hashbrown recluse

Easy Dijon-Crusted Salmon

2011-03-04T16:19:00.001-05:00

Jill

I hear a lot that some people are afraid to cook fish at home, but fresh fish is actually one of the easiest things you can make. When I moved into my first apartment, I was completely new to cooking and I harbored some of these same fears. I figured salmon would be my best bet since I was pretty familiar with it, plus it completely changes color when it's been cooked. I went on a bit of a googling frenzy and I ended up in the possession of one of the easiest, most delicious salmon recipes I've ever tried (still to this day).

This recipe calls for THREE ingredients. It's also ready in just 10 minutes, so combine those two factors and you have yourself a really healthy, delicious dinner that's ready in about the same time it will take you to throw together a salad or a side. Since your main flavors in this dish are salmon and dijon, it's really important that you get a really good quality grainy dijon mustard. Once broiled, it forms a flavorful crust on top of the fish and it really seals in a ton of flavor while keeping the fish from drying out.

Easy Dijon-Crusted Salmon

Grainy dijon mustard
Salmon fillets
Soy sauce

Preheat the broiler. If your broiler is inside the regular oven, cover a baking tray with foil and spray with non-stick spray. If the broiler is in a separate drawer, spray your broiler tray.

Coat the entire top of the fillet

Brush the fish with dijon mustard, making sure to cover the entire top surface. Once covered, sprinkle the fish lightly with a little soy sauce. Broil the fish for 10 minutes. I like to serve this with spinach or baby potatoes and a cucumber salad.

Lemony Chickpeas with Chicken Sausage and Spinach

2011-01-31T13:19:00.000-05:00

Jill

So here I am again! After quite a long hiatus from this blog, my life has begun to regain something resembling order and I can fit these updates back into my schedule again. The boxes have been unpacked (except for the ones that probably never will be) and the new semester has started to kick in. My new kitchen is almost sorted out, complete with a brand new range.

I'm now the proud owner of my very first gas cook top, although there is definitely a strong learning curve involved. We opted for the most basic, no-frills range we could possibly find. This means no clock, no timer, no oven light, and no indication that the oven is pre-heated. This was a little scary at first, but I've been catching on to the oven's various quirks and learning to work around them. I burned a lot of food before I realized that the left side of the oven gets a lot hotter than the right side for some reason. I also burned some things in the broiler drawer before I realized that I could actually lower it, but I've never had a broiler drawer before so I'm cutting myself some slack.

I have to say, I do really enjoy cooking in this kitchen. I've never had enough room for appliances, all of the oils, vinegars, and spices that tend to collect over time, or the counter space necessary to actually relax. All of this added space makes cooking feel like a different experience.

And of course, the never-ending challenge remains: finding ways to eat healthy on a busy schedule. This recipe involves pretty simple, easy to find ingredients that really work well together.

Lemony Chickpeas with Chicken Sausage and Spinach

1 medium yellow onion, sliced
12oz (about 4 or 5) italian style chicken sausages, sliced
1 can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained
6-8oz baby spinach
1 tsp or more spike seasoning (or another season salt)
the juice of one lemon
olive oil
salt and pepper

Heat a thin layer of olive oil in a large skillet or frying pan over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until they begin to brown. Add the sausages and continue stir-frying until lightly browned on the outside (if your chicken sausages are not pre-cooked, make sure they are no longer pink on the inside). Add the chickpeas, spike seasoning, salt, and pepper. Cook until heated through.

Add the spinach and the lemon juice. An easy way to juice the lemon without a reamer is to cut the lemon in half, hold it over the pan, and stick a fork inside the lemon half. Then squeeze the lemon over the fork, pushing the fork around in a circular motion to remove all of the juice. Continue heating, gently incorporating the spinach into the rest of the ingredients, until it begins to wilt. Remove from the heat. Taste, and add more salt, pepper, and spike if necessary.

Sick-Day Chicken Soup

2010-11-07T08:46:00.003-05:00

Jill

It's bound to happen. Every year, the temperature drops significantly over night, and then one of us gets a cold. Blech. Everybody knows that home made chicken soup makes you feel better when you're sick, even if it's only helping you mentally. If you've got some kind of full-time commitment like work or school (or screaming children), you may think that making a pot of chicken soup from scratch is an impossibility given your super-busy schedule. WRONG, IDIOT. JEEZ. DON'T YOU KNOW ANYTHING? Um, I'm kidding, but seriously, I've learned along the way how to cut some serious chicken-souping corners and still come out with a huge pot of something that tastes just as good as chicken soup from complete scratch.

I'm not dissing soup from scratch. In fact, I love it. My mom used to make us her Bubby's chicken soup recipe at least once a year, and it smelled amazing all day. I haven't been brave enough to ask for the recipe, but it's on the to-do list, along with my mom's brisket and my grandma's matzah balls (which always taste better than the ones I make.) What I love about the forthcoming recipe is that I can get home really late, throw everything on the stove, and still have dinner ready at a reasonable hour without too much fuss. This holds even if I'm the one who isn't feeling so great.

I first learned this shortcut secondhand by reading the Amateur Gourmet's blog several years ago, and he apparently learned it from a recipe on epicurious, which in actuality was from a 1998 issue of Bon Appétit Magazine (what a tangled web of passed-down information!) The short-cut here is that you boil your fresh chicken in pre-made broth. It sounds like a food abomination, but dear lord is it delicious. Plus, making the chicken stock, the part of making soup from scratch that usually takes forever, is cut down to 20 to 30 minutes and you come out with a very rich broth.

This recipe, like any soup recipe, is very easily customizable to your own tastes. However, if it's starting to get late and somebody isn't feeling well, short-cuts are your best friend. If chicken anatomy and the prospect of undoing it are not something you're really comfortable with, you can actually buy a whole chicken cut up into 8 pieces at your grocery store nowadays. And just like in the last recipe I posted, I opted for a package of fresh soup greens to fill my soup's vegetable quota.

Sick-Day Chicken Soup

A 3-4 lb chicken, cut into 8 pieces (breasts, thighs, wings, and legs)
4 32oz cartons of chicken broth (16 cups)
One package of soup greens, or the following vegetables:
-one parsnip, peeled and diced
-two large carrots, peeled and diced
-the white part of one leek, cleaned carefully and diced
-one turnip, diced
-a few hearts of celery, diced
-one small onion, quartered
-a few sprigs of parsley and dill, chopped
1/2 to 1 cup of rice or small pasta
salt and pepper

Pour the chicken broth into a large stock pot. Add the chicken pieces and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn the soup down to a simmer, and with the cover partially off, simmer for 20-30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. If you're not sure if your chicken is cooked, test a piece with a cooking thermometer.

