Thanksgiving

Every food blog I read is doing a Thanksgiving post, so why not my own?? I'm kind of hosting our big dinner - The Pedant and I are combining families in the party room of our building. Other family members are making the Turkey, but we're still pitching in.

I'm making a Pecan Pie (recipe from Joy of Cooking, which I have heard from a friend is the easiest and best recipe for pecan pie) which I'm excited about. I'm making that Wednesday after work.

I'm also making a Southwest Quinoa and Sweet Potato salad (ala Mark Bittman). I've already cooked the sweet potatoes and will cook the quinoa and assemble the salad Thursday. But it will be a rush - I am running a 5 mile race that day (in order that I can enjoy my pecan pie!). I was originally going to make the quinoa Wednesday but am running out of room in my fridge...

My mom and I will also be assembling stuffed mushrooms and finishing a stuffing. It should be a hectic day, but fun.

Food for the Week

Yesterday was Sunday which means I did some cooking for the week, since between work and school I have little time for cooking. And also little money and little caloric needs for going out 2 meals a day. (However, I am probably treating myself to Subway for dinner tonight. I do love Subway. And laziness. But in fairness, I'll be passing Subway on my way home from picking up a packet for my 10 Mile Race this Sunday, so I get a pass, right?)

Regardless, back to food for the week.

I made a pasta dish with shells (they were supposed to be Whole Wheat, but The Pedant couldn't find so we have white wheat pasta which is luxurious after whole wheat...) with asparagus, peas, basil, mint, scallions, lemon zest and feta cheese. It's from Vegetarian Times and I made it last year but kind of screwed up (like, it was supposed to have "garlic oil" so I used garlic powder, which was fine, but not great and I didn't have 1 cup of fresh basil so I used waaaay to much dried and it tasted kind of funky). I fixed my mistakes: lots of fresh basil and I put 2 whole garlic cloves in the measured out oil to flavor it, but not too much. It came out really well. It's totally fresh tasting and delicious. It will be great for lunch. Plus, we got the asparagus at the farmer's market, which is always fun. We also got apples and some really amazing cheddar cheese from a new vendor. I had my book club over so we had a cheese plate - plus meringue cookies which I made for the first time and were great - and it was really great.

I also made granola from scratch (well, from Bittman) which TP and I have gotten into lately. It's incredibly easy to do and really much healthier than the stuff we could buy. I messed it up slightly so the dried fruit got REALLY hard and crunchy, but it came out well.

Although I didn't make it for the week, TP and I had some great food for lunch. We had friends over last week and made a pizza with fresh mozzarella, but had 2 small balls of mozzarella left over. So we sliced that up and put it with some of the fresh basil on chibatta rolls. I added avocado and TP had tomato. I drizzled the rolls with EVOO and balsamic. It was amazing. We had a side salad with a poached egg for protein. Very tasty.

Indian Feast!

For dinner last night, The Pedant and I decided to make some Indian food complete with leftovers for lunches. It's been a while since we've cooked from the best curry book ever, so we decided to rectify the situation. We made a potato with spinach curry and an eggplant-chili stir fry curry. The potato curry was fantastic - it had new potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, garlic and dried chilies and turned out really well. It was spicy, but not overwhelming and flavor full. The eggplant was spectacular. We stir fried french-fry style slices in a VERY spicy mixture with chilies, lime juice, lime zest, salt, garlic and cilantro, added tomatoes and then let get very tender. It was immensely flavorful. I even needed some Greek yogurt (which I found a GIANT tub for cheaps at Costco! SCORE!!! Especially with a $3 pineapple. May not be super organic/local, but very tasty! I figure rejoining a CSA will balance that out, right??) and the wild rice blend we made to make it edible. But it was super good.

For lunch, we met some friends at the Lost Dog Cafe. We all has some really great sandwiches. I got the veggie, which had guacamole (although not enough to satisfy this avocado lover), zucchini and broccoli on a pita with provolone cheese melted on top. TP got some really tasty fries which I had. It was a great lunch. Plus, the restaurant does great things for dogs! Hooray!

Tonight is a vegetarian pot-au-feu from the slow cooker. I will also make a Bittman Wheat Berry salad for some lunches. We had very good wheat berry salad at TP's parents' Friday night and we have some leftovers of it, but both of us really enjoy wheat berries. They have plenty of healthy benefits and make a great addition to salads.

