Leftovers for Breakfast

I think I've mentioned here before that I don't often make breakfast. If I wake up early enough that breakfast is warranted, I either get a latte or eat whatever's left in the fridge from the past few nights. For example, this morning I ate a slice of cold pizza! And I know I mentioned eating the leftover yaki onigiri cold for breakfast. I'll also eat stir-fries, salads, baked goods--whatever is there and doesn't have to be prepared beyond maybe heating up for a minute or two.

Anyway, after a super late night on Saturday (Mike and I didn't get home until 4am after Cabaret and it was soooo amazing and Amanda Palmer puts on a damn good show and I had a drink with absinthe in it and it turns out I don't like absinthe), we slept late and I was in the mood for a real breakfast. Enter the leftovers from the night before--I was really glad, in the morning, that I'd been too rushed and afraid to make the Chicken Creole with an entire cut-up chicken, as per Becky's recipe. Because we ate all the chicken that I cooked in it, we had a whole bunch of the sauce left over, and I had a vision for that sauce.

Creole-Poached Eggs.

With well-buttered rye toast from my favorite bakery.

The recipe for this is basically "make Chicken Creole, have leftover sauce, crack some eggs into it and simmer until the eggs are cooked to your liking." It took maybe 15 minutes to whip up and we had a wonderful Sunday breakfast. At 1pm. And as far as I'm concerned, that's still breakfast because I had to drag Mike out of bed for it. (Hey, it was really only around 8 hours of sleep.)

This has completely cemented in my mind the importance of making big one-pot meals. You can poach eggs in the leftovers. I intend to try to find something else that I can do this with soon, because runny yolks mixed with vegetable-y sauce on delicious bread is possibly the best way to have breakfast, ever. And that huge pile of food is almost completely vegetables! It's even healthy!

Okay, so I'm super excited remembering this and now I'm sad that I don't have anything to poach eggs in for dinner. (And I really want to make huevos rancheros soon!) What does everyone else here eat their eggs with?

Taste&Create: Chicken Creole

It's time for this month's Taste&Create! This month, I was paired with Becky of Baking and Cooking, A Tale of Two Loves. I went through her archives and found that her very first recipe, "Sunday Chicken Creole," is exactly the type of thing I would do if I knew anything about 1-pot cooking, which I don't. But looking over the recipe, I was pretty convinced that I'd love it: peppers, tomatoes, onions and garlic. I mean, that's how I cook. So I'm pretty sure this is at the last minute (or perhaps even late--which I feel bad about, but my classes are INSANE this semester; I think I'll be not doing Taste and Create for the next two months).

So basically, this is an extremely easy meal. And people around me are talking too much for me to type (and I'm in a huge hurry, as usual), so here's a recipe and some pictures!

RECIPE: Chicken Creole

adapted very slightly from Baking and Cooking, A Tale of Two Loves

Ingredients:

-4 large chicken breasts

-3 tbsp olive oil

-2 cups chopped red onion

-2 small green peppers, chopped

-4 sticks celery, chopped

-5 cloves garlic

-2 tbsp chili powder

-2 tbsp paprika

-1/2 tbsp smoked paprika

-2 28-oz cans whole tomatoes in puree (Cento's San Marzano tomatoes are in puree; I found that they generally didn't say what the tomatoes were in unless you looked closely at the ingredients. If you can't find them in puree, drain the liquid and use a can of tomato sauce.)

-1/2 cup white wine

Instructions:

1. Chop the peppers, onions and celery. Put them and the minced garlic in a large stockpot with the olive oil and saute for three minutes.

2. Add the paprika, smoked paprika and chili powder and cook for another three minutes.

3. Put in the wine, tomatos, black pepper and chicken. Simmer for 35 minutes until the chicken is cooked thoroughly.

4. Serve over rice.

Step 2!

Also step 2! This smelled so good. I'm just discovering a love for paprika--it's so exciting!

Step 3: It's almost done! Yay!

You can't even see the rice. I should have made more, but this was delicious! I was happy with how it came out.

I tend to chop everything up and mix it together. It worked pretty well for this. The chicken was super tender and all the flavors had fully permeated everything. It was delicious!

Hah! Simple. Dinner that takes less than an hour, and it's so easy for a weeknight when you don't have a lot of time. Which I don't. And even the blog post didn't take much time! YAY! Mike and I are off to see Cabaret now, so go check out Becky's blog--she's got some great recipes on there! (She's got bacon cupcakes in there somewhere, too!)

I hope everyone has some exciting plans for the weekend! I'll be doing statistics homework and writing papers, so I'm glad I'm at least starting it out on a good note!

We're still not sure who killed Amanda Palmer, but I put her into a food coma and that's pretty awesome.

Hi guys! I promise there's food in here, but I have to be a fangirl for a moment. You'll probably learn more about me than you could from all the rest of my posts combined here. If you don't want to hear about me (or, well, about Amanda Palmer, really) you can scroll down to the recipe.

Today I'm going to take you into a fantasy world that is very much like the real world that you live in right now, except that you're me a few weeks ago.

There's a lot of music that I listen to, a lot of art that I look at, a lot of books and comics that I read. I'm not going to say these things that I do are the best things, but they're usually the things I love (okay, except for the music, my car doesn't have a CD player so I'm usually stuck listening to whatever's on the radio). With all the media that we have such easy access to these days, it's easy to not think about it most of the time--but I bet you all have someone, an artist, writer, musician, something, that really makes you think or care or push yourself or whatever. Think for a bit and I bet you'll come up with someone--a song that changed you, a poem that you memorized in grade school and never forgot, a book that suddenly made your mind click in the right way so that you're looking at the world in a way that makes sense to you now.

