At least now I know what a galette is now...

Roasted apple and butternut squash galette with maple mustard glaze.  Admittedly it sounds far more toothsome than it actually was but at least I know what a galette is now.

April 18, 2012

Not exactly a meatless monday

I know that it's Monday and Monday is supposed to mean meatless but bacon doesn't really count right? I mean, it's like 97% veggie and just the teensiest, most insignificant bit of salty delicious bacon to make the Brussels sprouts more, shall we say, delicious?

March 26, 2012

Meatless Monday Rides Again!

It is my honest belief that if bacon cannot make a meal better, cheese can.  It's true, I have the belly and the booty to prove it.  Unfortunately, just because this is so does not mean that one should be adding these things to each meal and it is in the spirit of that (and my arteries) that I'm bringing back Meatless Monday.

Does fish count as meat?  The Catholics seem to think not as is evidenced by fish fries on Firdays but I've really always wondered why.  I ask because this picture is from a week or so ago and I ate fish tonight.  I hope this doesn't subtract from my record.

Behold! 

March 5, 2012

Roasted sweet potatoes and cherry tomatoes served wtih sauteed spinach and onions and topped with an over-medium egg. Suprisingly deee-lish! 

mmm shepherds pie

I don't generally spend my days bemoaning my singledom but I have to admit that I do miss having someone to cook for.

Someone to try out new recipes on. 

Someone share comfort food with after a long day, sipping wine in the kitchen while the food cooks.


Individual Shepherds Pies
March 1, 2012

I love to cook, in large part because I love to eat but I find that I do it less now that I'm single. Occasionally I will get a bug to try a new recipe or eat risotto and I do value myself enough to follow through on those very simple wants.  I love the cooking but the eating, it just isn't as much fun. 

Thank goodness for friends who are willing to be fed with the guarentee that should my culinary experimentation turn out poorly I'll certainly spring for pizza.

Operation Chana Masala

I heard that when it comes to food there are two kinds of people: people who eat to live and people who live to eat.  I assume that if I were one of the former I'd be much thinner as I've heard people of this persuasion express their complete satisfaction at all but living on toast and fruit.  I've even heard one say that they just "don't have much interest in food."  DON'T HAVE MUCH INTEREST IN FOOD?!  If you expect to be my friend and you don't enjoy food, you'd better be bringing something fan-damn-tastic to the table in exchange.
 As it is I live to eat and while I'm clearly not ashamed of it, I'd like to make a reasonable love affair, one that doesn't result in my being a blobby extra in Wall-E the TV show. 

This quest for delicious and healthy food has lead me to Indian food. It's fragrant, complex in flavor but simple in composition.  It's often vegetarian, yogurty (which isn't a word but it should be), high in fiber and low in sodium.  It's exactly what I was looking for. 

February 15, 2012

It also satisfies my love of concocting in the kitchen.  Presiding over sizzling spices, simmering pots and sauteeing vegetables.

And for my next trick, I shall find someone too cook for. :-)

Please sir, may I have some more

One of my new life resolutions has been to eat breakfast.  I hate breakfast.  Actually hate might be too strong of a word, but at the very least I loathe eating breakfast.  I'm not hungry when I get up and it goes against every I-want-to-be-thin bone in my body to eat when I'm not hungry (you know, when it's not french fries or dessert) but the side of me that is swayed by evidence based arguments knows that I need to eat it.  

So here is evidence that I'm eating not only breakfast but a healthy, protein-y, complex carb-y and fruity breakfast. It's the fuel for my mother fucking day and I'm eating every single god damned morning. This had better be worth it.

January 19, 2012

Post Soup-Cheese-Chocolate Tourte Carnage

I do so enjoy soup and cheese night with foodie friends.  It's always tasty and sometimes, just sometimes, someone adopts a new kitteh and snuggles abound!

January 10, 2012

Healthy Eating for the New Year

January 2, 2012

I had to take my new immersion blender for a spin and thought why not some green soup?

That's how you do it bitches...

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, what's not to like about good food, good drink, family and a long weekend?  Especially when there's pumpkin pie to the be had!