Remove the chicken pieces and set aside. Skim any fat off the top of the soup and discard. Add the vegetables and rice or pasta. For rice, let the soup simmer for about 20 more minutes, and for pasta, follow the amount of time on the box. When the soup is almost done, add back some shredded or chopped chicken meat from the chicken you set aside (maybe a cup or so). Test to make sure your vegetables and rice/pasta are tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Note: You'll have a lot of leftover cooked chicken from this recipe. It's pretty bland to eat on its own, since you boiled a lot of the flavor out of it. I almost always end up making chicken salad with it the next day. I've been using a recipe almost identical to this one forever, and it makes awesome use of all of that chicken.

Moving

2010-10-28T13:02:00.001-04:00

Jill

I've noticed that a lot of blogs go through the cliche where weeks pass by without a single post, followed by some sort of sorry explanation to account for the laziness. Well, this blog is no exception, but I promise I have a great reason!

Through an incredible stroke of luck, Keith and I have landed an extraordinary deal on renting a house (through his boss) and should hopefully be moved-in by December 1st. The place has the potential to be really great, but the condition it was in when we first saw it was a little scary. Gross carpets that were pretty much coming up on their own lined most of the house, not to mention a couple of mystery rooms with some random wood-blocks nailed to the walls (maybe they partially ripped out some built-ins?), mixed in with the general feeling that the place could really use a good scrubbing.

The room I am most excited about, however, is the kitchen. Unlike any of the other apartments I've lived in, this kitchen is actually its own room. It has tons of cabinets (even though they're filled with curling nasty contact paper) and a double sink, which is another "first" for me. When I saw the kitchen for the first time, I was really excited, and then a little nauseous from its current color scheme. The previous owners must have REALLY liked pink, since the walls, floors, cabinets, and even ceiling were all painted a really gross fleshy pink color. I've never been much of a pink person, but I'm sure even pink's biggest fan would've gotten a little dizzy in that room.

We have been given permission to do absolutely anything we want to the house, but since it still doesn't belong to us, we're trying to avoid investing too much money in this project. We've made a ton of progress so far, especially on the wood floors that we found underneath the carpet, two layers of old linoleum, and old newspapers. Having an actual floor in the house has made so much of a difference.

So that's my lame excuse. Every ounce of spare time has been spent fixing up this house, but I really hope we have something to show for it. I'll post some "in progress" pictures below, and hopefully I'll have some "after" pictures to post in a few months.

My kitchen-to-be

Extreme two-tone pink attack

Your eyes do not deceive you. Faux-brick linoleum partially covered with laminate make up the kitchen counters

My favorite! Wood-burning stove

Weird Carpet-esque linoleum upstairs found under actual carpet and another layer of linoleum

Under the linoleum... '20s newspapers and wood floor. $3.98 frocks!

Blurry carpet-ripping action shot! He actually caught the lamp before it fell

Under the carpet. Who would cover this up?

Asian-Inspired Vegetable Soup with Shiritaki Noodles

2010-10-03T13:41:00.001-04:00

Jill

Making soup used to seem mysterious and time-consuming, but now I've come to the conclusion that it's got to be difficult to screw it up. Boil water with something to make stock, or buy premade stock and save yourself buttloads of time. Then you just add anything you like. I've gone through those steps multiple times and I've yet to come out with anything inedible or gross.

Since it's been pretty soup-weathery outside, I wanted to try something that I've been dying to try for ages. It all revolves around shiritaki noodles, a low carb, low fat, low calorie wet-packaged noodle made from yam and tofu. They have a different texture than any other noodle I've tried. Instead of the "bite" that you get from al-dente cooked pasta, these noodles have kind of a "snap" to them.

Since cutting back on some of the super-fatty foods in my diet, I've tried shiritaki noodles a few times. I've had them with regular old pasta sauce, and while it wasn't horrible, it also wasn't that great. These noodles seem better suited to some things than others, which is why I have been dying to try them in a soup. I suspected that the texture would really hold up well in a soup, and I have to say I was really happy with the way it all turned out.

In the lazed-out mood I was in while shopping on this particular day, I picked up a package of soup greens for the veggies in this soup and only added a package of frozen peas and scallions to the mix. These pre-assembled packages usually contain all of your chicken soup basics: a few carrots, a couple of hearts of celery, a big parsnip, the white part of a leek, a turnip, a small yellow onion, and a small handful or so of herbs. I used all of those veggies in this soup, making it pretty American-style with added Asian flavors. I think this soup should be very versatile as far as vegetables go, so if you have something you want to get rid of, chuck it in. I really wanted to add some napa cabbage, but the idea didn't strike me until long after I was at home with my groceries with a big pot bubbling away on the stove. I also didn't add the herbs from the package and reserved them for later use.

Asian-Inspired Vegetable Soup with Shiritaki Noodles

8 cups of vegetable stock

2 cloves of garlic, minced

about a teaspoon or more of minced ginger (or powdered ground ginger)

soy sauce

sesame oil

sriracha sauce (optional)

3 scallions, sliced

one small package of frozen peas

3-4 8 oz packages of tofu shiritaki noodles

vegetable oil

A package of soup greens, or any combination of the following vegetables:

-one parsnip, peeled and diced

-two large carrots, peeled and diced

-the white part of one leek, cleaned carefully and diced

-one turnip, diced

-a few hearts of celery, diced

-one small onion, quartered

Heat the vegetable oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the garlic and ginger (if fresh, not powdered) and stir until they become fragrant but not brown. Add the leeks and stir for a moment longer. Add the vegetables to the pot, excluding the peas and scallions, and then pour in the stock. Bring the soup to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. Allow the soup to boil for 30 minutes to an hour, until the vegetables are softened to your liking.

When the vegetables are soft, get a separate pot of water boiling for your noodles. While you are waiting, to the soup, add about 1 Tbsp of soy sauce, a few drops of sriracha sauce, and a very small drizzle of sesame oil. Taste the soup and salt and pepper to taste. My soup at this point wasn't nearly gingery enough, so I added some additional powdered ground ginger. Adjust these seasonings to your liking, then add the peas. (Note: be careful with sesame oil, it is extremely potent and you can easily add too much and over-sesame your soup. Add very small drizzles at a time, tasting as you go.)

Drain the packages of noodles in a colander and rinse well in the sink. The liquid the noodles are packaged in isn't the greatest smelling stuff, so you will want to rinse them and boil the noodles in a pot separate from the soup. Add the noodles to the boiling water and let them boil for about 3 minutes. Drain again, then either add them directly to the pot of soup or add some to individual bowls and ladle the soup over them. Garnish with chopped scallions.