Now imagine that there's a thing that you do. Something that you do and know you're doing well and people love and appreciate--in my case, food. And that person who changed everything has a blog, and they write in their blog about a show that they're doing that--wow, is only about an hour away, that's not a bad drive at all. And there are rehearsals, and there are a lot of people, and the rehearsals are long, and they need to eat. And that person--your person--needs people to do your thing and bring it there. Amanda Palmer needed people to bring food to Cabaret rehearsals in Cambridge. My person. My thing. I couldn't not do it.

Most of the time when I mention her to people, I get a weird look and a confused "who?" in response, so for those of you giving me that look right now, she is a musical artist and force of nature. (I say "musical artist" because I really feel that in this case "musician" doesn't cover it.) Now, I didn't know anything about Amanda Palmer a year ago. I'd be giving you the same look that you're giving me right now if I were on the other end of this conversation, but that changed drastically in a very short period of time.

I don't know exactly how to describe Amanda's music. I think she files it as "punk cabaret," which may not make sense if you're not familiar with it, but I promise it fits. What I can say about it is that when I was introduced to her solo CD "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" (there's a book now, too) I was in a really bad place that I needed to get out of. I'm not going to describe it in depth--there was some depression, some anxiety, some trauma--I was broken. I'm not going to give Amanda all the credit here (I cannot express my gratitude to Mike for being there and talking me through things or just holding me when I break down in the middle of the night and he has to be at work at 6am--he has been my rock and he doesn't understand how much he's done). But when Mike's not around, or when I need to be alone, I listen to her music. And it was listening to her music that started making my brain tick the right way again, that pushed me to go beyond just crying to Mike and heal myself. It's not quite "empowerment," there's more to it than that, but I can't express it. And then at some point, she freed herself from her record company, and to celebrate she posted a free song for her fans. I listened to it and I cried and I laughed and I suddenly knew that despite everything, I was going to be okay. So that's what Amanda Palmer means to me. What she creates helped me find my own strength that I know was there all along, but not quite within reach, and jump up and grab it and hold on to it. At some later point, I started feeling depressed again, and with that strength that I'd found I was able to fight it off by myself without running back to antidepressants or just being miserable, and it felt great to be able to do that. Amanda, if you're reading this, thank you so much for doing what you do.

It's not like I'm completely better now. Honestly, people terrify me. I've always been shy around people I don't know, but for some reason in the past few years I get scared to go to parties. Social anxiety isn't fun at all. Mine's bad enough that, when Amanda made that blog post about wanting people to bring food, I was almost too scared to send an email about it. But I did, and I worked things out, and I thought about food and what kind of food vegetarians and vegans and people who can't eat rice-based products and carnivores all love, and I made a whole lot of falafel and I went to that rehearsal and fed the cast of Cabaret, including Amanda Fucking Palmer. (I hope people here aren't offended by swears, but I'm pretty sure that if you write a lot about her you have to include that. It may or may not actually be her legal middle name. Okay, it's not, but her lawyers apparently actually thought it was, and it belongs there. I can't censor her.)

Okay, okay, I'm getting to the food. Here. Sorry. I didn't turn into a burbling puddle of fangirl when I met her, so I kind of had to here, just because I needed to get it out. (I doubt it would even be possible to turn into a burbling puddle of fangirl around her--she's so down to earth and so real [in the sense that I usually expect people who are even remotely famous to have some manufactured personality]). She's an incredible person to hang out with. She asked me about me, and we talked about how cool it is that the internet lets people who are artists make a living off their art without "making it big" and how cool that is, and about food comas and crazy schedules, and I told her about how I sort of want to be her fiance when I grow up (oh, right, she's engaged to Neil Gaiman, if you didn't know that--somehow it seems right that my two favorite famous people/biggest influences are going to get married).

FOOD STARTS HERE.

You may have noticed up there that I said I made a whole lot of falafel. I'm posting the recipe, of course. I was asked for it. I'd be posting it anyway, but that seems important. I made double-batches of this recipe, and I made three double-batches, so essentially six of these. It was a lot of food. It was stressful for a couple minutes when I wasn't sure they were going to finish in time for me to put on real clothes and pack things up and drive to Cambridge. I'm going to tell you right off the bat not to make double-batches of this unless you have a HUGE food processor--it was quite difficult to integrate everything at times and required a lot of "pulse, stop, push stuff around with a spoon, put the cover back on, pulse again, repeat." If you don't have a food processor, that's totally okay too! It'll take a lot longer, but you can dice everything really small and fork-crush the garbanzo beans into it. And the best part of this recipe is that it's baked instead of deep-fried--no greasy oil making it heavy in your stomach and it's SO much healthier. YES.

RECIPE: Baked Falafel

Adapted from ChowVegan

Ingredients:

-1 15-oz can garbanzo beans (chickpeas)

-1 small onion (or large shallot), chopped

-2 or 3 cloves of garlic

-1 tbsp fresh parsley

-1 tbsp fresh cilantro

-1 tsp lemon juice

-1 tsp coriander

-1 tsp cumin

-1/4 tsp dried red pepper flakes (double for spicier falafels) (yes I know it doesn't pluralize like that just work with me here)

-2 tbsp flour

-1 tsp baking powder

-IF YOU'RE FORK CRUSHING: 1 tsp olive oil (adding this in the food processor will make it come out very liquid)

Instructions:

1. Drain and rinse the garbanzo beans. Leave them in a colander in the sink until you use them so they drain adequately; you don't want to add too much extra liquid here.

2. Slice the onions, peel the garlic, and throw them both into the food processor along with the parsley and cilantro. Pulse until everything is finely minced; it will sort of look like a coarse crushed ice type of dessert.

3. Pour in the garbanzo beans and everything else (coriander, cumin, lemon juice, red pepper flakes, flour, baking powder). Using a wooden spoon, try to stir the mixture enough to get the garbanzo beans at least slightly integrated with the onion mixture--this will probably be a lot easier in single batches than it was in double batches.

