Busy Cooking Weekend!

Yesterday afternoon, after a trip to the store, The Pedant and I spend a snowy afternoon cooking up a storm. We made a fantastic dinner plus lots of food for the week. Now that I'm back in school and coming home late and TP working long hours again, we needed to make sure we have lots of extra food on hand. Going out to eat is fun, but not worth wasting the money or calories for sub-par lunch options!!

So here's a round up of the great food we cooked for the week:

Cauliflower Salad from everyone's favorite Monk. It was basically easy - steam cauliflower (we just boiled it in some water since we had it boiling for some later), put it in a bowl with hard boiled eggs, shallots and capers. Make a tasty dressing with hazelnut oil, EVOO, dijon, white wine vinegar and tarragon (which we didn't have so we used herbs de provonance). I tasted it and it was really good. I think it will get better in the next few days in the fridge.

Southwest Egg Muffins from Pinch My Salt. I found this recipe a while ago and printed it out. I decided to make some egg cups for freezing for quick, easy breakfasts or lunches. Like a mini fritata! I hadn't tried this recipe but it came out well. I did use less eggs but I think it came out fine. I bought egg substitute (because 8 whole eggs just seemed grotesque for someone who grew up eating mostly egg whites!) and misread the bottle so I used 4 egg's worth. I think it was fine.

Veggie Egg Cups from Slashfood. I made this last year and enjoyed it. This year it worked well too. (Although harder to get the muffin tins cleaner than I remembered!!) The cups were a little runnier when we took them out of the oven but still looked tasty.

Saturday Night Italian Feast!!

Dinner was a great feast complete with leftovers for the week. I decided to make stuffed shells which I never had before. They turned out well. I mixed some ricotta cheese with frozen spinach and stuffed the shells with that. (Note: I will need more than one tub of ricotta and 1 box of spinach next time...) I made a really simple tomato sauce and topped them with just a bit of mozzarella cheese. The only problem was that the shells broke in the box so we were left with lots of pieces. Solution: Appetizer of broken shell pieces with some EVOO, Parmesan, sea salt and red pepper flakes.

We made 2 salads: orange and red onion salad which I love. It's sweet and sour and savory and salty. And easy: just use rounds of oranges and slices of red onions, place on platter (or our case, rectangular container for easier clean up), drizzle with EVOO and sea salt. The other was from the best monk and was a Venetian Gorgonzola Salad. It made a lot so we have plenty left over. It was arugula, endive, radicchio, frisse, granny smith apples, walnuts, Gorgonzola and a dijon-based dressing. It was perfect. Elegant and classic.

We also made lunch yesterday from last week's Minimalist column: the fried rice. It was simple and perfect and delicious. Definitely becoming part of the rotation.

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.

Mmm...Feat...

When I was 11 going on 12, I became a vegetarian. (I still am, in fact, with a short interlude when I ate chicken and turkey in college.) My parents thought this was ok, but my mother, in classic my mother, said: "Do what you want Sherbs, but I'm not cooking a special dinner for you. You'll eat what I make." So I learned to become a non-crazy vegetarian. That is the kind that "real" vegetarians cringe at: I eat things cooked in meat, soups with a meat stock, things that are touching meat, etc. As a kid, my mom basically stuck a veggie burger in the same pan of chicken. And I ate it. And enjoyed it.

Although, when I became a vegetarian, my family was opened up to the world of textured vegetable protein. Now, since my ancestral home is kosher, we could have cheese on taco night! And peperoni pizza! And bacon cheeseburgers! And turkey and cheese sandwiches! (My father always likes to say that he's treifing it up. I always make fun of him for saying that every time.) I then, in my infinite punniness, labeled these delicacies "Feat" from "fake meat." (See what I did--I took the F from fake and the Eat from meat and...oh never mind, it's cute!)

All this talk about TSP brings me to my lunch: (fake) Beef and Broccoli. And although I haven't eaten real beef and broccoli in at least a decade, it was quite tasty. I dredged the feat in corn starch, soy sauce and hot and spicy Szechuan and sauce, browned them, and then sauteed onionsbroccoli (duh) and cooked it all together. Mmmmm...

Leaning Tower of Pizza

Anyone who has talked to me in the past few days knows there was supposed to get a pizza party at work, but for various reasons, it was postponed. I was bummed. But today, we had the pizza party! (Why? Because I made lunch last night.) And, boy, for kosher pizza, it was tasty.

It actually came from the cafeteria (go fig!) and it contained the 3 things I deem necessary for pizza:

1. Lots of cheese
2. A good amount of crust that isn't too dry
3. a very tasty tomato sauce

That sauce was very good. So good, in fact, I ate 2 slices. It was full of oregano and very fresh.

I relatively hate canned tomato sauce. I grew up with my mom making her own, with lots of garlic, and lots of hot pepper. So that's how I learned to make it. Thinks made from a can when it's easier, healthier, and MUCH tastier to make yourself I think are cop-outs. This holds true for tomato sauce, cake, cookies, some soups. It never holds true for macaroni and cheese from a box. That stuff is awesome! And as much as some days you want a good, cheesy, greasy slice of NYC pizza, sometimes a better made one is just what I need.

Mmmmm...

Actual Food

While The Pedant has chosen to enlighten you with his off-the-beaten-track links and articles, I, on the other hand, will actually post about food.

I had lunch with my parents today. We went to a small Italian place near my place of business. It was nice. My dad had a salad chicken thing ("I don't want to go anywhere for a salad. I eat salad everyday." Later... "Oh! This dish has salad!"), my mom and I had a "roasted seasonal vegetables with pannini and roasted goat cheese."

It had some of the best elements of Italian food:

• Cheese, and lots of it
  
• Vegetables (especially asparagus and eggplant)
  
• Olive oil
• Garlic

I did think there could have been more garlic, and it missed one of my most favorite veggies, MUSHROOMS. Mmmm.... There is nothing in this world better than mushrooms. And more protein. As a vegetarian, I often lack protein at restaurants. So, in like 30 minutes for my coffee run, I will get a snack as well. Since now I'm a bit hungry.

So, all in all:
Free lunch: good.
Goat cheese: very, very good.

Fuzzy Foods...GROSS!

While The Pedant just posted about his lunch, including Okra, veggie crumbles, ramen noodles and corn, I would like it known that I dislike okra. I'm not sure why. I don't dislike it in the way that I dislike other veggies (as you will soon learn, I am "picky," according to The Pedant, I'm "fussy." I don't like tomatoes, cucumbers, most peppers (with the exception of a Dr. Pepper), beets, jicama, etc.), but the fuzzy taste is just too much for me.

While in this post I lauded my love of asparagus, I forgot to mention the phyllo-dough, feta and asparagus wrap then baked in an oven. Mmmmmm...cheese....

You will soon love my love for cheese. And I promise to get to my update on Iron Chef chocolate. Yum!