Staves of Life

As we speak, the Le Creuset Dutch oven is heating up for more of Cook's modified "no knead" recipe - the one that one actually has to knead, but not much. In storage are several finished loaves of black bread from Bittman's green bible, although one of them is denser than the other despite using the same ingredients contemporaneously. Waiting to rise is a Pueblo Indian sage-flavored bread made with cottage cheese, a recipe from my new ethnic food cookbook; a gift from my sister.

Why so much bread? Because 2 lbs. of yeast at Costco is the same as three packets at the Teet. So now I have a block of yeast in my fridge, of which I've used four tablespoons.

Back to the ethnic cookbook. Earlier tonight, I made the Pueblo Indian "Pojoaque cream soup" recipe, which is pinto beans, evaporated milk, garlic, and chili powder (I used ancho for some Bobby Flay big bold flavor). It goes in a blender and then on the stove to heat up.

I thought it would be spicier, but it's really tasty regardless. Pinto beans give it a mellow flavor, but a rich one.

While eventually I'll try the non-Indian recipes in this book, there is a Souix recipe for pumpkin stuffed with beef and wild rice on pg. 255. I have to make it.

A bread for all seasons...

I had my first encounter with baking bread this weekend. The Pedant has already baked several loves, and I didn't do the work all myself (hooray teamwork!) but I did more work than just pre-heating the oven and eat the finished product (although there was much of that last night and this morning).

We had a bottle of beer still from the last time we made bread (the America's Test Kitchen Almost No Kneed Bread calls for 3 oz. of beer which helps in the cooking process). I'm not a beer drinker and TP seldom drinks beer that's not "fancy" so we often have a random bottle of beer in the fridge from some cooking project we never made or a 6-pack we bought several months ago for the cooking project. And, since bitten by the bread making bug, I suggested we make Bittman's Brown Bread again.

We made the Brown Bread Saturday evening (after the ravioli debacle) and let it rise overnight. It came out really well. We doubled the recipe to freeze some. One batch (we made two smaller loaves) was a bit wetter than the other and came out nicer, but both were amazing. Bittman suggests spreading whole grain mustard on the bread. And boy, does that taste good! Especially when it's still warm. I had it this morning with some peanut butter which wasn't perfect but still tasty.

We also set the Almost No Kneed Bread last night and used most of the beer to make Bittman's Beer Glazed Black Beans. I'd say we do that much of the time we're making bread (and vice versa) since the black beans call for a cup of beer and the bread calls for 3 oz. Plus, the black beans are just too delicious.

Tonight, TP is making dinner from his new cookbook and I'm making my famous butterscotch brownies for a work party tomorrow. Hooray!

Pan-Asian Carrots!

As I wait for my dutch oven full of chickpeas, oil, and garlic to turn into deliciousness (at least according to the Post's food section of two weeks ago), I will blog about the "pan-Asian" carrots I just made.

Like so many things we do, this was from Mark Bittman's grimoire of eatings, "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian." I needed to get rid of some of the three pounds of garlic I got at Costco, much to my better half's chagrin, and so the Quick-Glazed Carrot recipe variations caught my eye.

This one involved simmering the carrot slices in sake with a teeny bit of olive oil (and garlic, because I had to get rid of it). Then, at the end of the cooking, I mixed in a solution of white miso and low-sodium soy sauce.

Turned out pretty good, actually. Not knock my socks off, but totally edible.

Okay, time to check the dutch oven.

More Lunch News

I too have an exciting lunch today - in fact, I had it for dinner Tuesday so I know it'll be good. It's a sandwich with hard boiled eggs (which I relearned are very tasty on sandwiches while in Scandinavia), roasted garlic hummus, Bittman's caramelized onion chutney and lettuce. And I'm quite excited. The chutney is much spicier this time than I've had it before, mostly because the hot peppers were very hot. But it's quite tasty. And the bread gets all soft and saturated with hummus which is fun.

Lunch Lessons Learned Today

As I'm home and searching for jobs, I am now making lunch out of what we have in the pantry at the moment, and trying not to subsist entirely on Fiber One™ bars (or their Special K equivalent which have extra warnings for fibrousness) and fifty-cent ramen. This would be easy except that I am lazy and occasionally suffer from what I call "food aphasia," which is where I look into a fridge at raw ingredients and say, "how does this become food"?

Today, I made food in two steps. I cooked up some Uncle Ben's "Country Inn Mexican Fiesta" rice, adding a can of Goya red kidney beans for complete protein-icity. I then heated up a Quorn cutlet with some of Mark Bittman's tomato chutney.

