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Jan. 13th, 2008
What I've been cooking & baking
Jan. 13th, 2008 11:37 amI didn't do much cooking or baking while we were out of town, but I did a bit before and after.
On New Year's Eve, we had a friend over, and I made my version of Pasta ala Bosca: whole wheat rotini with soy sausage, mushrooms, olive oil, red pepper flakes, and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese. I also made some garlic toast to go with it.
Once home from Florida, I got the cooking bug again, and J. even got in on the act by making us delicious whole wheat pancakes with bananas and pecans. I love this combination; the sugar from the bananas gets a bit carmelized in the frying pan, and the creation, overall, tastes a lot like banana bread. Good stuff!
Recently, I've also made:
-Sweet potato, white potato, and lentil curry. I've made varieties of this before without a recipe, but this time, I sort-of-kind-of followed a recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, and I think it turned out really well. Chopped peppers really added something to it.
-A weird Italian-ish bean casserole with biscuit dumplings on top. It sounded good in theory, but didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked. I wish I'd had a different assortment of veggies (stewed tomatoes and zucchini, maybe) and had used a smaller pan so that the casserole under the dumplings/biscuits had been deeper.
-Sweet potato and black bean enchiladas. A really nice flavor combination, and I thought the sauce especially was brilliant this time. However, I think I'd skin the sweet potatoes next time as the tough skins made texture a bit of an issue. I cooked the sweet potatoes, mashed them, and added reduced-fat sour cream and black beans and seasonings to be the filling. I have an issue with reduced fat sour cream, as some brands add all kinds of weird ingredients to make up for the missing fat. But I've found "Daisy" brand reduced-fat sour cream is fabulous and has like 4 ingredients in it, all natural. The texture is just a bit different than full-fat sour cream, but not in a bad way, and the taste is really good and fresh. And if you use cumin at all for flavoring Mexican and Indian dishes, I recommend using whole cumin seeds instead of powdered. Just a sprinkle of them really adds some punch to the dish.
-Homemade brownies. A perennial favorite at our house. They're usually gone within 24 hours at our house, but we actually managed to restrain ourselves and not finish them off for nearly 48 hours after I made them, this time!
-Grilled cheese & avocado sandwiches. I had an avocado that was really ripe and needed to be used up, but didn't have the ingredients to do much in the way of a Mexican dish with it. I've made cheese & guacamole quesadillas before, so I thought that avocado might work in grilled cheese OK. I added a splash of salsa and a spritz of lemon and a dash of garlic powder to the avocado, mashed it up, and slathered it on one piece of 9-grain bread. Then I layered a mixture of sharp cheddar and Irish Dubliner's cheese on top of that, another piece of bread, buttered it, and fried it in the pan like a regular grilled cheese sandwich. I also added some slices of red/yellow/green pepper to my sandwich but left them off J.'s as he's not as big a pepper fan as I am. They turned out really tasty, but super-filling. If you make this for dinner, I seriously doubt you'll have room for a bedtime snack even hours later.
-Soy sausage, chopped pepper and cheese omelets. Variations on the soy sausage and cheese omelet are pretty standard at our house since discovering "Gimme Lean" soy sausage. Good stuff!
I get this question less often since I live in the Ann Arbor area, which is pretty vegetarian-savvy, but it always amused me when people would find out we're mostly-vegetarians and ask us, "Well, what do you eat?" Pretty much anything except meat. We eat this kind of delicious stuff all the time, so I can't ever remember feeling deprived by not having meat as an option. . .
On New Year's Eve, we had a friend over, and I made my version of Pasta ala Bosca: whole wheat rotini with soy sausage, mushrooms, olive oil, red pepper flakes, and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese. I also made some garlic toast to go with it.
Once home from Florida, I got the cooking bug again, and J. even got in on the act by making us delicious whole wheat pancakes with bananas and pecans. I love this combination; the sugar from the bananas gets a bit carmelized in the frying pan, and the creation, overall, tastes a lot like banana bread. Good stuff!
Recently, I've also made:
-Sweet potato, white potato, and lentil curry. I've made varieties of this before without a recipe, but this time, I sort-of-kind-of followed a recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, and I think it turned out really well. Chopped peppers really added something to it.
-A weird Italian-ish bean casserole with biscuit dumplings on top. It sounded good in theory, but didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked. I wish I'd had a different assortment of veggies (stewed tomatoes and zucchini, maybe) and had used a smaller pan so that the casserole under the dumplings/biscuits had been deeper.
-Sweet potato and black bean enchiladas. A really nice flavor combination, and I thought the sauce especially was brilliant this time. However, I think I'd skin the sweet potatoes next time as the tough skins made texture a bit of an issue. I cooked the sweet potatoes, mashed them, and added reduced-fat sour cream and black beans and seasonings to be the filling. I have an issue with reduced fat sour cream, as some brands add all kinds of weird ingredients to make up for the missing fat. But I've found "Daisy" brand reduced-fat sour cream is fabulous and has like 4 ingredients in it, all natural. The texture is just a bit different than full-fat sour cream, but not in a bad way, and the taste is really good and fresh. And if you use cumin at all for flavoring Mexican and Indian dishes, I recommend using whole cumin seeds instead of powdered. Just a sprinkle of them really adds some punch to the dish.
-Homemade brownies. A perennial favorite at our house. They're usually gone within 24 hours at our house, but we actually managed to restrain ourselves and not finish them off for nearly 48 hours after I made them, this time!
-Grilled cheese & avocado sandwiches. I had an avocado that was really ripe and needed to be used up, but didn't have the ingredients to do much in the way of a Mexican dish with it. I've made cheese & guacamole quesadillas before, so I thought that avocado might work in grilled cheese OK. I added a splash of salsa and a spritz of lemon and a dash of garlic powder to the avocado, mashed it up, and slathered it on one piece of 9-grain bread. Then I layered a mixture of sharp cheddar and Irish Dubliner's cheese on top of that, another piece of bread, buttered it, and fried it in the pan like a regular grilled cheese sandwich. I also added some slices of red/yellow/green pepper to my sandwich but left them off J.'s as he's not as big a pepper fan as I am. They turned out really tasty, but super-filling. If you make this for dinner, I seriously doubt you'll have room for a bedtime snack even hours later.
-Soy sausage, chopped pepper and cheese omelets. Variations on the soy sausage and cheese omelet are pretty standard at our house since discovering "Gimme Lean" soy sausage. Good stuff!
I get this question less often since I live in the Ann Arbor area, which is pretty vegetarian-savvy, but it always amused me when people would find out we're mostly-vegetarians and ask us, "Well, what do you eat?" Pretty much anything except meat. We eat this kind of delicious stuff all the time, so I can't ever remember feeling deprived by not having meat as an option. . .