FoodCraft

It's a tie - Recipe: 1 Invention: 1

2012-01-22T21:12:00.002-06:00

As you likely can tell, much of my cooking is done just by throwing in things that I happen to have around. There's not a ton of pre-thought on what I'm going to do. I often look at a recipe and then modify it as I'm inspired. Tonight, I did that twice with dinner. One was a success; one was a failure.

Roasted Beets. ::sigh:: This was the failure.

I don't know why I didn't stick with the recipes I saw online for this one as it was the first time I had ever cooked beets. I don't really like them (or haven't traditionally, though I am somewhat determined to grow to like them, especially since I'm growing them in my raised bed out back). But I kept hearing great things about "roasted beets" and how the sugars in the beets make them sweet and tasty through a high temperature bake.

Most of the recipes talk about taking the whole beet, wrapping them in tin foil, and roasting them at a high temperature for 60 to 90 minutes. After taking my CSA box beets out of the fridge and looking at them again, I thought...maybe I should do this differently. You know, buck recipe convention. Someone should have smacked that peeler out of my hand. Here's what happened.

I cut off the greens (sorry folks, didn't keep them...too wilted) and the little root end. I held a couple of the root ends to my head and wiggled them around. I walked up to the boyfriend who was on the couch with the dogs and said, "take me to your leader!" The boyfriend felt he had to console one of the dogs by saying, "don't worry, she's just kidding." I'm not sure it was necessary. He knows I'm an oddball.

But I digress.

While the recipes included foil, I decided that I would peel the beets (sadly, removing their lovely scarlet color) and quarter them. (The boyfriend and I decided that they smell like dirt. More specifically, the smelled like top soil. We were hoping that the cooking would, well, develop that scent into something more appealing.) I then put olive oil, salt, and pepper on them and tossed them onto a baking sheet. I put them in a 425 oven for about 35 minutes. (I put the timer at 45 minutes to check on them, but they looked pretty pathetic once 35 minutes had passed.) I took them out. They had one really caramelized (read: burned) side and the rest of it looked sad. Once they cooled, I tried one.

Let's just say, Recipe: 1 Intuition: 0

The night was not yet finished. Not too long after I had put the beets in the oven, I cut up the rest of a bag of red potatoes into quarters, put some olive oil, salt and Garlic Herb Mrs. Dash (yes, I realize the salt sort of defeated the purpose of Mrs. Dash) and tossed them into another baking sheet. They went in with probably 35 minutes left on the timer. I was trying to recreate some amazing roasted red potatoes that I had made earlier in the week. They came out pretty dern tasty, but should have stayed in a little longer to really crisp up as they had the first time. I should have probably left them in for 45-50 minutes, but they were just dandy.

The boyfriend wanted to consume some sort of meat for the protein. The only non-canned meat we had were two pre-cooked chicken, apple, and smoked gouda sausages. That wasn't going to work the same way a regular spicy sausage would, so pasta with tomato sauce was off the table. I tried to think about what I had that would support the apple flavor in the sausage. I opened the fridge, and stared.

I got it. Grapes. And...my salted caramel pear butter from Confituras.

I sliced the sausages lengthwise so there was a flat side. I put a little bit of olive oil in a non..non-stick pan (as in, would brown up and caramelize nicely) and cranked up the heat. Once the oil was shimmering, I put the sausages in, cut side down. I let them brown up a bit and then flipped them. After I got a little color on the other side, I put them aside on a plate and turned down the heat a little bit on the pan. I then put about a cup of red seedless grapes into the pan. They immediately started getting a little brown, which was fine, but I realized they weren't going to be able to deglaze the pan if none of their juice was getting out.

So, I grabbed my kitchen shears and started cutting them. Thank goodness those things were sharp. We had no flying grapes. Once they had cooked a little bit, I started scraping the brown sausage bits off the bottom of the pan with my wooden spoon and smooshing the grapes at the same time. I then added about a tablespoon and a half of the pear butter. I stirred that around and made sure to get all the brown goodness off the bottom of the pan. I squeezed a little bit of grapefruit juice into the sauce to brighten things up (and to avoid an over-sweet sauce). While I was letting that cook down a bit, I put the sausages back in the sauce (to make sure they were heated all the way through and that they melded a little bit with the sauce).

Because I wasn't 100% sure how successful the sauce would be, I decided to make sure the potatoes, which I knew were good, weren't going to be defiled. I put the potatoes in a bowl and put that bowl on a large plate. I then served up one sausage (two split halves) each and spooned the grape/pear butter sauce on top. It worked. It was rather tasty. I'll likely try something like that again. I think it would have been a really good sauce on a pork chop, or something like that. If I had had some calvados or apple cider, that might have even been a great deglazing liquid to use prior to putting the halved grapes in the pan.

Invention/Inspiration: 1 Recipe be damned. :-)

...pictures to be posted at some point in the near future.

CSA box take...3?

2012-01-20T17:00:00.000-06:00

I am a sucker for coupons. I'm actually fairly sure I am on the verge of having an actual diagnosed problem. These dern groupon-y things (coupons sent to you via email every day...yes EVERY DAY) really get me. And lo and behold, there was recently one to start receiving a CSA box (either weekly or bi-weekly) from Johnson's Backyard Garden. I have been a customer of theirs before, and while the produce is certainly lovely, you don't have the ability to add on any additional produce items (poultry, cheeses, etc.). And then I remembered...you can with Farmhouse Delivery. I couldn't refuse.

So, I signed up to receive a bi-weekly CSA box from Farmhouse Delivery. In truth, the concept of getting a bushel after bushel full of winter veggies I don't typically enjoy didn't excite me. However, the ability to add a chicken onto my bi-weekly order was too appealing to pass up. And, with my recent discovery of kale and how much I like it, I thought that I was bound to like other veggies that had before been on my "no fly" list.

This first week contained the following:

a SIX POUND roaster (I'll just roast it like I do chicken every time. Always turns out good)
cauliflower (on the no fly list)
beets (on the no fly list)
chard (I figure it's pretty similar to kale, so it's probably ok)
spinach
two of the world's smallest avocados
cilantro (on the no fly list, but I do like it in pho, so I might have to try to make some of that)
lettuce
a large grapefruit
a cabbage (on the cusp of the no fly...but I like it in soup, so that's where it's probably destined to land)

I think that's it. Stay tuned to see what I do with all this.

Quick Post: Tonight's cooking in pictures

2012-01-04T21:15:00.001-06:00

Roasted Farmers Market Chicken

Kale Chips

Baked Brown Rice with Zucchini

Quick Post: What's eating me...

2012-01-04T20:38:00.000-06:00

I don't understand how a large major-name grocery store in a decent neighborhood that is always packed can be this bad.

I've returned 3 half gallons of milk (one of their store brands, nonetheless)
The turkey the boyfriend bought recently seemed about a day from going bad
The salmon I bought yesterday evening already went bad before I could cook it tonight for dinner
Last night when we went to the store, the milk seemed like it was being kept, well, not so cold
Last night they were out of bananas. Not just the organic ones. All bananas. ALL OF THEM

UGH!

It's entirely likely that I might start going to another grocery store going forward, but this company is so omnipresent. And I really like a couple of their stores, so I'm just not sure what I should do.

Regardless, my first step is to bring the salmon back first thing in the morning and let them know about all the other issues. grumble grumble

Quick Post: Another goal?

2012-01-01T18:26:00.002-06:00

Alrighty. I didn't succeed in my goal last year of posting 25 times. I got up to about 20, but that's not 25. This year (2012: The Year of Productivity), I will choose the same goal - 25 posts in the year. I need to make sure to post 2x/month, and I think that's do-able. Of course, I thought that was do-able this year too, so hey.

But this year, I'm going to add reminders on my calendar and hope for the best. :-)

Christmas Cookies

2012-01-01T18:23:00.000-06:00

I've always been a little jealous of the people who have fun holiday traditions with friends like cookie swaps. I never really think about it, though, until I hear that my friends or co-workers are participating in one. So, when we were asked to bring desserts to my work holiday lunch and that there would be a contest to see who has the best ones, I knew I had to get to work.

I've gotten a bit of a reputation at work for cooking, so making sure I did something worthwhile. I immediately hit the internet to find some impressive cookies. What I did not do was to consider the weather outside when I was selecting my two entries into the contest.

My first selection was peppermint meringue cookies. It was easy enough - just use some egg whites, add some sugar, add some peppermint extract, and then add in some red food dye. This was a good excuse for me to buy food dye and a piping back with four different frosting tips. I love an excuse to buy new cooking gadgets.

As I started mixing them, they looked really promising. What's fun (and rather effective, I think) is that you're not supposed to actually mix in the red dye. The recipe says that you should add some drops, but then as you are putting the meringue into the piping bag, it mixes itself somewhat, but not completely. It ends up being a pretty interesting effect. Mostly pink, but some stripes of white and red.

The instructions also suggested that I use parchment paper, and since I (surprisingly) didn't have any at the house, I had to buy some of that too. Aw shucks. I piped them out onto the two half sheets lined with parchment paper and baked them per the recipe. They turned out pretty good, but then you're supposed to let them dry out and become crispy. Ay there's the rub. More on that later.

The second selection was Christmas wreath cookies. The recipe was easy enough. Essentially, you're supposed to make rice crispy treats but with corn flakes instead of rice crispies, add some green food coloring, and decorate with red hots to represent little holly berries.

The recipe was pretty accurate in terms of "ease of creation" however I think they had the order of steps in, well, the wrong order. They suggested that you mix the melted marshmallows and butter with the cornflakes and then add the green dye. Well, if you know anything about marshmallows, you know that they become stickier and harder the cooler they get. By the time you are stirring the last of the marshmallow mixture into the cornflakes and everything is sticking together, it's pretty much impossible to stir much more.

When I decided that the recipe did not include enough marshmallow mixture, I added what was left of my green dye to the mixture before adding to the corn flakes. It was much easier. But, I will say, the recipe also called for only about a teaspoon of green dye. I guess the dye that I bought must have been weaker (though it was the exact same dye that my mom used to buy when I was a kid), because I ended up using the entire little bottle of the stuff. They still didn't turn out as dark as the picture in the recipe.

That said, I think they turned out pretty good. My lovely silpats were fabulous. It was no problem getting the slightly-dried, sticky, and still delicate concoctions off them. It was great. Only problem? They didn't dry. I'm sensing a theme here.

The lesson of the day?? Don't make two types of cookies that require drying out for success on a day that is wet and drizzly. Both of the cookies tasted good, but they were sticky as all get out and chewing the not-so-dried meringues ended up more like chewing peppermint gum than a crunchy cookie. I'll definitely make them again, but I'll check the weather forecast first.

Quick Post: Appreciation

2011-12-31T20:31:00.002-06:00

There's really not much better than when the person you care for states his enjoyment of a dish you've thrown together. He really likes when I roast a chicken (I got another one at the Farmers Market this morning, so roast chicken is coming this week), and that's nothing fancy. He likes when I do the salmon on papillotte, and that's just putting some stuff in tin foil and throwing it in my oven.

So two nights ago when I made another version of my Melting Pot Soup, and he told me that he really liked it, his praise put a smile on my face. This time, in addition to the chicken feta spinach sausage, I used some whole wheat elbow macaroni instead of orzo, baby bok choy, celery, onions, carrots, dried oregano, dried basil, and some red pepper flakes.

He loves it. And it's really easy to make. There's still a lot left, but it's going quick.

Caffeine Addiction

2011-12-31T20:06:00.000-06:00

I like coffee. But I don't typically drink coffee on a daily basis. If I have a caffeinated beverage, it might be a Diet Coke or, if I'm going into work early, I'll treat myself to a latte.

But all of that changed when my boyfriend's mom and aunt got me a Keurig for Christmas. It's the mini-version and you have to pour in the water one by one, but it is perfect. And since I opened the box just a few days ago, I've had at least two cups of coffee each day.

While I hope things will settle down a bit once I'm back to work following the holidays, I do think in the short term this is going to save me some money. Towards the end of this year, I was buying a latte pretty frequently. This way, I can brew my own coffee before I leave for work, drink it on my way to work, and not feel the need to stop and buy something.

I'm finding that I'm drawn to the flavored varieties, which I don't know that I would have foreseen. I suppose once I finish the K-cups that they gave to me with the brewer, I should settle down and get a box of normal every day coffee (lord only knows what those flavorings include).

My final concern is the environment. I don't love the idea that these little pieces of plastic are filling up the landfills. But I'm doing my best to offset it by opening up the top (after the coffee is made) and scooping out the used grounds to add to my compost. (There will be a post in a bit about my little garden out back.)

So, all in all, I'm excited that I got this Keurig. If I need to worry about caffeine withdrawals later on, so be it.

Some recipes of interest

2011-12-31T19:38:00.000-06:00

Here are some recipes that I've come across recently. I think they're all certainly do-able, and they look like they'd be pretty tasty. I haven't tried any of them yet, but there's always 2012.

Chocolate Ganache Hazelnut Torte
First off, how can you go wrong with a pie that most likely tastes like Nutella? And, this really does seem like it doesn't take a crazy amount of baking skills or practice. Of course, I say that having not tried it yet. But it's definitely going to be tried...maybe for Valentines? I wonder - do they make a heart-shaped tart pan with a removable bottom?

Black-Eyed Pea Cakes with Jalapeno Sour Cream
For New Year's Day, there is a Southern tradition that you need to eat some black-eyed peas for good luck. While I am a Yankee, I do have Southern heritage, so I can't really remember when my parents first told me about this tradition. I only remember thinking that it was just something you do. So, that's why I was thinking that I might bring this to the New Year's Eve party that I'm going to tonight. And then I thought better about that. Instead, I'll make some of these tomorrow for NYE brunch. I think they'd be a good way to start off a new year. I will, however, likely use Greek yogurt instead of sour cream.

Steak with Cognac Sauce and Salad
This is one of Real Simple's recipes in their "A Month of Easy Dinners" collection. While I'm disappointed that they go the route of frozen potatoes, I get that it's supposed to be easy, so hey. Otherwise, I think this recipe could be a real winner. Yes, it has blue cheese and heavy cream, but it's not much for a recipe that serves four. I think the hard part (as per usual) would be sticking to sharing it with three people instead of just hording it for yourself.

Party Foods

2011-12-31T11:00:00.000-06:00

I have a tendency to overdo it. This is especially true when I am planning a party. Apparently, it is also the case when I am GOING to a party at someone else's house.

And, for those of you who might be curious, I don't mean the kind of overdoing it that leads to a headache the next day. I mean food.

Tonight, a friend-couple of mine is having a Holiday Game Night. For starters, I decided to bring some sweet things. My latest obsession from the bulk section at the grocery store is dark chocolate covered pretzels. The salty sweet crunch is outstanding. They went into my large trifle dish. An easy, but nice, presentation.

Secondly, one of the boyfriend's favorite cookies (also from the bulk section) are the peanut butter stars. They have vanilla, raspberry, chocolate, cinnamon, and peanut butter. I bought all but raspberry (they were a little too pink for my liking). I put them mixed together and put them in my medium-sized trifle dish.

We were asked to bring a nibble, and the hosts mentioned that they liked cheese balls. As if planned, I saw a recipe in my daily(?) Real Simple email - Goat Cheese with Pistachios and Cranberries. I went to the store. I was going to essentially follow the recipe to a T (which isn't too hard, given the three ingredients). However, when I got to the store, the logs of goat cheese available in my regular grocery store were very wee.

What was a girl to do?

I thought about buying three of the plain goat cheese, smooshing them together to make a larger roll, and then following the recipe. But then I saw the different flavors - plain, honey, and garlic/herb.

A plan started to develop.

I ended up making three kinds: Honey Goat Cheese with Pistachios and Cranberries, Plain Goat Cheese with Cajun Sesame Crackers, and Garlic and Herb Goat Cheese with...well...more herbs.

For the Plain Goat Cheese (far left in the picture above), it took me quite some time to determine what I was going to crush and put on the outside, but I went with the sesame sticks that you often see in party mixes. I wanted more than the regular plain sesame stick taste, so I decided to up the ante by going with the Cajun sesame crackers. It worked out really well.

For the Honey Goat Cheese (middle in picture), I bought some plain roasted pistachios. I added some dried cranberries to the bag and started banging on them with a wine bottle. Once they were all mostly crushed, I put the crumbled concoction on a plate and rolled the honey goat cheese in it. I used both hands and made a point to press the crumble into the goat cheese. I then put some leftover crumble in a piece of cling film and rolled the cheese into a little log, tucked the ends under, and put it in the fridge.

Then, maybe my favorite, is the Garlic and Herb Goat Cheese. For this one I used some dried oregano, dried basil, fresh cracked black pepper, and some garlic powder. Super easy, and just sort of pushed up the flavors that ran throughout the cheese itself .

They were a hit. I might have eaten a lot of cheese last night. :-)

How can it be? Only half way there??

2011-12-30T16:44:00.001-06:00

Boy, did I lose momentum!

Almost a year ago, I vowed to post 25 times over the entire year of 2011 . Unfortunately, to date I've only posted 12 times. And I think one or two of them I wasn't going to count.

Then I looked in my drafts. I've got a ton of posts started, some even with photos. Why did I never finish them? And I've been taking pictures of my food throughout the last 9 months since my last post. Why did I never post them?

This year, work got a little crazy, so I suppose I can blame it on that. Not sure that's a good excuse b/c I was able to get a number of other things accomplished throughout the year, but it is what it is.

So, while it seems unlikely that I will be posting 12+ more times today and tomorrow, I will do my best to at least finish the posts that were started and maybe upload some of my food pictures. I've got some good ones. I might not make 25 posts in total, but I'm not going to beat myself up for that.

I've since gone into my drafts and posted 3 of those that were waiting in the wings. I went through and deleted the other drafts that were never going to make it. Now, I'm only 9 posts away from my goal of 25 for 2011. Will I be able to do it?

Some potential upcoming blog topics:

Christmas cookies
Coffee addiction
Party foods
Thanksgiving empanadas
Anniversary dinner

Variation on a Brown Rice Theme

2011-11-30T17:47:00.001-06:00

I realize I've sung the praises of the easiest Baked Brown Rice recipe in an earlier post, but I feel the need to return to the scene of the crime. This brown rice recipe continues to be a staple. It's low-intensity, is super tasty, goes with anything, and really can be dressed up with just about anything.

Tonight, as with my earlier post, I have added chopped button mushrooms. I continue to be lazy here and buy the pre-cut ones. I really should get more bang for my buck by buying the whole ones, but the concept of standing over my sink brushing the dirt off of them strikes me a having the potential to reduce my motivation to zero. What can I say...I know my limits.

And, as before, I am going to add half (if not more) of a regular, normal, everyday, yellow onion. I have added red onion for a little bit of color once. With the time in the oven, the taste difference is minimal, and the color sort of loses it's luster. However, instead of red, we're going for the other Christmas color - green. I'm going to dice up some zucchini and add it into the mix. I love zucchini raw or cooked, so the way I figure, it will be hard to mess that up from my perspective.

I might have gotten a little carried away with the veggies this time (this is probably the most I've ever put in there), but we'll see how the brown rice reacts. I've got a half diced medium yellow onion, about 1.5 cups of roughly chopped button mushrooms, and 1.5 roughly chopped medium zucchini. I'm certainly not worried about it tasting good. I'm worried about the brown rice not getting to soak up as much of the buttery, salty, boiling water as it should while it's in the oven. But then again, both the onions and zucchini should give off some moisture as well, so maybe it will balance it out?

Normally, I double the recipe when I put it in a 13x9 baking dish, but there have been times that when I add veggies to that recipe, it gets awfully close to the top of the dish. This time I did just one recipe (not doubling) since I put so much else in the dish. Before I wrapped it up in foil, it certainly looked promising, even if I've got at least twice as many veggies as I do rice.

Now...to wait for 1hr. tick tock.

Good news. It looks delicious. I will have a bit of it tonight, but then I'll dish it up to be servings

Taco Salad Casserole

2011-09-30T17:03:00.000-05:00

This sounds like it could have been taken from some outdated cookbook featuring a woman on the cover wearing a fifties-style dress and a spotless apron while holding up a casserole dish and smiling at the reader.

Or perhaps it would come from a fabulously retro food delivery pair here in Austin like the Casserole Queens. (They've been featured on the Food Network a couple times. How snazzy is that? Or sizzly )

But no. It came from my brain. (Please, try to control your awe.) and...IT'S HEALTHY. (Now you can applaud.)

I've always loved the idea of 7-layer dip (despite the fact that there is rarely a chip that has the heft required for dipping into such a thing). So, I figured, how can I make a healthier version and maybe even a full-meal version?

Answer:

Browned ground turkey (in place of ground beef)

This is an instance when you can actually go for a lower fat content since it's going to be with a bunch of other items that will give it some moisture. When using it in other applications, I typically use 93/7 (7% fat), but for this one, you can use 97/3 or 99/1.

Black beans

Black beans are the best ingredient, ever. I typically like to use Kuner's beans with lime and jalapenos in this recipe, but I actually strain out the jalapenos - just using the black beans without rinsing them includes enough heat for most people.

Fat-free Greek yogurt instead of sour cream

Use this instead of sour cream. Seriously. I promise in this application, you really won't taste any difference. If you're unsure, don't put it as the top layer. When it's mixed in there you definitely won't be aware of it. Fage is the best out there. I buy a big tub of the stuff for all sorts of uses just about every week.

Guacamole

The fat in this one is good fat...leave it as is. If the avocados look good to me and area reasonable price (oddly infrequent even here in TX), I'll make my own with lime juice, garlic, and jalapenos. However, in the other cases, I use Wholly Guacamole. It's great in a pinch. I'd also suggest not putting this one as the top layer as it will brown as it oxidizes.

Brown rice

I know that rice isn't necessarily a typical addition in the 7-layer dips that are out there. I suppose this is what makes this a casserole (more of a full meal) rather than just a dip. Brown rice adds some fiber to the dish (along with what the beans bring to the table). I often use Uncle Ben's Ready Rice, but can't find the exact flavor here.

Salsa

Salsa is a great way to add flavor with very few calories. There are so many good salsas out there. Texas Texas, Kinky Friedman's Politically Correct (from which money goes to animal rescue), and Green Mountain Gringo are some of my favorites. You could, of course, make your own too.

Low-fat cheese

This is certainly a nice-to-have not a must-have. It used to be that low-fat or fat-free cheeses weren't worth the packaging they came in, but the past few years have seen advances in the taste of low-fat cheeses, so this can be a decent addition without adding too much fat.

Some other potential additions are corn, roasted chicken, or chili. Also, add some cumin in there. It's potentially the best spice out there.

So there you have it. I like to compile it in a glass Pyrex dish so the people eating it can see each layer they're about to taste.

Swimming upstream with the trout

2011-03-12T16:05:00.001-06:00

Yeah yeah. I know it's not trout that swim upstream, but keep reading.

I went to the grocery store to look at what fish looked good, assuming I would likely purchase some salmon fillets, when I asked the fishmonger, "what's the difference between these two fish?" "One is trout." "Oh. It looks a lot like salmon." (not my finest moment) But it does! (And, in my defense, the label was partially cut off.) Since the fishmonger said that you could prepare it the same way as you do salmon, I figured, let's try it. I was a little worried as the boyfriend's taste buds tend to be, well, particular, but hey. I was cooking, so I get to choose.

So, just like I have prepared salmon many times before, I decided to do it en papillotte (in a pocket). The boyfriend was going to come over after working out, and I figured he was going to be a little hungry, so I figured that I should make a snack for him. I decided to make kale chips again. This time, the bunch of kale took up three baking sheets. They were, once again, a hit.

As for the salmon, I didn't want to do the exact same thing as I have done before (lemon, salt, pepper...and...basically, that's it)so this time I put a slice of onion on top and some bell peppers sliced into thin strips beneath. I did, of course, stick with the salt and pepper, but didn't add acid.

Once again, fish in a packet turned out...well...swimmingly. It was flaky and the bell peppers still had some crunchiness left in them. I probably cooked it at 350 for something like 15 minutes (honestly, I can't remember, as I'm finishing this post many months after the fact).

Some other thoughts about cooking fish in a packet, if you do include either vegetables that exude a lot of liquid or you put some butter, lemon juice, and/or white wine, you end up with a nice "jus" in the bottom of the packet. The best thing to do with that is to get a hunk of crusty bread (but not too crusty so as it hurts the roof of your mouth) and sop up that liquid. Tast-i-licious.

Shameless Commerce Division* of FoodCraft

2011-03-08T14:19:00.000-06:00

I've started another blog. Not that I'm leaving this one...just a different focus. Crafty Keeping Active: http://craftyactivity.blogspot.com/ Basically, it's a blog about how I'm going to add more activity to my life.

*"Shameless Commerce Division" is from Car Talk. I love CarTalk.

the agony of defeat

2011-03-02T22:56:00.000-06:00

Shockingly, my experiments in the kitchen don't always turn out as good as I would like. Tonight was one such experiment.

