More Food!

OK, The Pedant reminded me with his last post that I've been bad at posting. We've done some great cooking and I should share. Since I just don't have time to let you know what I've made the last month, I'll start with the last weekend:

Rye and Cornmeal Muffins: I saw this recipe in the New York Times and it was great. Super easy to make and really tasty. We had them for dinner with a Quick Belgian Salad from the salad cookbook. Very yummy.

Minestrone Soup: I have to say that I've become known (well, with TP) for my Minestrone soup. It' a pretty easy recipe: cook some veg in broth (usually water though - then it makes a broth plus LOTS of spices), add a can or two of tomato paste, put in beans and pasta, let it get thick and yummy. I made it again this weekend from a batch of vegetable soup I made a few weeks ago. It's super tasty.

Fennel and Onions with Capers: Lidia Bastianich (whom I love) has a great and easy recipe for fennel and onions with capers. We made it in a much smaller pan than usual (since we were making it with some chicken soup and turkey meatballs for TP - I'll let you hear about it from him) so it took longer for the veg to caramelize but man, this dish is tasty!

New obsession: Trader Joe's. I like their low fat string cheese so much. Also, they have mini goat cheeses that come in a pre-packaged 1 oz block. Perfect for omelets. Or anything else. Mmmm.... And they have these super cheap pouches of beans - soybeans and chickpeas. So tasty.

Recent Food Developments

We'll get to the eel in green sauce in Belgium in a later post, despite it having been two months ago.

First, Cafe Green in Northwest DC is much tastier than a vegan restaurant with a large number of raw food dishes has any right to be.  Their not-quite-bibimbap was pretty tasty, even if not served in a superheated iron bowl.  And the Sherbs loved their raw food assortment. 

For dessert, the cake we got tasted like good pareve cake (better than meh), but the raw cashew "milk" shake I had was pretty fabulous.

Next, the Teet now carries individually packaged servings of freeze-dried fruits.  As they say on Twitter, #winning.  

Finally, I tried to use an online "healthy recipe" guide which advertised that it could give me a healthy meal just by inputting three items currently in my fridge.  I tried that, and these were the failures:

• soy chorizo + endive + mayonnaise
• cheese singles + tuna salad + tomato (despite this being a pretty regular weekend lunch standby; fat free cheese singles on Starkist's "tuna salad in a bag" is more than tolerable on toast).
• ketchup + onion + beans (okay, no baked beans recipes?)
• dehydrated onion + brie + vegetable broth (and I didn't even try to confuse it with the fact that I was using Ile de France's "mini brie" - which, for the record, is superior to Trader Joe's Mini Brie Bites; there's something off about the way the Trader Joe's ones taste)
• mustard + orange + beans

Okay, I do have some esoteric food in my house, but if I was down to just a couple things, I couldn't trust this recipe finder to help me with my "brown rice + whole wheat pastry flour + apple/grape juice mix."  Or my "Fiber One muffin mix + San Marzano crushed tomatoes + anchovies" (two of which, however, will make a perfectly fine pasta sauce - just remember that there's no "apples and cinnamon" buccatini).