Weeknight Vegetarian Chili

2010-09-17T15:45:00.001-04:00

Jill

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE making a big ol' pot of meaty chili and letting it slowly simmer together. However, it's not always practical to pull one together from thin air. For instance, you may not always have fresh beef or its defrosted alternative ready to go at a moments notice. This vegetarian chili can be thrown together from stuff that can be kept in your cabinets indefinitely (almost), takes about half as much time from start to finish, and tastes pretty darn good if you ask me.

This chili is also pretty open to interpretation. You don't need to add the carrots if you don't have any. I had the better part of a bag of baby carrots in the fridge, so they got diced up and thrown into the pot. You don't like kidney beans? Don't add them. Replace them with more pinto beans, or try some black beans for something different. This recipe is guaranteed to give you leftovers if you're serving two, like me, but if you want to polish this off in one night, cut the quantities in half.

Weeknight Vegetarian Chili

about 1 Tbsp minced garlic

2 yellow onions, diced

about a cup of carrots, diced (optional)

one large bell pepper, diced (or two small ones)

1 28oz can of diced tomatoes and their juices

2 tsp cumin

1 tsp chipotle chili powder (less if you like it less spicy, more if you want to burn your socks off)

2 14oz cans of pinto beans, rinsed and drained

2 14oz cans kidney beans, rinsed and drained

salt & pepper

oil

Heat some olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the garlic and stir fry for about 30 seconds, then add the onions, peppers, and carrots. Cook for about 10 minutes, until soft (probably more time with the carrots, less without). Add the cumin, chili powder, and a little salt and pepper, stirring to coat all of the veggies. Cook for a few moments further.

Add the beans and the can of tomatoes. Bring the mixture to a boil, then simmer for about 20 minutes until most of the liquid is absorbed. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary.

Baked Pasta Puttanesca

2010-09-07T22:42:00.004-04:00

Jill

I'm not sure if this is a universal statement or not, but when I go back to school, my stress level skyrockets. The amount of time I have for planning and creating elaborate meals shrinks, and I pretty much just want to curl up in a ball and have somebody take care of everything for me. Since I don't live in fantasy land, I have to make due with what I can. I think this semester I'm really going to try making quasi-healthy cooking a priority so that I don't get on the train to Bloatsville, USA.

Since Keith and I have been pretty good in terms of healthy eating, I decided to reward us with some good old fashioned comfort food. Baked ziti was probably my favorite thing to order off of the Italian take-out menu before lactose intolerance, but I haven't even attempted to re-create it since the dairy-ban. Pasta puttanesca is actually kind of a recent discovery for me, but I love it so much I would probably eat it every day if there were no consequences. The forthcoming recipe is an attempt at merging these two things together. I used my favorite puttanesca recipe from "Never Enough Thyme," although I have to cut the anchovy paste out of the recipe if I want Keith to eat it too. I used some really nice italian pasta called Pennoni, similar to a penne rigate, but you can use any pasta you like. And as always, my recipes are dairy free, but just switch out the non-dairy ingredients for real cheese if you want to try a more decadent version. Adding cheese to puttanesca sauce and baking it may be the biggest bastardization of real Italian cooking you can come up with (other than Chef Boyardee,) but Keith and I both agreed that these flavors were really outstanding together.

Baked Pasta Puttanesca

3/4 lb pasta (ziti, rigatoni, etc.)
about 1&1/2 tbsp minced garlic
olive oil
1/4 to 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper (depending on how spicy you like it)
28z can whole tomatoes
1/2 cup pitted kalamata olives, chopped
2 tbsp capers
about 10 leaves of fresh basil, chopped
8 oz of non-dairy mozzarella cheese shreds *(see note below)

Preheat your oven to 375º. Spritz a 2 qt. rectangular casserole with some olive oil spray and set aside. Cook pasta in salted boiling water until al dente according to package directions.

In the meantime, heat a drizzle of olive oil in a large frying pan or skillet over medium. Add your minced garlic and crushed red pepper and cook until fragrant. Add the juice from the can of tomatoes, then add the tomatoes themselves, crushing each one individually in your hands to break them apart as you add them (be careful! They squirt!)

Steamin' up the lens

Add the olives and capers to the sauce and stir to combine. Allow the sauce to come to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and allow it to cook down for about 10 minutes (until it isn't watery.) Turn off the heat and add the basil.

Drain the cooked pasta and add it to the sauce in the pan, allowing it to soak up the flavor. Toss Gently to combine.

Layer half of your pasta mixture on the bottom of the casserole. Add half of your shredded "cheese", distributing evenly over the pasta. Add the remaining pasta to the casserole, and top with the rest of the cheese.

Cover the casserole with foil and bake in the oven for about 30 minutes.

*On the "cheese": Wow, there sure are a lot of non-dairy cheeses available on the market now! This particular time around, I used mozzarella flavored Daiya shreds, and it made the pasta very gooey and cheesy. However, I have used Veggie Shreds brand in another pasta casserole in the past, and I may actually prefer those in this particular application. The Veggie Shreds seem to mix into the pasta and retain a lot of stretchiness, while the Daiya shreds leave a "snowy" looking layer on top and become rather gooey. I do like gooey cheese, but in a casserole it might be nice to have something with a little more body. This of course comes down to personal preference, and if by chance you are going for a vegan version of this dish, the Veggie Shreds are not among the options for you.

Mediterranean Swordfish in Parchment Packets

2010-08-28T11:54:00.003-04:00

Jill

Usually for Keith's birthday, I ask him what he would like me to make him for dinner. This year he decided he wanted to eat swordfish, and all I can say is thank goodness for food blogs. Prior to that, my entire fish-cooking repertoire consisted of salmon, haddock, cod, and tilapia. That's it. Swordfish has always seemed like something out of my league. Why? Because I told myself so, and then it becomes the truth. I did a little food blog searching and came up with a recipe that seemed relatively simple to prepare.

The recipe (which comes from "Sass & Veracity", who found it here) has you bake the fish in little parchment packets. You prepare a salad of tomatoes, roasted peppers, onions, olives, capers, and lemon juice, along with a couple of herbs and spices. This recipe calls for pasta to be baked along with the fish, but something about that pairing rubs me the wrong way, so I replaced the pasta with some rice. On the parchment, you layer the rice, salad, and fish, then close the whole thing off and bake.