First off, at first glance, I thought I had couscous in my pantry. I wanted to make couscous with dried fruit and almonds. It's so tasty and almost seems dessert-ish. Next, I thought, why don't I mix ground turkey with some feta and some spices and make some meatballs.

None of it worked out.

First I tried to make meatballs. I had chosen the 97% fat free kind of ground turkey, and let me say, if ever there were a confirmation that fat adds flavor...'cause this stuff was taste-free. I mixed in some diced onion, feta cheese, dried basil, dried oregano, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. I thought for sure that would help things. I balled them up into about golf ball sized meatballs and put them on a pam-sprayed baking sheet. Into the oven they went at 350 for 20 minutes.

As it turned out, I had quinoa and not couscous. I still chopped up the dried apricots and mixed them with the slivered almonds and the sultanas (golden raisins) while the quinoa was cooking...just so I could get my head around things. I also realized...well, if I'm cooking quinoa, I should use broth. And then I opened the pantry. Sweet. Just one cup of stock. So the quinoa, after being rinsed thoroughly and toasted in the pan with a tiny bit of oil was cooked in one cup of chicken stock and one cup of water. Not what I would normally do, but this was just the way the night was going.

The meatballs came out and despite being completely cooked, they looked anemic. B-O-R-I-N-G. Despite all the things that I put in the mix, they tasted as anemic as they looked. Again I say...sweet.

Then I thought, well, I'll just forgo the dried fruit and almonds (they were really for the imaginary couscous), and I'll add black beans into my quinoa. I'll throw a little "house dressing" on it too. I get the house dressing out of the fridge. It's pretty much empty. So I put what is left in the bowl and then went to make more dressing. No balsamic. It's at the boyfriend's house. Strike85 against this meal.

The boyfriend decided to add marcona (as he calls somewhat jokingly "maricopa county") almonds to his quinoa, black beans, and cut up meatballs. He said he liked it a few times and that the almonds really made it.

I had quinoa, black beans, a tiny bit of house dressing, and cut up meatballs. A passable meal, but man, it was not what I had planned in my head. I'll have to go and get some couscous to do my dried fruit/slivered almond meal.

(As an aside, two nights ago I made leek/broccoli soup and put too much liquid in it. The tilapia I made was fine, and actually tasted pretty good when piled into a bowl of the soup, but nothing earth-shattering. Let's assume this was not the beginning of a streak of mediocre meals.)

this post brought to you by fur

2011-02-28T15:29:00.000-06:00

Hi all,

I realize this is not food related, but I couldn't resist. The Humane Society is putting on a contest wherein people vote for your dog, cat, parakeet, horse, turtle, ferret, whatever and it raises money at the same time.

Below is my furry son. Vote for him. The picture below shows him covered in mud - his favorite state of being...outside of snuggling with me on the couch.

"Broderick Monroe Craft"

A new crispy, yet healthy, treat?

2011-02-25T16:02:00.000-06:00

I don't know about you, but kale has always been somewhat intimidating. Not that I thought it would be hard to prepare, but the one(?) time I've tried it, it lived up to its bitter (literally) reputation.

Enter "The Next Food Network Star."

Reality TV has its up and downs, but I'm a sucker for a food-related reality show. ::gasp:: I love Iron Chef, Top Chef, ...any of the Chefs. The Next Food Network Star is a competition to become the next personality on the Food Network a la Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, etc. Contestants are asked (and constantly reminded because they seem to forget) to demonstrate their "culinary point of view" and to develop their story. I was hooked from episode one...and now, 6 seasons later, I realize much of the finalists are like those of American Idol - oddly, in some seasons, the runners-up were actually better than the winner.

Season One's winners were a couple guys whose point of view was that they were preparing for dinner parties...or something like that. Their show, Party Line with the Hearty Boys, didn't last more than one season. I found them terribly insipid. Season Two's winner fared differently. The winner, Guy Fieri, has become the ubiquitous, bleach blond, spikey-headed, high octane host of multiple shows. It might be that I would like some of his recipes, but his overuse of terms like "Flavortown" annoy me to no end. He now even hosts the ridiculously stupid "Minute to Win It" game show outside of the confines of Food Network.

Season Three was forgettable. There was some sort of controversy when it was revealed that one of the finalists had lied about his background. (Seriously, people, are we still doing that? Do people ever get away with it??) The eventual winner was reinstated into the finale in his place, and she won. I remember her "culinary point of view" but not her. Apparently she found herself to be forgettable as well, because she chose not to renew the show for another season.

Season Four I remember better. Of the final 5 contestants, four of them have their own shows. This is where the American Idol parallel is at its best, in my opinion. The winner, Aaron McCargo Jr. just didn't suit me. And his show, Big Daddy's House, seems clunky. That said, it's in its third season, so who am I to judge? His runner-up, Adam Gertler, had one show that didn't last, but now has a show called "Kid in a Candy Show" where he investigates all things sweet. While he was frenetic and somewhat tiring to watch given his high energy, I think he makes a better TV host than Aaron. The other two contestants who have shows work on the Cooking Channel (a sister station to Food Network). I guess when you create a whole other channel, you need to fill up the hours.

Season Five is where my kale comes in. This was a pretty good season. While I found the runner-up to be insufferable, some of the other contestants had great appeal, in my opinion. The winner, Melissa d'Arabian, has an interesting background. She met her husband in France, has an MBA, and lived in TX. For me, the draw to her was clear. Her show, Ten Dollar Dinners, shows how you can cook multiple courses for a family for under $10. And, amazingly, she can do it. I watch her show only if I stumble upon it, and the other day she was making croque madams. As someone who is a sucker for essentially an open-faced grilled cheese with cream sauce and fried egg, I watched further. A side dish she was making, was kale chips.

I've heard about kale chips and passed them up at every opportunity. But this seemed like an easy thing to try, and if it turned out horribly, ehh...not much was lost. Basically, the recipe calls for three ingredients: kale, olive oil, and sea salt. Guess what? DELICIOUS. And really as easy as it sounds. Set your oven at 275 and start ripping the leaf off the stalk. Easy - pinch the stalk at the base and run your hand up to the top of the leaf. Some of the stalk will rip off in your hand, but not to worry. Rip the leaf up into pieces about an inch in size. I ripped and then rinsed (organic kale - no need to do anything other than rinse). Then, make sure the kale pieces are dry.

Once they're dry, move the kale pieces to a baking sheet (it took two) and put a total of two tablespoons of olive oil over the dried pieces (I put a tablespoon on each baking sheet). Roll them around and make sure every leaf gets a little oil on it. Sprinkle with sea salt. Not too much, though, because you can always add more after they come out of the oven. Into the oven they go - 10 minutes then move them around and flip them as best you can. Put them back in for another 10 minutes, or thereabouts, until they're crispy. I put a little more sea salt after they came out. Delish.

Oh, and Season Six of The Next Food Network Star was pretty good. Aarti Sequeira, the winner, has a show called "Aarti Party" where she makes sometimes overwhelming Indian food very accessible to the average American. I haven't tried any of her recipes yet, but they always look tasty.

So, my only question is...do you lose any of the nutritional value by baking the kale? If you know, please post!

The Minimalist goes the way of the Dodo

2011-01-27T09:22:00.000-06:00

As you have most likely heard, Mark Bittman has decided to retire his weekly column in the NY Times, The Minimalist. Once I picked myself up off the floor and wiped away the tears, I started thinking about a fitting tribute to the man who takes NY dry wit and mixes it with his love of food in a way I could only dream to achieve.

I may have found it today.

I'm thinking, a la Julie and Julia, that I might try to create all of the dishes on his 25 favorites list found here. I'm using non-committal language because I've just started a new job and vowing to do something potentially this involved seems a bit daunting. But it's not like I'm trying to make it through his entire book of "500 Revolutionary Recipes for Better Living," so maybe it is do-able.

Stay tuned.

Claims claims everywhere and not a bite to eat

2011-01-25T14:13:00.000-06:00

Following up on my previous post, I just happened to read this article on Salon.com by Ellen Tarlin. A quote is below. It's not like this is a major surprise, but I will say I did think Cheerios were a healthier option. Oy.

Manufacturers also label foods in tricky ways. They make portion sizes unrealistically small so calorie and nutrient counts appear sufficiently low. A pint of ice cream is supposed to contain four servings of half a cup each. I don't remember the last time I ate just a half-cup of ice cream—probably because there never was one. Food companies also manipulate our perceptions by printing health claims prominently on their packages. When foods are criticized as unhealthy, instead of pulling products, the market alters them, creating "functional foods," which tie an ingredient in the food to the prevention of a certain disease. In some cases, such health claims are irrelevant, because they tout a characteristic a food already naturally possesses (it's meaningless, for example, to say an oil is low-carb, when, in fact, all oils are fats and contain no carbohydrates), or are so qualified as to render them pretty much meaningless, like this one from a box of Cheerios: "Three grams of soluble fiber daily from whole grain oat foods, like Cheerios cereal, in a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease. Cheerios cereal provides 1 gram per serving." So if you are already eating a low-fat, low cholesterol diet, eating Cheerios will provide you 1 gram of a substance that might reduce the risk of heart disease. In her book What To Eat, Marion Nestle reveals "The real reason for health claims ... health claims sell food products." Forbes reports that these foods "masquerading as drugs are a booming $31 billion business in the U.S. alone."

Food labels also misdirect. Front and center on a General Mills Cocoa Puffs Cereal box are the words "Whole Grain: Guaranteed," but the ingredients list reveals the whole grain to be "whole grain corn" (corn is one of the most overused foods in our country). The next ingredient is sugar, followed by corn meal and corn syrup, which are two other corn products and one other form of sugar.* (The two main sweeteners are most likely divided this way so the "whole grain" can be listed first since ingredients are listed by weight.) One three-quarter-cup serving of the cereal still contains 10 grams of sugar* and encourages people to eat chocolate (or at least chocolate-flavored foods) for breakfast. Nonetheless, the health claim leads consumers to believe the cereal has health benefits, thus making them feel better about buying it and serving it to their kids or eating it themselves.

A kind of love story...

2011-01-24T22:37:00.000-06:00

I am in love yet again. (Yes, I still love Mark Bittman, but amazingly, this is not about him.)

In recent months, I have experienced a training program called the Corporate Athlete. It's not training in terms of sports (though there is a "movement" component), but it's rather about energy management. Everyone always talks about time management, but sometimes time is out of your hands and there is a finite number of hours in the day. Your energy, on the other hand, is something that you always have control over.

That sounds a little more New Age-y than it is...I promise. You have to build on your physical or basic energy in order to optimize your other energy (emotional, mental, and spiritual). It's very Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for all you nerds out there.

And while I love the Corporate Athlete program (and desperately would love to be a certified instructor), this is not about that program either. This post is about Kind Bars.

While in this Corporate Athlete program, one of my co-workers who was leading the training mentioned finding Kind Bars. It took me a while until I tried one. And as soon as I did, it was love. ...But first let me tell you a story....

I was working out with a trainer (a trainer trainer, not a Corporate Athlete trainer, sadly) and she suggested I try one of those protein bars as a good supplement to the cardio and weight training she was having me do. This was a woman who was supposed to have my overall health in mind. A woman who was helping me trim down. I tried the protein bar she suggested. "I like the chocolate chip cookie dough flavor." (That should have been the first red flag.) It had the texture of all those other protein bars - chewy beyond belief, a serious test for any dental work. And sweet. Good lord was it sweet. So I turned it over to check out the ingredients.

And there they were. The first five ingredients. (And remember, this was supposed to SUPPORT my HEALTH and help me LOSE WEIGHT.) #1- corn syrup. #2- high fructose corn syrup. #3- calcium caseinate. #4- sugar. #5-fractionated palm kernel oil. Did I mention this young woman said she was getting a masters in nutrition??

Okay. Out of the first five we've got two kinds of corn syrup, one of the worst oils we can get, something I can't pronounce, and good ole sugar. No wonder it was sweet. yikes.

Now back to the Kind Bar. Basically, it's made of things that not only can be pronounced but also are actually good for you. The first one I had was the Cranberry Almond bar. Tasty doesn't begin to describe it. It tastes like...well...what it should taste like - cranberries and almonds. If you look at the first five ingredients (there are a total of 9 compared to 40 in the other bar) they are #1-almonds. #2-dried cranberries. #3-macadamias. #4-honey. Okay...the fifth ingredient seems to be basically just a nicer way to say corn syrup (from what I can tell), but at least it's not genetically modified. :-)

The next two bars I have tried by them (I have about another 8 waiting on my kitchen counter) were equally delicious. For breakfast one morning when in a rush, I had the Fruits and Nuts in Yogurt bar. Yum. And then tonight for dessert (when I really wanted to go out and get some ice cream), I had the Sesame and Peanuts with Chocolate bar. Certainly healthier than a pint of Blue Bell.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to continue my Kind affair with a Almonds & Apricots bar. It is, indeed, love.

Quick post - Foolproof Oven-Baked Brown Rice

2011-01-10T22:53:00.000-06:00

I can't remember to whom this should be attributed, so I'm hoping my mom will read this and comment. (I'm thinking it was my idol, Mark Bittman, but I can't be sure.)

Basically, it's the easiest brown rice recipe that allows for a great deal of customization. I usually add roughly chopped button mushrooms and half of a large onion (also chopped roughly).

Brown Rice, Foolproof Oven-Baked

To minimize any loss of water through evaporation, cover the saucepan and use the water
as soon as it reaches a boil. An 8-inch ceramic baking dish with lid may be used instead
of the baking dish and foil. To double the recipe, use a 13 x 9” baking dish; the baking
time need not be increased.

1 ½ c.
2 ½ c.
2 tsp.
½ tsp.

long-, medium-, or short-grain brown rice
water
unsalted butter or vegetable oil
salt

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 375 degrees. Spread rice in 8-inch-
square glass baking dish.

2. Bring water and butter or oil to boil, covered, in medium saucepan over high heat;
once boiling, immediately stir in salt and pour water over rice. Cover baking dish tightly
with doubled layer of foil. Bake rice 1 hour, until tender.

3. Remove baking dish from oven and uncover. Fluff rice with dinner fork, then cover
dish with clean kitchen towel; let rice stand 5 minutes. Uncover and let rice stand 5
minutes longer; serve immediately.

Brown Rice with Parmesan, Lemon, and Herbs

1. Heat 2 tablespoons unsalted butter in medium nonstick skillet over medium heat until
foaming; add 1 small onion, minced, and cook until translucent, about 3 minutes. Set
onion aside.

2. Follow recipe above, substituting chicken broth for water, omitting butter or oil,
reducing salt to 1/8 tsp, and stirring onion mixture into rice after adding broth. Cover and
bake as directed. After removing foil, stir in 1/8 tsp ground black pepper, ¼ cup minced
fresh parsley, ¼ cup chopped fresh basil, ½ cup grated Parmesan, 1 tsp grated lemon zest,
and ½ tsp lemon juice. Cover with clean kitchen towel and continue with recipe.

Quick post - Salmon. It's what's for dinner...and lunch

2011-01-10T22:46:00.000-06:00

Tonight I did the same thing I did last week - pocket cooking of salmon and zucchini. Super tasty, super easy, and super healthy. Honestly, how can you go wrong?

Amazingly, I managed to keep myself from eating the entire 8 ounce fillet that I had purchased. Since it had been on the plate with the zucchini I was eating that had herbs de provence on it and the lemon that was on the fish. I flaked it with some raw zucchini, so the juices from the fish, the lemon, and the herbs de provence were combined with the raw (yet very tender) zucchini.

I also baked some brown rice tonight - the fool-proof method (see the following post). So, tomorrow's lunchbox is full. From the top to the bottom - flaked salmon with zucchini, brown rice with mushrooms and onions, unsweetened applesauce, all-bran crackers with laughing cow cheese, and yellow and orange bell peppers. I started to pack dried cranberries and crushed pecans for my morning oatmeal, but then I remembered that I am going to a morning event with Leadership Austin, where they will serve breakfast.

This should give me enough energy to get through the pilates class I'm going to after work....

That new year enthusiasm

2011-01-05T00:32:00.000-06:00

As with many other people, I start the new year with an enthusiasm that is, let's face it, bound to wear off. That said, I'm celebrating my small wins.

Today, I didn't have too many wins on the breakfast or afternoon snack front. In my previous post, I mentioned my work is having a celebration where we had free breakfast tacos and free cupcakes. I had two of each.

However, the wins began shortly after work. I had worked too late to get to my pilates class on time, but that didn't stop me. I went to the gym and made sure to sign up for pilates classes on each of the Tuesdays and Thursdays for the rest of the month (it's a sign up class at the gym).

But signing up was not the win. I got on the treadmill. It wasn't the world's best workout, but let's be honest, I usually bite off more than I can true, so slow and steady is my new motto. I did 30 mins: a 5 min walking warm-up and then did 3 minutes running and 1 minute walking. I didn't remember to look at the distance I covered, but all in all, I was pleased.

The wins continued at the grocery store where I didn't buy too much (a SERIOUS win), I didn't have any impulse purchases (unless you count pickles and soy sauce), and everything I purchased was healthy.

Another win was dinner. Super healthy. Preheat oven at 350 (ahhh...the good ole all-purpose 350). Two packets made from foil - one had a
salmon fillet (technically larger than I'm supposed to have, but hey), seafood seasoning, and slices of lemon. The other had two medium zucchini sliced in 1/4 inch slices, a little bit of olive oil, and some herbes de provence. The two packets stayed in the oven for 20 mins and came out perfect. Delicious.

The last win of the evening (b/c clearly going to bed early isn't happening) was preparing my meals for tomorrow.
In my Oots lunch box (as shown from top to bottom), I packed breakfast, lunch, and a snack. Breakfast is Fage fat-free Greek yogurt, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, wheat germ, and ground flax seed. Lunch is three beans (black, kidney, and green) and brown rice with a bit of italian dressing on it. Hearty, tasty, and full of fiber. On the left is one of my latest favorite "desserts"...it's really just apples and dried cranberries in a skillet with some water and cinnamon stewed down until the apples are really soft and the cranberries are somewhat rehydrated. It's so delicious. And, technically, the only bad thing for you is the sugar in the cranberries.

The next row down is the snack row. 18 (one serving) of All-bran crackers and two pieces(?) of Laughing Cow Light Original Swiss. Each of those are only 35 calories and they're super tasty. Lastly, one of my favorite things is dill pickles. This is two spears of Vlasic dill pickles. Recently my boyfriend read that they have a lot of potassium (some runners/bikers drink pickle juice to avoid cramping), and since I'm getting back into working out, why not eat more pickles? (In truth, I just like them.)

I also prepared (somewhat) for tomorrow night's dinner. It will be chicken and brown rice stir fry. I've got chicken breasts in the fridge defrosting, I've got brown rice in the pantry, and tonight I purchased three different bell peppers, an onion, and some shredded carrots. I'm excited to make dinner tomorrow night. ...with my impulse buy...soy sauce. :-)

Yay new year enthusiasm! And with that, good night.

There's cake in the break room!

2011-01-04T11:11:00.000-06:00

What is it about free food? (I'm sure I've blogged on this topic before, but I feel it needs to be revisited.)

With the new year comes many people's resolutions to "get fit" or "go on a diet" or some other health-related goal. While I don't disapprove of that, I'm trying to not think of it as just something that one does on Jan 1st. I was really getting into pilates before the holidays, so I'm going to start back up with that...not because it's the new year, but because I'm back in town.

And, of course, given the time of year, wouldn't you know...my company has free breakfast tacos available this morning and free cupcakes this afternoon (we have a big relaunch of our company brand, so it's a celebration day).

What are they trying to do to us??

I wonder how many people's resolutions we just helped to take two steps back with these offerings.

I knew that we would be having these tacos and cupcakes (I volunteered to help out with the larger event), so I had a healthy dinner last night and will only be having a salad at lunch. I think the key is balance and not beating yourself up about taking advantage of those freebies from time to time.

I'll also be going to pilates today after work - I just hope I can walk tomorrow or, more importantly, Thursday when I plan to go to pilates again followed by a body pump class. ack.

It's a new dawn. It's a new day. And I'm feeling good.

2011-01-03T15:34:00.000-06:00

I'm a sucker for a resolution. There's something romantic about large gestures towards our future. The only problem is, I'm also a sucker for being hard on myself when my proverbial resolution eyes end up being bigger than my proverbial resolution stomach.

As such, I've decided to start small. My resolution is to write "more." How 'bout them apples?

So what is "more?" It's a lovely amorphous term that could allow success to be defined in a number of manners. But I am a bit of a nerd, and I do like numbers, so let's be real.

The way I figure, I should average out the past three years of posts and as long as by the end of 2011 I have posted more than average, resolution...well...resolved! I'm choosing an average and not just an improvement on last year because while the first half of the year started out with a bang, the second of half of the year definitely whimpered.

Here's the post count:
- 2008: 20
- 2009: 42
- 2010: 11
To write "more" than the average of the past three years, I need to post 25 times in the next year. The way I see it, that's basically twice/month maybe with one or two additional notes here and there.

That's definitely do-able. And I've got a year to do it. So start counting (what, you thought I wouldn't count this one??), and get ready to read. One down.

And for those of you who recognize the subject line, yes, it is a Michael Buble song. His "I just haven't met you yet" song is a definite guilty pleasure, and I felt "Feeling Good" was a great way to express the new year. Feel free to make fun of me.

Quick Post: There's a fungus among us

2010-07-12T12:54:00.005-05:00

Over the July 4th weekend, I took the BF home to Brooklyn for his first trip to New York City. I promised more walking than he had done in years. I'm not sure he heeded my warning to the extent he should have.

That said, I was the one that ended up with blisters.

The blisters were brought on by the red leather Liz Claiborne heels that I wore with my black and white dress to Babbo, one of Mario Batali's restaurants in Greenwich Village.

As you might imagine, every single thing we tasted was extraordinary. Literally...it was light years beyond ordinary. The asparagus and fresh ricotta ravioli was mouth-watering. The chianti-stained tagliatelle with wild board ragu was out of this world. The grilled garden vegetables tasted better than any grilled veggies I have ever had. My sister and brother-in-law each had a secondo, and I picked off of everyone's plates. Everything was magnificent.

But what might have been best was the BF's porcini tasting menu. The dishes were:
Anitpasto – Porcini mushrooms with arugula and balsamic drizzle
Primo - Tagliatelle with porcinis in a cream sauce
Secondo – Pork tenderloin encrusted with porcini, sea salt, and something else we can't remember

Lastly, we ended the meal with a pistachio and chocolate semi-freddo. I used the chocolate stick that was on top to stir my cappuccino. A divine ending to a spectacular meal.

Then we walked to the subway so the BF could see Times Square at night. That's where the blisters began.

Quick Post: An Admission of Love

2010-06-30T11:59:00.003-05:00

Many of you know of my obsession with grilled cheese. I even spoke of at one point opening a grilled cheese sandwich shop.

But this is not about my love for grilled cheese. It is an admission of love...for Mark Bittman.

I pretty much adore everything he does. As I've mentioned before, even if it's something I will never try, his attitude is so attractive that I will scan the recipe, read the article, or watch the video.

Here my obsession meets my love: One of Bittman's Videos entitled, Actually Grilled Cheese.

This is 2:24 minutes (with an additional 15-20 seconds for the lead in ad) of Bittman's dry wit (he suggests adding mustard, pesto, ben gay or sunscreen to the sandwich) and his simplistic yet brilliant food ideas.

I am in love once again.

Garlic Anyone?

2010-06-20T20:58:00.003-05:00

In keeping with the attempt to eat healthy, I decided to try a recipe that I've been wanting to try for a while. Baked chicken with a coating of All-Bran (Garlic and Herb) Crackers. I was excited about it. This is a considerably higher fiber option than regular breadcrumbs. And lower calorie to boot (18 crackers to a serving). Plus those crackers are wicked tasty.

Off to the store I go. Well, lo and behold, no All-Bran Crackers. Now, this is the grocery store where I shop almost exclusively, so I know that I've purchased them there before. But now the shelves are filled with the store brand gourmet crackers, none of which are even near my beloved All-Brans. So what to do? Well, I go back to the original recipe. Instead of All-Bran crackers (which was my touch) I picked up some Fiber One Cereal. A co-worker of mine has done this baked chicken thing with Fiber One before, so I knew it could work. My only concern was that the cereal has a sweetness to it that I wasn't sure I wanted in the coating of the chicken. The plot thickens.

When I got home, I had 3 plump chicken breasts, which were clearly larger than the 4 ounces each that I needed. I had looked at a baked chicken recipe and they gave a cooking time for a pounded out chicken breast. Perfect. I weighed them out and they were about 8oz each. Perfect. I pounded them out and cut them in half. But before I had even gotten to the chicken, I put 1.5 cups of Fiber One Cereal, garlic powder, dried oregano, dried basil, some salt and some pepper in my Cuisinart. (If I couldn't have gotten my hands on some Garlic & Herb crackers, gosh darnit, I was adding garlic and herbs!) Pulse pulse pulse until those little branches of Fiber One are made into powder.

