Friday, March 26, 2010

You've Been a Bad Girl, Gaga. A Very Bad Girl

I have no idea why Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video takes a song about getting bugged while dancing and turns it into a story about mass poisoning.

Anyway, I've been a bad blogger, and I will remedy that with this short update. I discovered in my favorite ethnic cookbook a great way to combine two of my favorite packaged foods - canned fish and ramen.

It's in the "Hawaiian" section, where it basically says to stir-fry them.

It is tasty-riffic, especially with extra veg and ponzu sauce.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Dinner last night was late, but tasty. When The Pedant and I got home from the Teet we walked into our apartment (which we hadn't been in for a while) and it smelled like a fire. Which was odd because non of our appliances were on. We called maintenance and after some time they pinpointed the stench to the apartment NINE floors below us who left something on the stove and then went out. The burning smell permeated through the vent. You can even still smell it this morning. We didn't want to cook until we knew the source, in case there was something odd. Once we did cook it turned out really great. We used our electric grill and took advantage of the nice weather. TP marinated some chicken breast for about 36 hours in Soy Vey. We bought some cute, little sweet peppers, baby bella mushrooms, an onion, a green bell pepper, yellow squash and tempeh (for me) and put them on skewers with some of the Soy Vey. It came out really well. We made some boil-in-bag brown rice (since we started Passover cleaning last week we found we have A LOT of rice, so after Passover, we'll be making LOTS of rice...) and now have some great lunches.

Monday, March 15, 2010

More Weekly Cooking

UGH! We have become such neglectful bloggers...It seems we have little time to cook, let alone post, except for weekend updates. So, here is (yet another) weekend update.

Saturday, I had a GREAT training run for a 10 mile race coming up next month. 9 miles in 1:35:50! I was PUMPED. So, to celebrate, (although WW hates when I treat myself with food...) The Pedant and I headed off to our local sushi place. I did eat a bit too much, but had a great appetizer of complementary fired tofu (I guess they were out of miso? Sad.), green salad with super tasty ginger dressing, edamame, avocado roll, kampia (squash) rool and tamgo (egg). It was as tasty as ever. For dinner, we enjoyed a homemade fiesta! We repeated the jicama and avocado salad from the best salad cook book and ate it with an Atlantic Magazine Food Channel recipe based off of Bobby Flay's Black Bean Jalapeno soup. I had made the soup before and it was amazing. This time, it was good but the jalapeno peppers were not quite as spicy as before and the kick wasn't as intense. Oh well. We also bought some Edy's slow churned Thin Mint ice cream.

Sunday we had a wedding and enjoyed our time there. Since the wedding was in the afternoon, we stopped off at the supermarket for some veggies to make a light salad for dinner. We also did some cooking for the week. It included making our own smoked paprika hummus and a sweet potato and quinoa salad. The hummus came out really well. But, it's hard for it not too. Not as smooth as some brands but I'm NOT removing the skins of the chick peas in order to get the smoothness that requires. The quinoa salad was a Bittman recipe for lunches. I've read a few places sweet potatoes are great for runners and they are also SUPER tasty. This salad was pretty easy - boil sweet potatoes diced into bite size pieces, add quinoa, red pepper, shallot. Vinaigrette dressing of EVOO and sherry vinegar. Salt and pepper. Enjoy.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Sunday Night Cooking!

Since our lives are busy and we are a) cheap, b) health conscious and c) much prefer to eat our own cooking than buy lunches/dinners because of reasons a) and b), Sundays have been spent cooking food for the week. This is what we made:

Vegetable Pizza

During the snow storm, I made some whole wheat pizza dough to freeze. Last night, I made a pizza with some of this dough and it came out really well. The dough was a bit sticky and I needed to add a lot of extra flour and it was on the thinner side on some parts. The Pedant made pizza last week for dinner so we had some extra sauce and cheese. I sauteed up a shallot, a bunch of asparagus and mushrooms in some balsamic and let it get really well cooked. (Mostly because I spent more time fussing with the pizza, but it turned out great!) The pizza came out really well.

Farnase Salad

Another winner from the best salad cookbook. Also eaten for dinner last night. It was fennel, red onion, oranges and parsley in a salad dressing of lemon juice, olive oil and honey. It was really good. We had that with the pizza for dinner.

Red Bean and Sweet Potato Chili

I love sweet potatoes and have read recently that sweet potatoes are good for runners. So, I decided to make this slow cooker chili. It looked okay when I took it out of the slow cooker this morning. I usually like my chili thicker, but it smelled really good because I put in a lot of chili powder and chipotle powder.

Wild Rice and Barley Salad

Dinner tonight from the best salad book. It has wild rice, barley, LOTS of shallots, celery, golden raisins and almonds. Should be tasty.

And now, a movie plug. We watched Word Play last night. It was great!

Saturday Night Fiesta Dinner

I'm training for a 10 mile race coming up in April and have been going on long runs. Saturday morning, while running 7 miles (!!!!) I had plenty of time to think about food, which is the only reason I run. We had some leftover mini potatoes that needed to be used and what better way to make potatoes than in Tortilla Espanola. So The Pedant and I had a Spanish/Mexican dinner that was fantastic.

Tortilla Espanola

I sliced the potatoes very thin. We sauteed them up with 1/2 a vidalia onion and a bunch of garlic in (too much - my hand slipped!) olive oil. Sadly, it was not Spanish olive oil like Jose Andres would have liked, but whatever. We let that cook until the potatoes got cooked and the onions browned really nicely. We then used egg beaters to make a tortilla. Sadly, it didn't flip as well as hoped, but it was super tasty.

Jicama Avocado Salad

While looking for food for the week, TP passed this salad recipe in the best salad cookbook and wondered why we hadn't made this salad yet. We decided it was similar to the "Spanish" theme and cooked it up. It was very simple - chopped jicama, chopped avocado, cilantro, red onion, lemon juice, olive oil. It was really amazing.

Dinner was just lovely. We bought some Ben and Jerry's light Phish Food which made it even better.