Continuing the long standing tradition of baking pies with Erica the Wednesday before Thanksgiving ... beautiful pumpkin pies were made.

November 23, 2011

about that whole cooking thing

I had a goal last week, a goal to cook three healthy meal as week that I blogged about here.  It was a small goal, piddly even and seemingly easily achieved.   There was a second goal last week that I hadn't blogged about, equally as piddly and seemingly easy to achieve, which was to not work excessive overtime.  I epically failed on both counts. 

In the face of having waxed poetic about setting small but achievable goals and then failing to meet said goals, I can only conclude that I am an imperfect person who at times cannot meet even the smallest of goals.    I do suspect however that failure at the second goal may be at least in part responsible for failure of the first.

Life might not be inherently messy but mine is and only two meals were cooked this week: Bean and Hominy Potpie and Lime Chicken with Avocado Salsa.  I did however put a patient on a study, scored a dubious point against EPIC electronic records, practiced the virtue of patience, ran circles in 100+ degree heat, did the right thing over the easy thing at least twice and talked at length about leukemia with a very scared and nervous woman.  In light of all this I opted for:

instead of Zucchini Fritters with Tzatziki on Thursday night. 

Two words: worth. it.

3 Meals a Week is all a working girl needs

I'm not sure when it happened or even how it happened but I'm coming to enjoy cooking. I especially love to cook when I don't have to cook.  There's something about knowing that a peanut butter and jelly sammich is just moments away makes me want to chop, dice, mix, puree and (this one in particular) stir.  Stirring veggie ragouts or brownie batter makes no difference, I just like to stir things.  I'm starting to think that this is a genetic predisposition because my sister has the same affinity, as was proved by the cranberry sauce debacle of 2005. 

I've been setting a lot of a goals lately. Most of these goals are small, they are tangible and they are so far from earth shattering that at face value they are a little pathetic but they are achievable.  The hope is when these small and slightly pathetic goals have been met, I can set more small and slightly pathetic goals and one step at a time I'll get closer to being the person that I want to be and living the kind of life that I want to live.

One of these goals is to cook three meals a week.  It's nothing compared to what some of my friends do even in a single day, but this is me and in my life, cooking three healthy, tasty, veggie filled meals a week is something that doesn't happen right now but with a little bit of effort, could.  So on tap this week:

Bean and Hominy PotPie (courtesy of Eating Well magazine)

Greek Zucchini Fritters with Tzatziki Sauce and green salad.

Cilantro Lime Chicken with avocado salsa. (Pictures to come.)

Operation Peirogi

To complete the weekend of ill advised cooking adventures, yesterday I attacked pirogi. This is a first for me in that while I'm an expert pirogi eater,  I've never made them myself and haven't seen them made since I was in elementary school.  So despite a distinct lack of hands on experience I ventured forth armed with my Grandma's recipe, a gray, cold Sunday and cleaning the house to procrastinate.

Mary Kukulka's Pierogi Recipe

The Recipe (yes this is a proper noun) was supplemented with some scattered verbal instructions (when in doubt double, better yet triple the butter) but also did a little Googling to fill in the gaps in the hopes of missing a few common pitfalls.  This guy is way ramped up over his pirogi making as it is apparently very, very serious business.  While he should probably cut back on his caffeine intake, there was helpful information buried amongst the passion.

There's all sorts of stuffing for these tasty little suckers and while I'm sure I will attempt the others at a later date, potato and cheese are favored by my fam so I went with those.  The potato pirogi stuffing was made the night before per the practice of Grandma.

She always said that it was best to get it out of the way and after all the rolling, stuffing and boiling that was about to commence, she was right. 

Thankfully I had become quite well acquainted with my mixer the day before because I ended up making three batches of pirogi dough.

Apparently one batch of potatoes requires a triple batch of dough - duly noted. And can I just say that there was nothing more I wanted this weekend than a KitchenAid mixer?  I spent a decent amount of both Saturday and Sunday cursing my sister for not registering for one when she got married so that I could have borrowed it this weekend.  Sigh...the girl just doesn't think ahead!