I whipped up three egg whites (not until frothy, but until all the aspects of the egg whites were more homogenous than right out of the shell). With one hand (always keeping one clean), I put the now six pieces of chicken breast in the egg whites, turned them about and then into the powder. It worked swimmingly. From there, on to a baking sheet. (Did I mention I pre-heated the oven to 350? Quite a household commitment in 100 degree Texan weather, I might add.)

Once all six pieces were done, I put the baking sheet into the oven (middle lower rack) and baked them for 20 minutes. A quick flip and back in for 3 minutes. They were golden brown and cooked perfectly. Success!

While the chicken was cooking, I put together a bean puree that was the suggestion of the BF. I put two drained cans of Great Northern Beans and put them in the Cuisinart. I peeled three garlic cloves and threw them in. Let me stop here. That was too much garlic. I should have listened to BF. He told me that it was going to be too much. Let me repeat. I should have listened. In addition to the way too much garlic, I added some extra virgin olive oil. I probably should have used the really good stuff for this as the taste would have been a nice addition. Pulse pulse pulse. After tasting it (and, yes, I could tell it was too much garlic at that point), it needed something. I added some red pepper flakes and cayenne (not much of either, for the record). All in all, it's definitely something to do again, just not with as much garlic. This recipe made 4 servings.

So, if you put a serving of the puree and a serving of the chicken together, it's only about 200 calories. Tomorrow night, I'm going to add a spinach salad with some balsamic drizzle. I think it will work really nicely. Maybe the salad will break through the garlic of the puree. Fingers crossed.

Quick Post: My Favorite Spices and Another New Recipe

2010-06-18T19:51:00.005-05:00

Cumin is almost always the front runner. Something about that smokey and versatile just seems to go with everything I make. Well, almost everything.

But, last week when I did my salmon en papillote recipe, I decided to turn to the old standards of the spice cabinet, dried oregano and dried basil. In that recipe I considered using herbes de provence as I often have on my sauteed zucchini, but a while back I guess I put too much on and did not enjoy it. So I figured, why not try the oregano/basil combo. It worked perfectly.

So today when I was making a healthy meal (trying to modify my calorie intake...wheee) that also tasted good, I thought about those two spices again. I browned about a pound of ground turkey and stirred in vegetable primavera pasta sauce. I then put those two items into a dish, rinsed out my large skillet, and put a touch more olive oil in. I sweated half an onion (in retrospect, a full one would have been more than okay in this recipe) and threw in two diced golden zucchini (the most amazing marigold color you've ever seen) and one diced green zucchini. And what did I season them with? Why dried oregano and basil, of course.

Since I had put salt and pepper on the ground turkey and the pasta sauce already had plenty of salt, I didn't put any more in with the zukes. Once they were cooked through (with a bit of bite left), I mixed them with the turkey and pasta sauce. It was great. I had had a hankering for a pasta dish, but this satisfied that craving without the actual pasta. This recipe ended up making 4 servings of 330 calories each, which fits perfectly into the meal size I'm going for.

Quick Post: Just Desserts

2010-06-18T19:34:00.003-05:00

My culinary experimentation and exploration is primarily of the savory variety. I do make profiteroles with chocolate sauce. I do make a citrus pound cake with lemon sauce. And I do make banana bread. But overall, I'm not really much of a baker, which for some reason says to me that I'm not much of a dessert maker. But recently when I just got my KitchenAid stand mixer, I made a chocolate chip cookie batter (much of which was eaten raw), so perhaps that will change.

Probably due to that mini-success, a lot of dessert recipes have been catching my eye. Some require baking, others require freezing, and even some require grilling. Some are better in the winter, while other should probably only be made in the summer. Either way, they all sound tasty.

Jamie Oliver's Lemon, Lime, and Peppermint Sorbet: http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/fruit-recipes/lemon-lime-and-peppermint-sorbet

Lemonade Cookies: http://foodblogga.blogspot.com/2009/09/lemonade-cookies-monsoon-monocookie.html

Grilled Fruit with Lemon Zabaglione: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Grilled-Fruit-with-Lemon-Zabaglione-352991

Hmm....seeing a common theme? I'm a sucker for citrus.

And since it's Peach time in Texas, I've been thinking of making a peach and cherry rustic tart. Sadly (my former baking instructor's heart is breaking as I type this), the likelihood of my making my own dough is...well...none. I still have a pie shell in the freezer (how long do those things last in there? hmm). I'm thinking about just rolling that out and using it. I'll be sure to keep you informed if I attempt ths recipe.

Lastly, I would like to publicly commend my BF on his outstanding custard. The other day I went over to his apartment, and couldn't identify what he was cooking on the stove. He wouldn't tell me. (He joked it was just something he found on his stove and thought he'd see what it tastes like.) When he was done stirring, he poured into three mugs, scraped some nutmeg on top, and put the three mugs in the fridge. After dinner, he handed me one with a spoon - it was fabulous custard. It was absolutely delicious. He is now planning on getting a creme brulee torch. I support that decision.

another quick thought

2010-06-12T15:09:00.004-05:00

One blog I neglected to add in my previous post is one partially authored by a high school friend, Harriet. She's had some pretty cool jobs, but working for a radio station and blogging about food is up top (I realize I'm biased). Good Food is blog and radio show that features food stories from all over Los Angeles. They cover recipes, local food heroes, restaurants, and items known as the "Bacon Explosion." You just can't go wrong with something like that.

If you're in the LA area and don't know about this already, get to tuning your radios to 89.9 KCRW and listen from 11am-12pm (Pacific Time, of course) to catch Good Food. What to do if you miss it or aren't in LA? Well, you can download the podcast on iTunes, of course. Details are on the website.

more blogs

2010-06-12T14:54:00.001-05:00

My life at work has been pretty hectic for, well, over a year now. In order to reduce some of the craziness, we hired some folks recently. As such, I have a new teammate, and as luck would have it, she's a foodie too!! In fact, she's even more of a foodie than I am, as her time during her "sabbatical from corporate life" was spent creating and running a food company where she taught cooking classes, developed recipes, etc. She even has a blog.

So we decided. Since neither of us have been very good about actually keeping up with our food blogs, we would make a monthly meeting of the newly formed "SSFBS" (Super Secret Food Blogging Society) during lunch and hole up in a conference room and spent the hour writing on our blogs.

Our first meeting was not "successful" in terms of actual publishing, but I started a couple drafts and she did some research on eel, the topic for her next post. All in all, for our inaugural visit, it was a good start. While weren't writing, though, we were chatting about food. And she shared with me some of her favorite food blogs. So I'm now sharing them with you.

101 Cookbooks
This pick might seem an odd one for me, as 101 Cookbooks is primarily a vegetarian blog. Let's be honest. I'm a meat eater and proud of it. But her wide variety of influences makes her recipes interesting, exciting, and, no doubt, tasty. Her focus on more natural ingredients is something I'm trying to get better at. In an ideal world, I would only shop through a CSA and the farmers' market, but I'm not there yet. This blog might inspire me to get there.

Chocolate and Zucchini
Clotilde has been blogging about food since 2003, so I'm pretty sure that makes her an "old-timer" (despite being younger than I am). She started out as a Computer Science major in college who grew to love food during her time living in the Bay Area (she's Parisian and is back living there). Since 2003 she has written books, garnered pretty major media attention, and scores of followers who are rather active on her virtual community. I now count myself as one of the pack.

Simply Recipes
This is just what it sounds like. It is a well-written and simple repository of some great recipes. The pictures are compelling and drool-worthy. The prose is short and sweet, and the recipes are wonderfully descriptive. At the bottom of the page, you'll find other recipe suggestions based on the one you're reading. This is a new favorite to be sure.

And, last but certainly not least, At Table
This is Laura's blog. Her website has an amazing list of recipes, upcoming classes (for those of you living in Austin) and links to some very interesting stories, books, and blogs. Personally, I'm hoping to attend her "Feeding Your Inner Athlete" cooking class.

Quick and healthy summer dinner

2010-06-08T20:53:00.004-05:00

Lately, the concept of slimming down has been at top of mind. I've gained some weight since I started dating my boyfriend. My friends say it's "happy weight" as it comes from indulging in dinners out at restaurants, Saturday morning doughnuts, or Sunday afternoon Coke floats. And, yes, more alcohol has been consumed on those lazy weekends while watching sports.

In our defense, we have also done a lot of active things like going to the golf driving range, having batting practice (with a wooden bat and a tennis ball...sort of a bit odd), pitch and putt, long walks, etc. I have also joined the gym where he goes and have committed to going 3-4 times/week at minimum (having someone to meet there sure does help).

But let's be honest. It's all about the food.

So, in an effort to prepare a pretty healthy dinner the other day, I improvised a salmon en pappilote. (Thankfully, this is not rocket science.)

I didn't have any parchment (though I've lately decided I should at least have some in my pantry, so that needs to be remedied), so foil it was. I wasn't actually sure how that was going to affect cooking time, so I looked up some recipes on epicurious.com (the best recipe site out there bar none...of course I'm biased since my bro-in-law is the technology team lead of the website) just to get a sense of how long it should cook. The resulting information? 25 minutes at 350. (well, sort of...keep reading)

I take out two large pieces of foil and doubled them over. I put about a teaspoon of olive oil on each. Over at my cutting board, I sliced about half of a zucchini in 1/8th inch slices. I then placed half of the sliced zuke on each piece of foil; salt; pepper.

Side note: when I say salt and pepper, I mean fresh ground. I have a sea salt grinder and a black pepper grinder. They are my go to spices. And now, back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

I then put the salmon on top of the zuke slices. When I went to my grocery store's fishmonger, I asked for 3-4oz fillets. Frankly, I wanted more, but I know you're really only supposed to have that sized fillets. As luck would have it, he cut them a bit too large and they were 6oz each. (Sweet!) I really can't imagine only eating half of that portion, so I think 6oz fillets are the way to go in the future. But I digress....I put the salmon fillets on the zukes. I then dusted them lightly with dried oregano, dried basil, and a touch more sea salt. Then I sliced a lemon (because I'm not actually sure if I can eat oven roasted salmon without lemon) and put a couple slices on top of the lemon.

I sealed up the packets by lining up the long sides and folding them over a couple times. Then I folded over each of the shorter sides a couple times. The little presents were ready. I put them on a baking sheet and put them on the lower of my two oven racks (sort of low middle). I set my kitchen timer for 20 minutes, as in my experience, salmon always takes longer to cook than the recipes say. I don't know how it could be such a universal problem, but it is. So my theory was that I would check on it after 20 minutes and, depending on the progress, would mentally prepare myself to not eat for a while.

As suspected at the 20 minute mark, the little packets weren't quite done. The good thing with salmon is that I don't need it to be cooked to a fair-thee-well, but it looked close enough that "properly cooked" seemed within grasp, so I decided to try for a bit more. I turned the oven up to 400, put the packets (re-closed) back in, and reset the clock for 10 minutes. Truth by told, I knew the oven wasn't going to get up to the full 400 by the time the buzzer went off, but I figured it would work all the same.

When the ringing began, I took out the packets. I couldn't hold back and risked a bit of fingertip burning to open it up and check if we were done. We were. They were absolutely perfect. In the next 90 seconds while we waiting for the foil to become a little more manageable, I microwaved some Uncle Ben's Brown & Wild 90 Second rice. Once that was done, I put half of the rice on one plate and the contents of one packet on top of that. I did the same for the other plate. The fish, zucchini, lemon slices and olive oil had made a great sauce that permeated the wild rice.

I thought it was delicious, but perhaps more importantly, the boyfriend thought it was fantastic and requested that I make it again...soon. (He also had the suggestion of adding more zukes some with a thicker cut to add some more veggies and more texture. I think he's got something there.)

Calorie-Free Reading

2010-05-25T20:09:00.006-05:00

As do many foodies, I watch a lot of the Food Network. I watch "The Best ____ I Ever Ate" which recently even had an episode that focused on deep friend items (including deep fried bacon!?!?). I watch Iron Chef America (though what we really need are the giggling and shy actresses/models that they have on the judging panel in the original Iron Chef). I watch Good Eats when I feel like seeing what a culinary anthropologist might say about s'mores.

I watch all sorts of things. But aside from a variety of culinary magazines, I don't tend to read food-related books. That has changed lately.

A few months back, I saw an article talking about this wine book and how it didn't make anything sound too fancy. That it would talk you through figuring out what it is you like instead of telling you what to like. I figured that since my wine pallet is so sophisticated that I usually just say, "I like red," this might be the book for me. It is. I'm only partially through the book (Drink This; Wine Made Simple), but absolutely love the writing. The author, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, writes like a normal human speaks. She doesn't beat around the bush, and there is no pretension in how she presents a typically pretentious subject.

"Much ado is made about corkscrews, but any one that works for you is good enough. I like the traditional one with the little arms that you life up; they usually cost less than $10 and will follow you to your grave....I admire people who can use a waiter's corkscrew effortlessly, but I'm not one of them (though I keep one in the car for picnic-related emergencies)." Picnic-related emergencies? I love it.

"All that being said, if you spend more than five minutes in this lifetime thinking or reading about corkscrews, you're wasting your time. Magazine editors periodically assign stories about them, but I think this is mostly because they go to the store and don't know which one to by, so they think it's an issue that needs getting to the bottom of. It isn't." Tell it like it is, sister.

My Birthday was earlier this month and since my friends and family know me so well, I received too food books for the day. From my sister and brother-in-law, I received the book that Tom Colicchio says he used to teach himself how to cook. It is Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques. Aside from its step by step illustrated and informative guidance, it makes me smile because of my sister. Hearing her immitate the way he says, "you cut it into streeeeeps." She just loves the way he says, "streeeeeps." And I agree - he's just so cute!

The second book I received for my birthday was from my friend Oren. It is Heat by Bill Buford. I hadn't heard about this book before, but the more I mention that I'm reading it to my foodie friends, they all rave - apparently I'm behind the curve. But I'm catching up. This is a riveting and hilarious book about a NY Times writer/editor who seemingly by accident finds himself in the kitchen of Babbo, one of Mario Batali's critically-acclaimed restaurants. The book flips back and forth between Buford's initial days as an kitchen extern (or kitchen slave as he refers to it) serving under a no nonsense prep chef and Mario's initial days as a chef learning his craft first in California and then in Italy. Much time is spent explaining just how raucous he was as a young adult - and it's hilarious. Images like that of "Batali drinking tequila from a goatskin boda bag, the liquor splattering all over his face" continually make me chuckle. As a side note, the book's full title is Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany and that pretty much sums it up.

I recommend all three - Drink This when you want in your face honesty. Complete Techniques when you want to smile. And Heat when you want to chuckle at the image of a drunk guy in shorts and orange clogs who is only one of the world's best chefs.

References (Amazon links, but I suggest borrowing from your local library or buying from a local bookstore):
Drink This: Wine Made Simple by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

Complete Techniques by Jacques Pepin

Heat by Bill Buford

No chili for you

2010-03-16T12:48:00.002-05:00

Last night I didn't make the chili that I had planned. In fact, despite having defrosted in the fridge all day, the ground pork and ground beef were still rock solid. So, instead I ate a couple of my "gourmet ramen" noodle soups. They turned out pretty good.

But then I got inspired. I wanted something sweet. In these situations, I often dream of the little chocolate buttons that I would get as part of a Nutrisystem delivery a couple years ago. I would dip them in a tablespoon of peanut butter, and they were divine. (As a side note, the only proper way to eat peanut butter is with chocolate. I have been told my dislike of PB&J sandwiches is un-American. So be it.)

But without those chocolate buttons, I turned to the bar of dark chocolate I had in my freezer. Since my mother had recently discovered the jar of peanut butter in my pantry, I knew I had the makings of something wonderful. And then it occurred to me that I had the remainder of some vanilla ice cream in my freezer too. The wheels were turning.

In a mug I dumped the chocolate (which I had chopped into fairly fine chunks so they'd melt easier). I then added about two tablespoons of the creamy peanut butter. Into the microwave it went. The initial melt of one minute didn't quite do the job, so I think I put it in for another minute. A sauce was born.

The cool thing (no pun intended) about the dessert was when I drizzled (read: poured) the sauce on top of the ice cream it hardened. That makes sense since at room temperature the chocolate is solid, but it was a surprise nonetheless. And then I was immediately thrown back to the Magic Shell that my sister and I used to eat. At first, we really only had it when we visited family in Mississippi. Then, one miraculous Saturday morning, it was located at our corner grocery store in Brooklyn. Oh so tasty.

Anyway, breakfast this morning was the remainder of the banana bread and lunch is a couple more packets of the Thai Kitchen soups. Tonight, the chili will be made and I'll be making corned beef, cabbage, and champ to bring into work on Thursday (my knitting group will be having it for lunch).

...somewhere in all of this I have to cook a meal for my Caritas delivery. hmmm....

A new way to think about food...for the time being

2010-03-15T11:26:00.010-05:00

It's pathetic, I know, that I have not posted to this blog recently. It's like the diary I told myself I would keep every year. It just doesn't happen. I drafted a few entries, but never actually got around to finishing them or posting them. So sad.

Anyway, this post isn't going to be so much about a recipe, but more about my week's goal. Aside from St. Paddy's Day (which deserves a break from the rules), I am going to do my best to try to eat only out of my pantry, fridge, and freezer. I also am going to try to post every day what I am eating. Not as a way to keep a food journal in terms of calorie intake, but rather so that I can be accountable to the world at large for my pantry/freezer consumption.

I realize that this goal may sound a bit extreme, but I'm doing it for two main reasons:

Saving Money

Until this week, I have been receiving CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes for the past, say, 6-8 months. I am very much for consuming as much local food as possible. And the items that arrive in these CSA boxes are not only local, but they're healthy (given that they're vegetables and fruit). When I first started receiving the CSA boxes, I got the produce through the Johnson Backyard Garden. It's such a fun idea that what is now a viable business and essentially a farm started as someone's backyard garden not far from downtown. Sort of has that "anything is possible if you dream big enough" vibe to it. Their produce was great, but you had to go pick it up between X and Y hours on this particular day of the week. Not a big pain, but I'll be honest, I forgot to pick it up a couple times. (This is not completely tragic as any food they have left over from the pick ups gets donated, so it all went to a good cause.) One thing I did like about their boxes too was that if you didn't want X product, there was a sort of "leftovers" box where you could put it. And if there was something in that leftovers box that you wanted, you could take it as an exchange. There were a couple times that I exchanged something for some jalapenos. One thing that didn't work for me, though, was that you were really only able to get vegetables. They didn't really have any fruit, and as for other foods (dairy, meat, etc.), you couldn't order through them (you could order eggs). This isn't a "negative" of theirs, but it's just how they have chosen to focus their service.

So, after a few months with Johnson's Backyard Garden, I decided to switch to Farmhouse Delivery. I had seen them featured in a number of articles and ads in Edible Austin, and a friend of mine was a devoted customer. Not to mention, a few of the smaller restaurants around town also used their services. All in all, a good set of reviews. The price was pretty comparable ($37 for a delivery, if delivered every other week). They deliver right to your door on your designated day of the week, and if you've ordered something that needs to remain cold, they provide cooler bags to make sure nothing spoils. The other really cool thing about Farmhouse Delivery is that you could order items on top of your regular produce basket. You incur an additional cost, of course, but the products they have available range from cheeses to cubed lamb, honey to granola. So many options that it's hard to hold back. Most of these options were also the vendors that I like to support at my local farmers' market, so it's sort of like having the market delivered to your house.

The only problem is (and this was the case with Johnson's Backyard Garden too) that there's too much food. As a single gal, even one who likes to cook, it's hard to go through a huge bushel of food. An added "problem" is that my boyfriend likes to cook a ton too (don't get me wrong, it's not really a problem - he's such a good cook), so it's not even like I am eating all of my meals at home. In fact, I have been cooking very little at home in the past few months only compounding the issue of food spoiling before I can get to it. In other words, losing money. So, I have made the painful yet necessary decision to stop receiving CSA boxes for the time being. If I need some local produce, I can either find the local items at my grocery store, or I will wait until Saturdays for the farmers' market.

Making Room

My freezer is pretty big. I have one of those french door refrigerators with a big freezer on bottom. I fell in love with this fridge when I bought my house in 2007. I was hell-bent and determined to make this fridge fit in my kitchen no matter what. In fact, I even had to take a jigsaw to the upper cabinets above the hole for the fridge so it'd fit properly. The fridge was destined to be mine. And it holds a TON of food. This is good and bad. Back to the whole "spoiling" thing, it's easy to lose food in there. In the past month or so, I have gotten a lot better about periodically cleaning it out, so hopefully, that's something I can keep up with. And if I'm not getting huge deliveries of produce, that will help keep it organized too.

The freezer, on the other hand, is fully stocked. This past week and weekend, I made a ton of chicken and vegetable soup (using up the bok choy, green onions, carrots, broccoli, chicken, and celery from my last CSA box). Then we made even more stock from the remaining chicken carcass. My freezer, therefore, has probably about ten containers of soup or broth tucked in there. I also have local meats that I have gotten from CSA boxes or the farmers' market. I have two pork tenderloins just waiting to be seared (so many good recipes for those things), I have cubed lamb just waiting to become a stew, I have ground pork and ground beef that were originally going to become my mother's meatloaf...but they might become chili now, and so on. (I must confess. I have a bag of Ikea Swedish meatballs in there too.) I also have a ton of frozen veggies - broccoli, veggie mixes, edamame, etc. There are frozen berries, fake sausage patties (as a meat eater, I still think they're pretty tasty), and loaves of bread that will become breadcrumbs at some point. There is even a bag of ripe bananas waiting to become banana bread. There is, of course, a bar or chocolate and a couple things of coffee grounds.

And that's probably not even the complete list. It is filled to the brim with no room for anything else. I need to really eat that down to a point where I can put more things in there.

The pantry is similarly stocked. I've got a bunch of canned soups (which I realize have a lot of sodium, but I don't have a problem with that in my diet), canned veggies, canned beans, canned fruit, pasta, brown rice, white rice, couscous, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, and so on. My latest obsession has become these ramen-like soups and noodle dishes from brands like Simply Asia or Thai Kitchen where you just add boiling water and let it sit. So much more sophisticated than the Top Ramen packets we used to eat in college...and hey...without the MSG, which is a big bonus.

All in all, there's a lot to be had out of the freezer, fridge, and pantry.

Today's Food

This morning on my drive into work, I had three slices of banana bread. My mother made banana bread this weekend while she was in town with some severely overripe bananas I had in the house. I could not for the life of me find the recipe that I had used in the past, but I didn't remember anything particularly distinctive about it, so we just looked for another. I found one in the Junior League Cookbook from Jackson, Mississippi (a gift from my MS family since I'm a member of the Junior League of Austin). The recipe had one interesting addition - you could use sour cream instead of the typical buttermilk. And while buttermilk adds that special something to a variety of recipes, I was certainly more apt to eat the rest of the sour cream before it went bad than I would have been to use the buttermilk in a recipe before it went bad.

For lunch today I have leftover salad from Saturday night (she made a salad from some CSA tomatoes and lettuce...ALL of the avocados had gone bad in record time...grr.). I put some dressing on it before I left the house - this dressing was something I had whipped up a week or so ago. English mustard, Dijon, balsamic, dried oregano, dried basil, salt, pepper, a touch of white vinegar, and some extra virgin olive oil (just not the super fancy kind that has a lot of personality and flavor). It's a pretty big salad.

I also brought some of the sweetpotatoes that my mother roasted with olive oil and Old Bay Seasoning. Yes, you read that right. No seafood as far as the eye can see...but Old Bay. My mother had served these to me back in February when I was visiting home. I'll be honest, at first, I wasn't sure it would be something I would like. Old Bay is supposed to be on crabs and in crab cakes. But sweet potatoes?? They turned out marvelously! So she made them again when she was here this past weekend, and once again they were super tasty.

Lastly, because I have a mild obsession with them, I have a number of pickle spears as what will likely be an afternoon snack. There is not much better than Vlasic (or possibly B&G) kosher dill pickles. The crunch, the acidity....it's all so very good.

Tonight, I'm thinking of making chili. I've got the ground pork and ground beef in the fridge defrosting. I've got some green onions left. I've got a can of kidney beans and a can of black beans. I've got a big can of tomatoes. All in all, I'm not exactly sure how it's going to pan out. And, I need to say this as someone living in Texas and the daughter of a Texan . I realize Texas chili does not have beans and does not (I wouldn't imagine) use ground meat. This, therefore, will not be Texas chili. I will have to name it something else.

