Quodlibets

Weekend Posting Resumes

I have nothing to blog about, which is why it's taken me this long to get around to it.  That, and I figured if nothing else came up, I could blog about dinner.  I was going to make this meal tomorrow night, but seeing as how Super Bowl whatever-and-a-half is the late game tomorrow (3 pm, for those of you non-football folks), I didn't think I'd be wanting to cook during the Thrilla in...Indianapolis.  So I got us to the grocery today (instead of our normal Sunday morning dealie) and decided to go ahead with the meal tonight.  It's from a recipe recommended by a co-worker; she said her family gobbled it up, and after hearing about it, I decided Sam would conceivably eat it, so why not try it?  Plus, it's casserole-y, which is right up my alley.

It's baked angel hair; sort of lasagna-like, but not exactly.  You cook a pound of angel hair, and layer it with a meat sauce made with bottled sauce, tomato sauce from a can, and ground beef.  Also in among the layers is cream of chicken soup mixed with sour cream, and mozzarella cheese.  (I did mod the recipe; I used cream of chicken instead of cream of mushroom, and I used mozzarella instead of colby-jack, and I'm glad I did both, though I suspect I would like cream of mushroom just fine.  It's Sam who won't abide anything mushroomy.)  And then you bake it.  For an hour. 

It was okay.  Certainly not bad, and definitely edible.  If you're thinking that the picture shows an uneatable amount of baked pasta, you're correct.  I'm experimentally freezing half of it to take out and eat later next week.  That's in addition to the two tupperwares I stored in the fridge for the rest of the week.  If Sam thinks I'm cooking anything else for the next week, he's out of luck.  I'm cooking this, and only this.  We'll be sick of it by next week.  So maybe I'll save that frozen bit for after our CA interlude.  If you're interested in a full recipe (with quantities and such), drop me a line.

It smells like high school in here

In a good way.  I cooked tonight, and I made something that my mom used to make all the time: chicken and asparagus.  It's a light, lemony pasta dish, something I loved then (and happen to still love).  The first time I lifted the lid on the skillet, to see if the chicken was done, the smell of home and high school hit me like a ton of bricks.  It hit my nose, and I could have been there.  And quite frankly, if the food had been crap (it wasn't, thank goodness!), I think I still would have inhaled it (in the um, oral sense).  Frankly, I ate it far too quickly than I should have, because it tasted so wonderful. 

Like always, I tweaked the recipe a little bit.  I put less pasta in (I don't need a lb. of pasta) and more asparagus (there's never too much asparagus), and used waaay less olive oil than recommended.  I also added a little bit of crushed red pepper with the thyme, which added a very muted heat (very, very small amount of pepper), which I love.  Instead of scallions, I used shallot, which is what I bought on accident.  And actually, I think I'll stick with it.  I loved the slightly caramelized taste of the soft shallot.  And my last tweak was to nearly double the amount of lemon juice at the end.  I can't get enough of lemony savory dishes (but oddly, I don't love lemony desserts), and I always thought, even as a teen, that there wasn't enough lemon, and if I do say so myself, I was right.  (Sorry mom!)

It felt good to be cooking again, and I'm wondering if there's some way I can get to the store at least twice a week, for the produce.  If I buy it ahead of time, it nearly always ends up going bad, but if I shop for it the day I want it, I generally am able to use it all up.  Which is what happened tonight.  I have some leftover shallot, but that might come in handy this weekend.  I have a bit of extra asparagus too, so maybe I'll make some turkey sausage/asparagus/lemon pasta.  I seriously can't get enough of the lemon.  Mmm, now I'm thinking about ceviche, which is non sequiter, but also usually very citrusy. 

Anyhow.  I feel like a better person because I cooked, and I know I have enough left over to bring for lunch, which is quite a treat.

Fake (and better for you) Alfredo

Technically speaking, what I made for dinner involved following a recipe.  Untechnically speaking, I'm not sure why I needed a recipe to help me put together this little assortment of ingredients.  Essentially, it looks like alfredo, and with the kick of parm it included, tasted and smelled a little bit like it too.  So here's what I did:  Boil pasta.  Drain (save 1 cup or so of the water before you drain) pasta.  Put pasta back in pan.  Throw in a chunk of goat cheese.  Sprinkle with parm.  Dribble pasta water in until the right consistency; add parm until you reach your preferred taste.

Easy, huh?  There were quantities in the recipe I used, but I couldn't be bothered, since I didn't want to cut a recipe into 1/8ths or whatever it would have been.  I only cook about a cup of pasta at a time (diet trick), and I just didn't feel like trying to figure out how much of the goat cheese and parm I needed.  So I just kind of threw together the cheeses and the pasta, and made it to taste. 