4. Turn on your food processor and let it do its thing, stopping frequently to mix things around and make sure it's fairly evenly textured. It won't be perfect, but if you don't do this you'll end up with hummus at the bottom and mostly-whole-garbanzos at the top. Be careful not to let it go too long, or you'll just end up with hummus.

5. Heat your oven to 375 degrees (F). Take out and oil some cookie sheets. Roll the falafel into balls and press them to make patties, placing on the cookie sheets. They don't spread like cookies, so you can put them pretty close together, but keep in mind that you do have to flip them halfway through baking so if they're too close that gets difficult.

6. Bake your falafel for thirty minutes, taking it out and flipping them over halfway through.

7. When your falafel is done, let it cool for a few minutes, then serve in a pita with lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and tahini sauce. (Adding hummus is a common practice, but it's one that I don't understand since falafel is pretty much hummus that's been processed for a shorter time and then cooked. If you want hummus, you can add it.)

The tahini sauce recipe that I used was perfect and can be found here. I followed it to the letter, so there's not much point in my typing it up again (it's late and I'm sort of tired).

Step 2. If you're using a food processor, slicing things like this works--if you fork-crush the garbanzo beans, mince everything really really tiny. (Instructions for fork-crushing are at Chow Vegan, linked above.)

Step 2, continued. This is just the above stuff after being processed for a few seconds, but it looks so fresh and delicious that I had to take a picture. I don't know why it looks so dessert-like to me.

Step 3. Everything else, added.

Step 4. If you look closely, you might notice a whole garbanzo bean or two. That's okay--I just crushed them with the spoon as I came across them. It's better to have more texture than to turn your falafel into hummus--can you see on the right how it sort of already looks like hummus on the bottom?

Step 5. This was a little closer than they should be, but like I said, only because it was difficult to flip them.

This was a lot of falafel.

It got eaten, though!

By Amanda Palmer! (Sorry I'm pointing at your boob, Amanda. I was trying to point at the sandwich to say "I made that!" but I guess I couldn't really tell where the sandwich was.) Are you familiar with The Princess Bride? You know that part where Buttercup kisses the King because "he's always been so kind to her, and she's killing herself once they reach the honeymoon suite" but he's too excited that she kissed him to process what she said and just says "Isn't that nice. SHE KISSED ME!" Well, that's sort of what it was like, except Amanda wasn't planning on killing herself or anything. It was just sort of awesome and surreal, so despite the fact that I'm all scrunched up and the camera added like 50 pounds to me (that's a lie, maybe 10) it's my favorite picture ever. (Photo credit to someone in the cast who took the picture with my camera. I'm terrible with names so I can't tell you who.)

And, of course, the rest of a hungry cast, all of whom were SUPER COOL. (Photo credit to Amanda's phone, I'm not actually sure who took the picture. Someone in the cast. Amanda posted in on twitter.)

And then Amanda went into a food coma power nap and told me it wasn't creepy if I took a picture as long as I promised it was sexy. I think this is a pretty sexy nap picture, don't you?

OKAY I'm pretty exhausted now because it's been a busy few days and is going to continue to be a busy few days, so I'm gonna leave you with that. And I'll probably come back and edit this post to add some appropriate links tomorrow. And I know I said I'd post Friday and it's technically Saturday, but I'm still awake so to me it's still Friday. ALSO THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: since it's technically Saturday, it's now officially Mike's birthday! Wish him a happy birthday in the comments, he totally deserves it. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIKE I LOVE YOU.

Oh, one more thing. If you're anywhere in the Boston area--actually, within four hours of the Boston area, go see Cabaret. I saw a little bit of rehearsal and it was amazing. I can't wait. Buy tickets here.

Asparagus Risotto

A while ago, a couple of the blogs that I follow posted recipes for asparagus risotto. I've never made a risotto before--well, not a REAL risotto--and I absolutely love asparagus, so of course I absolutely had to make it. I went searching for recipes all over the place. Though I didn't really know how to make a risotto, I felt very strongly that it should include more than a tablespoon of cheese and/or cream, yet that seems to be how most recipes write it. I finally found a satisfactory-looking recipe over on Epicurious, modified it a teensy bit, and got cooking.

This was my first experience that caused me to realize how much I've come to love cooking from blogs and sites like Recipezaar (now Food.com), where people who aren't professionals make the dish and write it up. The instructions are clear to those of us who didn't go to culinary school, and if we have a question, we can easily ask. Things like "turn the burner from medium to low" don't usually get left out. While I'll probably make this again sometime, I'll make it from the recipe I'm typing up here, not the one I followed the first time.

RECIPE: Asparagus Risotto

Ingredients:

-1 1/2 lbs asparagus

-4 cups chicken broth (one box)

-1 tbsp butter

-1 large red onion

-2 cups arborio rice

-1/2 cup white wine

-2 tsp chopped fresh sage

-1 cup freshly grated romano cheese

-1/4 cup fat-free half and half

-water (about 2 cups)

Instructions:

1. Wash and trim the asparagus. Cut off the tips and set them aside. Cut the rest of the asparagus into inch-long pieces.

2. Combine about 2/3 of the asparagus with one cup chicken broth and one cup water in a blender. Puree and set aside for later.

3. In a large saucepan, melt the butter and sauté the onion over medium heat until tender. Add the rice and lower the heat to medium-low. Once the pan has cooled down a little, add the wine and stir until absorbed. (This should take about 4 minutes. If it takes less time than that, lower your heat more. If it takes longer, turn the heat up a little. The original recipe doesn't say anything about changing the heat so my first half cup of wine just cooked off immediately and I ended up using a whole cup and it was perfectly delicious, so if it cooks off too fast and doesn't actually absorb, don't worry about adding a little more.)