I'm dreaming of some snow cream

2009-12-21T08:50:00.002-06:00

Since most of the blizzard in the Northeast has passed (at least that's what I hear), I should have posted this a couple days ago. But better late than never.

When my mom was growing up, snow storms meant her mother would make snow cream for my mother and her siblings. This tradition was passed on to me and my sister. Since my sister still lives in the Northeast, she's keeping the tradition alive and passing it along to her son.

Not surprisingly, this is a very simple "recipe." The ingredients are fresh fallen snow, heavy cream, vanilla extract, and sugar. That's it. If the snow is still falling, put a bowl outside and catch it while it's fresh from the sky. If the snow storm just stopped, you can scoop up some snow...keeping in mind to avoid...erm...discolored snow. In Brooklyn, we would open up the kitchen door, put our two bowls on the verandah (as we call our little landing leading to the sprial stairs), and wait not so patiently for the snow to fill up the bowls.

Don't use much vanilla - that stuff is strong, and if you put too much in, it's pretty nasty. Just do a tiny bit, taste it, add more if necessary.

The same thing applies to heavy cream - if you add too little, it tastes too much like, well, snow. If you add too much, the heavy cream melts the snow so much that you're really just eating iced heavy cream. Start with a little, and add more if it's needed.

Lastly, the sugar. This is a point of debate. One might think that you would want something like confectioner's sugar so the sugar would melt nicely into the rest of the concoction. But my sister and I agree - granulated sugar is the way to go. The grit is what makes it (and, as my mother says, what disguises the grit you might have gotten from the snow).

If you're in an area that is receiving snow, seriously, try this. It's one of my most favorite memories of childhood winters. And once you try it, you won't be able to go through a snowstorm without it. While other people might have been stocking up on salt or snow shovels, my sister (wise beyond her years) was stocking up on heavy cream.

What's one more?

2009-12-19T13:49:00.002-06:00

I decided, that since I'm doing such a stellar job of posting regularly here (please note the sarcasm), that I'd begin another blogging project. My friend and former fellow hockey player and I have started a blog about Macaroni and Cheese. Well, she started it and I asked to join. So, we'll see how inspired we get, and hopefully I'll try some new recipes just to put them on the blog.

Check it out: http://easypleasymacncheesy.blogspot.com/

Yours in cheesy goodness,
CraftMafia

Getting "Caught Up"

2009-12-05T19:23:00.005-06:00

My father, for what I can only imagine has been the entire length of his professional life, has felt that he needs to get "caught up." As his undeniable daughter in a variety of ways, I have found myself feeling and speaking the same way when it comes to work. (I used to speak that way about housework, but thankfully, my mother has staged and organizational intervention in a few sessions, and I think I've conquered that demon.)

But aside from work, the other thing I always need work on to catch up is my reading. There are just too many things that I'm interested in to read to my satisfaction. I get a ridiculous number of magazines (some I don't think I've paid for in years, others have been guests). Most of them, as you might imagine, are food-related. It's tough to keep caught up.

Then there is the robust internet world of food - keeping up with food blogs is a seemingly impossible task. Right now, I'm following about 15 food blogs and a handful of other blogs created by my friends. (If only I didn't have such smart and creative friends....)

So consider this a pledge (yes, yes, I know I've made and failed on some of them in the past, but I shouldn't be penalized for dreaming). I will consider reading my food blogs and my food magazines as a household chore. I have recently decided to pick particular days for particular household chores, and I think Saturday should be the "get caught up on food reading" day. It's the perfect thing to do with a football/baseball/hockey game on the TV with a dog curled up at your feet.

And since today is Saturday, I'm catching up on my food blogs. Only 95 unread blog posts to go. Magazines, I leave you to next week. Hey, I only created my pledge tonight, and the football game is already at halftime. (Go Horns.)

back on the horse

2009-12-01T19:55:00.002-06:00

I'm not sure why I didn't post in September. In October, I cooked a lot, so clearly didn't have a good excuse. But November, well, I did have a good excuse there. I participated in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. An honor-system contest (there's nothing really to win other than bragging rights) that asks participants to compose 50,000 words in the month of November.

In case you've never attempted to write in such a volume, a single-spaced page with normal 1" margins and Times New Roman font at 12 (a common default on most word processing programs, one page is about 660 words. Now imagine writing just shy of three of those a day. It sounds easy, at first. And truth be told, it is easy towards the beginning of the year. Through our AuNoWriMo (Austin Novel Writing Month) discussion forum, this year I receved a spreadsheet that has all these bells and whistles to track your progress, check your mood (yes, there's a chart for your motivation level), and how many words you've written per hour on average. It was fantastic and completely spoke to the nerdy OCD/anal person that I really am. One of my favorite aspects of that spreadsheet predicts that, if you stay at the pace you are currently writing, you will be done by X date.

After the first day when I more than doubled my day's allottment of words, I was floating around, so pleased with myself. I knew I couldn't keep up the pace, but according to that column of cells, I was going to be done by mid-November. How encouraging! The next day I didn't write anything, but I was still slightly ahead of the game, so all was not lost. The first year I did NaNoWriMo, I only wrote about 10k words. Last year, I think I wrote about 17k. But this year, I wrote 23k. I could certainly have written more - I was not lacking for content - but it was just the time that caused problems. The issue with November is that this year in particular, I traveled up to spend time with my family. And while that is a complete blast (we're all a bunch of weirdos), it does't necessarily help me set aside time to write.

I'm determined to participate in NaNoWriMo next year, and it's looking like the schedule will work in my favor. It's an "Thanksgiving off year" as things go in our family (when my sister spends Thanksgiving with her in-laws and Xmas with us), so I'll likely just hole up in Austin and feed my dog turkey and stuffing while writing.

I know it's a little premature, but I've already scheduled to take the beginning and the end of November off work. Well, that is, I've entered it as such in my Vacation Hours spreadsheet that automatically calculates the hours I've acrued every day and how much I have taken to reveal the balance. Yes, I have a vacation spreadsheet. Feel free to chuckle.

For more on NaNoWriMo - www.nanowrimo.org

tiny produce - a quick post

2009-08-16T23:21:00.001-05:00

I work in the semiconductor industry so I understand the concept of putting even more punch into a smaller and better package. But do we want this for our produce?

At the farmers' market a couple weeks ago, I ran across these small pears. And when I say small, I mean SMALL! Look at it in comparison to a cherry tomato. A grape! The kiwi looks like it's going to unhinge its jaw and eat my little pear. And this was supposed to be the same thing as an Asian pear? Those big grapefruit-sized, wonderfully crisp yet juicy monstrosities?? I asked the vendor, "Why are they so small. I normally see them much larger." I guess it's just in the way they trim the trees.

Many of the vendors at the farmers' market aren't exactly known for their well-developed rhetoric, but I'll admit I was hoping for something a little more informative. Alas. I was intrigued enough to buy a bag, and, after all, isn't that what counts? Making the sale?

So I brought them home and washed a couple of them off. I then marveled at just how minute they were. I was beginning to feel like I did in 5th and 6th grade when I was the tallest person in my class, boy or girl, and I let everyone know. I felt large and in charge. I mean, a pear with the diameter of a quarter? Insanity. Had I drunken from the "Drink Me" bottle or eaten the "Eat Me" cake?

Either way, I don't know what had happened, but they actually made me ill. Maybe they should trim the trees a little differently because the big ones never made me sick.

melting pot soup

2009-08-16T22:55:00.004-05:00

I am very blessed to have a wonderful brother-in-law. While he has innumerable pride-inducing characteristics (great husband and great father just to name two), one of my favorites is his interest in food. He works to create the epicurious.com website and has a non-work-related love of cooking interesting meals. At one point, he was making his own cheese in their ground floor tiny kitchen. Amazing.

At some point he and I were talking about some sort of Italian wedding soup. I don't know where that name came from, but I must have recently seen a can of Campbell's Italian-Style Wedding Soup ("Meatballs and Spinach in Chicken Broth" as it is described on the label). I think he had also told me of a version he made, and it piqued my interest.

I figured, instead of meatballs I could use the feta and spinach chicken sausage my local grocery store sells. I seared it off and chopped it into large-ish bite-sized bits. The mirepoix would, of course, stay the same (carrots, celery, and onions). And while the sausage was searing in another pan, the mirepoix would get things going in my large pasta pot. Once those had sweated out, I added in some chicken stock. I don't remember how much, but definitely too much. I ended up having an entire pasta pot full of this soup. But wait, I've gotten ahead of myself.

Right after I added the chicken stock, I started cutting up my bok choy and giving it a quick rinse. That's what I was substituting for the spinach...a decidedly non-Italian ingredient, as far as I know. I threw in the sausage since, while seared, it needed to be cooked through. I added some more water (as if there needed to be more volume). Then after a few minutes of boiling, I added the orzo. Did I mention that's what I replaced the little nondescript pasta balls in the Campbell's soup with tri-color orzo. It is a favorite of mine.

Not much longer after that I added in the bok choy. Some hot red pepper flakes and some freshly ground black pepper joined in on the fun. Not much salt was needed since broth usually takes care of itself. As you can see from the next picture, I made A LOT of the stuff.

The way I figure, this melting pot soup sums up the various cultures to which I was exposed as a child growing up in New York. Every family had Chinese food from time to time (my Jewish friends always having big family dinners at the Chinese restaurant on Christmas, a tradition of which I was mildly jealous). And though we ate Chinese food fairly regularly, I am aware that it pales in comparison to the real deal. But what can I say...my mother could eat her weight in Schezhuan green beans (though, being a bean pole herself, I suppose that is not much of a feat). And, of course, Italian food was ubiquitous in the city. Even though we were a borough away from Little Italy proper, we were only a few blocks up the hill from a neighborhood whose light poles were painted the green, white, and red of the Italian flag. And then Campbell's soup - I have such distinct memories of their "alphabet soup" from childhood. This might sound gross to many, but we added milk to our beef broth-based alphabet soup. It cooled the soup down to suit our childhood palettes, but more importantly, it's what our mom and dad did, so it was the right way to eat your soup. The next step, of course, was to crumble Premium Saltines (original, thank you very much) into the soup by the handful. That is still one of my go-to soups when I need something comforting.

In any event, it's a soup informed by my culinary past in the Melting Pot of all Melting Pots. And it's darn tasty.

dinner party

2009-08-16T22:29:00.005-05:00

I am unabashedly overjoyed to be out of the stay out until 4am crowd (well, at least not as a regular weekend occurrence) because it means that I have moved into the dinner party set. Yes, some of us had dinner parties a decade ago, but a decade ago I don't think I really saw cooking for what it is - a therapeutic way to let my creativity flow....not to mention some tasty vittles as a result.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to receive an invitation to a friend's house for a dinner party a few weeks ago. And let me say, this was a proper dinner party. The cocktail of the evening was a basil gimlet (OUTSTANDING drink, I might add, and one that I need to try at home sooner rather than later). The appetizers were figs drizzled in honey, olives, baguette slices with some sort of sun-dried tomato tapenade (maybe I'm not remember that part right, but it was good whatever it was).

Then came the entree. A perfectly cooked beef roast (red and bloody in the middle, but out to just ever so slightly pink towards the ends....something for everyone). Since we were in absolutely no rush and have a wonderful time making conversations in between nibbles of sticky figs, the hostess put the roast in while we were there. The hour flew by (no doubt helped along its way by the gimlets) also because the rest of the meal was a sort of dinner theatre. The way this apartment is set up allows some people to sit at the island's counter, watching what the cook is doing, and someone else could stand over to the side and participate in the island's conversation while talking to the cook. While all of this conversation was taking place, our hostess was deftly grilling bias-cut yellow squash and zucchini, large slices of avocado, and onions. The cheesy polenta that she had made earlier in the day and let set in a baking dish didn't fare quite as well on the grill as the vegetables, but taste-wise it was certainly a star (I'm willing to make that trade off any day - cheesier polenta that doesn't grill well...no problem here).

I feel as if I'm leaving something out, but the red wine we had with the dishes was the perfect accompaniment. It was all perfect. We then retired to the sectional to look over some magazines and continue our wine and conversation when the hostess exclaimed that she had completely forgotten to serve us her chilled melon soup as a starter. Oh well - we'll have it for dessert...and that we did. It was delicious. There was a dollop of what I surmised was greek yogurt on the top and she had added some dried herbs to the soup that I would have never considered - perfection.

The piece de resistance was that she insisted some of us take home leftovers. I've never been one to shy away from the leftover, so I gladly accepted. The first dinner companion said she would only take leftovers if it were in a tin foil swan. The gauntlet was thrown. Ask, and ye shall receive. A tin foil water fowl was created (one can't say for 100% sure if it was a swan, but the point was easily made). So how would our hostess follow up that masterpiece? With a tin foil fish, of course.

The picture doesn't do it justice, but I got to bring home a fish whose shape I can only describe as being shared with that of Flounder from Finding Nemo. It was perfect. However, it could not have been more perfect than the leftovers found inside. My dog, of course, got a tiny nibble of the meat (I'm a sucker for the pooch. What can I say). But the vast majority was left to me. I think I got two meals out of that beef roast and it was even more flavorful each time I bit into it. I'm thinking I'm going to have to try my magic at some point with a beef roast. Yum

Is work more important than food blogging??

2009-08-13T22:06:00.003-05:00

As some of you may have noticed, my blogs have been on a hiatus. This is not due to the fact that I haven't had and note-worthy food-related activities. On the contrary...and there are pictures to prove it!

This note is to say, forgive me, foodies. My day job (the one that pays for my food) has been a teeny bit busy lately. But don't fret! I have 4 blog posts in the hopper, some replete with visual aids. I commit to you all now before Blogger, the fridge, and my mother - I will post them before the weekend is through!

So check back come Monday morning, and if I haven't posted, send me nastygrams. Seriously. Yell, scream, throw tomatoes....

Much love from the busy foodie...

Oodles of Noodles - quick post

2009-07-20T22:08:00.004-05:00

This past Friday, I went to another one of Whole Foods Culinary Center's cooking classes. This one was not a Lunch Express as mentioned in a past post, but rather was a dinner menu with four courses and some wine (a step up from the iced tea at lunch).

Chef Corinne Trang took us on a tour of different noodle styles, and the food was amazing. She has a very interesting culinary history from Southeast Asia to Paris to NYC and a wonderfully informative, yet casual style when demonstrating for a class.

She currently lives in NYC, so for those of you who live there or live nearby, she's frequently referencing her favorite restaurants and dishes from around the city.

She's got a great range of books, and I encourage you all to check them out. (Family, if looking for a gift idea, I'd love her Essentials of Asian Cuisine book - it's almost like a reference book, less cookbook.) And, of course, she's got a blog. She is now in my right hand Food Blog list and can be found at: http://www.corinnetrang.com/blog.

Lemony Schnitzel

2009-07-20T19:54:00.007-05:00

Okay, let me start by saying, I am a British Isles Mutt. I am not of Austrian extraction. So my version of weiner schnitzel would likely offend the purists out there. With the disclaimers out of the way, on we go.

As part of my "grand plans" purchases yesterday, I bought some thinly-sliced pork cutlets and a big package of baby spinach. After having had amazing schnitzel in Fredericksburg, I had been wanting to give it a try. Tonight my original plan was to make my Melting Pot Soup, but without the orzo or the sufficient chicken stock that plan was thwarted. One lemon left....schnitzel it is.

For those of you who might wonder did the breading puff up, the answer is no. I used bread crumbs. For my set up, I had a plate of two eggs (probably could have stuck with one) scrambled and another plate of breadcrumbs.

In the pan I used a little butter and a little canola oil (so the butter won't burn). Unfortunately, the fire was a little too high for the first two pieces, as you can see in the picture. I turned the heat down for the next two batches, and they came out perfectly golden and crispy. In between each batch I added just a tad more oil and a tiny sliver of butter to make sure there was enough to pan fry in.

As I had the cutlets out of the pan and on the drying rack (so they could drip any excess oil they might have), I decided to make a pan sauce. I deglazed the pan with the juice of one lemon and a little more butter to make the sauce shine. It smelled amazing. I probably could have added some herbs, but I didn't have any on hand.

In retrospect, there was a bit too much butter and too much lemon. Had I had white wine on hand (which I never have because I don't like it), I should have deglazed with a bit of that, thrown in some shallots, and then done about half a lemon.

I got to thinking that I need to probably also have some green. I decided that a big pile of baby spinach sprinkled with a bit of "House Dressing" with a couple cutlets on top. A little drizzle of sauce on top.

I think this will make for some very tasty leftovers too.

Grand Plans - A quick post

2009-07-19T23:19:00.004-05:00

Today I went by the grocery store just to get some pickles (I had to make tuna salad), and it was one of those situations where you end up buying a heck of a lot more than you plan. (Oddly, it was not because I was hungry.) BUT, I had specific recipes in mind. I've been wanting to oven roast some leeks (just thought it's worth a try), so I bought a bunch of leeks ($2.99). I thought about making my Melting Pot Soup, so I bought bok choy ($1.38) and chicken, spinach, and feta sausage ($3.17). In thinking back to my fantastic trip to Fredericksburg, I also decided to get some thin-cut pork chops to try out a wiener schnitzel recipe ($1.99). I purchased some avocados at Costco last week, and I've been dying to make some guacamole, so I bought an onion ($0.23), some garlic ($1.00), and some jalapenos ($0.19). In addition to some other items, I got a pretty full 4 bags for just around $35.

One thing I'm trying to focus on is not letting my food spoil before I get to use it. That's a hard thing for me because I always have such grand plans, but I'm hoping this time will be different because I do have grand plans.

A Lunch Person

2009-07-19T22:45:00.005-05:00

When I was three, I attended a half-day session at the school down the block from where I lived. Being the "older than my time" girl from an early age, I was bothered by the fact that there were other kids (some 4 years old, some 3) who were staying there for the entire day. I wanted to be a "Lunch Person" like those who stayed until the afternoon. My mother, wanting to support her youngin's desires, would pack me a lunchbox that I could bring to school, even though I didn't eat it there. I was a Lunch Person.

I am again a Lunch Person. I have begun bringing my lunchbox to work. Yes, you read that right. I'm in my 30s, and I bring a lunchbox to work. Think a modern bento box, less disposable packaging, healthier meals, and downright cuteness. My lunch box is made by Oots. I am in love with it. It has all these cool little containers inside, and if you get the "Deluxe" version, it comes with one large and four small plastic containers that fit inside. (You can also buy it without the inserts.) I was lucky enough to receive one of these beauties from my sister and brother-in-law as a birthday present back in the beginning of May (everyone...mark your calendars for next year...). But it took me a couple months to get in the swing of actually using it as intended. There have been a couple days I've trotted along with a frozen meal inside, but that's not nearly as exciting.

So I gave myself an assignment. Go to the farmers' market (see my previous post called The Prodigal Daughter), buy some tasty vittles, and make sure to eat healthily with the help of my Oots Lunchbox. I started with some fruit. I cut my orange in the "Chinese restaurant" style way, as my mother calls it - in half from pole to pole then slice parallel to the equator. It's the best way to eat an orange. You can just rip the flesh out with your teeth and you barely get any pith.

Next came blueberries. A ton of blueberries in another small bin. They are so easy to snack on throughout the day. I love the way they pop in the mouth.

I also packed one of these little squares with cheese and crackers. It was some delicious Colby that I got at the farmers' market (my dog also likes it...he likes cheese). The Colby was firm, but not oppressively so - it didn't hurt my gums when I chomped down on a big cube. The crackers I used were, brace yourself, good ol' Premium Original Saltines. I know that this Colby could have stood up to a Carr's cracked pepper of a similarly spiced cracker, but there's just something about those Premium Saltines. I love them. One thing I didn't really think about, though, was that the moisture from the cheese made the crackers a little less than desirable in texture. But don't get me wrong, I still ate them. You can't beat the perfect amount of salt on those things.

Lastly, as mentioned in my last post, I had done up some zucchini and and steak in the same grill pan. I had some leftovers in the longer of the plastic bins. Boy were they tasty.

Tomorrow I'm taking another meal. Dark sweet cherries and green grapes in two small bins. Another small bin has some tuna salad (tuna, light mayo, celery, dill pickles, celery seed, salt, and pepper), and the fourth has some more dill pickle spears and some more celery. The big bin has two pieces of Nature's Pride Double Fiber bread (remarkably tasty for how much fiber is in them, and I can toast them at work and make my tuna sandwich) and a handful of Marcona almonds (that are absolutely irresistible).

I'm hungry just thinking about it.

Prodigal Daughter

2009-07-07T23:45:00.003-05:00

After a fairly long hiatus, I returned to the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market this morning. I love that place. In an effort to be more financially responsible, I have made a conscious decision to not buy a ton of produce that will just go bad in my fridge. So while I spent a nice chunk of money, I did not overbuy in terms of amount.

I limited myself to the following items:

One cantaloupe
Two Sharlyn melons
Two zucchini
Two yellow squash
Two cucumbers
A skirt steak
1 lb. Black Bean & Queso Fresco Ravioli in Cilantro Pasta
Some green beans
Four mid-sized tomatoes
A dozen farm-fresh eggs

Some explanations...

Sharlyn Melon I found this definition online: "This melon tastes like a cantaloupe and honeydew combined. Sharlyn melons are sweet with netted outer layer, greenish-orange rind, and white flesh. The availability varies, so check your local supermarkets and farmer’s market." It's funny because to me it smelled a bit like a mix of a peach and a cantaloupe.
The first one I ate didn't have nearly as intense a flavor as it did a fragrance. It was good, but a bit of a let down. The flesh was perfectly ripe, though, and I was able to just sit there and carve out bites with my spoon. The second one, however, had a more developed flavor, and it was rather tasty.

Skirt Steak
At about 9:30pm two nights ago, I realized that I had not prepared lunches for the rest of the week (as was my intention). So I figured that since the skirt steak was pretty thin, it wouldn't take too terribly long to cook it. I was right. I didn't put anything but salt and pepper on it and threw it on my grill pan. About 2-3 minutes each side, resting about 10 minutes (while I cooked the zucchini), and it was perfectly pink in the middle. Delicious.

Zucchini I cut a zucchini in half and then in small half moons. I tossed them with a tad of salt, pepper, and some herbs de provence. I then threw them in my grill pan so they could also soak up some of the beef yumminess that was left on the pan. Definitely turned out as well as I could have expected.

The only thing that went wrong at the Farmer's Market this time around was that I brought my pooch with me. He was wonderfully behaved, but there was a lot to smell, say hello to, and so on. He isn't particularly food motivated, so I didn't have to worry about him jumping up after some food or people. It was just hard to maneuver a leash (while trying not to trip people) and trying to remember not to drop the eggs or smoosh the blueberries or the tomatoes.

As of yet I haven't used the tomatoes, yellow squash, cantaloupe, green beans, and cucumbers. But check my next post to see more about the ravioli and the blueberries.

Airport Food

2009-07-01T21:03:00.000-05:00

Traditionally, airports are full of a variety of fast food chains. One example of that is certainly DFW - that behemoth of an airport the size of a small Malaysian principality. The options in the food court that I've seen there range from the insipid Wok on Roll (which I might add does fill the desperate need for something resembling General Tso's) to the ubiquitous McDonald's and Burger King.

Austin Bergstrom International Airport (affectionately referred to as ABIA) seems to be different. I'm sure many of the smaller regional airports across the country have a similar aesthetic, but as a Brooklynite, I really haven't spent much prolonged time in smaller airports. All of that is to say, I don't propose that ABIA is different from other smaller regional airports, but rather that it is certainly a different breed from the larger hubs.

This is my second time living in Austin, but in the 6 years in between, I visited annually. Each time I went in or out of ABIA, I stopped by two of the eateries - Amy's Ice Cream and Salt Lick BBQ. (Not normally in that order...but yes, sometimes....I keep telling any kid who will listen, one benefit of being an adult is that you can have dessert first or as the whole meal...but I digress.)

Amy's Ice Cream is local fare much like Cold Stone Creamery. Not having been to CSC more than once, my next statement might be inaccurate, but I'm throwing caution to the wind. Amy's has a ton of more quirky personality than CSC could ever have. Part of that, of course, may be a function of Austin's "weirdity," but it's a company that not only tolerates the counter culture personalities, but also embraces and encourages it. Amy's is where seemingly all of the pierced tattooed young punks/hippies/hipsters work. And it's not all about the folks behind the counter - the ice cream itself has a quirky personality.

There are about 20 flavors that can be used as a base - some are your typical flavors (Coffee being my favorite) while some are more exciting like Mexican Vanilla or Pumpkin Pie. And then there are the "crushins." They have all manner of cookies, gummies, and fruit, not to mention sauces and sprinkles. One of my friends recently sang the praises of Mexican Vanilla with Nutter Butters Crushed in. Almost exclusively I gravitate towards the slightly more pedestrian (and yet ethereal) Coffee ice cream with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups crushed in.

