Beer-Glazed Pinto Beans and Penne, Pedant Style

New protip: do not wipe your brow after slicing hot peppers from the CSA. It burns. For a while.

Was out of ideas for dinner, and forgot I had tuna casserole in the fridge, so I made pasta with a variation of Bittman's beer-glazed black beans for the sauce. First I threw some hot peppers from this week's CSA box into a pan of hot olive oil and ground black pepper. Then I sauteed the too-sharp red onion remainders from last week. Once that was done, I added a cup of Amstel Light (I drank the rest), orange blossom honey, pinto beans, and red pepper flakes (to ensure spiciness). Into this I put nearly-cooked whole wheat penne.

It's a little sweeter than I expected, but it has a nice burn on it that makes it quite tasty. Works really well with parmesan (what doesn't)?

Cheese Overload!

We have made and eaten some pretty awesome foods this week.

Last night I made tomato cobbler from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian; like any cobbler, it's chopped up fruity stuff with a batter topping. Unlike fruit cobblers, the tomato is mixed with salt, pepper, and cornstarch, then covered with a flour and cornmeal batter. It was pretty good, but not as good as I'd hoped; probably because I didn't add enough cornstarch and so the tomatoes didn't sufficiently gel.

I hate cornstarch. Every time I open the box up, the silken powder gets everywhere. It sticks to my hands, won't measure easily, and doesn't wipe up or wash off without work. So I try to avoid it as much as possible.

This morning I made scones again, and again with chocolate chips. The recipe from Quaker Oats is wrong about adding raisins (or chocolate chips) halfway through the process; if you do that, the raisins or chips will end up mostly on the edge of the scones, and will become burnt into bitter carbon. The rest of the scones turned out fine, though.

Dinner tonight was fondue, from our Barnes & Noble fondue cookbook. It was easy - chop an onion, sauté in a hunk o' butter, add flour and sour cream, then stir in gruyere and cheddar until gooey deliciousness achieved. It was so awesomely cheesy tasty, and none of us should have eaten as much as we did, even using broccoli and cauliflower florets as a nod to balanced nutrition.

Also a frequent dunk into the cheese goodness was Cook's Illustrated's "Almost No-Knead Bread" recipe, which is sadly no longer online for free. It's a variant of Bittman's loaf, with a little tweaking for a higher rise and tangier inside. And it worked, despite all my attempts to ruin it with inaccuracy (I'm not sure I added enough flour), shortcut-taking (we didn't let it cool for two hours because we were too hungry), and my complete inability to knead. The crust is crunchy, the inside soft and tangy, and it tastes like something you get at a restaurant. Next time, we're making it with whole wheat flour.

Chicken Salad Success!

I had a bunch of roast chicken that my mom gave me after dinner Friday. I had a bunch of kosher-for-Passover mayo that wasn't getting any more shelf stable in the back of my fridge.

So I made chicken salad. I also added one whole onion and a whole mess o' pepper.

The salad came out great, so I distributed it onto a number of Pepperidge Farm® Deli Flats for future lunch consumption. Deli Flats are not only pareve, as mentioned before, but are quite good as not-a-lot-of-bread which still tastes like bread. I got the 7 Grain, because they're more fiber and less fat than the Whole Wheat. Go figure.

Pineapeño

Today's dinner was fish, which means that the Sherbs was nowhere nearby. I liked it anyway. It was tilapia, baked with pepper, served over rice with a pineapple and jalapeño relish and a honey and balsalmic vinegar sauce.

It was delicious, but I don't know how it would work without some dead animal protein, to which the Sherbs is opposed.

A short search of the Food Network recipe library (you can add it to your Mozilla search tab on this page) reveals that the only pineapple and jalapeño recipe they have is Emeril's "Pineapple Jalapeño Sorbet." And people wonder why I always change the channel when Mr. Lagasse is on.

Seriously, though, the sorbet has a perverse fascination for me. Spicy cold dessert sounds like it shouldn't work, but it just might. Maybe if the sorbet was mixed with some limoncello (lemon would be a complementary citrus flavor to the pineapple), which would make it a dessert which is cold, spicy, and alcoholic, then you'd be talking.

(how to I "peño" everything? HTML special characters, my friend.)