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.

A Weekend of Carbo Loading Before (and after) a Race

This was yet another weekend of good food - both cooking and being cooked for. Here's the story:

Friday Night: The Pedant and I had very little food in the house by the end of the week and after a long week decided to treat ourselves to dinner out at our local sushi place before seeing Good Hair (Highly recommended!). The place was really busy, but the sushi was as good as ever. Even though I don't eat fish, I personally enjoy sushi - it's never too much for me and I never come out super stuffed or eat too much. Plus, I do love avocados. It can get pricey but it's worth it to know I'm eating better than cheesy Italian food or fatty Chinese food.
Saturday Dinner: I was running my first 10K Sunday morning and needed to "carbo load" (i.e., make a recipe TP saw on line). We made butternut squash risotto from Cook's Illustrated and it was really tasty. It was very different than the butternut squash risotto that TP made last week but really tasty. We amended the recipe a bit - mostly because we bought cut up squash without seeds or fibers (easier to deal with) so we didn't let the stock simmer with the seeds or fibers. But it was still really, really good. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

Sunday Brunch: Since I ran the 10K that day (with a pace about 30 seconds better than I did for my 5K and my best time ever! 64 (or 68, depending on the time on the website) minutes!), we had planned to make pancakes. However, both TP and I were tired and felt like treating ourselves (well, me, I ran, TP just cheered me on) so we decided to forgo pancakes (which we better make soon since we stocked up on maple syrup!) and went for brunch instead. We went to a creperie I'd been wanting to try and it was really, really good. I got the Crepe Moroccan which was like spinach pie filling in a crepe with a delicious mint-yogurt sauce. We shared the Just Peachy desert crepe and it was just peachy and super. (I did have PB&J before my race, a granola bar and 1/2 a (white bread but part of my post race food packet) bagel toasted with butter and honey before we went for brunch.)

Sunday Dinner: After a much needed nap we began making some dinner foods. Since we still have a hoard of potatoes we found a soup base recipe in Lidia's Family Table for a savory potato broth. That took a while to make (more time than we realized) but the end result was great. We froze more than half of it and made a garlic and onion soup with the rest of the broth. We poached some garlic in water and chopped up an onion and then let them thicken in the broth before pureeing it. And it was SO GOOD. I think I can't stress how good it was, since it was SO GOOD. SO GOOD. The best part (other than the garlic and onions and broth was the pureed bits of Parmesan cheese rind that was a little present. SO GOOD.

To go along with that soup, we made a crunchy couscous salad from our favorite benedictine. It was pretty good, but I think it had too many cucumbers.

I also prepped our last massive sweet potato and acorn squash for a slow cooker soup recipe for winter squash and sweet potato soup. We'll have that for dinner tonight with pasta in a creamy Gorgonzola sauce. Yum!

Here is Sherbs running her 10K. I'm the one in the red shirt (showing my support for Jody Wagner) and the purple jacket tied around my waist

Things I Learned Recently

Evidently, there's a new conveyor-belt sushi place in DC. If I hadn't just got downsized, I'd go, especially since it is a fusion place and our last fusion experience worked out really well.

Also, Rhagavan Iyer has a pretty awesome curry cookbook. His curries with pasta have all been tasty, although we have to work from eating all the cashews pre-recipe.

Election Party!

So, the Sherbs and I are planning an election results-watching party. I want the party to have election-themed foods, but I have some difficulty with foods related to the vice presidential candidates.

My tentative munchies menu is as follows:

1. Obama-themed food: Vegetarian "Hawaiian" pizza - pizza with fake ham and pineapple. Combines Obama's Hawaiian and Chicago heritage, plus those doubts that pineapple on pizza is "real" pizza are equivalent to some critics' take on Obama's ethnicity.
2. McCain-themed food: Vietnamese spring rolls. There was a really tasty-looking recipe in Vegetarian Times, and McCain does occasionally mention that he spent some time in Vietnam.
   
3. Palin-themed food: Baked Alaska (maybe). Baked Alaska is kind of hard to make, plus it's a little lazy. I may do a chocolate mousse instead, but that's merely a pun, and not very clever. I did a search on Russian snacks, for an "I can see Russian snacks from here" joke, but most Russian snacks involve foods that make the Sherbs gag, like salted fish or fish eggs.
4. Biden-themed food: California rolls (maybe). Neither Scranton nor Wilmington has a famous local food. Delaware sort of has crab, so we could do imitation crabmeat, but no one really wants to eat that as is. So, California rolls.

If anyone has better VP foods in mind, let us know.

A Bone to Pick

I have a bone to pick with vegetable sushi. Now, I understand sushi is chic and very hip and therefore can be costly. Fine, I get it LA, you want us all to be uber thin (<begin tangential rant>I'm still ticked at the stupid body issues talk Tyra gave to her girls on America's Top Model (it was a fluke, there was nothing else on and The Pedant and I needed to digest a lot of Halloween candy pre-gym), I mean, c'mon, yes the industry is ridiculous, but as TP reminded me, Spain has set minimum weight requirement on models - Tyra, use your pull and do something not let the girls be teary eyed and then throw up their salad! <end tangential rant>) and eat bite sized portions based on Japanese fancy cuisine, but $5.85 for 8 pieces of brown rice avocado sushi?! C'Mon guys! This is VEGETABLE. And RICE. Not fish that needs to be very fresh and cut well. Ok, I did get the dish at WholePaycheck Foods, but still. I find it frustrating when VEGETABLE sushi is more than $2.00 for 6 rolls.

I may make "I have a bone to pick" a reoccurring topic when I need to rant. Like, "I have a bone to pick with slow service." Ala dinner last night. Yes, TP and I settled, mostly because I had to pee pretty badly, but still the service was veeerrryyyy slllloooowwwwwww. Pick it up a notch guys!

Ha HA!

But, in fact, I will provide more detail as to how the Sherbs and I roasted those vegetables! Point to the Pedant!

The mushrooms, onion, and eggplant were sliced lengthwise, the pepper into strips. Olive oil, salt, pepper, and liberal amounts of paprika were added. We then cooked the whole thing in the oven for about twenty-five minutes.

Very tasty.

Dinner was sushi, and as such was always fabulous.

Last night, Stoner, C-Berts, Peppy and I went to a Pilates class. I have become quite enamored with pilates classes over the past 8 months or so, mostly because, similar to Yoga, it's fake exercise with many benefits. (Unlike yoga, there is no silly chanting or silly "find yourself/thank yourself/let go of worldly possessions/obsessions" bullshit. I kind of like my attachment to the Internet and celebrity gossip, thank you.)

Now, I have been doing Pilates about once a week since June, with a month or so hiatus. But, man-o-man, last night was difficult. And a little more yoga than we all wanted.

So, to counter-act the push ups we had to do (what are we, soldiers? NO!), we went out for sushi. Now, there's a treat. A late dinner with some wasabi and making fun of push-ups. And, to quote one of my new favorite movies, "Wasabi makes everything better."

It could not, unfortunately, stop the mild aching in my abs and arms. I bet DDP could.