The other local delicacy that I could not pass up whether arriving into or departing from ABIA is the Salt Lick BBQ. The main Salt Lick restaurant is out in Hays County about 20-30 minutes Southwest of Downtown Austin (only about 15-20 minutes from my place, thankfully.) Because Hays is a dry county it's BYOB. People show up with coolers full of beer. If the wait is long, there's a huge outdoor area where you can dive into that cooler, sit and listen to live music, and in cooler weather, sit by a fire pit.

Inside, you can eat with some other people at a community table - everyone just packed in together at a picnic table. Or you can get your own picnic table. The BBQ pit is right there in the building so you can't help but smell like seared flesh when you leave; it's a glorious thing.

At the airport, however, you can buy beer with your, say, brisket sandwich. In some ways it's a better experience. What the airport clearly lacks is ambiance (there's nothing like barbecue off of plastic plates while seated at picnic tables). But the ability to pair your meal with a beer then take about 10 steps to the right and follow that brisket up with some Amy's.

Salt Lick + Amy's = perfect together.

Agida

2009-06-16T12:10:00.015-05:00

A couple weeks ago, I seemed to be in a three-day spell of Agida. For those of you who are unfamiliar with that term, it is an Italian-American phrase that means heartburn. It's often used to say that you're experiencing some sort of grief, but the kind I experienced was the heartburn kind.

For some reason, I had the worst heartburn after the lunch I had on that Sunday at the airport. (See my next post for a discussion around the phenomenon of airport food.) It didn't get better any time soon. In fact, after arriving in Chicago for a work conference, I was determined to get a steak...but my stomach was hurting so much that I didn't bother and went with bland room service instead. I had some afternoon doses of Mixed Berry Tums, but after the room service, things reverted back to the previous hurt.

The next morning, my stomach still didn't feel that great (not nausea, but pain), so I started the day with some water and a couple Tums. I then when for a run/walk of a few miles. I was feeling good (there's just something about spandex and my Army shirt that turns on my Supergirl persona), and went to the morning buffet. I didn't overdo it (despite temptation). I had fresh squeezed OJ, coffee, a small bowl of oatmeal, a couple small pancakes (which I didn't finish), and because I felt I needed some protein, an eggs benedict.

The oatmeal was fantastic. Each little grain popped in my mouth sort of like perfectly cooked quinoa. I put in a little bit of brown sugar and just a dash of maple syrup (just because it was there), but I suspect it would have been perfection even without the added sweetness.

The pancakes were only picked up because they were just brought out from the kitchen, so they were piping hot and quite fluffy. As pancakes go, they were perfectly lovely, but I didn't feel like finishing them.

Lastly, the eggs benedict. That is likely not a good choice when chafing dishes are involved, but it's typically one of my favorite breakfast/ brunch items. Both the yolk and the hollandaise were congealed. Not good. But I wanted an egg. (I should have gone with scrambled, clearly.) But the meal served as my breakfast and lunch.

(Side note, I was staying at the hotel where Obama spoke to the AMA, so over coffee and oatmeal, I was watching people, police, security, and protesters scurry about. Excitement, but I didn't see the man himself.)

That afternoon there was a variety of treats at the conference - ice cream, a candy bar (literally bins of malt balls, jelly beans, and a big bowl of popcorn), tons of sodas, bowls of hard candy on each of the tables, Kisses, etc. Then on each of the conference tables, there was one (sometimes two) bowls of hard candy. They're trying to kill us. I managed just to have a small cup of popcorn and a chipwich (or rather, a Tollhouse brand chocolate chip ice cream sandwich). During a drowsy afternoon moment, I might have had a hard candy or two.

After the program, we all went to the Hard Rock Cafe's China Grill where we had three different app stations, passed apps, table waitstaff, and a bar...all paid for. There were tortilla chips with tuna tartare, various sushi rolls, pot stickers, skewered meat, etc. I had a few glasses of wine and a lot of appetizers. It was enough so that I didn't feel hungry any more, but not enough that I was stuffed....maybe not quite enough for a full meal. Either way, my stomach hurt again. So when I got back to my room, I ordered ice cream through room service. The cold felt good in my belly. But going to sleep, my stomach hurt again.

Then this morning...ouch, my belly hurts! (A quick side step here. By my "belly" I'm referring to the top of the stomach where it meets the esophagus.) I got up early (after staying up late), packed, ironed my clothes, and headed out the door. I did pick up a coffee (Fat-Free, Sugar-Free, Vanilla Latte at Starbucks, aka a skinny vanilla late) at Starbucks, which was likely not too kind on my stomach. But I had a toasted poppy seed bagel at the conference center with cream cheese - I thought it might make things better. a) I shouldn't bother eating bagels outside of Brooklyn. It's just setting myself up for disappointment. b) I should have eaten at the hotel (I had a voucher for a free buffet) and had a big bowl of that oatmeal. Bygones.

More agida.

I'm pleased to say that spell has long since passed, but it was a tough three days there.

A reminder to help

2009-06-05T14:56:00.003-05:00

As schools are letting out all over the country, many children who rely on their school's breakfast and lunch to make it through the day are now left without food options. While for many of us it might seem like nothing has changed (you still have to go into work, sit in your cube, and eat whatever it is that you've either managed to scrounge out of your fridge or buy from a local eatery), but as you can imagine, this change of season can be devastating to little mouths all over the country.

So, in addition to asking you to volunteer your time or money to your local food bank (I'm arranging for my group at work to spend a half day at the Capital Area Food Bank here in Austin), I am also sending out this quick reminder of the "Pledge to End Hunger" campaign.

While of course they will gladly accept monetary donations, what they are asking for is for you to "sign" their campaign. You put in your email address, name, and state, and poof...their partner, Tyson, donates tons and tons of food to food banks in your state. I blogged about this first back a few months ago when there were only 1350 pledges, but I'm surprised to see that the number is only up to 4801. That's a great start, and it's translating into 140,000 lbs of food & 560,000 meals donated. But 5,000 people is not that many; imagine what we could do if twice that many signed up.....

Please "sign" the Pledge to End Hunger campaign and tell your friends. Just by posting your support of this program, people receive food. It's that easy. I signed up and I've maybe received about 2 emails a month at the most, so it's not like you're adding your name to some crazy telemarketing roster. It's just a super easy way to help.

Sign up. Today.

Lunch Express leads to a future Mexican fiesta

2009-06-03T20:44:00.006-05:00

Today I went with my friend, Adrienne, to the Whole Foods Market Lamar Culinary Center for one of their Lunch Express classes. These are not hands on classes like knife skills (though they offer those). Instead, they provide a starter, an entree, and a dessert while the chef instructor demonstrates the same menu at the front of the class.

Let me tell you - these people know how to do demonstrations. First - the instructor. This woman, Chef Allison Heaton, is high energy, down-to-earth, clearly skilled, and has great suggestions as to ways to tweak the recipes. She says things like, "if you're making this for a dinner party, you might do it that way, but if it's just me and my fiancee, we do this." She understands that while we all deserve it, we don't always feel like going all out when it's just us. I believe she instructs most (all?) of their Lunch Express classes, as she knew many people in the audience.

The second impressive thing is the ingredients they use; this is, after all, Whole Foods. They have the tastiest looking produce, sustainable products, and all of the ingredients are available upstairs at the store (which I'm sure is very appealing to those people who do not have to go back to work after the class). As for the sustainable thing, I just read last night in edibleSeattle that hearts of palm "harvesting" typically kills the palm trees they're taken from. (The latest issue was my souvenir from a recent trip to Whidbey Island...more on that trip in the next post.) Apparently the quickest way to the heart is just to chop the whole thing down. Hearts of palm isn't really on my regular pantry list, and I'm not a "greenie," per se, but hearing that made me think they never would be. Enter Whole Foods - today Chef Allison made explicit reference to the fact that the hearts of palm she was using were sustainable. She said that all hearts of palm that they sell at Whole Foods are sustainable. She mentioned that if you buy them at another store, just make sure to check the can for the word "sustainable."

Lastly, it's the set up. There are nine tables holding four seats each. It's a tad crowded, but it's really not problematic. The drink options are ice water or unsweetened tea (they do provide both "Sugar in the Raw" and a stevia-based sweetner). Simple, but it really does cover most bases. Periodically, a couple of the people helping out bring pitchers of the two drinks around the room filling half-empty glasses. They provide you with a printed menu of what you will not only be tasting, but also seeing demonstrated (it's double-sided, which wins a prize from my non-greenie self). They also provide you with a newly sharpened #2 pencil, the feel of which I absolutely love between my fingers (said the girl who prefers to type...but there's just something about a good ol' yellow pencil, don't you think?). And the last thing about the set up that I find impressive is the way in which the cameras are set up. Now this may sound like a given for a demonstration classroom, but I have been in two cooking classrooms I can think of where the cameras just didn't do the process justice.

A small bonus at the end of today's class was that I asked the front desk people if they knew of a good knife sharpening guy/gal. They did, and they had his card. And guess what - he makes house calls! Hazah! Finally the knives in my kitchen will be worth using again (I'm just not very good with the knife stone I have....).

I encourage anyone in the Austin area to attend these classes. The Lamar Culinary Center offers a variety of classes on a number of themes and their prices seem to be quite competitive with other classes of this type that I've seen out there.
Lamar Culinary Center - 525 N. Lamar Blvd - 512.542.2340 - http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/lamar-culinarycenter/

And if you're near another Whole Foods somewhere else, find out if they have a Culinary Center. It's a great $18 "lunch and a show."

When you feel cruddy....

2009-05-28T21:11:00.002-05:00

Recently I sent a message out to my friends on Facebook asking what they like to eat when they're not feeling well. The way I see it, there are three kinds of not feeling well. Headaches (I get the migraine kind), colds/sinus infections, and stomach issues are another. I guess just being down in the dumps or having the blues, as I often refer to it, is a fourth kind. So I'm adjusting my previous statement - there are four kinds of not feeling well.

When I have a headache, I'm often not hungry. The headache can lead into nausea, so situations one and three can morph from time to time. But typically in those cases, I end up just picking at food, not really eating anything of worth (and probably not anything that's actually too good for me). When it comes to stomach issues, Campbell's Chicken and Noodle (or Rice) Soup is a winner. Actually, Campbell's Alphabet Soup (I'm not sure what the official title is) with a splash of milk and some crushed up saltines wins in any situation, regardless of the ailment.

When feeling blue, the only solution is plain old comfort food. Down here in Austin, a great and cheap option is the "veggie" plate at Luby's. If you've ever seen King of the Hill when they go to a big cafeteria style restaurant with a bunch of blue-haired bitties...that's Luby's. It's extremely busy in the late afternoon....prime dinner time for the walker set. Their veggie plate includes three "vegetables" (which basically just means "non-meat"). I usually will choose two helpings of mac and cheese and one of fried okra (now you see why I put the word vegetables in quotes).

A small digression, I remember the first time I saw mac and cheese listed as a "vegetable" on a menu. There was this small Southern restaurant around the corner from my house in Park Slope, Brooklyn. This restaurant was as authentic as it could be in NYC, where the female chef walked around in her boots, played Lucinda Williams on the music system, and cooked some mean Southern comfort food. Delish. I believe it was there that I was first amused by a restaurant listing mac and cheese as a "vegetable." Sadly, that restaurant (as many in the high turnover neighborhood of Park Slope) didn't last, and I believe it has since been a wide variety of institutions including a sushi place, some sort of fusion restaurant, and a coffee bar.

But back to the "not feeling so hot" food parade. When I asked my friends what they recommend, there was an interesting array of responses. One friend suggested that hot Dr. Pepper with lemon is a great sore throat cure. (I can't believe I didn't try it a couple weeks ago when I had the worst sore throat. I'm sure there will be another opportunity.) There were the obligatory "chicken soup" responses, which, let's face it, is a good answer to just about any ill...book titles notwithstanding.

Now I've been sick for close to three weeks, so my culinary muscles are not so much looking for ways to flex. I have been leaning on cold fast food treats (frosties, ice cream sundae-type things, and so on). But tonight, I actually opened up a can or three. Back to my low-energy, no frills, feel better meal - a can of black beans, a can of corn niblets, and a can of tuna...plus a little House dressing (Good Seasons Italian Dressing) okay, a lot. Some Diet Coke and grapes, and a meal is made.

Wow...I sure am a gourmande.

It's a small plate after all....

2009-05-28T20:23:00.001-05:00

What are the odds? A few weeks ago on Facebook I mentioned in my status that I'd spend the evening blogging. And lo and behold, a friend of mine said that she, too, is a food blogger. Honestly...what ARE the odds? Maybe it's some sort of generational return to domestic life, but in a modern way with a splash of technology? I should probably thank an ex-boyfriend for getting me into food, but since I had a cookbook at an early age when my sister and I were tasked with cooking one night a week, I don't think he gets full credit.

It seems that at least four of us from our college class have food blogs, with at least three of us hoping to get books out of it. I'm going to guess that there are others in our class with similar interests and aspirations. Crazy.

So, on that note, here are the three Eph-oodie-blogs from my fellow classmates. They're always available in the blogroll on the right side of the page, but I just thought the coincidence deserved an editorial mention.

Dena's Recipe Exchange. Dena describes her blog as "an exchange of ideas for what to cook when you're feeling stuck. Or when you simply want to expand your repertoire. This blog is designed for anyone who's been in a food rut, afraid to try new things, or overwhelmed by a 500-page cookbook."

Ambrosia and Nectar. Annemarie describes her site as "Foodie things that make you feel divine." She always has the most amazing photos of her creations, but the best picture thus far is from her latest post (date 5/21) - showing her son covered in pureed beetroot. Hilarious. (For those not baby-oriented, don't worry, this blog is a food blog, not a mommy blog. This was a brief diversion.)

Revel and Feast. Janee has a broad range of tastes that she covers in her blog. To me the most amazing thing is that her kids are eager to sample her sophisticated fare such as Pollo al Pimentos and Pork Chops with Artichokes and Capers (I likely would not have been as open until lately). She provides tested recipes and mouth-watering pictures for each of her entries. The latest one (5/23) is Strawberry Basil Lemonade...sounds delicious and something I very much plan on trying.

Enjoy.

Guten Apetit

2009-05-12T21:38:00.002-05:00

A couple weekends ago, my parents visited from Brooklyn. My father grew up for much of his childhood in Texas and even went to college here in Austin. But amazingly, he had never been out to Fredericksburg (A German town out in the hill country). Since I had never been either, he was eager to check it out. My mother, being pretty easy going most times, was along for the ride happily.

On our way out to Fredericksburg, we drove to the Pedernales (oddly pronounced, "perdinales") Falls State Park. My dad said that while he was at UT, his frat brothers went out there all the time, but he was never along for the ride. As we entered, there were many signs warning of the possible fast rising flood waters. While the signs were attempting to be serious, their language was pretty hilarious for those of us who have a dry/sarcastic sense of humor (I am my parents' child...what can I say). The signs gave orders of what to do if you saw flood waters coming your way, which essentially consisted of drop your belongings, turn away, and run as far and as fast as you can. But the last "order" given on the sign could have either been the result of if those previous steps were successfully taken or it was the oddest order I've ever been given, "LIVE." Oh good. I'm glad they told me to live because otherwise I might not have chosen that option after dutifully dropping my belongings, turning around, and running as fast and as far as I could. ...Ok...maybe you had to be there. But we got a chuckle out of it.

In any event, while in the Hill Country (a name that those from more mountainous environs might think was actually tongue-in-cheek), we passed a number of vineyards and farms. Sadly, it was a little early in the season for the farm stands by the side of the road to really be in full bloom, but mark my words, I'm going out there at some point with the express purpose of hitting up every single farm stand. I'm a sucker for food that is lovingly cared for by human hands, where you put a fiver in a tin can as part of the honor system when the owner isn't right there looking over your shoulder. Reminds me of buying corn up in the Berkshires. Yum.

Once we got out to Fredericksburg, we were pretty ravenous (I think it was something like 2pm at this point). Things were getting a little testy, but we all kept our cool. My father had been given the recommendation to find "the best German place" on the far end of town, so we drove through town (blink: there it goes) and found nothing. As we were aiming for the "far side," though, we did notice a place called Der Lindenbaum. It was featured in a book that I had gotten for my father to keep at my house so he could pick restaurants/farms/sites out of it to see when he visits so I'm not saddled with the whole cruise director task.

If I'm going to be totally honest, I wasn't keen on eating German food. I didn't say this to my parents, but frankly, I just couldn't think of what was German aside from beer (which I'm just fine with, of course) and bratwurst. Not that I have a problem with cased meats, just it didn't sound that great. But the Hill Country was settled by vast numbers of German, Czech, Polish, etc. back in the day and some of those cultures live on quite strongly. So we decided Der Lindenbaum must have been what my dad's friends were talking about, and I might say, it changed my life.

First of all, we had the most amazing waitress. Clearly a bit overstretched in terms of the number of tables she had to cover, but she was perfectly attentive and had a great "straight talking" kind of attitude. You want to know what the best thing is on the menu - boom: Jagerschnitzle. You want a hefeweizen (that was just me) - boom: you want the Erdinger not the one listed on this menu. You want a dry reisling - boom: here you go. You want to know which dessert to get - boom: she says, "avoid this, avoid that." No punches pulled. And she didn't pull that same old song and dance you get at so many restaurants when the waitress is asked, "what's the best thing on the menu." "Uhhhh....it's all good." Great. Nice to know you have a discerning palette. But this lady did. She got high marks for taking control, but for also listening to what we wanted.

Being suddenly struck with a tad bit of culinary trepidation, I decided just to go with the plain ol' weinerschnitzle. Pounded out pork, pan fried, with a lemon to squeeze over it. It was divine. As per her suggestion, my mother got the Jagerschnitzle. This is the same thing I got but with a mushroom "sauce." While the mushrooms were remarkably tasty, they were still very firm and meaty and pretty big to begin with, so we felt it was really more like a side dish instead of a sauce. Super tasty all the same. My dad got the gulash. He says he's had better, but that it was still pretty good.

The star of the show, however, was something that I had seen Tony Bourdain sample in East Berlin with a former spy. The TV show "No Reservations" rarely has items that I think I'll really have an opportunity to properly sample. But amazingly, they had it on the menu at Der Lindenbaum - currywurst. My dad and I wanted to get a side dish of it after I told him about it. My mom also sampled it an enjoyed. Basically, it's some sort of wurst (I don't know my different wursts, so forgive me) in this amazingly succulent curry sauce. I kid you not, had I not been with my parents (and maybe not in public), I would have picked this plate of sauce up and licked it clean. The wurst drowned in the sauce was exquisite. The weinerschnitzle drizzled with the curry sauce was even better. I now know that if I ever make it back to Der Lindenbaum (which seems like an inevitability), I will not even open the menu and will order the currywurst platter. (And another Erdinger Hefeweizen Light or two.)

Scrumptious.

Der Lindenbaum
http://www.derlindenbaum.com/
312 East Main Street
Fredericksburg, TX 78624
830.997.9126

Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

2009-05-05T12:55:00.003-05:00

On May 5th, the IT department (and a few select guests, such as myself) had their 3rd annual Cinco de Mayo Salsa Competition. Apparently last year they had some chutneys from some of our co-workers originally from the Indian subcontinent, but this year, most items were traditionally salsa or queso.

My addition to this mix wasn't quite as stellar as I had hoped for, so I plan on revising the recipe and then posting it here at a later date. But the basics are back to my beloved corn niblets (canned, baby) and black beans (also canned). I suppose you might get a better bean flavor if you started with the soaking of the beans and so on, but this was something I had to put together very quickly, so that was not an option. I intended to put red onion in there but when I cut into my huge red onion (that felt firm to the light squeeze), it essentially exploded. The middle was rotten. Grody. Bummer. So I moved on to the huge shallot I had sitting with my garlic and put in a big shallot (finely minced) and a medium-sized clove of garlic (also finely minced). Truth be told, I attempted to grate the garlic through my microplane at first to turn it more into a mush that would work itself through the dish completely, but the ROI was lacking - not a lot of garlic mush for all the effort I was putting in. Dicing won out.

Then came the seasonings. I knew I wanted to put in cumin. It is one of my all time favorite spices. The smokey mild heat just can't be beat. (I'm a poet and I didn't even know it.) And it goes with so many other things. So I added a liberal amount of cumin, some cayenne, salt, and pepper. It still didn't have enough zing. So I added a bunch more cumin. Better, but still lacking. I opened up my pantry and searched for something that would work. Aha! Taco seasoning! So I sprinkled in probably 1/3 of the packet on this mixture (which was two cans of each corn and beans). It livened it up and got it to pretty decent, but like I said, it's going to need some refining. Oh, and measuring. That's the thing I find so hard about writing down my cooking exploits....I don't really measure. I guess I need to get better at that. Experiment while I'm in the mood, but just take note of what I'm doing.

Despite what my mother believes, the sniff test doesn't always work

2009-04-28T10:59:00.007-05:00

Even though I am in my 30s, I still call my mother (2,000 miles away in Brooklyn) to ask her if a food I'm considering eating is still good. Nine out of ten times, her suggestion is to conduct a sniff test. The basic process is: 1) open container. 2) stick your nose as close to the food as possible. 3) inhale deeply. It's not rocket science. My mother has an amazingly fine-tuned schnoz for such things, whereas I'm not sure my nose's palette is quite as refined. Nonetheless, I frequently rely on the sniff test. After all, it's what my mom does.

Enter StillTasty. This great tool was advertised by Tasting Table Everywhere today, and I'm a little frightened to see where I've gone wrong so many times. I freeze and refreeze things that, according to StillTasty, shouldn't be refreezed (or in some cases, shouldn't be eaten altogether based on the way I've thawed it in the first place).

I see this as being an endlessly useful tool. You can find products by category or just by entering its name into the search function. I just came across "Parmesan Cheese, Commercially Grated and Packaged - Opened" in the Dairy category and found that my big tub of grated Parmesan from Costco is still good to go. (And yes yes, I know a block of Parmesan is preferable with "just in time" grating as needed, but I needed a lot of the stuff for a couple lasagnas a few weeks ago, and it just seemed easier on my arms.) There are indications for how long something would last in the fridge versus how long it would last in the freezer. There are even little storage tips, and while many of those are just common sense, they are reminders of what you should be doing, regardless of what you are doing, which is always helpful.

So, while I'm sure the sniff test will win out many times, I will turn to StillTasty more often than not. Even though I don't think I've ever really gotten sick from something in my fridge...or maybe I'm just blocking out the experience.

Summer Soups?

2009-04-27T18:48:00.005-05:00

With the beginning of summer (we've had weeks of what any normal human being would call summer here in Texas already), it's pretty odd that I've been craving hot soups lately. This craving wasn't helped (and was potentially multiplied by a steak craving) after watching the last Everyday Food episode that aired on PBS this past weekend. I like a lot of the dishes they tend to produce because the name really does fit - 9 out of 10 times it's something you could do on a weeknight either for one or for a family of four. Their recipes are pretty basic, and they explain things quite well, which I would imagine is very helpful for someone not so comfortable in the kitchen.

This past episode was called "Soups and Salads." They started with something that is a kin to my favorite thing to order at a Vietnamese restaurant - Seared Beef and Noodle Soup. (http://www.pbs.org/everydayfood/recipes/seared_beef_and_noodle_soup.html)The recipe had a few moving parts, but it's really rather accessible by anyone. I would say the most difficult part of the whole thing would probably be cutting the carrots into julienned strips, but since you can buy a bag of carrots already julienned at the grocery store, I can't imagine that'd be a prohibitive step. The next difficult thing would likely be searing the steak, but since you're about to put it in a bowl with hot broth, under cook it. No harm done. Rice noodles might also scare people who haven't used them before, but they're just as easy as cooking couscous...pour boiling water on them...and wait. I love their consistency i.

Another soup they featured was a Chickpea and Pasta Soup. (http://www.pbs.org/everydayfood/recipes/chickpea_and_pasta_soup.html) This one had a little less personality than the Noodle Soup, but I think it's got potential. Basically, you sear a little garlic, add broth and water, dump in some pasta (they used elbow macaroni which I think suits this) and some garbanzo beans. She topped with parsley and parmesan. Frankly, I think it would have been more robust with chicken broth (sorry to my vegetarian friends out there) and maybe with the addition of mushrooms or spinach (or some sort of veggie that holds up in a soup). This is suggested as a good portable thermos-type soup for kids to pack in their lunch or for an easy work-friendly soup. This is making me think I need to invest in a soup thermos.

Speaking of spinach, my last ode to the "Soups and Salad" episode of Everyday Food is not a soup but a salad. Pretty basic, but the Beef and Spinach Salad really solidified my need for steak in the next couple days. (http://www.pbs.org/everydayfood/recipes/steak_salad_with_spinach.html) It's not that this recipe is earth shattering (which I think is the point of Everyday Food), but it's just good, hearty, healthy, tasty, interesting food. Blue cheese and walnuts (though you could easily use another nut like pecans) always add umph to salads. When you include grapes in there and some tasty baby spinach leaves (which are awfully meaty for a vegetable) topping it all off with steak, I wonder why I'm not eating this just about every night.