HOLY COW. We were both so blown away by this recipe. The rice soaked up the flavors of both the fish and the Mediterranean salad, and the fish came out juicy and perfect. The flavors of the olives and capers were so strong in this recipe, but they meshed with everything so nicely. I honestly have ordered fish at a Mediterranean restaurant that didn't taste half as delicious as this. The presentation is also pretty awesome, as you just plop the individual parchment packets on a plate and unwrap it at the table.

Out of the oven

For a salad, in an attempt to make something different than my usual dinner salad, I did some more food-blog-scouring. I popped out with a recipe (from "What Would Cathy Eat") for a simple salad made with arugula, red onions, beets, and oranges. I won't re-post the recipe here since I really didn't change anything, but I will admit I took a shortcut and used canned pre-sliced beets. I know the flavor is different when you cook fresh beets yourself, but I honestly like canned beets. I also used the juice of half of a small orange in the dressing.

Below is the recipe for the swordfish with a few slight changes. Originally, the recipe lists 3 cups of fresh tomatoes, chopped, but that was just way too many tomatoes for me. Instead, I used two large heirloom tomatoes, and I couldn't imagine having any more in the finished product. They also list pepper-infused olive oil as an ingredient, but I have no idea where to get this and I really didn't want to spend the money on a whole bottle of fancy olive oil that I would be using just two tablespoons of. Instead, since I purchased pre-roasted bell peppers in a jar, I used two tablespoons of the oil that they came packed in, which was pretty pepper-infused if you ask me. And, as mentioned before, I switched out the pasta in this recipe for rice, and I'm really glad I did. The swordfish steaks I bought were also MASSIVE, as compared to the 5oz steaks called for originally. I just increased the cooking time very slightly and everything turned out.

Mediterranean Swordfish in Parchment Packets

2 footlong sheets of parchment paper

2 swordfish steaks

2 large tomatoes, seeds and insides scooped out and sliced (somewhat like a pepper)

1 1/2 roasted bell peppers, any color, chopped

2 Tbsp each of chopped fresh parsley and oregano

1 1/2 Tbsp minced garlic

1 quarter of a red onion, sliced

2 Tbsp capers, chopped

12 Kalamata olives, pitted and sliced in half (I realized after the fact that they meant to cut it in half widthwise, while I sliced them lengthwise... I don't think it matters at all)

2 Tbsp lemon juice

2 Tbsp red pepper oil, or oil from the jar of roasted peppers

Regular olive oil

1/2 cup uncooked long grain white rice

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Add your tomatoes to and season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Add the next eight ingredients to the bowl (bell peppers through pepper oil) and drizzle with about 2 Tbsp regular olive oil. Stir this mixture to combine and cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Put this mixture aside on your counter and let it sit for about an hour.

Preheat your oven to 450º and prepare your rice. Boil 1 cup of salted water in a saucepan. Once boiling, turn down the heat and add the white rice. Stir briefly and cover, allowing rice to cook for 15 minutes. Once cooked, fluff the rice with a fork.

On a baking sheet, prepare parchment packets. In the center of one sheet of parchment, add half of the cooked rice. Top this with a generous spoonful of your pepper/tomato mixture. Place the swordfish on top, and then spoon on some more of the pepper/tomato mixture. To close off the packets, I just kind of folded two opposite sides of the parchment into the middle, then twisted and scrunched the other two sides together. Any way you can figure out to close the parchment is acceptable... one of the packets opened slightly during cooking and this had no affect on the fish. Repeat this with the other piece of parchment with the remaining ingredients.

Scrunched together packet

Bake the packets in the heated oven until cooked through. The original recipe states 12-15 minutes should do the trick, but since these swordfish steaks were so huge, I left them in for 16 minutes and they were cooked perfectly.

A Review of Daiya Vegan Cheese

2010-08-15T11:38:00.001-04:00

I think it would be a lot more difficult to live lactose-free if there weren't all of these wonderful products on the market that cater to people with issues or lifestyles similar to mine. Replicating cheese is obviously a HUGE deal, as tons of childhood comfort foods revolve around this ingredient. Some of the available products I've encountered, however, have been either baffling or downright gross.

A common ingredient in a lot of these non-dairy cheese replacements is casein, milk protein, which makes them a non-option for vegans or those who are allergic to dairy, as casein is usually exactly what they are reacting to. The huge difference I've noticed between casein containing products and those without it is structure. This makes sense, as I'm sure adding milk protein to something gives it the cheese-like stretch and texture that's so crave-able. I've actually encountered a supposed "cheese replacement" that contained casein and also stated "may contain lactose." Who the hell is eating that stuff? Who CAN eat it? And why wouldn't they just eat real cheese at that point?

If you're going for something baked and melted, that's where the non-casein containing stuff usually falls short. I tried the "Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet" stuff raw, and it wasn't too bad. The cheddar flavor especially, sliced and put on sandwiches is actually really delicious. I made the mistake once of grating the mozzarella flavor and trying to bake a pizza with it, and it turned into some kind of wet grossness that slid off the crust when I picked it up. Yuck. Lesson Learned. As I've mentioned before, I think the "Tofutti" brand cheese slices taste like gasoline, so I never tried melting it as I really have no desire to eat melted gasoline.

A year or so ago, a product called "Daiya" started generating some buzz on the internet. It's another shredded cheese replacement, but the stuff is completely vegan friendly and therefore contains no dairy whatsoever. I was intrigued and looked into buying some, but it seemed to be only available for wholesale. I was disappointed, but also excited to learn that a few pizzerias were making vegan pizzas with the stuff. I reasoned that if they were selling it to the public, it couldn't be disgusting. When I walked into the little independent supermarket in my neighborhood the other day and saw that they started carrying it, I immediately snatched up a bag, excited to try it.

In an attempt to cling to my diet, I baked small pizzas on little individual flat bread rounds. I made plain pizza, black olive pizza, and chopped pepper and onion pizza. A lot of the "cheeses" I've tried have trouble becoming pizza when I start loading on the toppings... they don't melt quite right, so I wanted to make a gradient of plain pizza to loaded pizza. I tried some of it unbaked right out of the bag and the flavor was different, maybe even better than some of the other products I've tried. Hope!

I popped them into the oven at 425º for about 10 minutes. Non-dairy cheeses have the tendency to stay as separate shreds, even after melting, and the Daiya seemed to be no exception from this. However, it seemed to turn into one mass, like real cheese, directly under the top layer. It's possible that if I left it in the oven for longer it would have completely melted together, but I was afraid of another wet blob incident and possibly took it out prematurely. This is only a visual concern, however, and has no effect on the taste.