4. Add 1/2 cup broth and the chopped sage, again stirring until absorbed. Continue to add broth but the half cup, allowing each one to be absorbed before adding the next half cup. After about 15 minutes, add the asparagus pieces that you didn't puree, and continue adding half cups of broth. Once you've run out of broth, add two half cups of water in the same manner.

5. Increase the heat (back to medium) and add the asparagus puree. Stir often until absorbed.

6. Add the cheese and cream, stir thoroughly, and serve! Garnish with fresh sage if you would like.

Step 2. I took about 12 pictures of this and this was the least blurry one. Sometimes I think my camera hates me.

The rest of Step 2. It looks like those green smoothies that I buy at the store, but I wouldn't drink this. Just set it aside for now.

The rest of the asparagus, after 2/3 of the stalks were pureed. The only reason to separate the tips is to not puree them, so if you want to toss them in the bowl together now, that's okay. You probably don't even need a separate bowl to begin with.

Step 4. I loved how the red onion had a nice pink color that contrasted with the sage (and, later, asparagus) but most of the color disappeared after cooking for so long. Oh, well--it tasted delicious.

Still step 4--this is right after I added the asparagus. I'm glad I used the hugest pan I had, this made a TON of food!

Step 5: Asparagus/water/chicken broth puree added, and I'm now very worried that my pan will overflow if I stir too vigorously. Epicurious seems to think this takes 3 minutes to absorb. Like I said earlier, I like to have some direction about the heat. Mine did well after taking a while to absorb, so I guess it's okay.

Everything is added! It's ready! WOOOOO! Notice how the onions don't look nearly as pink anymore? After some refrigeration they lost their color completely.

The 'eat' step. It was rich and thick with plenty of asparagus flavor but it didn't overpower the grilled chicken that we ate it with. It's very warm and perfect for a cooler evening.

So, there's my first risotto! I was pretty happy with it, and I had leftovers for quite a while, which was nice. One night my mom and I had the leftovers with poached eggs, thanks to Kevin over at Closet Cooking. (I forgot where I'd seen it when I decided to try it, but went and found his post afterward. He deserves credit for such a perfect combination!) My mom was skeptical; I was not--the runny yolk complemented the creamy risotto perfectly and made for a great light meal. (Not that the risotto itself doesn't make a delicious light meal, of course.)

Given the amount of risotto I had left over, unless you're serving at least 6 people, I would probably recommend cutting this recipe in half or freezing half of your leftovers--the last of mine went bad before I could eat it! I was very sad about this. Now, though, I have a bag of arborio rice and an idea of how to make risotto, so I'll be looking for more tasty recipes. I think it would be fun to make this with three colors of asparagus--green, white, and purple. It would be so pretty!

Okay, so I've voiced my opinions about where I like to cook from. How about you guys? I'm assuming that if you're reading this you're not averse to cooking from blogs, but do you have difficulty with cookbooks or "professional" recipe sites? I'm sort of nervous about using epicurious again; both recipes I've followed have been less than ideal in the way of instruction, and I'm not sure there's anything I'd want to make that couldn't be based on something in one of the blogs I read. What do you think?

Oh, and I've also started a new thing with the comments. I'm not quite sure how it works, but I've enabled commentluv, which means that if you have a blog and leave a comment it'll link back to your most recent post with a title. I think it will also let me reply to comments directly, but I'm not sure. Let me know how you like it!

wheatberry salad

I've been terrible about blogging this week. Every day I think, at some point, "Oh, I'll write a blog post today!" and it hasn't happened yet. This may be because Mike brought his Wii over to my house and I've been playing Zelda, or possibly because it's been so hot that I didn't want to do anything but complain about how hot it is. It's been pushing 90 all week, even in the middle of the night, and I don't enjoy this kind of weather. (I also hate cold weather. Hooray.)

I was going to write a bit about what wheatberries are, but when I went to Foodista to find a widget to put on the bottom of this post, I found that they didn't have a page about wheatberries (and therefore no widget) and I had to write one myself. So, if you're curious, click on the foodista widget at the bottom of this page to see what I wrote up over there. The cool thing is that if I'm wrong about something, or know something you don't, you can edit it! It's kind of like a wikipedia for foodies, which is awesome, except people can freely edit recipes other people post and I'm not sure how I'd feel about that.

Anyway, wheatberries make awesome salads. I first discovered them when a little bakery/cafe down the street from my house (literally a 5 minute walk) carried a wheatberry salad. Mike and I used to buy it whenever we were there as a side for whatever else we ate. Unfortunately, this little shop closed down and I can no longer buy wheatberry salad there--so I learned to make it! The last day I went there, I asked the guy who worked there what goes into the salad, and he listed a whole bunch of things, and I tried to commit them to memory so I could replicate it at home. This is what I ended up with. I'm not including amounts, because you might say "I don't really like a lot of uncooked red onion" or "hmm I want a LOT of carrots!" and also because I didn't measure amounts. I feel that, ideally, you want to end up with about the same volume of vegetables as you have of wheatberries.

Oh, the important things about wheatberries: the hardest part is finding them, but if you're fortunate enough to have a Whole Foods nearby they sell them in bulk for under two dollars per pound. They triple in volume after they're cooked, so don't cook too many at once unless you want a ton of extra wheatberries (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as you'll see next time I post which will hopefully be soon). Lastly, you have to soak them overnight before cooking them, so if you want to make this, plan ahead!