Lastly, the other amazingly simple soup that has my mouth watering (and is also adding a "pro" to the columns for the thermos purchase) is Nigella Lawson's Pea and Pesto soup. (http://www.nigella.com/recipe/recipe_detail.aspx?rid=153) I typically like anything that Nigella does (with few exceptions). I find her style infectious and her shortcuts perfectly defendable. This soup has 4 ingredients plus salt. Boil frozen peas with some lime juice and two whole scallions. Once they're boiled, take out the scallions. Pour the whole thing in the blender, throw in a few dollops of the fresh pesto stuff from the store (see...there's a shortcut I can get behind), and your soup is done. Another thermos wonder.

I'm hungry. Time for supper.

Tasty Words

2009-04-25T21:53:00.008-05:00

I'm trying not to drown myself in more things to "waste my time," but I just can't read enough about food. So, I've added a few more blogs to the list on the right of your screen.

Orangette - The author, Molly Wizenberg, came to the same realization in 2004 that I have come to more recently. She knew that what she wanted to do needed to be somehow connected to writing about food. Now she has a very successful blog, a monthly column in Bon Appetit, and even a well-received book (A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table). She even met her husband through her site! Check out the blog at http://orangette.blogspot.com/.

Copywriter's Kitchen - I love the description of this blog. "Fast frugal scratch cooking for freelance writers and other busy people." (Plus, I think the name probably appeals to my grammar nerd tendencies.) The Spring Risotto with Asparagus recipe looks scrumptious, and I plan on trying it out some time soon. Visit the blog at http://www.copywriterskitchen.com.

The Wednesday Chef - I don't remember how I stumbled up on this one (I think from one of the blogs above). The most recent post right now is about baked rice (do you detect a theme in the recipes I'm reading about?). I've never heard of baking rice before (that's not in a casserole), so this might be another use besides stew for my Le Creuset dutch oven. I'm new to this blog, but I think it has some great potential...especially since the author is on a trip to Paris. Only good food experiences take place in Paris. Check out The Wednesday Chef at http://wednesdaychef.typepad.com/.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

2009-04-13T11:18:00.004-05:00

I have been avoiding Twitter like, well, a really chewy and lukewarm scallop. I just can't understand why anyone would want to follow me in 140 character limits (as we've seen, I'm not much on short sentences), and, frankly, I'm not sure who I would want to follow who doesn't have their Twitter updates automatically updating their Facebook status. Yeah yeah, I can follow celebrities, which is mildly appealing, but with the varying level of detail they go into, I'm not sure it wouldn't just drive me crazy.

That is all until now. This might change things. Today as part of the Tasting Table Everywhere newsletter, they featured a way to keep up with your favorite Chefs and food trucks/carts. They even have a way to follow the Food Shark in Marfa, TX (!?!?!?). There's even a link to "Find More Twittering Food Trucks." This may just be what I needed to get me onto Twitter. Here's the link: http://tastingtable.com/email/campaign/548.html.

If you're unfamiliar with Tasting Table, it started with the New York version and has since expanded to LA and "Everywhere." They have a feature article every newsletter and there's a weekly "Weekend Update" with food-related goings on. They also update the openings, closings, renamings, etc. of the restaurants in NYC (and I assume LA). As a former New Yorker who goes back every now and then, I often archive mentions of new or interesting restaurants so I can visit them when I go home. (I really want to create something like this for Austin, but I suppose that's a project for another day and another time.)

And with that, I leave you with one last thought - I am acutely aware that I have been shirking on my blogging duties. There's really not much of an excuse outside of the fact that my stupid laptop at home (Dell Inspiron 1501) doesn't have a working battery any more. So it lives on my dining room table and not by my bedside or by the couch, two places where I do some of my best blogging. The battery has so little use that you have to shut down completely before moving to a new location. It takes forever for the shut down and start up process to take place, that I've essentially demoted my laptop to a desktop.

But not to worry, I promise I'll get back to it. ...and I might even buy a new battery.

Rodeo Food

2009-03-22T23:12:00.004-05:00

This will be a brief post, but I wanted to make sure to announce that I had a jumbo corndog at the Austin Rodeo yesterday. I have recently discovered my unending love for corndogs. I had one at the Texas Book Fair in October and was in love. I'm honestly not sure when the last time I had one was, so I'm not sure where this love comes from. We're not a family that attended any state fairs, and when there were street fairs I had gyros and funnel cake. I like hot dogs, but not so much as to love corndogs. I like cornbread as much as the next person, but again, a corndog is so much more than the sum of its parts. It's an odd obsession, but perhaps the excitement is that I really only partake in the glory that is corndog 2-3 times a year. Who knows.

In any event, below is a picture of my jumbo corndog. It was absolutely everything I had hoped for and more.

pics now added

2009-03-19T23:31:00.003-05:00

Just FYI for the throngs of people who are following this blog, I have added some pictures to some of my past posts. I've started with the post about St. Paddy's (Eire go Brach) and My Valentine's Party. I hope to keep up this habit and remember to take pictures of what I'm doing and actually add them to the blog, so fingers crossed.

Thanks to all for reading!

Foul Foul

2009-03-19T22:50:00.004-05:00

I hate breaking down cooked chickens. I learned in my cooking class how to break down a raw chicken (not that I remember how at this point), but one of the reasons I don't roast whole chickens very often (aside from not owning a roasting pan) is that I really think picking apart the cooked chicken is a pain in the butt. A secondary reason is that I think poultry is terribly boring, but that wouldn't really be the reason not to roast.

But as I mentioned in my last post, there was a deal at the grocery store for a rotisserie chicken with a free baguette and a free family-sized caesar salad. So I went for it. I got the chicken home, and the next day I was wrist deep in the greasy skin of the chicken while my dog was apoplectic due to the aroma. I pulled off the drumsticks and made a pile of skin and a pile of meat. I cut off the breasts, which remained mainly intact. And this is where I believe diminishing returns begins. I start poking around looking for more edible flesh. I pull off what must be the thighs, I pull off some some other little pieces here and there, and eventually I decide I've done my best.

I called my mother to complain mildly about the process. She said, "don't you just love picking the meat off the bones?" Uhhh....no. "Isn't it a great sense of accomplishment?" Uhhh....no.

All in all, I got some good meat off the bones. I've already had three meals and probably have another three using it, so that's good. Definitely good yield for the money. I had a couple small chicken sandwiches (using the baguette as well), and I did another one of my "casserole" dishes. I put some Uncle Ben's 90-second Whole Grain Vegetable Harvest Rice, some of my ubiquitous canned green beans, some of the chicken, and some of our "House Dressing" in a container together. Shook it up, and voila!

By the way, I don't know if I've ever explained my family's "house dressing." I'll leave that for another post where I'll talk about some family memories I have around food. As I say in the cookbook I'm slowly but surely putting together, memory is our sixth and possibly most powerful sense when it comes to food.

But I digress. The thing that I'm most looking forward to is boiling the devil out of that carcass with the Trinity (onion, celery, and carrots) all to make some great stock. That stock will, hopefully, be turned into my kinda wannabe Italian wedding soup that's not really Italian wedding soup. It's super tasty and has bok choy, sausage, orzo, and tons of goodness....especially if there's homemade stock. Yum.

Cooking on a Budget

2009-03-17T14:06:00.005-05:00

Every week(?) I get an email from my local fancy H-E-B grocery store otherwise known as Central Market. Normally the deals they advertise don't really strike my fancy, but this time, something caught my eye. Buy a rotisserie chicken and get a baguette and a family-sized caesar salad for free. A total value of roughly $8. Well that's probably three meals for me there, so that's a great bargain. And I might even cook the carcass down to make some stock, so that's a bonus as well.

Then I was also shopping for my annual Irish feast - corned beef, cabbage, and champ (see my last post). The tab looked like this:

Thyme: $1 (with leftovers)
4 bulk carrots: $0.85
Parsley: $1.49 (with leftovers)
4 russet potatoes: $3.99 (with a potato leftover)
3 bulk onions: $2.30 (with an onion leftover)
1 head of cabbage: $1.43
3lb hunk of corned beef: $11.71
bunch of scallions: $0.69

All of those ingredients made enough food for three of us at lunch today and probably two more portions for lunch tomorrow.

So for a tab roughly of $32, I got 8 servings (plus the potential for some homemade stock) for a total of $4 per serving.

Hot cha!

Eire Go Brach!

2009-03-16T18:02:00.004-05:00

I guess I'm running a bit behind on these posts. A bit later while the potatoes are boiling, I'll take a moment to figure out how many posts I need to add to catch up.

This is just a quick note to say that tonight I'll be making corned beef, cabbage, and champ. The recipe for corned beef and cabbage can be found at epicurious.com. What I like about this dish (as with much from the British Isles) is that you're basically just boiling something within an inch of its life. Literally, this recipe calls for 3-4 hours of boiling (which means I should get to the store and get home soon if I ever plan on going to sleep).

Champ, on the other hand, I learned from a lovely ginger-haired lad I dated for a while who was from Belfast. While he was staunchly loyal to Britain, I still choose to celebrate Ireland Forever (Erie Go Brach) with his recipe. It was a damp cold day when he made this for me, and it just could not have warmed me up any better. Essentially, you simmer milk (or cream...skim probably isn't the best here) with a knob of butter and some scallions. You're basically seeping out all of the scallion-y goodness and the milk becomes infused with it. You then use that oniony-milk yumminess to serve as the lubricant for mashing your potatoes. They end up being a bit soupier than traditional mashed potatoes, but they're lovely and creamy and decadent. He said his mom used to make it for him when he wasn't feeling well. It truly is the ultimate comfort food.

Pledge to End Hunger

2009-03-09T10:39:00.004-05:00

I was raised to be creative and find ways to give back. A few times growing up, my mom, sister, and I would spend the day before Christmas working in a local soup kitchen where we wrapped gifts, cooked food, created "to go" dishes of food, etc. for homeless or severely disadvantage people. I loved that tradition. This past year, I emailed one of the nuns that run that soup kitchen, and unfortunately, they already had enough volunteers. Well, it was unfortunate for me, but certainly fortunate for them.

The problem is, that's just during the holidays.

When it's not the "season of giving," not enough people give. And here in Austin, the supposed problem is that we don't give our money, but we give our time. (And to the "I Live Here I Give Here" people, your focus should on PERCENT PARTICIPATION not dollar amounts when you come to speak to a group of young professionals....or most anyone, for that matter. Did we not learn ANYTHING from Obama's fundraising tactics??) People, at least we give back and we're involved. Ugh.

So I figure, why not think of community involvement like the manufacturing concept of continuous improvement. Continuous community involvement? Sounds good. Sounds like a lot of work too, but it doesn't have to be.

No, I haven't hijacked this blog to talk about giving back, per se. There is still a connection with food. And that's exactly my point. Even the most embedded couch potatoes have something that is of interest to them. And the beauty is that you can share that interest with others in a way that gives back to the community.

I have volunteered at the Capital Area Food Bank a couple times, and it was a blast. While washing off cans of peas isn't exactly how I'd like food to be in my life all the time, knowing that I was helping and occasionally coming across an interesting shelf-stable product was a more than sufficient reward. I hope to volunteer with them again.

I leave you with a link to the "Pledge to End Hunger" campaign. While of course they will gladly accept monetary donations, what they are asking for is for you to "sign" their campaign. You put in your email address, name, and state, and poof...their partner, Tyson, donates tons and tons of food to food banks in your state. The problem is, not enough people have heard about it because as of my post, there are only about 1350 pledges. That's a great start, and it's translating into 46,935 lbs of food & 187,740 meals donated. But that's smaller than my college (and I went to a TINY college). We can do better.

Please "sign" the Pledge to End Hunger campaign and tell your friends. Just by posting your support of this program, people receive food. It's that easy.

Ro what?

2009-03-08T21:21:00.003-05:00

For those of you who do not know Rotel (http://www.ro-tel.com/index.jsp) is a widely-used ingredient in dishes here in Texas. I spent one year 2001-2002 in Austin without being introduced to this ubiquitous canned good. But in 2006 when I moved down here and in with my friend Heather, she was shocked (dismayed?) that I had never heard of it. I looked at the can and asked (the audacity!), "Uhh...isn't it just diced tomatoes and jalapenos? Couldn't you just dice the things on your own?" BLASPHEMY!!

The typical dish made with Rotel (or is it Ro*Tel?) is queso. For those not in the know, that is the cheesy spicy dip that you use with tortilla chips. Personally, I've always chosen (outside of a restaurant, that is) the Tostitos brand queso (http://www.tostitos.com/prod_salsaqueso.php). It's available at such gourmand eateries as 7-11 or Walgreens, and it is delicious.

But tonight it was homemade queso. I had some friends over, and one of my friends left me a bag with the two ingredients and some really tasty tortilla chips. Oh, and did I say the other ingredient is Velveeta? Oh yes. That bizarrely shelf-stable yellow/orange cheese-like product. To date, I had never prepared anything with Velveeta either, except for maybe boxed mac and cheese. So this evening was a first for two things.

I announced to my friends that I had never made queso with Rotel and Velveeta. This shocked them. "You don't have a crock pot? But you like to cook so much!" questioned one friend. "I like my queso a little more watery so I do two cans to one block, but it's a question of taste." advised the one who brought the products. "How exciting!" I exclaimed.

I decided to stay with the advice I had been given as opposed to the advice on the box, which was to pair just one can of Rotel with the entire 32 oz (yes, you read that right) block of "cheese." Instead of microwaving in a bowl as my friend suggested, however, I decided to turn to the box for the cooking method - melt it over low heat in a medium sauce pan. I did not choose this method due to the friendly warnings about how queso in the microwave can bubble up like oatmeal, but I will say the concept of cleaning that fake cheese stuff out of the inside did give me pause.

My friend also warned me that I will never go back to bottled Tostitos queso. It is likely that she is right.

A small failure

2009-03-06T09:36:00.004-06:00

I wanted to update all of you to say that I did not make the writing deadline to submit my manuscript to the folks at the Writers League of Texas. The plan was to write a synopsis page and the first ten pages of my cookbook (sans recipes and pictures for this contest). But alas, I just didn't devote the appropriate time to the project (I could list the excuses, but why bother). So tonight as the 6pm deadline rolls by, I'll just be thinking about what might have been if I had won and had that meeting with an agent/publisher.

...actually, no. At 6pm, I'll be waiting in line at Yoga Vida for the free Bikram Yoga class with water bottle, mat, and towel in hand....probably while reading The Best Food Writing of 2008.

Food and Kids

2009-03-06T09:24:00.004-06:00

Some of you know about my undying love for my TiVo (I've had one since 2000). Having a TiVo usually means that I watch everything in "TiVo Time" which means that you're never watching live TV. You get to fast forward through the advertisements (or if you're averse to embarrassment like I am, through the icky confrontations on reality shows) and basically tailor the show to your every whim.

But for some reason lately, I have been watching live TV. This means, I've seen a lot more ads, some of which are hilarious and involve food and kids (my other love besides food and my TiVo). So, without further ado - I feature three of those ads below. You can watch them on the YouTube links provided.

What is this, minced? You bring me minced??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTx2yNmHdgA
This Van De Kamp's ad had me literally LOLing on my couch. It's Jackie Mason mixed with the old guy in Coming to America ("what is this, velvet?") mixed with a precocious little girl. It's brilliant on all levels.

What if it had a flat bottom?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3KXaF2_UzU
Something about the slow motion celebration in this Old El Paso ad cracked me up. The boy is so cute and his creativity genius is appreciated by the make believe Mexican town. Fantastic.

Why don't we have both?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGnTW8EhGSk
This one is the weakest of the lot, but my favorite part in this Old El Paso ad (aside from the moment of celebration, of course) is the argument over "suave" or "duro" (soft or hard) tacos the two kids are having at the dinner table. The resulting suave/duro taco wheel is priceless.

I'm beginning to think that I should have had this post sponsored by Old El Paso or Van De Kamp's.....

This doesn't really count....

2009-03-03T22:56:00.004-06:00

...but this post is just to announce that I'm going to go through all previous posts and put tags in. I like the fact that my other blogging friends do this, and I've always intended to do so, but I just never really got around to it. So there you go. (And no, this doesn't count towards my 25 posts in 8 weeks count.)

cheap eats

2009-03-03T22:07:00.003-06:00

The economy has not been kind to me. Gas was killer there for a while, and now that I live in a driving community (gag....I miss the subway), that hurt me for a bit. I had to put my property taxes on my credit card back in December (because I had not planned well), and that's a HUGE chunk of cash (easily the most I've ever charged on my card). Then there's the 10% pay cut that my company required of all employees (VPs and above had bigger cuts).

So all in all, I've been focusing more on cheap food than on healthy food. This, in addition to a loss experienced recently, has meant that I've gained a bit of weight. It sure is tempting to do the quick and easy fast food thing when you have a coupon for a free burger, or free breakfast, or whatever. And I recognize that I didn't have to spend that money to begin with, so it's not cheap - it's more expensive than eating something that's already in my pantry or fridge.

I've been trying to get out and walk my dog more, not only because it benefits him, of course, but also to keep active. Problem is, my big loop around my neighborhood walks by a bunch of restaurants at the end, and I like going to the donut shop (to get breakfast burritos, this is Texas, after all) with only about three-quarters of a mile left in the loop. Clearly, things need to change.

But, as Katie Scarlett O'Hara says, "tomorrow is another day."

Today, however, is still the deal for cheap eats. And boy can Austin deliver. Even with very little money, there is something to be said for going out and spending some time with some friends surrounded by free food and half price drinks. :-)

So, below is a link to a day-by-day list of happy hour deals here in Austin. Next Monday, some friends from work and I are going to Freddie's for the free brisket and wings starting at 6pm. Aw yeah.

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/dining/entries/2009/02/08/restaurant_deals_the_big_fat_m.html

Killer Spaghetti...or is it Killing Spaghetti?

2009-03-02T10:18:00.005-06:00

On Saturday I was, once again, trying not to spend any money and use the food stuffs I had already at my disposal. I was also inspired (yet again) by a Nigella Lawson recipe featured on her TV show (all repeats, but I still watch them while drooling). Lemon Garlic and Mushroom pasta. Because I went to Costco back for the Valentine's party, I knew I still had scores of lemons and limes. And I had some Dreamfields (high protein, low on the glycemic index) spaghetti. I had a huge clove of garlic. No mushrooms. Okay, so my version was going to be Lemon Garlic Spaghetti.

Let me tell you, not only was this one of the easiest dishes I've ever made, but it was so tasty that I ate about half a box of pasta in one sitting. No, that's not advisable, but it's almost unavoidable due to just how good this stuff tastes.

I did this with spaghetti, and frankly, I think any long pasta would work well. I don't anything like a rotini or penne would make a nice pairing with the sauce. But that's just me.

Ingredients:

1/2 box of spaghetti
2 decent-sized cloves of garlic, crushed or minced
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1-2 Tbsp really good "sipping" olive oil (super tasty, but nothing you'd cook with)
1 large lemon

Implements:

Big pasta cooking pot
Large non-stick skillet for sauce
Garlic crusher or chef's knife for mincing
Microplane/zester
Tongs

Instructions:

Once you've gotten your water up to boil, salt it like you've never salted anything before. I've often heard that you want your pasta water to be as salty as the Mediterranean. Mine might have been as salty as the Dead Sea, but it was just that much tastier.
Put the pasta in the boiling water (check the package for the proper timing). Don't forget to stir it around periodically so the pasta doesn't stick.
While the pasta is cooking, heat up a non-stick skillet over medium/medium-low heat with the extra virgin olive oil (not the super good stuff)
When the oil has come up to temperature (shimmering slightly), put in the garlic. The point here is to brown it slightly, but watch out - burned garlic is one of the nastiest tastes on the face of the Earth...very bitter, almost metallic. If you're concerned, lower your flame.
Did you stir the pasta?
While the garlic is browning, rinse off your lemon and use a microplane (or zester) to put the zest of the entire lemon into the oil/garlic mixture. The aromas will begin to dance and it is such a happy fragrance.
Cut the lemon in half, and squeeze in the juice from one half. My lemons were particularly large, so feel free to put in the lemon from a whole lemon. Just depends on how citrusy you want your dish. Stir in the juice and the zest.
Turn off the heat under the skillet and just make sure the sauce is combined.
Assuming you've stirred your pasta periodically, by the time the buzzer has gone off, you've got some perfectly al dente and separated pasta. Take your tongs and pull out some of the pasta. Let the water drip off of it, and add it to the skillet. Take the tongs to make sure the pasta is covered with the sauce. Repeat with the next bunch of pasta and continue until you've got the half box of pasta rolling around with the sauce.
Since the skillet has been turned off, it's now "safe" to add in the really good olive oil. Choose a deeply-colored olive oil that you might use for dipping bread and pour in 1 tablespoon of the sipping olive oil. (If you don't have that great bottle of olive oil, you can use your extra virgin olive oil, but I wouldn't put as much on it.)
Turn the pasta around in all the sauce once again, and separate into two bowls. Make sure each person has some garlic, some lemon zest, and some of the olive oil/lemon juice mixture. Just to top it off, if you've got the really good olive oil, drizzle on one more teaspoon or so to each of the servings.

I was so excited by this recipe that I posted my glee to Facebook stating I had "just had some killer lemon garlic spaghetti." A friend of mine from Italy responded with, "Spaghetti with lemon and garlic???? You are spaghetti's killer." I'm guessing that means this is not one of the approved sauces for the pasta, but boy did I love it. In fact, I've got leftovers for lunch today. :-)

Shrove Tuesday

2009-02-24T22:09:00.003-06:00

Prior to today, I had never heard of Shrove Tuesday. According to the ever-popular Wikipedia, "The festival is widely associated with the eating of foods such as pancakes and often known simply as Pancake Day, originally because these used up ingredients such as fat and eggs, the consumption of which was traditionally restricted during Lent."

My original plan to honor this "new to me" holiday was going to be to take advantage of the free short stack IHOP (the International House of Pancakes, of course) was offering up at all of their locations. There's one a few miles from my house, and while I didn't know exactly where it was, I thought free pancakes was reason enough to find it. But I got an opportunity to play squash tonight, so that went by the wayside.

I thought about it and wanted to stick to my plan of having pancakes for Shrove Tuesday (any excuse to have pancakes for dinner). I then remembered seeing a box of buckwheat pancake mix in my pantry. It came to me. I was going to have dark chocolate chip buckwheat pancakes. I still had chips left over from making my chocolate sauce for Valentine's strawberries. I knew that was going to be tasty. And then another epiphany. Craisins.

So in celebration of Shrove Tuesday, I made and ate a small batch of dark chocolate chip craisins buckwheat pancakes. YUM.

Food Stories

2009-02-24T11:22:00.005-06:00

Recently, I was alerted to a writing contest here in Austin. It's run by the Writers' League of Texas and it's their 2009 Manuscript Contest. The skinny is that you submit a one-page synopsis and the first 10 pages of your manuscript. There are a variety of subjects that are judged separately, and the prize is a meeting with an agent/editor.

I've decided I'm going to try to submit. I say "try to" because I honestly don't know if I can get the first 10 pages written and edited up to the standards I'd like by March 6th. Basically, I need to get the whole thing written by this weekend to allow my family and friends time to read it, give feedback, tweak it, etc. And, it only costs $50, but right now, that's a nice chunk of money. So, the plan is to work hard this week to write as much as possible, and if I make it in time, I'll pay the $50 and submit it.

What is the "it" you might ask....IT is my cookbook. It falls under their "Narrative Nonfiction" category, so Lord only knows what other types of books I'd be going up against. But the distinguishing feature of this cookbook is the funny, poignant, universal stories that go along with the recipes. Yes, the food is great, but the stories are even better (and are sometimes accompanied by hilarious photos).

Just as a teaser, some of the story titles are:

Conflagration Popovers
Mistake Meatballs
Brooklyn BBQ Sauce
Statler Salad

Understandably, for the contest, I'm not putting the recipes or the pictures in the manuscript. My contact at the WLT suggested that I might want to focus my 10-page real estate on the actual stories, b/c it's not like they're going to test the recipes anyway. I guess if I have a really funny way to describe an ingredient or something, I might leave that recipe in there, but that's still up in the air.

So....cross your fingers, send me good writing vibes and thoughts of efficiency. And if you'd like to be one of the people to help me edit the 10 pages, definitely let me know....I can use as many opinions as possible.

My Valentine's Party

2009-02-22T15:54:00.009-06:00

I'm still eating leftovers from my Valentine's Night Party.