Lessons learned:

• Quorn is good with tomato chutney.
• Uncle Ben's "Mexican Fiesta" is about as Mexican as the taco stand at McFadden's on Cinco de Mayo (the Hawk & Dove in Southeast also has a similar stand on offer, but McFadden's manages to keep its ground floor from smelling like urine, thus making it a classier establishment despite the Georgetown frat boys). The rice is also pretty tasteless.
  
• The "Mexican Fiesta" rice does not go that well with tomato chutney.
• However, it tastes great mixed with the extra-spicy version of Bittman's onion chutney that the Sherbs cooked up for our Sunday hot dog party.

That's lunch. Now back to the job hunt.

Food Prep Day

I have ten minutes before I put the brown bread in the oven, so I might as well blog.

Today's been food preparation day here; I made scones from my mom's recipe (taken from the Quaker Oats cookbook) this morning (including my family's traditional chocolate chips), along with a bread from Bittman's magnum vegetarian opus that involved white flour, wheat flour, cornmeal, and molasses. It tastes great; so much so that it's already half gone. The Sherbs made our usual amped-up Fiber One muffins - we take Fiber One-branded "apple cinnamon" muffin mix, add apple bits and golden raisins, and enjoy it a lot more.

This evening's bread is a brown bread from Bittman; it smells good already, so I'm optimistic.

I'm also making a gigantic chickpea and mushroom soup from Lydia's Italy; the chickpeas still seem hard after an overnight soak and twenty minutes of boiling, but they're on boil for another two hours, so I will trust in Mme. Bastianich at current.

The soup itself is lunches and dinner later this week; dinner tonight is hot dogs. Hebrew National makes them low-fat.

Winning Dinner

Last night's dinner was an amazing WIN. Yes, in capitals, because it was that good. Since we love our CSA, The Pedant and I wanted to use some fresh broccoli and collards that we got. So, yesterday morning during breakfast we pull out Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian - a cookbook quickly becoming our go-to-first and favorite (although, shameless plug for presents - we are DYING for Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Italy which may be another great one since we are obsessed with her shows). Lo and behold he has 2 great recipes that we used for our broccoli and collards.

The broccoli was a suggested substitution for a green bean with miso-walnut dressing. And, after three tries at acquiring white miso, we blended the miso, soy sauce, ginger, walnuts and water in a blender and poured over steamed broccoli. It was tremendous - however, a bit salty for my taste with the miso and soy - but nutty and creamy and really great.

The best part of dinner was the rolled kale (in this case, collards) with feta, olives and tomatoes. (Ok, I picked off the gross olives and tomatoes.) Basically, you cut off the stems of the collards and saute with some EVOO and garlic. Meanwhile, you slice the leaf in half and cut a block of feta into small slices that get rolled into the collard leaves. Nest in the pan with the cooked stems, add wine (we used water but I'm sure it's even more flavorful with a good white wine) and pour olives and chopped tomatoes on top. Let it cook until the collards are tender and the cheese is just a bit melty. Then we topped it with chopped red onion. And it was gooood. Like, really good. Company worthy in fact. So good.

There was another Bittman win I almost forgot about. For my book club, I made Brown Sugar Cookies with Sea Salt. And I even fudged it a bit - I didn't have some semolina flour,so I used all all-purpose, rather than a mix, I used light brown sugar not dark (after having dried out dark brown sugar one too many times I never buy it anymore), and I had a coarse kosher salt. Yet, they still turned out amazingly. They were sweet but not clawing, buttery and a tiny bit salty for fun.

Cookin' With Beer, continued

Made Bittman's spiced squash tart last night for a gathering tonight. Hope it works out; I tried to slice the squash as I was cooking the onions and I think I burned the garlic.

As the Sherbs pointed out, we went on a bit of a beer foods kick recently, which is kind of funny as the Sherbs doesn't like beer and I rarely drink it. Not only did we make tasty beer-sauced mushroom tempeh (which really could be anything in the mushroom gravy; white wine would work just as well, as would a tasty stock), we made our regular favorite, beer-glazed black beans.

The beer and black beans we made was pretty tasty, in my view, but using Heineken (and some Rolling Rock when we ran out of Heineken) instead of a darker brew gave it less of a malty, wheaty taste, and highlighted the spice more. Still good, but not with a hint of caramelized porter sweetness.