It was good.  You have to like goat cheese, obviously, to like this.  I love it, so it's right up my alley.  I also cooked an Italian chicken sausage (the fully cooked kind; all I did was saute it until slightly brown) and ate it on the side.  Although, most bites included pasta and sausage.  And it was pretty good.  The magazine I got it from (Everyday Food, online) suggests throwing any number of ingredients on top, and I'm sure any number of things would be good on it.  But I love love love sausage, and have recently begun to love the inclusion of chicken sausage into my diet.  (Actually, I also just bought some turkey breakfast sausage patties, and am thinking of freezing them individually, so when I make eggs for myself, as I often do at diet time, I can eat a little decadent [relatively, people] sausage.)  And like I said, the sausage + the fake alfredo was good.   Something I can see myself making again, which is against pattern for me.  In general, I try a recipe once and then move on.  Haven't made too many things more than once.  Sloppy Joes might be it.

Also, look for more new recipe posts coming up, because I've got to start cooking myself food if I'm going to stay on the diet.  Otherwise I just get too bored.  I am most likely making a quick vegetable soup on Thursday, and if I do, I'll let you know.  (I do also just have to say that the Everyday food magazine?  I heart it.  Great quick and easy recipes that are pretty darn healthy too.  I don't think I've tried this many recipes out of one magazine ever.  All my recent recipes?  Everyday Food.  And the television show [on PBS] also showcases the same sort of things.  Sometimes they're a little out there, but man, I'm really doing well from the mag.)

Roast with Veggies

Yum yum!  Though it required buying a lot of peripheral items (a cutting board with a juice channel, a meat thermometer) and a trip to the butcher's, my roast was a hit.  Basically, I took and eye-of-round roast, slathered it with olive oil, coarse salt, pepper and thyme, and then cooked it on a cookie sheet with yukon gold potatoes, one red, one yellow and one orange pepper, and one red onion.  Oh, and three whole garlic cloves.  Oh, and I stuck slivered garlic into the roast.  And actually, I used a pretty modest amount of olive oil, making this one of the more healthy meals you can cook and eat.  I did end up cooking it a bit longer than suggested, since S likes his meat more on the medium-well side of medium, and the meat thermo was telling me to leave it in longer.  Which meant that I had to take the veggies off early for fear of burning and yadda yadda.  But the meat thermo didn't lie, and I would say that medium-well was where we ended up.  Still slightly pink in the middle, but mostly done.

The potatoes were absolutely delicious, as were the peppers.  The onions were okay.  Not the best ever, but edible, especially when combined with a piece of meat.  The garlic cloves came out mostly spreadable, too, and since we made some of those tubed breadsticks, that was nice.  I did hate the fact that most of the tasty crust of the meat came off, as it was fat.  (You know, to keep the roast moist.  Thanks mooj, for confirming that I was correct to leave that fat on!)  I did kind of regret that, because tht salty, thymey crust was awesome on the end piece.  Still, all in all, it's a one dish meal, and besides all the chopping, mostly hands-off and easy to cook.  I think it's something I'll make again, although only every once in a while, because roasts are expensive.  Although, I'm hoping to make some sort of beef wrap with lettuce, green pepper and a little mayo for dinner tomorrow, thus making use of the leftover roast and spreading the cost out over two meals.  Very nice.  (We found a GREAT butcher in the city, which we'll probably continue to use when we need nicer, tastier cuts of meat.  Or homemade sausages, beef jerky, pepperoni, salami, ravioli...etc.  Great place.  Can't stress it enough.)

Anyway.  Yummo!  Yay for me!  Two dinner experiments in one week.

Black Bean Soup for One

Because you clearly cannot expect S to eat beans.  In any form.

Anyway, the soup was very good.  Definitely something I'll make again, mostly because it's perfectly freezeable, and so next time I want it, I can pull it out of my freezer and have a warm, pretty freaking nourishing/good for me meal.

I found the recipe in Real Simple food, and if this is the only recipe I make from it, it was well worth it.  Here's the ingredients:  1 tsp olive oil, 1 pint (I used a 14 oz tub) fresh salsa, 1 can black beans, 1 can black refried beans, 1 can chicken stock.  I tweaked, as always.  First of all, I forgot to drain the beans, or rather, didn't realize I had to.  So I ended up not using a whole can of chicken stock, because it seemed like way too much liquid.  Also, I wasn't sure if 14 oz was a pint, but I figured that more tomatoes can't be bad, and I was right.  I do think that with a higher quality fresh salsa (mine was from the regular grocery store; next time I want to make this, I'll do it with salsa from TJ's or WF.  Also, I used low-fat/low-sodium chicken stock, to minimize the fat in the dish, and I also used fat-free black refried beans.  I wish I could say that it was so I could cut the fat, but the truth is, that's all I could find in my grocery store.  The whole dish took 25 minutes, from the moment I dumped the salsa in the oil to simmer for four minutes, to the end when I dished it into my bowl.  (Basically, saute the salsa for four minutes.  Add remaining ingredients, bring to a simmer and cook 5 more minutes.  Not kidding.)