This year, since Valentine's fell on a Saturday (and since a few of my friends were bummed they didn't have dates for the evening), I figured I'd have some of my single girlfriends over and we'd just have a good time on our own. Truth be told, even when I'm in a relationship with someone, this holiday doesn't excite me so much. It just seems a bit silly, but I'll take any excuse to cook for some willing guinea pigs, so I invited them over.

I did what I do when I have people over for food....I made WAY too much. I had two kinds of dip (a salmon dill dip and a spicy spinach dip), two baguettes and four kinds of veggies to do the dipping (snap peas, broccoli, celery, and carrots), spicy cheese straws, lemon cake with blackberry sauce, and strawberries dipped in chocolate. (I think I'm forgetting something too.)

The salmon dip didn't go over so well, but I think that was for two distinct reasons. The first is that I didn't really tell anyone what it was b/c I was so busy welcoming people into the house that I never really went oer what I had laid out for them. The second, I believe, is because even if they had known, the concept of lox isn't one that is too familiar (or appealing) to them. I love lox. Every time I go home to Brooklyn, I MUST have a toasted pumpernickle bagel with tofu scallion spread (oddly creamier than cream cheese, go figure) and lox. Lots of it. Pile it on. In fact, while making my dip, I took out a piece of lox, put it in the cuisinart. The next piece of lox went in my mouth. And so on. There was a point there where I was concerned there might not be enough lox in the actual dip. But as it turned out, I got all of the leftovers, and man they were good!

The spinach dip was a raving success. But the problem is, I can't recreate it. For me, so much of cooking is experimentation. But I was never much of a scientist....I don't keep track of my amounts. I now cannot properly recreate the spinach dip! I made it again for a work potluck this week, but it just didn't have the personality that it did the first time I made it. Part of that might have been that I only had cooked garlic in there when the original had both cooked and raw garlic. As I told some people at work, it didn't matter if the Valentine's night dip was super pungent b/c we were all going home alone to our cats. :-) But the dip also had red pepper flakes....maybe I didn't put enough of them for the redo? Either way, I've realized that my first estimations were a bit off, so this will take a bit of tweaking, but when I rediscover the magic that was the spinach dip, it will be called "Single Girl Spinach Dip."

I'm published! Ok...not really...

2009-02-18T21:31:00.004-06:00

Today, Mark Bittman had a column in the NY Times about "non-traditional" breakfast foods. He made mention of Migas, but they were a completely different from the Migas I know in Austin. So I posted a reply. I realize that a blog comment on nytimes.com is not even remotely in the same sphere as actually being published in the Times, but hey, we all have to start somewhere, don't we? :-)

The article link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/dining/18mini.html?_r=1&ref=dining

The blog link: http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/what-i-had-for-breakfast-this-morning/#comments

My comment:

I was confused by your definition of Migas. That’s not how we define them here in Texas. In Austin, “Migas” essentially means (and I’m oversimplifying) a western scramble with pieces of tortillas mixed in. They’re one of the best breakfast options around aside from maybe the breakfast burritos you get from the little holes in the wall where no one speaks English. (I realize they’re egg based and not really on point with the theme of your article, but all the same, they’re mighty tasty.)
In any event, I have since looked up the Migas you referenced and found they are typically prepared that way in Spain. Thank you very much for continuing to pique my interest in food through your blog entries, recipes, and articles. Keep it up.
— Liz Craft

A new goal...food and fundraising.

2009-02-18T21:12:00.003-06:00

In an effort to raise money for the not-for-profit At the Crossroads, I have joined their "I Think I Can" set of campaigns. Set of campaigns, you might say...yes. Each individual creates their own goal with the fundraising efforts all going to benefit At the Crossroads. What is At the Crossroads? It is a not-for-profit serving homeless youth in San Francisco that was started by a childhood friend of mine, Rob Gitin. These fundraising efforts raise money for blankets, food, hygiene items, etc. for those kids. They can be as silly as you want (Rob's campaign is to convince comedienne Sarah Silverman to go on a date with him) or as serious as you want (losing weight, quitting smoking, spending time with your family without the cell phone, etc.). You can learn more about At the Crossroads at http://www.atthecrossroads.org/.

As for my fundraising goal, well, it's to post on this blog at least three times a week for the next 8 weeks. With a bonus post, I'm committing to 25 posts before April 13th. It's going to be tight, and if you look at my last post, I've made promises before. But this time it's not all about me. So keep your fingers crossed for me, read my blog, and donate to the cause: http://atthecrossroads.org/campaign/lizcraft.

With that, I'm off to have a glass of wine and draft my next post. One down. Phew!

More, I promise

2008-10-31T17:32:00.003-05:00

Dear friends, family, and foodies,

I will be posting more in the upcoming month (partially as an attempt to achieve my NaNoWriMo goal - www.nanowrimo.org), so as a teaser, here are some of the upcoming topics:

the long promised second post displaying my cookbook collection
a summary of what i cooked last Wednesday night for my family in NYC
the menu I plan on serving on election night and its history
Mufas

And much more.

Get excited, foodie folks.

My legs hurt from standing so long...

2008-09-16T23:47:00.003-05:00

Well friends and fans....I have been cooking/baking for the past four hours, which doesn't quite make up for the fact that it's been over a month since my last post. :-( Anyway, I picked up some essential ingredients at the grocery store on my way home from work, changed into my pjs and an apron, and then hit the ground running at 7:30pm. I had been itching to make something more than my typical sauteed green and yellow squash or my frequent whole wheat pasta with ground turkey pasta sauce. I even tried to invite friends over on Saturday and Sunday just to have mouths to feed (the scare of a hurricane kept them home....we didn't get but about three drops of rain...but I digress). Thankfully, my team is having a day-long meeting on Thursday, so I jumped at the chance to provide some food for the day.

The first thing I made was lasagna. Let me start by saying, I am not of Italian heritage. I am a British Isles mutt...a sort of nondescript combo of all the islands (maybe with the exception of Wales?). And my mother who grew up on typical mid-western farm food (read: fried and boiled within an inch of their lives...but laden with fat, so awfully tasty). So one might find it surprising, but I think she makes some of the best lasagna I've ever had. The funny thing is that it couldn't be more simple. There's no meat in the sauce and it is a total of 6 ingredients: noodles, sauce, mozzarella, ricotta, parmesan, and eggs. Basta.

I never saw her using a recipe when she made it, I guess mainly b/c I can't imagine how one would mess this recipe up. As long as you remember to start with a tiny bit of sauce in the pan so the noodles don't burn or stick, alternate layers, tuck in the corners, and don't overfill the pan, you're pretty much good to go. As with most lasagna noodle boxes, there was a recipe on the side. It's a good thing. If going off the top of my head, I had forgotten about the egg to be used as a binder for the cheese blend. I also wasn't sure what temp to cook it - though my guess was only 25 degrees lower than what the box suggested. Other than that, it was a pretty typical recipe, but included meat.

While boiling the water for the noodles (no ready-to-bake noodles for me!), I microwaved a Weight Watchers Smart Ones: Fruit Inspirations meal (the ultimate irony, don't you think?). The water came to a rolling boil, and I cooked the noodles, drained them, and laid them out to dry so they wouldn't stick to each other like boys at a sixth grade dance scared of actually having to talk to a member of the opposite sex. I giggled at the promise of using my Cuisinart to turn my block of parmesan into tiny cheese crumbs. At that thought, I immediately threw my two hunks of mozzarella into the freezer. I had an idea....I'd use the shredding attachment on the same Cuisinart for the first time and turn the mozz into perfect little strips of creamy cheese, but they needed to be more firm for it to be successful. The parmesan worked like a dream. I pulsed it a few times and then let 'er rip. Tiny little dusty flakes were the beautiful result. The mozzarella's fate was not as pretty. I didn't really have the time to fully freeze them for any decent length, so the first hunk ended up almost burning out the motor of the Cuisinart when it got stuck between the shredder blade and the top of the device. I messed with it enough to sort of go through one of the hunks, but decided that I'd be better off leaving the second one for the topping, which would give me some time to cut it up (I julienned mozarella...haha!). And one last thing - I put my sauce on to heat through.

I assembled the layers: first sauce, a layer of noodles, a layer of nine "dots" of the cheese blend with half the mozz that was supposed to be in there, more sauce, a layer of noodles, 9 cheese dots, and so on. Once I was at the top of my Pyrex dish, I covered it with foil and started baking. In the meantime, I cut the remaining mozz into little fine strips. After baking about 10 minutes, I sprinkled the julienned mozarella on top (almost the whole other hunk) and re-foiled the top. I had a ton of materials left over...but not enough to make a whole entire other pan. So I decided to get creative. I have these two large baking ramekins that I bought at the Junior League Resale Shop after one of my shifts last year. They're the iconic white fluted ramekin...I couldn't resist (and I think I paid $4 for the two). So, I decided to put a little bit of cheese blend in a noodle cut in half, roll it up, and put that little cheese filled pasta roll on its end in the ramekin. I repeated and periodically doused it with sauce. It got pretty messy since the pasta rolls were taller than the sides of the dish, but it looked neat. I covered with foil and added to the oven.

Lastly I tried little layers of noodle squares, sauce, and the limited remaining cheese blend (certainly couldn't let anything to go waste!) It didn't fill up the top and I didn't put foil on this one when i put it in the oven. In retrospect, had I not filled my initial Pyrex dish quite so high, I would have probably had enough supplies to make a whole other (if slightly anemic) lasagna. I would have just been a little low on the cheese blend, I suspect. But I have another thing of ricotta, some left over mozz, and some more parmesan, so I could have whipped something up. I might have also run out of sauce, but I would have seen that coming and would have been able to know when to call it the last layer.

So after all my lasagna dishes were in the oven, I moved on to desserts. I had told some co-workers (including my boss) that I would bring in a loaf of banana bread today, but last night three things got in my way - I fell asleep on my couch while reading, I didn't have any buttermilk, and my little recipe post-it DIDN'T HAVE A COOKING TIME ON IT!! I've made this banana bread recipe multiple times, though not recently....how on God's green earth did I make it if I didn't know how long to cook it?? Anyway, in order to make up for the fact that I came to work empty handed, I decided to not only bake a loaf of banana bread, but I also decided to try out a new recipe for a citrus pound cake. It wasn't part of the of the recipe, but I decided to also create a citrus glaze (a few of the pound cake reviews said it was too dry).

Feeling adventurous, I started with the pound cake. Thankfully, when I bought a set of silicone baking items it came with two loaf pans. The batter for this pound cake required cake flour (which I don't think I've ever used before). I sifted the flour, baking powder and a few other things, whipped up the sugar and the zest of the orange an lemon until it was all sort of a light orangey color, and so forth. The batter didn't have any immediate leavening (like the banana bread recipe), so it definitely looked more like a runny cake batter. The recipe called for a loaf pan of slightly different dimensions, but when I piled the batter into the silicon pan, it was only about 3/4 of the way full, so I figured, let's throw caution to the wind. I tapped it on the counter a few times to let the bubbles out, set the timer on my microwave, and tossed it into the oven (having moved one of the racks to the middle).

On to my banana bread. I washed out my teaspoons, my mixing bowls (I had already used another couple bowls others during the great lasagna extravaganza which were washing in the dishwasher), a spatula, etc. Because the recipe has buttermilk, baking powder, and baking soda, it basically explodes once you mix wet and dry ingredients. Thankfully, I remembered that and got those two separate bowls ready. Then, in a flash, I used my trusty hand mixer to mix the two bowls' worth of ingredients. As it was expanding, I managed to get it into the other silicone loaf pan. Thankfully, both desserts are supposed to bake at 325 degrees, so I was able to pop it in the oven as well - I just set the timer on my oven.

The citrus pound cake came out first. I tested it after an hour, and it was just a bit too moist in the middle. But after another measly 5 minutes, the toothpick came out just slightly moistened. I let it rest for a bit in the silicon loaf pan. About 15 minutes later, the banana bread came out. At that point, the pound cake was cool enough to touch. I turned it out and put it on a cooling rack on top of a baking sheet. I had created a citrus glaze (mostly lemon with a bit of orange) and decided that I wanted to double-glaze the loaf. I pricked the top crust with a toothpick to make a few holes. I drizzled the glaze over the still warm cake, intending for this first layer to soak in (like I said, some reviews of the recipe said the cake was too dry). I will either bring the glaze with me on Thursday and apply the second and final layer of glaze right before surviving...or maybe I'll glaze it Thursday morning so it will have a chance to set. Decisions decisions.

My one regret is following the part of the banana bread recipe that said to grease and flour the pan. I think, actually, that flouring it was the reason a little corner stuck to the pan. It was a blessing in disguise, however, b/c I was able to do a quick taste (if only a corner of the pound cake had stuck....).

I can't wait for Thursday's lunch.

I'm stuffed!

2008-08-06T21:04:00.003-05:00

I went to the nutritionist yesterday. This is part of an overall effort not only to slim down, but also to understand more about the fuel my body consumes in and burns.

Based on the results of my RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate) tests, I should be taking in 1950 calories. Or rather, the balance at the end of the day should be 1950 calories. So that means that if I burn, say, 450 calories doing yard work, then I'm supposed to be taking in 2400 calories. HOW ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH IS A HUMAN SUPPOSED TO TAKE IN THAT MANY CALORIES??

Now, of course, this doesn't mean 2400 calories of crap (sadly, no cheese enchiladas with cheese sauce), but rather increased fiber, fewer simple carbohydrates, and so on. I would have never thought it was so hard to add calories!! One interesting (and now that I know it, seemingly obvious tip) was that my snacks shouldn't be just almonds, or just fruit, but a little of both. Apparently it's the combination of protein and carbs that makes the snacks more effective.

The online tracking service I use (www.calorieking.com) sets guidelines for how many grams of fat, protein, carbs, and fiber one should take in based on your calorie target. I have yet to figure out how someone is supposed to get up to that kind of a calorie count without going over at least one of those targets. Plus, get this. I played squash Thursday after work and, according to my heart rate monitor, I burned 1170 calories. So how am I supposed to end up with a balance of 1950 net calories after that? I'm supposed to magically eat 3120 calories without going over those fat, carb, protein, and fiber guidelines??

I'm definitely looking forward to my next appointment with the nutritionist next week where she'll actually give me a meal plan and hopefully explain some of these guidelines and rules that are seemingly conflicting notions.

The great muffin quest - episode one

2008-08-03T12:35:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to figure out some "grab-and-go" breakfast that won't bore me to tears and won't fill me full of trans fats. Thus was born the great muffin quest of 2008 as I feel blueberry muffins might just be the answer to my prayers.

Based on the rave reviews their pancake mix got over Thanksgiving, I turned to Hodgson Mill for my two base mixes. The first option was the Whole Wheat Wild Blueberry Muffin Mix. It has a delightful little blueberry-colored banner on the front of the box boasting, "Made with 100% Whole Grain Flour & Milled Flax Seed!" and another little seal saying, "450mg Omega-3 Oils per serving."

I mixed the box according to the instructions (yield listed as 7-8 muffins). I added an extra half cup of blueberries (dusted with flour to keep them suspended in the batter) for a little extra burst of flavor. But boy let me tell you, this batter was thick. In my little silicone muffin "tins" I put about a 1/2 cup of batter into 9 holes. The rose a little...just enough to have that little top, but thankfully didn't spill over. (I checked in on them periodically throughout the 16 minutes the box said just to make sure.) I put a toothpick in the center of two of them at the 16 minute mark, and they needed a couple more minutes. After 2 more minutes in the oven and 10 minutes of cooling, I popped them out of the silicone and put them on another rack (truth be told, the "cooling rack" I used at this point was an overturned flat bottomed basket in which you would cook smaller veggies on a grill).

They're deceptively moist, so that's good. They're also very blueberry-y...so that's also good. But I really thought they were greatly improved with one spritz per bite of I Can't Believe it's Not Butter.

When these are gone, I'll move on to the next mix and let you know how it goes.

Mission Grillpossible!

2008-08-02T12:42:00.003-05:00

I've done it!

I just thought I'd let all of you know that I have finally managed to cook a steak to medium rare on my grill pan! Hazah!

Type of steak: bone-in rib eye
Thickness: about an inch thick, maybe a little thinner
Size: large enough to make two portions...both for me - one of the times living alone is a great thing!
Seasoning: just salt and pepper...nothing fancy
Heat: just slightly under my #5 setting on my gas range (6 being the highest)
Cooking Time: 4 minutes on the first side (turning 90 degrees 2 minutes in to get those great grill marks) and 2.5 minutes on the second side (I did attempt to get the grill marks on the other side, but was not successful.
Resting Time: 6 minutes

It was juicy, flavorful, and full-on perfectly medium rare. The crust on the outside due to the high heat was the perfect complement to the tender pink silky center. I tried to mix a little balsamic vinegar and some margarine with the juices left in the grill pan to make a sauce, but something about the olive oil based margarine I have in my house just didn't taste right (not to mention it's not like there was fond, I mean, it's a non-stick surface, but there were just juices, so it was a valiant attempt).

All in all, I really want to eat both servings. Thankfully, I had the foresight to cut it in half and put the other half in a ziploc and in the fridge for a future meal.

Tonight, I will make my basil and goat cheese turkey roulade, and tomorrow I'll be baking blueberry bran muffins. The former I've made before, the later...never. Wish me luck.

To box or not to box

2008-07-27T12:55:00.002-05:00

This particular post will be dedicated to one of my favorite foods....mac and cheese. When my sister and I were young (but not too young), my mother had us cook one night a week (this didn't last for long just because of crazy schedules). We even started our own little cookbook in a red spiral notebook (we had little tabs cut out to represent the different sections a cookbook would normally have). One of our favorite meals to make was macaroni and cheese. This never involved a boxed sauce (certainly no Velveeta or powdered cheese to be found). We would create a rue, grate in white cheddar using one of those cylindrical hand crank graters, and mix away. Sometimes we'd bake it...sometimes we wouldn't.

But as an adult I moved away from sauces from scratch. Boxed pasta kits became a much easier option (especially the ones that just had squeezy cheese not requiring milk or butter...it's sort of hard to guarantee that as a college student you have those staples at your fingertips). Then as I got a little older, I started putting in canned tuna, Italian breadcrumbs, and cayenne pepper (I believe this idea might have come from an ex...but it's mine now, so there!). That combo became my ubiquitous tuna mac and cheese casserole. Occasionally, broccoli would be added. (I would like to point out with a bizarre mixture of disappointment and pride that I never once topped my casseroles with those little canned fried onions.)

Recently when my mother and sister were visiting, we watched a Food Network Mac and Cheese Challenge and an episode of the Next Food Network Star where two of the remaining four contestants were asked to cook mac and cheese. It was a full on craving attack. We had originally planned to eat something else (which escapes me at the moment), but after those two shows, it became obvious - we absolutely needed to make mac and cheese. Only problem - I didn't have any of the ingredients (except for flour) to make the sauce from scratch, so to the grocery store I went.

We used the whole wheat + protein (or something like that) fusilli from Barilla (I think), which was a slight attempt to increase the nutritional value of the meal. I made a roux, browned the flour just a bit, and started putting in the two cheeses that I had purchased - fontina and extra sharp white cheddar. The fontina was for it's melty qualities and the cheddar was for it's personality. A little nutmeg and black pepper were added to make the sauce pop a bit. I added a touch of freshly grated parmesan to add some salt. Once everything was boiled, drained, and mixed, I put it into a pyrex dish and topped it with a bit of the remaining cheddar and parmesan. We baked it for a while, but nothing got brown and bubbly (I think the brown would need to come from it being under the broiler, but I digress).

All in all, with a glass of a fairly nondescript red wine (just the kind my mom and I like), it turned out pretty well. Personally, it wasn't cheesy enough for me. I think I would have liked to either have a higher cheddar to fontina ratio, or maybe a different cheese altogether in the place of the fontina. Like I said, it melted really well, but it just didn't have enough punch. Mom and Sis said they thought it was good, and certainly it didn't keep me from eating the leftovers in quick order, but I'll need to adjust the recipe in the future.

My Food Shelf…Installment #1…

2008-07-20T15:00:00.001-05:00

I have a lot of books. I have an Art History section, a Religion section, a Fiction section, and more. I have, at times, received some ribbing about this. (One guy picked me up for our first date and said, “Wow, so did you like read all these or are they just here for decoration.”) I even have a food section. For the most part this section is made up of cookbooks, but there are a couple other food-related books that similarly inspire me. I thought I might list all the books that live on that food shelf, but Mom, I'm not sure I'm listing this bibliography by the strict standards of Chicago Elements of Style...please forgive me.

My Food Shelf:

On Cooking: a Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals (Third Edition), Sarah R. Labensky & Alan M. Hause. This was my text book at the cooking class I took at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration while there getting my MBA. This book is riddled with post-its, many of which stick out of the side with labels for things like clarified butter, popovers, mayonnaise, roulade, etc. I've only made two of those four things, but the banana bread recipe on a post-it on the inside cover I've made a ton of times. All in all, this book is not only a great cookbook, but a fantastic textbook to follow along for basic techniques, or those not so basic.
A Taste of an Arbuckle Mountain County Christmas: A Special Collection of Holiday Recipes and Ideas, Rainbow Family Community Education Club, Sulphur, Oklahoma. Yup, you read that right, Sulphur, Oklahoma. I got this (it's actually two years' worth of recipes in one) from my great aunt in that same state. This is a pretty country cookbook - it's a binder ostensibly to add in pages for years to come. There are the typical tabs for "Appetizers & Beverages" and "Breads & Rolls," but my favorite tab is at the back called "This and That." What, you might ask, would be in a section called "This and That?" Well, there's Friendship Tea, Susie's Sausage Roll(??), Cold Lye Soap (uhhh...isn't this a cookbook??), and of course the ever-popular Edible Play Dough.
The South Beach Diet Good Fats Good Carbs Guide: The Complete and Easy Reference for All Your Favorite Foods, Arthur Agatston, MD. This is one of the two South Beach books I have in my collection. This book, however, is not a cookbook but as the title suggests, it's a reference guide. I have not taken the time to really use this (I think it came bundled with my other SB book, but the basic concept is that you can look up a food and it lists the portion size, the total carbs, total sugar, and total fat. It follows up that food's listing with the recommendation (good, very limited, avoid, limited, etc.). I suppose since it's small and paperback one is supposed to carry it around in one's bag, but seriously, I think it's a little crazy to be that obsessed with food. Ok...that sounds weird coming from someone who has a food blog, but I mean, if you're preparing food, you know what you're putting in it and you can use common sense as to whether it's good for you or not. If you're out to dinner, it's not like you're going to know what's in every sauce and every dish, so there would likely be hidden "costs," and you can probably also use your common sense again. And heck, if you're out eating, enjoy it! (Of course, knowing the right thing to do doesn't mean you have the will power or desire to do the right thing, but that's a Dr. Phil show, I guess.)
The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss, Arthur Agatston, MD. This is that book that everyone was talking about for a couple years. There was a bit of a backlash against it when the Atkins diet was found to cause some problems, but I really think there are a lot of sensible recommendations in here, not to mention, some seriously tasty recipes. The first 110 or so pages tell you about the philosophy behind the multi-phased approach, the medical support, and so on. Honestly, I don't know if I ever read more than 20 pages of that stuff. The recipes for each of the phases take up 175 or so pages, and it's really rather easy to understand. It literally goes through each phase day by day. And while phase 1 does "deprive" you of most carbs, it's a pretty reasonable list of items. The daily lists sometimes make reference to recipes that are later in the book, and most of them are super easy to create. Without belaboring the point, I remember a recipe with chicken breasts and pistachio nuts. It was excellent....especially since the dressing was made of avocado. Seriously tasty.....just picture smothering a chicken breast in guacamole and then encrusting it in chopped pistachios.....delightful.
Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, Cheryl Mendelson. While this book doesn’t focus solely on food, the food section covers topics such as “The Whys and Wherefores of Home Cooking,” “Stimulating Beverages,” and “Serving Meals.” I haven’t made it through the whole book yet, but so far there are some good discussions around hosting and the larger food-related topics.
Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2007: An Entire Year of Recipes, Food & Wine Magazine. I got this book last year at the Texas Conference for Women. The Editor in Chief of the magazine, Dana Cowin, was one of the speakers on a culinary culture panel. I went up to her after the panel dispersed and told her about my restaurant idea, and she was really excited and quite encouraging. Of course, I might be missing my timing, but I still dream of opening the restaurant. Oh well. But I digress...the pictures, as you might imagine are mouth-watering. Everything looks glossy and succulent (I need to remind myself that they’re probably sprayed multiple times with shellac so they’ll stay as perky as they were at the beginning of the day. There are the typical sections of poultry, pasta, fish, grains, etc. , but I will say that many of these recipes are likely not things that I would make with any regularity.
Low-Fat, Low-Cholesterol Cookbook, Sponsored by the American Heart Association. The pages of this “classic” (note the sarcasm) have yellowed. This was printed in 1989, so needless to say, I’m quite sure many of the recommendations are somewhat out of date. I suspect, though, that many of them are probably still quite useful.

