Killing Your Sacred Cows since 1992

J. thought it'd be a good idea to skip our usual gym trip and hit happy hour instead to celebrate the start of our 3 day weekend. I didn't argue.

He had the "Hippie Sliders" and I had a grilled veggie sandwich (with pesto!) and sweet potato chips. And we both had beer. Mmm, beer.

Yum!

I 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. . .

This is an excuse to use my new icon, of course. I'm holding up the chocolate fudge cake I made this weekend as a birthday cake for a friend. I finished it with chocolate frosting and a really bad job of decorating it with sprinkles and colored sugar- it looked like a 3-year old's refrigerator art.

I was telling J. I don't think I've baked a cake the entire time he and I have been together. If I bake at all, it's likely to be muffins, cookies, or brownies. I just generally don't make cakes because I'm not a huge fan of them. Mainly, I like the gooey/chewy texture of brownies better than the light/fluffy feel of cakes, especially if they're too dry. This was just from a box mix, so pretty hard to screw up.

Last week, J. made brownies. They were just from a box, but he added chocolate chips and chopped pecans and brought most of them to work, where they were a hit. He had two co-workers tell him he had two new wives, since he had fed them...

As for me, I haven't been cooking from scratch a great deal; I sort of go through phases. Lately, it's been more about using pre-packaged things and jazzing them up a bit. One of our favorites in that category is making mac 'n' cheese from the box with more real cheese and either peas or broccoli for a bit of green veggies in the meal.

I've also recently made:
-Baked pasta dish with assorted veggies, soy sausage, and cheese
-Cheese & guacamole quesadillas
-Breakfast burritos (eggs, cheese, soy sausage, sour cream & salsa in a tortilla)
-Egg & cheese bagels (a favorite quickie meal around our house)
-Fruit salad (pears/apples/mango/kiwi)
-Tuna melt
-Veggie burgers with all the fixings

We need to get more potatoes soon, because I've been craving them. I think I'm going to make baked potatos with broccoli and cheese sometime soon.

We've been eating out here and there, but I'm getting into that nesting thing that happens when it gets colder and darker, and have been making a lot of food at home. Recently:

-Cheesy potato & broccoli soup in the crockpot
-Brownies from scratch
-Bean & rice enchiladas with green sauce
-Potato tacos
-Cheese & soy sausage omelets
-Curried chick peas and carrots
-Homemade mac n cheese with broccoli
-Taco salad (something that's become a recent favorite for a nutritious and filling quick lunch)

Potato tacos are really easy, and I don't know why I don't make them more often. Basically, you buy the crunchy corn shells, and then make spicy mashed potatoes for filling. I made the mashed potatoes with reduced-fat sour cream, a small dab of butter, green salsa, a couple dashes of powdered cumin and a couple dashes of chili powder. Stuff the mashed potatoes in the shells, top with shredded cheese & chopped lettuce of your choice, and enjoy.

I've been asked for two recipes, one for honey oatmeal bread, and one for the grilled salmon I made at a friend's recently (I don't have a grill but plan to try it in the toaster oven soon). Here they are:

Honey Oatmeal Bread:
This is the recipe for my specific breadmaker. If you were doing a loaf and kneading by hand and such, I would probably double the recipe, as this was a pretty small loaf.


7 & 1/2 ounce warm water
3 TBSP honey
2 cups bread flour (I used 1 & 1/2 white and 1/2 c. whole wheat)
1 cup oats (quick or old-fashioned)
1&1/2 tsp salt
1&1/2 TBSP dry milk (I just added a TBSP wet milk to the water)
1&1/2 TBSP butter/margarine
2 tsp yeast (or 1&1/2 bread machine yeast)

1. Add the liquid ingredients to the pan.
2. Add the dry ingredients, except the yeast, to the pan. Tuck bits of butter in the corners of the pan
3. Make a divot in the middle of the dry ingredients and add the yeast to it.
4. Start the breadmaker on basic setting.

Grilled pepper & ginger salmon
1. Take 2 Gortons grilled salmon fillets (they're already partly pre-cooked) and thaw them in the fridge or microwave on 50 percent until they're still cool but not frozen.
2. Put them in a small container and cover them in chopped peppers and onions (I used a frozen mix of green/yellow/red bell peppers, but fresh would be even better).
3. Cover the fish and peppers with a ginger-soy sauce marinade. You can google up an easy recipe on the internet, but I used the Paul Newman's Lowfat Sesame Ginger salad dressing. Let marinate for an hour or so.
4. Drain off a bit of the marinade and transfer the fish & veggies to a large piece of tinfoil, and wrap the tinfoil around the fish to make a sealed pouch. Grill over charcoal for 12-15 minutes or until the fish flakes when you poke it with a fork.

I imagine 12-15 minutes in my toaster oven will probably do the trick as well, but I'll have to experiment with that. I may try adding some broccoli and carrots to the peppers & onions as well.

I tend to go in cycles where I'll pick an ingredient (usually a quality protein or a vegetable I like but don't eat as often as I'd like) and will use it in various applications, and I've done a bit of that lately.