RECIPE: Wheatberry Salad

-Wheatberries

-Carrots

-Celery

-Red onion

-Green onion

-Green pepper

-Fresh parsley

-Craisins

-Balsamic vinegar

-Extra virgin olive oil

**NOTE: Everything (except the wheatberries and dressing) is optional!**

To cook the wheatberries:

Soak the wheatberries overnight in a lot of water. Drain and rinse them. You'll need a fine mesh colander for this--if it's got bigger holes, you'll lose some, or they'll plug the holes and you'll never get the water out. The next day, as early as possible, boil them. You'll need a very large pot to do this--everything I could find said to cook them in a 4 cups water to 1 cup wheatberries ratio. (I'm not sure how important that is, since they didn't absorb nearly that much water, but when I'm given a specific ratio I stick to it.) Boil them for about an hour, until you can eat one and it has a fresh pop on the outside and a soft creamy rice-like texture inside. Let them cool and refrigerate them. If you didn't give yourself a lot of time, you can chill them quickly by running cool water over them. I strained the wheatberries out of the pot, put them back in the pot, filled with cold water, strained again, etc, for about four changes of water before they were cool enough to stick in the fridge for a while.

To make the salad:

Chop all the vegetables into really small pieces--no bigger than your pinkie nail. Add them, and the craisins, to the wheatberries. Mix until thoroughly combined. Drizzle some balsamic vinegar and olive oil over the salad and mix again. Serve immediately, or chill. The salad can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to a week. And it's delicious.

Wheatberries. Don't they kinda look like popcorn kernels? I highly recommend that, before making the salad, you eat a small handful on their own--they have some excellent flavor by themselves.

Salad! Serve it with some grilled meat, or bring it to a party, or just eat it on its own. You may notice a lack of craisins in here--I completely forgot them, and I wish I hadn't, but Mike doesn't like them all that much and was thrilled. See? Everything is optional.

There are a lot of ways to make wheatberry salad, and you could probably add pretty much whatever you want and it would taste good. But this is really excellent and I urge you to try it out if you can find wheatberries anywhere--it's really simple, super cheap, and you can make a big batch and have lunch for a week!

I seem to be developing an affinity for summer salads. Though most of them are good any time of year, the vegetables are usually fresher around now, and I love having a cold meal that's filling and nutritious, especially when you don't have to cook anything (which this can be, if you keep cooked wheatberries around. I'm tempted to.) Do you have a favorite summer salad? I'd love to hear about it!

Sausage Stir-Fry with a side of Nostalgia

One thing that frustrates me as a person who likes to cook is the barrage of questions that I frequently have to face when feeding new people. "Where did you learn to cook?" "Where did you get this recipe?" Sometimes it isn't questions so much as assumptions--"Wow, your mom did a great job teaching you to cook!" The questions and assumptions on their own wouldn't be all that bad, but people always seem so disappointed in my responses. I learned to cook from reading cookbooks and following the directions. When I didn't know what something meant, I looked it up. More recently, I've expanded my skills using online tools (such as other blogs or sites like Recipezaar). Chances are, I found the recipe online; I think I have a total of two "old family recipes" that I can toss together from memory in my repertoire.

My point here is that, no, my mom didn't teach me how to cook, and I don't think that's a bad thing as so many people seem to. Why is it that everyone always seems disappointed when I say I got a recipe online, or that I taught myself with the help of numerous cookbooks and weeks of my life staring at the computer screen? My mom isn't a bad cook (though she would probably tell you otherwise)--I quite like her cooking, and when she does cook I think it's excellent, but she doesn't love it like I do. We never spent time in the kitchen when I was little with her showing me exactly how she makes a pie crust, and I think it's okay that I found out from a book.

However, the passion and interest must have come from somewhere, and that credit goes to my dad. He never really taught me a recipe, because I'm not sure if he ever really followed a recipe, but I do remember him busy making something for dinner and asking me if I could pit the olives, which was my favorite job because I ate most of them. (I got yelled at for this. Sorry, Dad.) He would chop up peppers for a stir fry and give me slices so that I could learn how much sweeter red peppers are than green peppers. There were nights that my mom and brother and I searched the refrigerator and cabinets and pantry for something to make for dinner, finding an old tomato, some peanut butter, three or four gallons of milk, huge jars of spices, and nothing else. Somehow, on these nights when there was nothing in the house and we were all too lazy to go grocery shopping, my dad could come home and whip up some simple, excellent meal out of our total lack of ingredients.

I never learned to be quite that resourceful, unfortunately--I either plan a meal out and go to the store and get everything I need, or I don't plan a meal and I go to the store wandering around until I find something that inspires me. I also never learned the knife skills that my dad tried to teach me; they're getting slightly better than they used to be but it still takes me at least 6 minutes to chop up a pepper. (I'm getting good at carrots, celery and rhubarb, though.)

So...nobody really taught me how to cook, and I find my recipes wherever I feel like, but I think my dad taught me how to play with my food and enjoy my time in the kitchen. He taught me to triple the garlic in any recipe I read and to like pepper far more than is perhaps healthy. And, without him, I never would have learned to buy twice as many olives as I planned to put in a dish. This recipe is based on one of those things that he used to come home and throw together, leaving the rest of us wondering where the ingredients came from but in the end quite satisfied with our meals. It's quick, simple, and delicious.

RECIPE: Sausage and Pepper Stir-Fry

Ingredients:

-1 package of sweet Italian sausages (usually contains 5 or 6) (If you'd like, use half a package of sweet and half a package of hot for some more variety--freeze the rest!)

-1 or 2 green peppers

-1 or 2 red peppers

-2 tomatoes

-1 large onion

-a whole lot of garlic

-some cooked pasta (homemade if possible!)

-ground pepper (or whole pepper in a grinder) (I like to use peppercorn medleys instead of just plain black pepper, but I don't really know what the difference is, so use whichever you prefer)

-extra virgin olive oil

-freshly grated romano or parmesan cheese

Instructions:

1. Heat some olive oil in a large frying pan. Once it's hot (a drop of water sizzles and evaporates immediately), add the sausages whole. Fry on each side for a few minutes, until lightly browned and partially cooked through. When you're not tending to the sausages, chop the peppers and onion (and, of course, garlic).