Ok. That's it for Installment #1. Stay tuned for Installment #2. Yes, there are more. :-)

Vegetarians...avert your eyes

2008-07-13T19:58:00.003-05:00

I love flesh. I love seared flesh. There are few food products that I actually crave, but red meat is high up on that short list. When training for the NYC marathon last fall, all I wanted after my long runs was a steak or a burger. As a celebratory meal after finishing the marathon (MANY hours after the masses), my father took us back in time to when he used to cook steak and potatoes on Sunday nights.

And yet, despite multiple attempts, I cannot cook a steak to save my life.

I'm a pretty good cook. I might even be well above average in that arena. But I cannot cook a steak. I've tried in my regular pan with a little bit of butter. I've tried in that same pan with some non-stick spray. I've tried both substances and no substance in my non-stick pan. Now that I'm the proud owner of a non-stick grill pan, and I've now tried multiple times to cook a steak on that pan.

I have the sear down. High heat, rotate 90 degree, and you get that fantastic "x" marks the spot sear marks. They're good looking. I've got that down pat. But getting it to be medium rare has been eluding me.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I bought a decent-quality steak. Nothing like what you'd bet from a real speciality store, but it looked good and was the type of cut I would have ordered at a restaurant. So tonight it went on the grill pan, and tonight the sear looked better than it ever had....I had high hopes. But after 4 minutes on each side, I put the steak on a plate to rest. It's definitely too raw, but I figure with 8-10 minutes of resting it will get to my beloved medium rare (on the rare side). I probably came back to it on the short side of 8 minutes, but it was still pretty raw inside...more so than I'm comfortable eating (at least when it's been cooked by my hands as opposed to someone who cooks steaks every day). So I put it back on the grill pan (screwing up my sear, I might add). I only left it on for another 1.5 minutes per side (or there abouts). I took it off the pan and let it rest for another around 8 minutes.

Guess what....yes, you could have guessed. IT WAS MEDIUM. argh. I mean, it's probably the closest I've gotten to medium rare, so I suppose I've been improving, but man, this is not how I like my steak. Should I have let it rest the second time for less time? Should I have put it back on at a lower temp? Should I have seared and then turned it down? Should I have transferred it to an oven-safe pan and put it in an oven for a bit to cook through, but not too much?

Obviously I'm going to have to refer to some of my many cookbooks (that list coming soon) to get some pointers or maybe I'll go to a higher end store (do they have "butchers" any more that have their own store?), b/c I really can't keep doing this to all this glorious flesh.

Like...OMG!

2008-07-12T22:26:00.003-05:00

OMG, for those of you in a generation with a letter earlier in the alphabet than X, means Oh My God/Goodness.

This is the phrase that I said upon discovering that there is a show called The Best Recipes in the World with Mark Bittman. My obsession has now made it on to TV. I have watched all of his Videos on NYTimes.com...where I also read all of his articles. I love his irreverent humor and his "devil may care" attitude about cooking - that's where I am. For instance, I was thinking about putting up a recipe for a soup that I made, but I haven't the foggiest what the amounts were of the ingredients. I chopped up what celery I had, possibly the remaining half of an onion (if memory serves right), and some of the baby carrots I munch on and put the three ingredients in the pan to serve as the aromatic base - the trinity, if you will. But I have no clue how much of each of them there were. Anyway, you get the point.

Ladies and Germs, set your TiVo's to your PBS Station on Sunday mornings...and it looks like you too might catch the upcoming episode entitled "Pure Porcine Pleasures II."

I love this man.

1962??

2008-07-10T08:59:00.002-05:00

This will be brief as I have to run off to work, but apparently I burn roughly 1962 calories on a daily basis just doing my regular walking around the house, sitting at my desk all day, and occasionally getting up to get a glass of water or a pretzel rod. WHAAA?? The metabolic consultant told me that I need on average 1509 just to sustain consciousness...consciousness being a good thing, I assume. Of course, you can eat less one day and more the next, but this is the overall goal calorie intake.

That's crazy to me (she said pretty much everyone is shocked by how many calories they burn during a day). When I've paid attention to my calorie intake I usually aim for 1200-1400 calories. In order to lose 1 lb per week, I'm supposed to cut my calorie intake by 500 calories, but never go below that 1509....so I guess I'd aim for 1550?? And of course if I exercise that gives me more room to play with. Now that I've got my heart rate monitor all calibrated, I'll be able to see how many calories I burn during any given workout (even the walking on the treadmill reading a magazine kinda workouts).

So the next step is to talk to a nutritionist to find out what types of food (the whole carb/fat balance) I should be eating and at what times of the day.

I know I haven't started out the day well b/c all I've had this morning thus far is a cup of coffee right after the test. If I get ready for work quickly enough, I'll scramble up a couple eggs and scarf those down.

...more later.

Resting Meal Rate?

2008-07-09T22:06:00.003-05:00

Tonight I'm going to bed early...around 10:30pm. That'll give me just shy of 8 hours of sleep before I have to get up for my RMR test at the gym. RMR stands for Resting Metabolic Rate and apparently the results of this test will indicate roughly how many calories I burn at different levels of activity, and with that information, we'll be able to tell how many calories I'm supposed to be taking in on any given day. Not only that, it's supposed to indicate what percent of my intake should be fat and what percent should be carbs (pray that I can eat my beloved Spicy Pantry Tuna Mac & Cheese Casserole going forward). I'm intrigued to see what this thing tells me.

The MAP (Metabolic Assessment Profile) test I took last week had some interesting results. I've been an athlete all my life. In my adult life (ahhh...grad school and 4 years of a relationship based on beer intake), I've put on some extra pounds, but through training for the NYC Marathon last fall, I lost 20 pounds and was really looking slim and trim. Sadly, I injured my right knee during training (I limped the last 10 miles of the marathon), so I haven't been able to run since last November. I'm now seeing my second Physical Therapist, and I have a lot of hope that she'll realign me. I'm so hopeful that I'm going to her even though she's not covered by my insurance (ouch!!). This is all after two orthopedists, a previous physical therapist and 4 cortisone shots (ouch again!!).

So back to the results, the MAP test told me that in order to burn 80% fat 20% sugar during a workout I need to keep my heart rate between 126 and 135. I chuckle even writing that. It took me a solid month of training to teach myself how to run slowly (I was a sprinter in junior high). But even after learning how to run for endurance and not sheer speed, walking on a treadmill is really frustrating when I'd rather be running. Keeping my heart rate at around 130 is literally walking at 3.1/3 mph on the treadmill with no incline. Can you say boring????? I didn't even break a sweat during my last workout. But if this is what I need to do to get my weight going back down, then so be it. And hey, maybe it will help me get through that pile of magazines that is looming in my living room.

Anyway, I guess all of this is to say that I'm curious to see what nutritional suggestions there are from the combined results of the MAP and RMR test. I'm also curious how that's going to affect my grocery buying and my cooking. I suspect that my grocery buying isn't going to change much. I feel confident that I make good choices at the grocery store upwards of 90% of the time. And I love spending my money at the farmers' market where there's a plethora of fresh produce. I do think, however, it's going to make it that much more important that I prepare a week's worth of meals and be diligent about bringing my lunch to work. Things are hard when I'm strapped at work, and I barely feel like I can leave my desk, so I run out and grab something quick....quick usually does not equal particularly healthy. ( We won't speak of the times I have only had around 7 minutes for lunch (1.5 minutes to get my change and walk to the vending machine, 1 minute to purchase the "Lean Pocket", .5 minutes to walk to the microwave, 2 minutes to heat, 1 to cool, and finally 2 minutes to eat).) But aside from the grocery/farmers' market shopping, I might also need to some pantry culling.

So, with that, I log off and go to sleep. Dreams of food. :-)

Night Owl

2008-07-08T21:49:00.002-05:00

I know I'm not supposed to eat late in the day. I get that. I even understand why (eat stuff, then lay there.....it's not rocket science). But I can't seem to eat earlier. Normally it's because I don't often get home until 7pm.

Tonight that wasn't the case. I got home on time. In fact, I left work early (I got in at 6:30am, so by 3pm, I was done for). I went to the gym, did one of my new boring workouts (walking slowly on the treadmill...keep the heart rate low and in my fat burning range...mind numbing), and came home. I cleaned up a bit, grabbed a small bite, and then my friend came over and we played Rock Band for a couple hours before his volleyball game. So then it was 8:30pm...and I wasn't really hungry, so I sat down and watched a quick TV show. Then by the end of that show, I was hungry - tummy growling. So now we're talking 9:30pm and I haven't really eaten dinner. I can't go to bed this hungry, so I decide to eat. I do a quick ham and cheese omelet, and it's pretty tasty. But now it's an hour later and now I'm super hungry again. What am I supposed to eat at 10:30??? I was going to go to bed in a half hour. I guess I'll grab some almonds and have a big glass of water. This is annoying.

At least I didn't use saltines...

2008-07-04T13:33:00.003-05:00

Well folks, I just made the most non-descript salmon croquettes. This is not so surprising as I really only used salmon (canned), Italian bread crumbs (store bought), and two eggs (not farm fresh like I typically like to have on hand). So given the ingredients, who would be surprised? I think I also over cooked them slightly. I decided to bake them instead of pan frying. I brushed a little olive oil on top of the cakes (croquettes, whatever) to make them sort of crisp up. When they came out of the oven, I put them on a cooling rack for a bit just to make sure that if there was any excess oil it could drop off.

I also didn't make the trip to the grocery store (it's July 4th...I'm still in my night shirt) to get some chipotle paste to make a chipotle mayo dipping sauce that I had originally wanted. Instead I used cayenne pepper and some garlic powder, which turned out ok...the redeeming quality of this sauce, however, was my homemade mayo from earlier in the week. (Yes, I'm very pleased with myself for making that mayo.) The dried spices were fine in a pinch (no pun intended), but not what I had really wanted.

There are a few things I would change.

I'd either spray my foil-lined sheet pan with cooking spray or I'd brush it lightly with olive oil before putting the croquettes down (that's sort of a d'uh...I should have thought of that).
I would also attempt to make my own interesting breadcrumbs and not use the ever-ready and ever-popular Progresso Italian Breadcrumbs (as much as I love them). Though, truth be told, I don't really know what I'd put in that outside of some garlic powder and some oregano...maybe dried basil? I'd have to look that up. I have a great baguette in my freezer for this very purpose.
I would possibly bake my own salmon fillets and flake that to make the base (though, let's be honest, canned salmon is probably fine for this application). Besides, do you bake the salmon? Poach it? What lends itself best to then being flaked and put in a cake?
I might try to make some more interesting dipping sauce. Maybe some sort of mix between guacamole and mayo? Or maybe a soy wasabi mayo sauce? I'll have to do some more investigating.
I would put some sea salt on the croquettes right after they came out of the oven. They could have used some more seasoning.

That's all off the top of my head. There's a great deal of room for improvement, but they weren't so bad overall.

yumm-o

2008-07-03T11:32:00.002-05:00

While I like a fair number of Rachel Ray's recipes, I do not like her little EVOO and other cutesy words/phrases....but for some reason, I just had to call this one "yumm-o."

And here's why...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mini.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Even if not all of these appeal to you, Mark Bittman has once again put together a great list of picnic type foods. At first glance, I'd be up for making most of them, but probably not exactly as he has them. But that's sort of the point, isn't it? As long as it inspires you, what difference does it make. I'd say unless you're trying to win a Mark Bittman cook-alike contest, or if he happens to be attending your picnic, it really shouldn't matter.

Happy grilling!

the flogging blues

2008-07-03T00:04:00.003-05:00

My secret has been revealed. I was thinking that by storing up flogs (food+blog=flog) I could beat the curse of falling behind in my 3x flogs/week. The problem is, they apparently show up listed as the day I created them, even if I actually post them three days later. So now I'm thinking that I have to keep my flogs in a Word doc and just copy and paste periodically. What a bummer.

Anyway, upcoming flog topics:
- the Ithaca Farmer's Market
- my small but bizarre cookbook collection
- last Thanksgiving and the great fire of 07
- where do you draw the line?
- my new Costco membership and my inability to shop sparingly

By the way, if anyone knows how to change this date problem, lemme know...that'd be dandy.

Much love and quiches.....

Struggling meal to meal

2008-06-28T16:39:00.010-05:00

For some reason, when I go on vacation or I have friends/family in town, I plan the meals first and fit all the other things around it.

Take my trip to Paris with my mother and sister back in June 2006. We had some touristy things we wanted to do (my sister hadn't been there in a decade), but let's be honest - the food was really all we HAD to experience. There was a restaurant that only served souffles (more expensive than we would normally have gone, but how often do you have a three course meal solely in souffle form?). There was the ubiquitous sidewalk cafe where we got our croque monsieurs, goat cheese salads, coffees, and carafes of red wine.

There was the crepes place we had to visit in order to subdue my sisters crepe-obsessed cravings. There was also the charming Italian restaurant across the street from our hotel. Sort of funny that we chose an Italian restaurant, but it was literally 10 yards from our hotel front door. Our waiter there was adorable (we went back a second time) and spoke Italian with my sister. He also sang for us and sort of "convinced" us to buy his CD, but it was charming all the same.

But the best food experiences, in my opinion, were the trips we took to the local grocery store or markets and the lovely fresh ingredients we consumed on benches in the park. The cherries were unbelievable and made a convert of me. The baguettes were as crispy and tender as you might imagine. And it was so difficult to restrain ourselves with the cheeses we got from the frommagerie.

God, those cherries were good. I had never really been a fan of cherries before that trip.

But this brings me to what will be my next topic - farmer's markets. The one we had up in Ithaca was fantastic. There are multiple ones here in Austin, and I usually hit up the closest one every Saturday morning. More on that later.

Food on TV

2008-06-28T16:22:00.005-05:00

For the majority of my life, I have watched too much television. I'm not completely sure how it came to this, but some have suggested that it was because I was limited to one hour per week for a few years of my childhood. Either way, I agree - I spend too much time in front of the television.

My television watching, however, has evolved from constant sit-coms and dramas (my TiVo is still full of Seinfeld at any given moment) to more "educational" shows - like food-related programming. Depending on the season, I watch:

Top Chef (Tom needs to learn how to use his knife and fork properly, but it doesn't dampen my viewing experience)
The Next Food Network Star
Hell's Kitchen (Chef Ramsay is terribly rude, but remarkably delightful)
Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (sorta makes me never want to eat outside of my house again)
A Cook's Tour (Tony Bourdain is a god)
No Reservations (ditto)
Martha (yes, I still love her)
America's Test Kitchen (I love Christopher Kimball's geeky New England persona)
Everyday Food
Nigella Lawson's new show (Express?)
Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger
Iron Chef America (Who doesn't love Alton Brown's wry sense of humor?)
Good Eats (ditto)

I'm sure I'm missing some, but it doesn't end with the TV. I love watching Mark Bittman's videos on the NY Times website (see the links to the right). Sometimes during lunch (for which I never leave my desk), I sit there munching on whatever I've brought in or gone to pick up and I watch him effortlessly create something as involved as paella or something as simple as tomato soup. His humor, his irreverence, his just general down-to-earth-ness (like that?) makes it a great escape despite the fact that while I'm watching him my inbox is being flooded with emails marked "urgent" and "high priority."

I also very much love checking out the recipes on Epicurious.com (I am biased, though, my brother-in-law runs the website). I love that they have joined in on the Facebook bandwagon. So now when a recipe excites me (which is hard to avoid), I can save it to my Epicurious recipe box and my friends on Facebook can view that inspiration for themselves. This almost implies that I cook some of these recipes. And, truthfully, that never really happens. This is the technological equivalent to my mother's big binders of recipes (that during one fateful visit home I tried to organize....I gave up and will likely not try again). I have a number of friends from various points in my life who also consider themselves foodies, and this type of technologies have made it possible for us to have a collective recipe box. How lucky can we be??

I must also make a shameless plug for the food blog of my college friend, Annemarie. My blog is more the pedestrian foodie blog. Hers is the blog to which I aspire. Let's be frank, while working 10-11 hour days, I'm not going to come home and make my own macaroons. I'm lucky if I don't hit up the fast food on the way home instead of heating up leftovers. But I drool almost every single time I read her blog. Her savory and detailed pictures of "pre" and "post" make my stomach growl, no matter how much Taco Bell I might have had that night. Her descriptions are so detailed and so well-written that it makes me believe that I too could attempt such grand dishes and meals. She tells stories of London dinner parties, great cheese discoveries, and her herb and vegetable garden....all things I dream of (yes, I dream of great cheese discoveries). In any event, the link is to the right - it's the Nectar and Ambrosia blog and it is most definitely worth the read.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I have made a pact with myself, much like the almost annual pacts I would make about keeping a daily journal - I have vowed to post 3 times each week. That's less than 50% of the days, so surely I can have the discipline to even just post what I ate...if it's food...it's fair game.

And with that, I'm signing off to go back to the one thing that might just keep me from flogging (get it - food blogging?) - Rock Band. I love hitting those drums. :-)

Mayonnaise is not as good as hollandaise

2008-06-28T14:59:00.007-05:00

Growing up, my sister and I had this book called From Bach to Verse. It took the famous hooks from classical pieces and added words to them. (This is a unsolicited plug for the book. I don't know if it's even in print any more, but it's brilliant.) For instance the chorus of Beethoven's 9th had the following words: "Sigmund Freud never hoid a concert due to chronic slouch. All his ritzy, somewhat schitzy patients tied him to his couch."

I don't know exactly what year it was (the book came out when I was 7, so I don't think it was too far after that), but my mother, sister and I were sitting at the piano in the living room plinking out the songs on the piano while singing the words. My father, who was sitting in the kitchen (probably eating a clandestine bowl of ice cream), would then yell out the name of the piece and the composer. As an avid classical music fan, my father found this exercise exceedingly simple, but he outdid himself with one piece. My sister, who would have been 4-5 years old at the time asked my mother spelling out the word, "what is M-A-Y-O-N-N-A-I-S-E?" Without hearing any other words in the phrase or even the tune, my father yelled out, "Chopin!" Unbelievable. He was, in fact, correct - the piece was Chopin's Polonaises. The "lyrics" are, "Mayonnaise is not as good as hollandaise. Hollandaise is inferior to sauce bernaise." Genius.

Today I made my own mayonnaise. I've been a sous-chef on this endeavor before when my ex periodically made his own, but this was the first time I've tried it on my own. I originally intended to use my blender or Cuisinart (as those are the ways he did it), but when I went digging into my cabinet to see which one I could grab first, I remembered my immersion blender. I decided that would be my implement of choice. I feel fairly certain that pretty much every single cookbook I have has a mayonnaise recipe, but I chose to go with my cooking class cookbook - it's a great reference for everything from basics like mayonnaise to ridiculous recipes (involving ingredients I've never seen in person) I will never attempt. The book is On Cooking: A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals by Labensky and Hause. It's super thorough and is usually my first stop. (I think in a future post I'll list the cookbooks I have. It's a motley crew.)

Anyway, I only had two eggs in my fridge (alas, the last of my farm fresh eggs), so I needed to halve the recipe. I had to decide between regular ground mustard and Coleman's mustard and ended up going with the former. I think next time I'll put some Coleman's in there - maybe it will give it a bit more personality. And that's what the finished product really missed overall...personality. I suppose I could have done the math wrong (which, as a former math teacher would be just shy of tragic), but it sure seemed like there wasn't enough vinegar in the recipe. It said to add lemon juice to taste, which I did. But at a certain point (always taste throughout the process!) it got too lemony, so I ended up also adding more vinegar instead of more lemon juice to it to balance out the immense amount of oil and to loosen it up a bit. I think in retrospect I'll also add a bit more salt the next time around.

What are my plans for the mayo you might ask? Well, I bought some grapes, some apples, and some canned turkey (yes, canned turkey) at Costco a week ago. I think I might see if I have walnuts and make some sort of Waldorf salad. I'll definitely have to thin the may with something, so I'll need to do some experimentation. I either need to get some big crispy lettuce leaves (Bibb or Butter, perhaps) or a tasty little roll on which to serve the outcome. I might also need to replace the walnuts with pecans, but I'll need to taste that and see if it works. I love pecans, but they're definitely different from walnuts.

A schmear in the land of steer

2008-05-12T00:21:00.003-05:00

This Sunday afternoon I decided to treat myself to a proper NYC bagel. My 32nd birthday is coming up and I’m feeling a bit homesick. I kept seeing advertisements online for “Manny Hattan’s New York Delicatessen, and I decided I needed to go and evaluate it. First check in the “con” column is that it’s up at the Gateway Marketplace – miles North of where I live. But if it’s good, that con can be overlooked easily. Second con, within the Gateway Marketplace, it’s sort of hard to determine where this place actually is, and the parking immediately around it is limited. Okay, so that’s two cons. A half con is that I wasn’t greeted promptly by a waiter upon being seated. This isn’t a biggie, but if it had gone on much longer than it had, I’d probably have been a bit cranky. The prospect of a bagel keeps me elevated. And the last con, which I guess should only qualify for a half con, is all the signage around the place. It’s hilarious to me that a deli (Deli is generous, by New York standards) in North Austin has signs saying “Home of the World Famous Reuben” as if it were invented here. I will say, though, that while the “Featuring Grandma’s Homemade Matzah Ball Soup” sign entertained me because now I’m intrigued enough to get a pint of it (or however they sell it) to take home and inspect. (For the record, I have never seen it spelled with an “a” – in my Brooklyn world I have only ever seen it spelled “Matzoh.”)

So what did I order, you might ask? They had a “Hudson Special” (again, chuckle-inducing name) where you could get two different smoked/cured fish with your bagel. I chose to have the ever-popular toasted everything bagel with cream cheese, whitefish salad, and lox. Let’s just hope they don’t put the whitefish salad on top of the cream cheese. That would be tragic. I also ordered a coffee, which has proven to be just the kind I like (with my little creamer and two packets of even more fake blue sweetener). They also provide you with a stainless steel bowl of two dill pickles and some kraut. That’s a definite check in the “pro column” as we all know how much I love pickles.

The plate arrives with a lightly toasted everything bagel (I like them lightly toasted, so that works for me) with nothing on it, a decent-sized scoop of whitefish, a little individually packed tub of name-brand cream cheese (slight minus), some tomato slices, and about four pieces of lox with some capers scattered on top. My one gripe is that the seasonings on the bagel were only on the top. But I suppose I can’t find that as a fault of this place – after all, they’re H&H bagels. So far so good. Now to eat.

The first half was exquisite. I don’t know if these really are H&H bagels (though I’m not sure how they could market them that way if they weren’t), but they are the perfect consistency. The cream cheese, was, well, supermarket cream cheese, but that’s all you need when you’re putting lox on top. And the lox was sort of thick, but not too bad. I’m really just looking for things to complain about at this point. I’ve never been a caper fan, so they remain on the plate. But if the second half of this bagel with whitefish salad is as good as the first half, I might have to make this a bi-monthly trip. (I can’t afford it on a monthly basis. Sodas here are around $2.50. So is the coffee, if you can believe it. I haven’t determined if there are free refills for either yet.)

The whitefish is more fragrant than flavorful. It’s not bad, but it’s not like La Bagel Delight around the corner from my house in Brooklyn. I tried it with the bagel, not so great. I tried it with the bagel and tomatoes. No improvement. I tried it with just tomatoes. Ditto. I even tried it on its own in order to give it a fair chance. It’s not that it’s bad, but something about the seasoning is off. I just doesn’t have the personality as the whitefish salad of my youth. Next time around, instead of getting a half order of both fishes, I’m definitely going with the full order of lox, and they had better include a second tub of Pennsylvania City cream cheese, because one of those tubs is really only enough for a generous schmear on one half of a bagel.

All in all, the bill came out to around $16.50. I know lox and whitefish salad are pricier items in the city as well, but c’mon….this is pretty crazy. I’m just trying to remind myself that this was an experiment in finding a decent bagel in Austin. And on that front, it was a raving success. But like I said, including a tip we’re talking $20 and that certainly isn’t something that I can afford with any regularity.

To eat or not to eat

2008-05-12T00:11:00.003-05:00

The theme of this blog keeps changing....but I think I've finally stumbled on a good topic - food. At the most basic of levels, food sustains. But when it's really great, food also entertains. Preparing it or enjoying it, both can be hobbies, and as it turns out, they're my hobbies. Weekends are when I do the majority of my cooking (I'm normally too exhausted during the week to do any significant cooking), but even when not really cooking anything new, I try to be creative. For me, drinks fall under the broad interests of the foodie, so I'll be writing about that a bit too. And as a quick disclaimer, by foodie I don't mean I eat cornish game hen with parsnip puree and quince chutney (or whatever)...I mean I enjoy food in most (all?) of its iterations. So don't be surprised if some store-bought breadcrumbs and canned tuna make appearances. That's just how I do things.