According to my Mom (hi Mama!) I showed a penchant for rolling out this dough as a 12 year old, so 25 years later I attacked it again.  I mean, it can't possibly be as hard as making Grandmother's pie crust right?  right?!?  Right:

It isn't nearly so difficult as that stinkin' pie crust, maybe I'll try that one when Mama's here next week.  Stay on the edges of your seats and keep a tight hold on those nipples, this is thrilling stuff. 

Stuffing placed:

Sealed with water, finger pinchin' and then finished off for good measure with a fork:

Boiled: 

and laid to rest:

Four and a half hours and four explosion casualties later I had 83 hand-made pirogi to gaze up on with glee.  It sure looks pathetic for 4 1/2 hours worth or work.  Then we ate them:

Not quite as good as Grandma's (as was expected) but a sight better than Mrs. T's if I do say so myself.   Plus a whole load frozen for later consumption once the fam arrives.  

This Christmas will be a lot of firsts for me  It will be my first with Wes- yay!  It will be the first one where I do not wake up with my parents in the same house - boo.  It will also be the first one in over a decade that I won't be at my Grandma's house. My Grandma passed away this past summer, peacefully and without pain which is exactly what she deserved.  I haven't found a way to write about her, it's hard to know what to say about a woman who I knew for my entire life but only a tiny portion of hers.  I'm still working on that but what I do know is that of the things that are quintessentially Christmas to me, my Grandma's pirogi is a big one.   My Grandma is not here this year and I think that I can speak for my whole family when I say that we miss her terribly.  My Grandma is not here this year but the tradition of her pirogi 's (imperfect as they are) will be.

Grandma, Christmas 2009

This post brought to you under the supervision of Kitchen Cat. 


He iz slepin' in ur kitchen



Wotchin' u kook and tipe



Christmas Cookie Bake 2010

There are some movies that just never ever get old.  I'm not sure what it is about them - but there's a handful of movies (Ocean's11, You've Got Mail, Love Actually and S.W.A.T just to name a few)  that I can just watch over, and over, and over without ever getting bored.  I know what happens and by this time I could probably recite most of them but they always help to pass the time when time passing is needed.

I'm thinking about this today because while I'm generally opposed to just having the TV on in the background, but I've been baking and cooking all weekend and have kept movies on in the background to keep from going absolutely bonkers.  It's the weekend before Christmas and along with my questionable decision to take on several large cooking projects about 30 seconds before needing the house to be so fresh and so clean clean, there are thankfully movies galore on TV to keep me entertained. 

Yesterday's task was cookies, cookies and more cookies.  Topsises of the list was my quintessential Christmas cookie: Julie Kearny's Gingersnaps.   Apparently these gingersnaps are the same as those made by my Great Grandmother on my Mama's side but hey, I know Julie and I remember eating hers and so I maintain: Julie's GingerSnaps. It just isn't Christmas until the Gingersnaps are made.  Second on the list was by request: Peanut Butter Chocolate Kiss Cookies for the Wes.  I also made and froze some homemade sugar cookie dough to make Snickerdoodles later this week for Club Fun (they're an Ashleigh fave) and my sister who also loves them.  The amount of butter I went through on Saturday alone is sinful, but the results were tasty and festive: 

Cookie Exchange Boxes and some extras for the Wes :)

Today's project was Grandma's Pirogi but that, is a whole other post of it its own. 



QotD: Holiday Edition

"Around the holidays I have a few really important rules, one of them is ALWAYS serve cocktails.  The other is to serve things that I can make ahead."

-- Ina Garten

The Barefood Contessa



My First British Thanksgiving

I bet you didn't know that those crazy Brits celebrate US Thanksgiving.  Should you toss the bull shit flag on this you'd be right (at least according to Wikipedia ) but if you think that Club Fun is going to let that fly, you'd be seriously understimating us. 

Meet Club Fun:

I think this might be the night that I learned you can put butter in rice
Deeeelish !

Matthew (former El Presidente del Equipo de Divertido, recently replaced by yours truly for survices rendered this past weekend) formally came into possession of a hard earned MBA from UF this past weekend.  Club Fun always endorses higher learning and celebrations were in order.  As is  par for the course with Club Fun meetings, funsies ensued. There was no cheese but there was beer, white wine spritzer, sushi and (a slightly belated) Thanksgiving, British style. 