I'm sure there's any number of tweaks you could perform on this recipe.  Fresh cilantro if you like it, spicier salsa if you like that.  I personally can see adding more beans, as it seemed to be on the runny side.  Also, I wish I had salted the pot a bit as it was cooking.  I served myself the soup with a dollop of Lite sour cream, and some crappy store-bought guac.  But this would be probably pretty delish with a garnish of fresh tomato or fresh avocado too.  Also, if you had a really high quality guac--Mamacita's, say--it would be dynomite.  But really, if you have a great fresh chunky salsa, you have most of the flavor you need. 

Seriously, this is one meal that I didn't mind making after work.  It was entirely pleasurable.  I'm very happy, and I wish RS Food would cough up some more recipes like this.

In which I cook smelly food

So last night I made sauerkraut.  It wasn't technically supposed to be sauerkraut--I used a recipe called "Sweet and Sour Cabbage"--but nonetheless, sauerkraut it was.  Actually, when I originally decided to try the recipe, I mistakenly thought it was a recipe for sweet and sour cabbage soup.  I'm not sure why I thought it would be soup, considering that the recipe nowhere mentions anything remotely soupy.

You might wonder why I didn't just write up the cabbage last night, and here's the answer:  I didn't eat the cabbage last night.  I meant to, I really did, but the cabbage took WAY longer than a half hour to be ready, and I was hungry.  Plus, after I took my first little taste I knew I'd need kielbasa or bratwurst to actually make use of the dish.  So this morning, I betook my tired butt to the store (before the Bears game) and bought chicken bratwurst and some lite smoked sausage. 

And so that's what I ate just a short half hour ago.  The cabbage was very good--far richer than normal sauerkraut, due to the butter and balsamic, I would think.  And it's not exactly sauerkraut, because it's just a tad too sweet.  But the idea's the same, and it went incredibly well with my (delicious!) chicken brat.  I've frozen two tupperware containers full of cabbage (the recipe made an incredibly large amount of finished product) and I think I'm going to force some on my mom at some point.  I know that's kind of mean, but I think she might enjoy it.  She's the only person I know who really LIKES cabbage, and I figure she may as well try my handiwork.  Maybe I can eat it with her.

So, one experiment down, one to go.  I think I'll end up doing the black bean soup on Thursday (?) or possibly Tuesday.  Not sure.

I've cooked dinner already

Remember when I was trying to cook one new dish a week?  Yeah, that fell by the wayside when summer and its incredible bounty of events happened.  And then the move, and well, you can see how the meals stopped coming.  We simply stopped cooking altogether. 

However, since we're settling in, and since we can no longer afford to eat out constantly (and even though we are in a place where we could happily eat out constantly), we've been cooking.  At first, we limited it to normal, boring things like chicken patties and hot dogs and egg sandwiches and lean cuisines and frozen pizzas.  But then I took out the slow cooker S's mom gave me for my birthday and decided to experiment.  Last week I made a roast that was intended to be a French Dip.  It wasn't really a french dip, so much as it was a roast we made into sandwiches because dammit, I bought rolls!  It tasted fairly pleasant, though I thought it was over-spiced and a little bit dry.  (S is a freak, however, and likes meat dry.  He prefers dry Thanksgiving turkey to moist, and I guess the same is true of a roast.)  It was by no means the best thing I've ever cooked (the barley...or the turkey sausage Giada pasta would be the contender for that crown), but it wasn't bad, either. 

So tonight, we invited my mom and sister over and I'm attempting another roast.  This one will have potatoes and carrots in the mix, instead of the subpar potatoes of last week (mashed, disaster.  I apparently do not have the knack for knowing when my potatoes are done.).  And I'm making corn on the cob, purchased at the local green market.  We had this same corn on the cob last week and it was fabulous.  Also, I bought some frozen rolls at WF, because they're fat free! and they look tasty!  and my sister just might refuse to eat the meat I've cooked, and so I'm trying very hard to provide her with many food options.  Just so she doesn't feel like she HAS to eat a turkey hot dog.  Which we have, and will cook for her, but still. 