2. Remove the sausages from the pan and slice them into medallions. (If you don't fry them whole first, they won't slice properly and you'll get sausage-balls with little strips of sausage casing, and you don't want that.) Return to the frying pan. Lay as many flat as possible.

3. Fry the sausages until cooked through, flipping occasionally. Once they're done (or mostly done, since they'll still be in the pan) add the peppers, onion and garlic. Sauté until slightly softened, but still crisp enough to crunch a little when you bite it--you don't want soggy vegetables.

4. While the peppers and onions are softening, chop the tomato. Once everything else is done, add the tomato and a a few grinds of pepper, stir, and cook until the tomatoes are hot.

5. Serve over a bed of pasta with a generous amount of cheese to top each dish. Make sure to get some of the juices from the pan onto your plate--they're excellent!

Tasty sausages!

Yum! Mike and I use a ton of vegetables when we stir-fry--that's a BIG pan full of them. We usually end up thinking that we should have used less, but we never do the next time, and we fill up on healthy food and don't have room for ice cream. (Which is really sad--there's key lime and graham cracker gelato in the freezer that we keep being too full to eat.)

That looks like a ton of food, but it's mostly a pile of vegetables. We used leftover homemade whole wheat noodles, which wasn't true to my childhood memories at all but they were perfect with this dish.

I was originally going to post this on Father's Day, but then I had to go to my cousin's graduation party, and then I forgot about it, and then I realized that I never really posted anything for Mother's Day and I didn't know if it was okay to post something for Father's Day and not Mother's Day, and THEN I figured, well, my dad was always the cook, so it makes more sense, and I also gave my mom an awesome scarf and baked her a pie. So, consider this a very belated Father's Day post. (I think he also deserves credit for my tendency to cook with peppers, tomatoes and onions.)

How about you guys? Did you teach yourselves to cook, or did you have a parent or grandparent to show you the ropes? Any family recipes?

I hope everyone (well, everyone in the US) has a great 4th of July tomorrow--we're going to my family's annual grilled-meat-fest (seriously: sausages, steak tips, burgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken, and it's all too good to pass up--I think I'll skip breakfast).

Flank Steak Pinwheels

So I know I've been talking a lot about grilling this summer and how exciting it is, but I haven't posted anything grilled yet. I know, I know. But, the thing is, there's really not all that much to post when I bought some chicken and some marinade at the store and put them in a bag for the day and then grilled them for dinner. It's just not blog-worthy. However, I had one recipe that I was particularly excited to make and I finally did and now I finally have the motivation to post it. Woohoo!

So, these flank steak pinwheels showed up in my inbox a while ago. Well, the recipe for them did, and it wasn't quite what I wanted to make but it gave me ideas. OKAY completely off topic, I'm trying to write this post while watching an NCIS marathon on USA (I'm not entirely sure USA plays anything else) and it's distracting because I'm addicted--as Abby says in the commercials (and, presumably, one of the episodes), "It's more addictive than pistachios. Well, have you ever just eaten one pistachio?" And since I love pistachios I understand her point AND she's right. Completely addictive.

Anyway, it's time for a recipe. Hooray!

RECIPE: Flank Steak Pinwheels

Adapted from Delish

Ingredients:

-One 1-lb (or a little more) flank steak

-3 cloves garlic

-3 tbsp herbed cheese (Boursin)

-1 cup baby spinach

-1 red onion (you'll only use a few thin slices)

-2-3 roasted red peppers

-Salt and pepper

Other stuff you'll need:

-8 bamboo skewers

-Meat tenderizer with a pointy side

Instructions:

1. Place the flank steak between two pieces of plastic wrap and pound it with the pointy side of a meat tenderizer until it's evenly 1/4 inch thick. (We kinda failed at this, the kitchen was rattling loudly and it was taking forever so we got to about a 1/2 inch thickness but really should have kept going.) If the pointy mallet rips holes in the plastic wrap, add more layers of plastic wrap around it.

2. Once the meat is evenly 1/4 inch thick, mince the garlic and spread it over one side of the meat.

3. Down the middle of the steak, spread a wide layer of the cheese (about 3 inches thick). On top of the cheese, cover the steak with roasted pepper. Sprinkle a few slices of red onion over the red pepper, and cover with spinach.

4. Roll the steak tightly, pushing in the filling that tries to fall out. Once it's rolled, push the skewers through it at even intervals, holding it together.

5. Slice between the skewers so you have 8 pinwheels. (We only managed to get seven because I didn't measure perfectly, but it's okay because we weren't feeding a lot of people.)

6. Okay, so when I rolled it and then put the skewers through there was too much filling and not enough steak (because it wasn't thin enough) so it ended up just forming a shell around the fillings instead of a pinwheel, and I had to take each skewered not-pinwheel, pull the skewer out, roll it again, and re-skewer it. This worked fine, but I wouldn't want to do it again, hence the "yes actually try to get it to a quarter inch" because then I wouldn't have had to. BUT if you don't manage to get it rolled up right, you can re-roll them individually.

7. Grill on high heat 3-4 minutes per side for medium-rare. Allow to cool about 5 minutes before serving.

Step 2: Okay, so I used a lot of garlic. This is not out of the ordinary for me. It was DELICIOUS.

Step 3: The rich herby flavor of the cheese perfectly complemented the steak and added a richness to the pinwheels, and spreading the leftover cheese on crackers was AMAZING. I think that's what it's meant for. So good.

Also step 3: I didn't take a picture after adding the spinach because it looked like a pile of spinach. But this is what it looked like before the spinach, and I think it had a perfect amount of everything. SO good.

Rolled up on the grill. It was quite difficult to keep all the fillings inside. The skewers will blacken a bit--one of mine even started to burn at the end like a stick on incense. That's okay; they'll still hold your pinwheels together!

A pile of pinwheels! Two pieces per person, perhaps with a side of black bean salad, and you've got an excellent meal!

