalid data. For security reasons, this solution may not be good in a production environment by non-trustworthy people but it could work well in a secure, internal environment among coworkers.

Create an inline website editor using contenteditable

Let’s say you have a website and you’re tired of making constant updates to some portion of oft-changing content, e.g. a conference agenda. It would be nice to offload this tedious work to a content owner who so often makes typos. But this content owner is non-technical and is a visual person. They need a WYSIWYG editor that would allow them to make changes directly on what it is that they want to edit, not directly in a database or something cryptic like a JSON file.

HTML5 supports the contenteditable attribute which makes any element editable. In the screenshot below, on a part of the byline is made editable.

Simple add the attribute “contenteditable=true” to the tag that wraps the text you want to make editable.

<p>Last Edited by <span id="author" contenteditable="true">Monty Shokeen</span>
</p>

When the content owner clicks on the text to editor, a black outline appears making it look like a form field.

The contenteditable attribute can be added to as many HTML elements as you want. Here is a live example showing three different editable fields with changes saved to local storage. Here’s an example showing how you can save the changes in JSON format and post it to a URL endpoint using AJAX or Fetch.

editor.js – a web-based WYSIWYG editor that outputs JSON

Many web developers are familiar with online editors like TinyCME. If you’ve edited a blog post in WordPress using the classic editor, then you know what I mean.

The problem with this type of editor is it’s too easy to accidentally output garbage HTML. WordPress has switched to offering a block style editor.

If you need to create a similar editor for your web project, editor.js offers inline block-style editing and it outputs clean data in json format.

Here’s a screenshot of example JSON output which can then be used with

This JSON data can then be used with a templating language like Handlebars to build web pages.

Need Icons For a Website? Use FontAwesome!

Icons make a big difference in the look of a website. When placed beside text links, they make the links stand out. They can be used to replace text links, especially on mobile. They accompany text to make boring, text heavy pages easier to read. But, finding icons or creating them can be difficult. FontAwesome solves this by offering thousands of icons that are easily searchable. If I search for car, here’s what I see.

To use an icon, e.g. of a car, just paste this HTML code.

<script src="https://kit.fontawesome.com/8758af3809.js" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

<i class="fas fa-car"></i>

Here’s a demo.

Grilled Corn Using Ninja Foodi Grill

So, I tried making grilled corn using the Ninja Foodi Grill and surprisingly, it came out really good!

Here’s the recipe.

Ingredients

  • Corn ears (make sure the kernels are big so you’ve got some meat to bite in to)
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Canola oil
  • Butter

Instructions

  1. Remove the husk (outer layers of the corn)
  2. Massage the kernels with canola oil
  3. Sprinkle salt and pepper
  4. Turn on Ninja Foodi Grill, click Grill button to Max setting, set time to 12 minutes, let preheat, wait till it says “Add food”, then put in the corn
  5. Set a timer for 6 minutes then turn the corn over
  6. When done, massage butter over the corn or melt butter in the microwave and baste the corn with the liquid butter

Prevent weeds from growing anywhere in your yard

As I’ve said before, weeds are notorious for finding ways of growing through weed fabric and along yard edges.

Middle of yard

To combat weeds from popping up in the middle of your landscape, lay cement board everywhere. Cement board is porous so water can still drain through it. For the areas between the cement boards, weeds will grow. To prevent this from happening, cut pond liner and place it where the cement board gaps are. Pond liner is very strong, UV-resistant, and almost impossible to tear. Traditional weed fabric may be marketed with the claim that it can prevent weeds but it can’t. Weeds still manage to come through. Plus, if you use weed fabric along edges where it’s exposed, it can degrade and easily tear as shown in the picture below.

Now I have to replace that weed fabric with pond liner like I did along a different fence.

Edges of yard

For edges, you can screw pressure-treated 2x4s to the cement edges using special screws and a drill bit for concrete. Just make sure to drill using the hammer drill mode.

If there is no room to drill a screw into the concrete, e.g. if the edge is near a fence, then you can drill 1/2-inch holes in the 2×4 using a 1/2″ spade bit and drive 12-inch long, 3/8-inch galvanized nails through the holes into the ground.

Cut some pond liner and staple it to the 2x4s. Don’t use traditional weed fabric. It will eventually fail and rip and weeds will come through it.

Hammer the large nails through the 2x4s and the pond liner into the ground along the edge of the concrete as shown below.

Allow some of the pond liner to extend beyond the end of the 2×4 so the next 2×4’s pond liner will overlap the first one and prevent weeds from growing in between the 2x4s.

Since 2x4s may not be perfectly straight, you can push them against the concrete edge using a clamp.

If the other side is a wood fence, you can simply staple some pond liner to the fence. In the picture below, the space between the concrete and the fence was narrow. I left a gap between the pond liner for drainage.

Easily cut cement board using a reciprocating saw. You can also use a utility knife or the WEN Electric Fiber Cement and Siding Shear, Variable Speed (3670).

In this case, I placed the cement board over the gaps between the pond liner to prevent weeds from growing along the gap.

You can then put rocks like I did pictured below.

There will still be a small gap between the concrete edge and the 2x4s. Fill that cap with concrete control joint sealant. I like Sikaflex Self-Leveling Sealant. Learn more.

For the rocks, I used ¾-inch ginger rocks / Sonoma gold rocks.

Shakshouka / Menemen Recipe

Moroccan Shakshouka and Turkish Menemen are very similar. Here’s my version of these dishes.

Ingredients

  • 3 eggs
  • 1 8oz can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes (Target / FoodMaxx)
  • 2/3 cup frozen diced onions (Smart n Final)
  • 1//4 cup cilantro for garnish
  • 2 tbsp wet minced garlic
  • 10 tbsp olive oil
  • Smoked paprika (not regular paprika)
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2 tbsp tomato paste (optional)
  • Pita bread

Instructions

  1. Pour olive oil in medium 10″ pan on medium-high heat
  2. Fry onions and garlic until slight brown
  3. Pour in diced tomatoes and sprinkle in smoked paprika, salt and pepper to taste (optionally, add tomato paste)
  4. When mixture is not too runny, make 3 deep dimples in the pan and crack each egg into them
  5. Cover and poach on low heat until egg white changes from translucent to white. Turn off heat so that egg yolk is still runny.
  6. Garnish with cilantro
  7. Cut some pita bread in quarters and warm for 15 seconds in microwave
  8. Eat
Fry diced tomatoes and garlic in olive oil
Cook fire-roasted tomatoes with smoked paprika, salt and pepper and optionally tomato paste
Make dimple in mixture
Crack eggs into dimples without breaking yolk
Cover and poach eggs on low heat until egg whites are white, not transparent
Like this
Garnish with cilantro and warm up pita quarters
Eat directly from pan