I know I'm forgetting a few things, but a list of what I've been cooking/baking:
-Various things with soy sausage, including cheese & sausage omelets.
-Various things with red bell pepper, including omelets and salad.
-A recent favorite salad combo has been greens, cucumber slices, thinly sliced red bell pepper, herbed feta cheese, and reduced-fat Caesar dressing.
-Another variation on my fruitee oatee bars. This time, I used 2 apples, sliced, and about 2/3 of a cup of frozen-then-thawed blackberries. It turned out a bit drier than some of the other fruit combos I've used before. I think if I go with apples again, I'll add not only the drizzle of honey I used this time, but also a tablespoon of water mixed with a teaspoon of lemon juice.
-Bean and veggie enchiladas with green sauce. The sauce was from a can and it turned out a bit soupy, but still good. I did NOT use the recipe from the can, which called for mozarella. Philistines! I used colby-jack but would have used chihuahua cheese if I'd had it on hand.
-Filled acorn squash. I had leftover enchilada filling, and it went into the two halves of an acorn squash that I'd baked, cut side down, at 400 degrees for 50 minutes. The recipes I'd read called for a whole hour, but the squash halves were practically mush after 50 minutes, so this seems excessive.

What I want to make next is potato salad with these little round red potatoes I have, and fresh dill from my yard. Maybe tonight...

-In the last few weeks, we tried a couple variations on make-your-own burritos. One night, we had refried beans, soy sausage and cheese in multi-grain tortillas. Generally, I think white Azteca brand tortillas are crap, but their multi-grain ones are surprisingly good. Another night, I made a 3-egg-and-cheese omelet, cut that in half, and slapped each half into a multi-grain tortilla along with refried beans and salsa.

-About a week ago, I made cheesecake brownies. You can get packaged mixes, but making it from scratch is really easy, too. Take a box of brownie mix and make it according to instructions, or make your favorite homemade brownie recipe to fit a 9X13 pan. Then, take an entire package of cream cheese (we used the reduced-fat neufchatel kind), add one egg and 1/4 c. of sugar and beat with a rotary beater until it resembles really fine-curd cottage cheese. Spoon evenly over the brownie mix that's already in a greased pan. Then take a knife and pull it through the pan several times to swirl the cheescake mixture through the brownies. Bake at the temperature and for as long as the normal brownie recipe calls for- voila!

-Earlier this week, I made homemade pizza. I have a recipe for a crust that's part white flour/part whole wheat, and I made it with homemade sauce, cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh chopped basil.

-Later in the week, I had leftover pizza dough, and I made it into cheesy-garlic breadsticks. Not bad, but a little chewy. They were best dipped in a marinara sauce.

-The breadsticks were a side dish that went with a home-cooked pasta dish I made: whole wheat rotini with tomato sauce, mushrooms, broccoli, and sund-dried tomatoes.

-Today, I made mint-infused water. I ganked the idea from airsucker who ganked it from slashfood.com. Soooo nice on a warm day.
http://www.slashfood.com/2007/08/29/cool-down-with-mint-infused-water/

-Also today, made a variation on Taco Salad. Del Monte makes these low-fat/non-fat "Savory Sides," and I got a can of the Santa Fe Corn, which comes with beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, and spices. I combined half a can of this with some Boca Burger crumbles, heated it up, and ladled it over mixed greens. Topped it with shredded cheese, tortilla chips, and low-fat sour cream. Had a side of corn on the cob with butter, salt & black pepper.

Growing children need fat, including sat fat, in their diets. Up to 35 percent of calories from fat is perfectly fine for toddlers and even teenagers. And adult women have a slightly higher need for fat in the diet than men do. Interesting stuff in this age of hysteria over dietary fat:

http://www.nutritionj.com/content/6/1/19/abstract

Between articles like this:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/photogalleries/bluefin-tuna/index.html

and listening to "Cod" as a book on CD, I'm getting very concerned about over-fishing and am feeling guilty about eating fish now, even though it's only once or twice a week.

Supposedly, wild salmon and other wild fish is better for you than farmed fish, but if this is the price you pay for eating wild fish, I'm not sure it's worth it.

I really ought to make it more of a priority to visit Trade Joe's more often. It's not really on my way anywhere, but whenever people bring over food from there, it's almost always delicious.

This weekend's festivities exposed me to three snacks-- two from Trader Joe's-- that I'd never had before. My opinion on each follows:

-Baked Cheetos. They're OK. They have a nice cheesy taste and texture, but they don't have the mouth feel of the full-fat Cheeto, so they weren't as satsifying. I think they'd be good as part of snack mix with cheezits and pretzels.

-Trader Joe's Poppy Seed Corn Tortilla Chips (not the exact name, but I don't have the package in front of me). Yum! Interesting texture, and really tasty for scooping up hummus.

-Trader Joe's Ridge Cut Salt and Pepper Potato Chips. Yum, yum, yum! I love the thick-cut potato chips, and the black pepper gives them a little something extra. So flavorful that just a handful is really satisfying.