The roast and veggies are in the cooker now, and have been for a half hour.  I've become one of those annoying people that likes to get up early, and do stuff.  I'm not kidding.  I woke up at 6:05 this morning, quite naturally, and feel wonderful now.  And I wasn't even resentful of the getting up.  Of course, I did pass out on the couch last night around 10, which might explain the waking up so early.  Nonetheless, I now vastly prefer this than the other option, which is to mess completely with my schedule by sleeping in on the weekend. 

God, I'm lame.

I'm sort of cheating

On the dinner experiment thing.  Because all I did was roast a big ol' bunch of asparagus with olive oil and lemon juice and sea salt.  I'd never done it before, so it was sort of a dinner experiment.  I should have cooked them for a minute or so less--it was a little done.  But pretty yummy, nonetheless.  And very filling.  I will absolutely be doing the asparagus roasting again. 

In Which We Attempt to Make a Wahoo's Fish Taco

We did not, I might add, precisely succeed.  It's not that the fish was bad.  It just wasn't right. 

I went to Whole Foods and bought a gigantic piece of fish.  Halibut, to be completely accurate.  There were four people in front of me at the fish counter, and every single one of them bought a big piece of salmon.  I hate salmon.  Anyway, salmon doesn't make a very good fish taco.  Now, because I bought the fish at WF, you can imagine it cost me an arm and a leg.  If we failed at this, you understand, it would be a very expensive failure.

We've never cooked fish here.  Fish is scary, I think.  It's hard to cook a piece of whitefish well, and S really has only branched out into fish eating recently, so we just never tried.  I ate fish in restaurants, and it was fine.  But then S went to CA and discovered Wahoo's, and their mastery of the taco filled with fish.  Also, we had a sample experience at WF with a piece of halibut and some marinade, and liked it very much.  At which point, I came home and scouted recipes for halibut.  I found a yummy-sounding prosciutto-roasted halibut recipe, and was all set to pick up the fish on the way home and cook it, when I realized I don't have a skillet that can go in the oven.  When I called S to inform him of the problem, he said, well, why don't we make fish tacos?  On Thursday.  So.  Here we are.

We picked up taco stuff--guac and salsa from WF, sour cream, cheese for him, lettuce for me, corn tortillas--and then I investigated the best way to cook fish.  I decided on grilling, which seemed like the best taco option.  I found a very, very basic recipe--brush the fish with a mixture of canola oil and lime juice, salt and pepper, and voila! grill.  Which might have been the problem.  We needed more flavor.  S wants to try to find some sort of marinade like we tried at WF, but aimed towards the taco.  I think we might be able to use some sort of spice mix/rub, but I'm not sure what. 

I do know that we're going to try this again, and we're going to buy less fish next time.  It was waaaay too much for us, and getting less will cost us less.  I would like to try roasting as well, just to see.  I'll keep posting updates as we cook more fish.

Now, I'm going to sit on my couch and molt.  At least I don't have to work tomorrow.

Back on the wagon

Tonight, for the first time in weeks, I made a new recipe.  I'd been lusting after this one since Monday night, when S presented me with a small present from his mom--one of Giada DeLaurentiis' cookbooks (if that's spelled wrong, oh well.  The book's not in front of me, and I'm too lazy to look it up.).  I don't love Giada, because I think she looks too skinny to be a cook.  She looks like she doesn't eat the food she cooks, and that annoys me.  However, I will admit that her food is infinitely more accessible, at least cooking-wise, than that other maestro of Italian food, Mario Batali. 

Anyway, the recipe.  Farfalle with Turkey Sausage, Peas and Mushrooms.  Primo delicioso.  It wasn't that difficult to make, and it tastes very good.  I really like the taste of turkey sausage in things.  I think it's almost better than regular Italian sausage.  Anyway, I didn't cut the recipe in half, because that's a pain in the ass with sausages, and I used fewer mushrooms (and baby Portobellos to boot) because the packages aren't in the size she specified.  I also used WAAAAY less oil, and I don't think it's missing anything.  And it's better for me.  (In general, I think cookbooks use too much oil.  I'm not sure if it's just my tastes, but it's too heavy and greasy.  I usually end up cutting out at least half of the oil from any given recipe.)  I didn't season according to her quantities either, but added as much as I thought it needed.  I season by eye these days.  (Unless I'm making sloppy joe.)

So yeah.  I would recommend it.  I could see myself making it again, but next time, I'd like to make it for someone else, who could enjoy it with me.  Sometimes I'm so sad that S doesn't like this kind of thing, only because I like to share good food.  I want him to taste it and tell me that it's as fantastic as I think it is.  Regardless.  Yum yum.