So, the verdict? Out of all of the non-casein containing, completely vegan products I've tried, this is a clear winner. On taste alone, especially once it's baked, I prefer it to anything else I've tried. On texture, it beats out the vegan stuff. It still doesn't quite have the same stretchiness as the casein products, but it has more stretch than any other vegan product. It also has a very satisfying gooey texture once it's completely melted.

Surprisingly, the toppings didn't influence the way the daiya cheese melted at all. The cheese on the pepper and onion pizza (which ended up being our favorite) melted just as much as the cheese on the plain version, so it seems that this stuff can probably take more abuse than some of the other products out there. Keith even told me that I should use Daiya in lasagna from now on instead of what I was using before.

I think we're going to start seeing a lot of new developments in dairy substitutions in the near future, as I've been noticing tons of stuff popping up on the market. I used to have trouble finding chocolate chips, and now I can just walk into a store and pick up a bag that says "dairy-free" in huge letters. There used to be a couple of tubs of soy-yogurt to choose from, and now there are tons of companies making yogurt in a gazillion flavors from soy and even coconut milk. I hope this isn't a fad, because it's certainly been making my life a lot easier!

Lentil Salad with Dill

2010-08-12T14:37:00.004-04:00

Jill

I can't believe that summer is winding down already! It's almost time to bring out the warmer clothes and spend hundreds of dollars on required textbooks that I'll probably open once or twice. I can still cling to the warm weather for a few more weeks and experiment with the last of the season's cold dishes that I'll have in my repertoire for next summer.

There are two stores that I generally head out to without a plan in mind for food. One is Trader Joe's, which would be a little more addictive if it wasn't so out of the way, and the other is a little independently owned market about 5 miles away from my apartment. They always have produce from local markets and interesting products that actually make it fun to go inside and see what you can come up with. At the little market, I found some really beautiful dark, almost purplish tomatoes and decided to make a salad.

I didn't come up with anything revolutionary, just a simple lentil salad. It was fresh, uncomplicated, and light, and I think that's all anybody can ever ask for during the last dwindling weeks of summer.

Lentil Salad with Dill

about 2 1/2 cups of cooked and cooled lentils or a package of prepared steamed lentils

1 bell pepper, any color - diced

1/2 an english cucumber, peel on - diced

2 small tomatoes

1 large stalk of celery - diced

2 lemons

2 scallion stalks - sliced

1/4 cup sliced almonds

fresh chopped or dried dill, to taste

olive oil

salt and pepper

Add the cold lentils to a large bowl. Add the pepper, cucumber, celery, almonds and scallions. Add some of the dill, a drizzle of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Juice one lemon and add it to the salad, stirring very gently to combine. Taste the salad. If it isn't lemony enough, begin adding the juice from the second lemon. Add more dill if necessary.

Chill in the fridge for several hours to allow the flavors to develop, or serve immediately. Before serving, dice the tomatoes and scrape out the seeds. This will keep your salad from getting to gooey. Stir in the diced tomatoes and serve.

Vegetable Tian

2010-08-02T22:29:00.004-04:00

Jill

I realized recently that it had been a while since I spent an afternoon in the kitchen, relaxing and preparing a dinner that takes a little more care and effort than the usual throw-together-and-devour meal. As I was pondering this idea, I came across some beautiful photos on tastespotting of vegetable tian, a French casserole composed of rounds of vegetables layered over a bed of sautéed onions and garlic. As I researched this dish, I found that most of the recipes were more or less the same. They all seemed to involve potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini at the very least, with eggplant and yellow summer squash occasionally present. Many of the recipes topped the casserole with melty gruyere cheese, which I would love to taste, but obviously that isn't an option.

I decided to give it a shot, using all of the vegetables I saw in other recipes and guessing the quantities I would need. I also tried out a brand new mandoline slicer, which should save a lot of slicing time and help to make the slices uniform in thickness.

When I took the slicer out of the box, I noticed that the thickness setting was fixed and that I could only make one type of slice. This was a little disappointing, as the photo on the box clearly showed a pile of cucumbers of various thicknesses. I figured I could deal with this since the slicer had many other blades for julienning and grating (I also bought it at TJ Maxx, spending a whopping 8 bucks.) I previously owned a much cheaper looking hand held mandonline that worked beautifully, and I literally used it until it fell apart.

First I tried the eggplant, something that my old mandoline had no issue with tackling. As I tried to drag the eggplant over the slicer, it would get stuck halfway through each slice and then basically rip the slice off of the eggplant at the end, leaving an extra chunk on each slice. Great, I thought, the blade is dull. Slices of eggplant were getting stuck in the mandoline. I went to push one of the slices out of the other side with my finger, and if you have ever used a mandoline in your life, you know that red flags should have been going off in my head at this moment. Instead, I barely touched the blade, making a nice little slice in my finger. It was was only about the size of a papercut, but now I was bleeding and irritated. On the bright side, I knew the blade wasn't dull.

After bandaging myself up, I proceeded with the rest of the vegetables (except the tomatoes and onions, which I sliced by hand.) The other vegetables went much more smoothly, and I started feeling better and relaxing again. After arranging all of the vegetables in a baking dish, I realized I had bought too many potatoes and had some extra squash, which I had already cut into rounds. I quickly threw together a gratin, which I baked alongside the tian for dinner tomorrow. If it's any good, I'll post that recipe as well.

All of the annoyances seemed to make the final product that much more delicious. Keith agreed, proclaiming that he even liked the tomatoes (a vegetable that he usually avoids if given the opportunity.) I topped the baked casserole with a sprinkling of vegan parmesan in place of the gruyere, and it was a lovely addition.

Vegetable Tian

2 small eggplants
4 or 5 tomatoes (I bought a bunch of on-the-vine tomatoes, figuring I would have some for later, but I ended up using them all)
1 large russet potato, skin on (I bought two and ended up with double what I needed)
1 to 1 1/2 zucchini
1 to 1 1/2 summer squash
2 yellow onions
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil
dried thyme
vegan parmesan topping (optional)

Slice the eggplant, potato, zucchini, squash, and tomatoes into rounds of uniform thickness, either by hand or with a mandoline. Slice the onions and chop the garlic.

Drizzle olive oil into a skillet or frying pan and heat over medium. Sauté the onions until they are very tender, then add the garlic and cook for another minute. Remove from the heat.

Preheat your oven to 375º. Layer the onions and garlic on the bottom of a baking dish. Many of the recipes used a 9x13 inch dish, but I used a rectangular 2 1/2 quart casserole that was smaller. In retrospect, the height of the baking dish may have been working against me in terms of cooking time, but everything still turned out.