Now, Matt is is your quintessential American guy.  He (rightfully) refers to football as football (none of that football-that-is-soccer nonsense pepetuated by the rest of the planet,) he quotes the Simpson's with inspiring accuracy and giggles when Harry Potter says "boogies."  Given all of this, it's usually a bit startling to meet his family who are all quite English.  Spend enough time with them and you'll find yourself using the words lovely and charming with increasing frequency.  This year, they had a belated Thanksgiving (awesome though they may be, they are Brits and thus are okay with having Thanksgiving in December) while Matt and Ashleigh were in town and I was invited to join.    This is nothing short of outstanding for me.

So you see, I've been hearing about the English Thanksgiving menu since I met Matt almost a decade ago. His American-ness encomapasses a zeal for Thanksgiving that puts most Thanksgiving enthusiasts to shame.  His enthusiasm stems from a love of gravy and he all but waxes poetic as he describes the house made of stuffing balls that he plans to fill with gravy and then roof with sausages.  Sausages you say?  Yes, British Thanksgiving includes sausages:

I have to say that they are an OUSTANDING addition to traditional Thanksgiving fodder and there will be sausages at Thanksgiving next year, this I can promise you.  British Thanksgiving was everything that I had dreamed it to be with tasty wine and amazing food made by Matthew's quite lovely and charming mom.  They don't have to include me in these family events but it certainly gives me warm fuzies that they do. 

And, because this was technically a Club Fun meeting, this entry wouldn't be complete without some Sabra lovin'.  She is the mascot after all.  And so I leave you with the unbearable cuteness that is Seniorita Sabra:

She's WAAAY bigger now but this is so unbearably
cute that I just have to post it :)

Meatless Monday Success!

The past few weeks I have tried to participate in Meatless Mondays (hence forth to be referred to as MM) not because I want to be a vegetarian (I'm not sure that I want to live in a world without cheeseburgers and steak) but because I see the health and environmental benefit to eating juuust a little bit less meat and a few more veggie.  I also think that it'll help me expand my veggie repertoire from the same old veggies that I prepare each week, perhaps encouraging me to eat more veggies, more often. My ass is displeased with this plan as it fears that it may, as a result of MM have a smaller role to play in upcoming years. Fear not ass-of-mine, I suspect that you are here to stay regardless of MM.

My previous attempts at MM have only been partially successful as I've ended up with turkey on a sandwich or bacon bits on a salad each time I've tried. This past Monday marks my first, 100% successful MM!

Breakfast:

Lunch:

Dinner:

I'll admit that breakfast and lunch weren't too terribly impressive but I was quite pleased and satisfied with my Naan bread pizza with pesto, zucchini, tomatoes and goat cheese. This particular MM was both adherent to the concept and (far more importantly) tasty and satisfying.

Quote of the Day

"I'm so sorry for the delay, I was munching on a bag of chips and time flies when you're eating chips."

A word on portion control...

I'm not sure whether my tendency to be found scraping the bottom of what once held my Amy's Mattar Paneer

is a testament to the tastyness of said food or just an indication of a personal rebellion against portion control.

I suspect it is both.

This is why Michele and I are friends...

Me: I ate a Nutella Panini for dinner last night.

Michele: Calling it a panini makes it completely okay. Slice up a banana, press it with the Nutella and you could call it healthy.

mmmmm custard

I remember when being sick meant that my mom took the day off of work to stay home and coddle me into being better.  Sick with a fever generally meant a sleeping bag or nest of blankies on the couch, along with movies that not only did I not have to go get but I also didn't even have to put in the VCR, because lets be real, we're not talking DVDs were talking VHS.  Depending on the severity of said sickness, it usually meant clean sheets mirculously appearing on my bed and homemade custard in little, single serving glass bowls with maple syrup in the bottom.

At the moment I'm thinking that being an adult is feeling seriously overrated. Thought now that I write this, I suppose what I should be thinking (and will be as soon as the antibiotics kick in) is how fantastic my Mom is.