So, these are the perfect grilled food to prepare for a summer dinner party, except that they take a lot of work and the ingredients are rather expensive--but it'd be wonderful for a party of four. Have another couple over, or a few friends, and show off your magic grilling skills! Even if you screw it up a little, you'll end up with an excellent meal. Serve something light for dessert--these rich, savory pinwheels will leave you quite full.

Well, I'm back to my ridiculous NCIS addiction. Tomorrow I'm making three pies for my little cousin's high school graduation party--I guess she's not so little anymore, huh? What are your plans for the weekend? Doing something fun with Dad? (Oooh, these would be a great Father's Day treat!)

Have a great weekend!

*I'm tagging this as gluten free but I don't know if Boursin is gluten free. But I'm sure that if it's not there's some other spreadable cheese you could use. I mean, you could probably use brie! So you might have to play with the recipe.

Black Bean Salad

During the summer, I really like having a salad as a side dish, or even as a light meal. Unfortunately, actual "salad"--that is, the lettuce part--makes me really sick. I miss things like Chicken Caesar Salad, and occasionally I'll decide that it's worth feeling sick afterward and eat lettuce, but I've managed to find a few excellent lettuce-free salads to enjoy in the warmer weather.

I first had this delicious black bean salad about....wow, six or seven years ago. My aunt Janny made it when we were visiting. My cousin Julia always used to whine when she made recipes from the Cooking Light magazine ("Is this from COOKING LIGHT?!"); I haven't tried many other Cooking Light recipes, but I imagine that while they're probably delicious to many adults, the palate of a 10-year-old requires more butter, sugar, hamburgers, etc. However, I'm pretty sure Julia didn't complain about this. My mom got the recipe. It's been something I look forward to in the summer every year since then, and though we use the original recipe as a reference we never quite follow it exactly so it's never exactly the same twice. I think that's okay.

I make this in bulk. It still never lasts more than three days in our fridge. My mom and I basically eat it as or with every meal until it's gone, and I'm usually immediately wondering when I should make it again. I made it probably about a week ago (a little bit more) and I think it's time to make more. It's just that delicious. So, without further ado...

RECIPE: Black Bean Salad

Adapted from Cooking Light

Ingredients:

-3 15-oz cans black beans

-A handful of fresh cilantro

-A few sprigs of fresh parsley (2-3 tablespoons, probably?)

-3-or-so green onions

-Juice from one lime

-3 large on-the-vine tomatoes (they'll be medium sized tomatoes, but large for on the vine tomatoes.)

-2 ripe avocados

Instructions:

1. Open, rinse and drain the black beans. I leave them in the colander while I chop everything else up so that they drain better. You could put them in a large bowl immediately if you want.

2. Mince the cilantro, parsley and green onions. Put them in a large bowl.

3. Cut the lime into quarters. Squeeze as much juice from you can out of each wedge into the large bowl.

4. Cut the tomatoes in half and scoop out the seeds (sometimes this is much easier if you cut the tomatoes into quarters). Chop them into small pieces, about a centimeter square (fingernail-sized?) and add them to the large bowl.

5. Cut the avocados in half and scoop out the pits. I find it easiest to cut them by leaving them in the peel and using a butter knife to cut cut a grid into the flesh, then scoop that out with a spoon. I usually cut about four lines up and down and probably six sideways for a good-sized "diced" avocado. You could also extract the flesh from the peel and cut there. (By the way, those little avocado tools that do this for you? I think they're pretty useless. You can do it by hand just as easily, and washing a butter knife is a lot easier.) Okay, so add the diced avocados to the bowl.

6. If you didn't put the black beans in the bowl at the beginning, add them now. Stir (gently, so as not to crush the avocado) with a wooden spatula until everything is evenly mixed together.

7. Refrigerate for 1-2 hours (longer is okay) before serving. (You don't technically have to do this, but I always think it comes out better if you do. Somehow the flavors combine during this time.)

Mike hates avocado, and he loved this. (I was glad he did; I would hate to make something he didn't like. I haven't so far.) It tastes super fresh and summery (I think that's the cilantro; for some reason it seems like it's definitely a summer herb) and all the flavors in it combine perfectly. You can serve it over lettuce or as-is. I haven't yet fed this to someone who didn't like it, so try it out, and try not to get too addicted.

What does Asian Fusion even mean?

I love stir-fry. It's possibly my favorite way to cook--you don't really need a recipe or even much of a plan, just a stocked refrigerator and some sort of sauce or marinade. When there's no food in the house and I have no idea what to cook, I tend to go to the store and stare at the sauces or marinades until something seems like a good idea, and I build from there--what meat makes sense with this? vegetables? Awesome. Dinner is planned. And, when I get home and start actually cooking, I always end up finding more little things to toss in. It's so much fun.

This dinner was inspired by my favorite restaurant (or, one of them): Fire and Ice. It has six locations over the country--two in Massachusetts, one in Rhode Island, one in New York and two in California. If you live near one, you should definitely try it out. They call it an improvisational grill. Every meal is completely personalized because you pretty much make it yourself. You get a table and order drinks, then you go up to the bars. At the bars, you grab a bowl and fill it with whatever you think sounds good--one bar has bunches of fresh vegetables and different kinds of noodles (from bowties to udon noodles), another has the raw meat (pretty much any kind you'd want). There's a hamburger bar, with bacon and sliced tomatoes and pieces of lettuce and anything else you'd put on a burger; there's also a salad bar (which I usually use as a vegetable bar part 2). You put everything into a bowl, pick a sauce, and bring it to this HUGE circular grill where they cook it right in front of you. Sometimes the chefs try to entertain the hordes of people standing around waiting for their food--it's great (but busy!) on weekends. Then you get to go back to your table. Your drinks are there, along with plain white rice and some tortillas, and you eat your creation. It's also all-you-can-eat, so if you want to try a few different things, you can make as many trips up as possible.