Begin placing your slices of vegetables into the pan vertically, repeating the same pattern over and over again. Don't worry if your rounds are different sizes, as they are bound to be. Align the tops of your slices with each other and use the pressure that will be created by the stacks pressing against the dish to keep them in position.

Sprinkle your vegetables with salt, pepper, and dried thyme. Drizzle some olive oil over the top. Cover the dish tightly with foil and bake for 45 minutes to an hour. It took about an hour in the oven for my potatoes to be completely tender.

If you want, sprinkle your casserole with vegan parmesan and return it to the oven for a moment. I wouldn't recommend leaving it in the oven too long, however, since unlike real cheese, it will not melt together and instead may burn. If you don't have a dairy issue, you can add gruyere cheese to the top of the casserole and return it to the oven until it is bubbly.

Fish Tacos

2010-07-25T11:54:00.000-04:00

Jill

Last night was one of those nights where it was really just too hot to think. I went to the store planning to get a couple of nice pieces of tuna to marinate and sear, but when I got there, the tuna didn't look so hot. Instead, I grabbed some haddock, a fish that I'm familiar with cooking. I usually bake the stuff in a hot oven with tons of heavy ingredients on top, but there was no way I was going to heat up my whole apartment.

The first time I heard the words "fish" and "taco" in the same sentence, I thought I might barf. I've lived on the east coast my entire life and never even ventured out west (though I really would like to), so my idea of what constitutes a fish taco was way, way off. I keep seeing pictures of these tacos in the food blog community and they don't involve heavy cheese, gloppy salsa, and flat wilty looking lettuce. They always look so fresh and delicious. That being said, when I made the decision to try making my own fish tacos at the store last night, I still had no idea how to make the real thing. I tried to string together a bunch of pictures that I had seen on other blogs and I actually came up with something that really tasted great.

This recipe is far from whatever a traditional fish taco might be, but it has fish, and it's in the form of a taco, so I'm still calling them fish tacos. I used sweet onions and peppers as filler, but I left them raw. I really liked having something crunchy and juicy to bite onto next to the soft avocado and fish. You can buy taco seasoning in the little packets, but it's also easy to make your own out of stuff you probably already have in your spice rack. Here's a quick little recipe for taco seasoning if you need some inspiration. I also found some pre-made corn relish in a jar while I was poking around the store, and it really added a nice kick.

I'll definitely be making these again as they were better than I expected. If I had planned them out in advance, I would have added a couple of things. In the future, I'll let the fish marinate in the seasoning mixture in the fridge for a few hours before I make the finished product. The fish was flavorful the way it was, but I could only imagine what marinating it would have done for the taste. I also wish I had remembered to buy some cilantro, but I added both of these things to the recipe below.

Fish Tacos

1 lb white fish like haddock
taco seasoning - store bought or home made
1 lime, zest and juice
1 bell pepper, any color (a banana pepper might be really good too)
1/2 of a sweet onion
corn relish
1 avocado
tortillas
taco sauce
olive oil
salt and pepper
cilantro (optional but recommended)

Cut the fish into 1 inch cubes and place them in a bowl with the taco seasoning, lime juice, lime zest, and a little salt and pepper. Drizzle the fish with a little olive oil and stir to combine. If you have time, I would let the fish marinate in this mixture in the fridge for at least an hour (the longer you let it sit, the more flavor develops, so let it go all day if you can.) If you don't have the time, do this step first and let the fish sit in this mixture while you chop the veggies.

Slice the onions and peppers into thin strips. Chop a handful of cilantro if you have any. I wouldn't recommend slicing the avocado until after the fish is cooked to prevent it from turning brown. If you feel the need to slice the avocado at this point, drizzle the slices with a little lime juice. The acid will temporarily delay the oxidation reaction that causes the color change.

Heat a layer of olive oil in a skillet or frying pan on medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the fish, making sure it is in a single layer. Stir fry gently until cooked through, about 5 minutes. The haddock was very delicate, so try to let the fish cook completely on one side before you flip or stir it to prevent it from breaking apart too much. Once the fish is completely opaque, turn off the heat.

To the tortillas, layer the fish, sliced avocados, onions, peppers, corn relish, and cilantro. Drizzle with taco sauce.

Note: A lot of people quickly fry the tortillas in a little oil before adding the other ingredients. I skipped that step this time around because I've been trying to cut back on my fat intake. However, if you would like to fry them, simply heat up a small amount of oil in a pan, add a tortilla and wait until you see bubbles forming inside. Then flip the tortilla over and repeat.

Healthy Breakfast. No, Really.

2010-07-19T13:40:00.001-04:00

Jill

So I love food. I love a LOT of food. However, this poses a little problem, or a big problem, depending on how you want to look at it. It occurred to me a month or two ago that I had reached the heaviest weight I'd ever been in my entire life. I couldn't understand how this could be possible. I cut out every single scrap of dairy from my whole diet. I stopped consuming the obscene amounts of meat I used to consume. I hardly ever ate candy, cake, or cookies, simply because I couldn't due to the dairy, and yet my weight was still gradually climbing.

The reasons behind this dilemma are actually pretty obvious. I was barely ever active, and on top of that, the amount of food I was eating (even if the food itself was healthy) was pretty ridiculous on its own. It wasn't uncommon for me to make a large amount of food for dinner with the intention of packing away leftovers for the next day, only to have Keith and myself polish off the entire batch in one sitting. Not great.

At first I blamed only the fact that I was basically sedentary and attempted to become more active without changing my diet at all. We started going for walks several times a week in a state park a mile or two away from our apartment. This was an important thing for me to do, but taking an hour-long walk in the woods followed by two platefuls of pasta had no affect on my weight whatsoever. Surprise.

A pretty view from one of our walks

The solution? It was mostly paying more attention to nutrition labels and serving myself more human-sized portions of food. I'm really only at the beginning of this process, but there has definitely been a happy surprise every time I step on the scale. It's been as simple as paying attention to the fat, calorie, cholesterol and carbohydrate contents in the food I buy and really trying to get those numbers to be as close to zero as possible. It seems like a pretty obvious solution, but apparently observing the obvious isn't one of my strong suits.

Breakfast was also something I had been neglecting, and when it wasn't neglected it was filled with greasy eggs, potatoes, and corned-beef hash from a diner. Hunting around for healthy breakfast ideas, most of the things google and even tastespotting turned up were not particularly healthy. Powdered sugar, gooey cheese, and greasy bacon were only a few of the things that topped some of these "healthy" breakfast ideas. I did however come across a recipe for adorable, perfectly portioned mini-frittatas that could be customized in any way imaginable, and better still: they're baked instead of fried.

This alteration of the recipe (courtesy of "What's Gaby Cooking") is my attempt to make as healthy of a breakfast as possible from this idea. I switched out the eggs for egg beaters, a no fat and no cholesterol replacement for eggs. This was my first time tasting egg beaters, and they were pleasantly fluffy and delicious. The vegetables here are steamed rather than stir-fried in oil, and only the smallest amount of vegetable spray was used to help the "eggs" pop out of their cups.

Healthy Breakfast: Mini Frittatas with Veggies

Egg beaters
A handful of your favorite vegetables - I used broccoli because I had some rolling around in the fridge
Parchment paper or muffin liners

Preheat your oven to 350º and line a muffin tin with either parchment paper or muffin liners. I will most likely use parchment paper the next time I make these as the finished product doesn't really pop out of the muffin liners very easily (though they are cute.) I lined four cups to make two frittatas per person.

Chop your veggies relatively finely. I quickly steamed the broccoli in the microwave in special steaming bags, though you could also blanch them in boiling water for a minute or steam them in a colander set over a couple of inches of boiling water. Distribute the veggies evenly into the lined muffin tin. Pour the egg beaters over the vegetables until the cups are slightly more than half full (about one egg's worth.)

Bake until set. The egg beaters took 15 minutes to set in my oven, though you may want to check them periodically beforehand to make sure you aren't over-cooking them. Serve with a side of fruit for a very healthy breakfast.

Blackberry Gel Pudding

2010-07-10T12:25:00.010-04:00

Jill

Chocolate has always been my favorite dessert flavor, but the older I get, the more I start veering away from chocolate and heading into fruit-related territory. I had some blackberries hanging around in my fridge and decided to try out a blackberry pudding because hey, why not. This is actually more like a blackberry gel dessert. If you want something with a more pudding-like consistency, halve the amount of cornstarch. The texture may be a bit deceiving after first cooking the pudding, but the after a few hours in the fridge, the gel really sets up.

Blackberry Gel Pudding
2 cups of fresh blackberries
2 tbsp cornstarch
1/3 cup agave nectar

Puree the blackberries in a blender or food processor until very smooth. Strain the puree into a saucepan. My "strainer" was actually just a mesh colander, so a few seeds got left behind, but it didn't matter too much. Something finer will take out all of the seeds.

Mix your cornstarch with a small amount of the puree in a separate bowl, then add it directly to the puree in the saucepan (to reduce the risk of lumps). Add the agave nectar and stir until combined. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly, then simmer until the mixture thickens. Pour the pudding into two ramekins and refrigerate several hours until set.

Vegan Pesto

2010-06-29T10:52:00.001-04:00

Jill

It's weird how the prospect of not being able to have something makes you want to have it more, even if you never really wanted it in the first place. I used to always take my coffee black with sugar, way before all of this lactose-intolerance nonsense. Now I've tried almost every non-dairy creamer on the market (and I've become pretty loyal to one made from coconut milk). I find myself wanting to try a lot of dairy foods that I never really cared about when I could actually eat them.

Honestly, I never even used to care about pesto sauce. Occasionally when I was rushing to grab something from the store and get it on the table, I would just buy a package of gnocchi and a tiny jar of tomato sauce for myself, and a separate tiny jar of pesto for Keith (who isn't a big tomato fan). I would eat that jarred pesto on rare occasion, but the super-oilyness and weird taste never really appealed to me. It didn't occur to me that I could make my own pesto until after I could no longer make it with real parmesean, but despite the obvious setback, I tried it and became a born-again pesto convert. It's so ridiculously easy to make, and there's really no need for measurements. It's kind of a taste-as-you-go sauce, but they seem to be more fun anyway. You just need a collection of the following ingredients and a food processor, blender, or my equipment of choice: a cheap supermarket-bought mini food chopper.

Vegan Pesto Sauce, Non rocket-science version

A few good handfuls of fresh basil
Pine nuts, about 3 or 4 tablespoons
Vegan Parmesean flavored topping* (see note below)
2 fat cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Salt & Pepper

Add the pine nuts to the processor and pulse until they break down. Add a little bit of basil and a splash of olive oil and process. Continue adding basil with small amounts of oil and processing until you feel that you have a sufficient amount and the sauce is nice and green. Trust me, it is impossible to mess this up. If you're really stumped about amounts, I've been noticing that a lot of supermarkets have started selling their fresh herbs in plastic tubs, and two regular-sized tubs seem to do the trick. Add the garlic and your vegan parmesean (I added at least two heaping tablespoons, but feel free to go crazy). Season with salt and pepper.

Taste your sauce. If it is too dry, add more olive oil. If it is too nutty, add more basil. If it isn't nutty enough, add more nuts. Feel free to add as much cheese as you like, which adds to the salty-factor of the pesto. The nice thing about making pesto sauce is that it is completely open to customization, and you can perfectly cater the sauce to your own tastes. Toss with your favorite pasta. My favorite choices are spaghetti, gnocchi, or ravioli.

*On the vegan parmesean: I've only ever come across two different types of this "cheese". One comes in a green tub and is lactose free, but once again, it contains casein which is non-vegan and non-friendly to those allergic to dairy. The texture and taste of the non-vegan version is far superior when you're straight up dumping it on spaghetti, but I've used both the vegan kind and the non-vegan kind in pesto sauce and I couldn't tell the difference between the two once it was mixed in there.

Cucumber Avocado soup with Prosciutto-wrapped Melon

2010-06-24T15:14:00.001-04:00

Jill

It's finally fixed! It seemed like forever, but my computer is finally fully functioning and operational. In celebration, I'd like to post some of the things I've been hanging on to for the past few weeks.

Lately, there have been a lot of unbelievably hot, muggy nights. They're the type of nights that don't really lend themselves to standing over a hot stove or cranking the oven. If you're in the same boat, try this combo out and see how quickly you become refreshed.

Cucumber Avocado soup with Prosciutto-wrapped Melon

(The soup is an adaptation of this soup from Citron & Vanille)
For the Soup:
2 Haas avocados
3 Tbsp of unflavored coconut-milk based yogurt (or soy yogurt if you can't find coconut)
1/2 English cucumber
1 Lemon (the original calls for a meyer lemon, which I'm sure is better, but I couldn't find any)
2 Scallions
1 cup of veggie stock
Ground Cayenne pepper for garnish

Cut the avocado into chunks. Peel the cucumber, cut in half, and scrape out the seeds with a spoon. Chop the cucumber roughly. Slice the scallions.