ANYWAY. I love that place. If you live near one, join their email list--they send out coupons with great deals sometimes, and you get free dinner on your birthday!

So when Mike and I went to make a stir fry a while back, I thought of Fire and Ice for inspiration. We got an orange ginger sauce/glaze, some chicken, three(?) red peppers, two onions, and a pound of green beans. By random luck, we found udon noodles in the grocery store--I learned to love Udon from Fire and Ice, so it seemed appropriate. And, honestly? I'm not sure I can write a recipe for a stir-fry, because I'm not sure I want other people following the recipe exactly--the whole point is to play around with it and add things that you think would be great.

I chopped up the vegetables while Mike chopped up the chicken and got it cooking. There were so many vegetables we had to use two huge frying pans, but that means it's HEALTHY! Yay! We mixed up the sauce in another bowl with some lime juice and soy sauce. I like to think it added to the flavor, but I didn't taste it without them, so I don't know--I just know it tasted good! When everything was almost done cooking I noticed we had a few mandarin oranges left. And I don't mean the canned ones in juice. I mean legit you-have-to-peel-this mandarin oranges. We saw them in the store and bought them once and haven't found them again (or if we see something that claims to be mandarin oranges, they usually look much bigger than what we got that time so we assume they're mislabeled clementines).

Once everything cooked and the vegetables had shrunken a bit, we condensed everything into one pan, making sure there was still some sauce in the other one, and fried the udon noodles for a few minutes until they were nice and soft.

Now...I think this is Asian Fusion food. (I'm not going to call it 'cuisine' even though I think that's what people usually say with 'Asian Fusion' because it seems pretentious to call a stir-fry that you cooked yourself cuisine.) I'm not entirely sure, though, because I don't really know what it means. I think it means something along the lines of "uses ingredients that remind you of things you might order at an Asian restaurant," which this definitely did--the orange ginger sauce seemed like a typical "Chinese" food ingredient, and I'm pretty sure Udon noodles are a Japanese invention (though I could be completely making that up) and, well, there was soy sauce. Oh! We also cooked (half of) it in a wok! That must count for something.

Believe it or not, we froze this and just ate the remains last night (with new Udon because we'd only bought enough for about three servings). It had never occurred to me to freeze stir fry before, but it was just as delicious the next time! We re-fried it in the pan again, and this time we added the little spice packets that came with the Udon noodles ("Oriental" flavor--even more Asian Fusion!) and some teriyaki sauce. (Side note--why does my spell check not know the word 'teriyaki' but suggests 'sukiyaki'?)

I'm not going to call this a recipe, because it's not. The most I'm hoping for is inspiration. Maybe you'll read this and one or two things will stick out at you and you'll think, wow, that sounds like it would be really good with this other thing. And maybe you'll try to recreate this exactly, but you'll have a hard time as I didn't include amounts for ANYTHING. Because I don't know. I just tossed some of one thing in, a dash of another, probably some cumin. The whole point was to have fun and eat something delicious, and it worked out perfectly.

Mashing Purple

So, I made a new discovery in the grocery store this week. I didn't actually make it, in fact I'd known it was there the whole time, but my boyfriend (I guess he deserves a name, doesn't he?) Mike found, for the first time, purple potatoes. Now I'd had purple potato chips, so while I'd seen them before I'd never really thought twice about it, especially because I had no idea what I'd do with a purple potato once I acquired it.

We bought them, and decided to make mashed potatoes. It was way more exciting than I expected. I later learned that the purple variety of potato has more nutrients in it than the regular kind, so maybe this is just how I'll do it from now on!

They were so small! This was by far the tiniest (and therefore most adorable). I quartered the rest of the before boiling them, but this one I just put a bunch of fork-holes in so it'd cook properly. When they were cut, the color was beautiful:

And they were all speckled inside! This was where it started getting really exciting. The potatoes were really purple, and I was really cooking them. They, however, lost a lot of their color in the boiling process:

Still definitely purple, but a much more subdued tone. It all got very pretty again when they were mashed, though.

They're kind of lavender now. I suppose I should be calling them "smashed potatoes" as we kept the skins on. Now, I usually cheat at this step and pull out my KitchenAid and its whisk attachment and make whipped potatoes, but Mike insists on mashing them the old fashioned way and allowing a few chunks to stick around. (Tangent: I really hate the word "chunk." It just sounds so awful, and I especially don't want it describing my food. I rarely buy cans of tuna because of this, despite the fact that tuna salad is the only non-sushi seafood I can abide. However, it makes more sense here to say 'chunks' than 'unmashed bits of solid potato' so I will have to deal.)

Mike's method turned out great; the potatoes were just as smooth as I'm used to. They also looked delicious with the rest of the food. The picture came out blurry, unfortunately, because the flash was making them look almost white and I don't have a tripod for my camera. And the point was the purpleness, so I wasn't going to allow them to look white in the pictures. Mike said he could taste the purple--that is, that they TASTED purple, which I understand because I believe very strongly that beets taste red (he thinks blood oranges taste red)--but I thought they tasted like pretty normal mashed potatoes, perhaps just a little richer. (Served with green beans pan-fried with freshly minced garlic, lots of olive oil, and balsamic vinaigrette; cajun marinaded steak. The flavors worked much better together than I expected them to.)

RECIPE: Purple Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients:

-2 lbs purple potatoes

-Whatever else you usually put in mashed potatoes (I used some dried parsley, garlic powder, butter and cream.)

Instructions:

1. Make mashed potatoes exactly the way you usually do, except with purple potatoes.

2. See the looks of awe on everyone's faces as you present them with purple mashed potatoes. Ask them if they can taste the purple. Regardless, they'll think it's cool.

Now I really want to make purple gnocchi.