Add the avocado, cucumber, yogurt, scallions, and stock to a blender. Juice the lemon into the blender and puree. Chill in the fridge, or serve immediately. When ready to serve, garnish with a little sprinkle of cayenne pepper.

For the Melon:
This really doesn't require much of a recipe. I used a honeydew melon, but I've seen this done with cantaloupe and even watermelon. If you want to be fancy, you can use a melon baller and secure the prosciutto in place with a toothpick. I was starving and not really thinking about presentation, so I just chopped the melon into chunks and wrapped a strip of prosciutto around each one. Here is a handy link if you're looking at a honeydew melon, like I was, and wondering how the hell to chop your way through it.

Mini Chocolate Berry Tarts

2010-06-14T13:14:00.003-04:00

Jill

So it's been pretty impossible to post updates lately, and this problem stems from the fact that my computer is in a semi-permanent state of dead. The computer is less than a year old and therefore still under warranty, but for some reason it's been taking an ungodly amount of time for it to get fixed. I have photoshop installed on that computer, and though you might not be able to tell from the horrible state of most of my own photography, I do like to touch up a couple of things before I upload pictures. For instance, the lighting in my apartment isn't always that great for taking pictures of food, and things that are actually in vibrant delicious colors end up being captured in sad, flat, unappetizing colors (with a little help from my non-pro point & shoot camera). With a few lighting adjustments on photoshop, I can get the colors in the photo to be pretty close to how they are on my kitchen counter.

That being said, I realize I can't really hope to keep a blog going if I don't continue to update it (plus I miss writing about whatever I ate the day before), so I'll make a couple of posts without my precious photoshop until this problem can be fixed.

On to the food! Last week, a friend and I were basically whining to each other about how stressful the past few weeks had been. Early in the week, we began dreaming about the weekend and how we could relax by the lake at her house and do absolutely nothing. The idea of mojitos sprang up pretty quickly, and then all that was left was some kind of ridiculously girly looking snack.

I came up with the idea of miniature berry tarts since I always see tiny pastry shells in the freezer aisle at my supermarket, and I've really wanted to try making something with them for a long time. I was even more surprised when I looked on the back of the box and saw that they were already baked. All I had to do was fill them with something and serve.

For the filling, I really wanted to use nutella, a chocolate hazelnut spread, but unfortunately it's loaded with dairy. However, my supermarket stocks something called chocolate "soy-nut butter," which is essentially a similar concept to nutella using toasty soy beans instead of hazelnuts. The taste isn't an exact mimic, but the flavor is very smooth and chocolatey with nutty overtones.

Blackberry and Raspberry Tarts, hangin' out in my fridge

Miniature Chocolate Berry Tarts

Prebaked frozen phyllo shells (the ones I purchased came 15 to a package, but since they were tiny, I bought two and made 30 tarts)
Enough berries to top each tart: raspberries, blackberries, or both (or whatever you have, blueberries might be good too)
A jar of chocolate soy-nut spread, or nutella if you don't have dairy issues
Mint leaves for garnish (optional; I had them lying around because of the mojitos and had the idea to add them last minute)
Zipper sandwich bags

Follow instructions for defrosting your pastry shells on the back of the box. Mine came in a little tray to keep them from breaking, but leaving them in the tray while I worked helped to keep them steady. Spoon a few tablespoons of chocolate spread into a zipper sandwich bag, trying to get most of it into one corner of the bag. With scissors, snip off the very edge of the bag (like a frosting bag), being careful not to make too large of a hole. I initially cut too much of the bag off and the chocolate began oozing out on it's own, leaving me to put the oozing bag inside of ANOTHER bag and snip another hole.

Using the sandwich bag like a frosting bag, squeeze a small amount of chocolate spread into each pastry shell. Don't worry if they aren't very attractive at this point. Gently shake the shells in their tray. This will cause the chocolate to level out.

Gently press a berry into the chocolate spread in each shell. Tear the tops off of some mint leaves if they are too large, and press the ends into the chocolate. I actually used the leaves to cover any spots on the tart shell where I accidentally globbed on chocolate. Chill them in the fridge for a little while before serving. It will make the chocolate spread harden just a little bit, and keep them from being too runny.

Zucchini "Pasta"

2010-05-09T12:50:00.002-04:00

Jill

So, it's been a while! Georgeanne and I are both in positions that have been making it difficult to post. She's staying at her sister's in Edinburgh (and eventually moving back here), and I have a lovely combination of final exams and a computer that keeps randomly shutting itself off. I have a ton of stuff saved up that I'd like to post, but I'll start with something really simple and easy to make.

Pretty much everybody loves pasta smothered in tomato sauce, but I stop craving the heaviness and carby-ness of pasta dishes as the temperatures get higher. Zucchini pasta was something that I assumed you needed some kind of fancy machine for or impeccable knifing skills, but I was wrong. Apparently, all you need is a couple of good zucchinis and a sturdy vegetable peeler.

This is less of a recipe and more of a set of instructions which I learned over at Summer Tomato. You need about 1 large zucchini per person (and the ones I grabbed were LARGE) and your favorite sauce recipe. Make this even easier with your favorite jarred sauce and cut the effort in half.

Lay one zucchini flat onto a cutting board and steadily glide your peeler from one end of the squash to the other. For large flat "noodles", rotate the zucchini and and run the peeler in a similar manner. For skinnier noodles, run the peeler over the edges you create as you rotate. My "Y" peeler made this task really simple. Deposit your noodles on a plate or in a bowl as you go so that you don't crowd your workspace. Stop peeling once you get to the seedy core. In the beautiful instructional video over at summer tomato, the author explains that the seedy part at the middle makes very squishy pasta, so it's best to reserve them for some other use. I ended up with cores that look like giant snail eyestalks.

Sprinkle some salt over your noodles. Coat a large, flat pan with oil and heat to medium. Quickly sauté the noodles until hot, then remove them from the heat to prevent them from getting too floppy. Top them with your favorite sauce. I thought that these noodles might make a really nice shrimp scampi since I LOVE the combination of shrimp and zucchini. However, I just got Keith to try actual shrimp scampi for the first time since he has some kind of aversion to seafood and pasta together (he liked it), so I might have to take it slow. The instructions at Summer Tomato also have a lovely recipe for a quick tomato sauce using a combination of canned and fresh chopped tomatoes.

Vegan Bolognese

2010-04-19T12:19:00.007-04:00

Jill

From the amount of vegan recipes I post here, a person might assume I'm a vegan. I'm actually neither a vegan or a vegetarian. A while back, I thought about the amount of meat both Keith and I were consuming on a daily basis. Without making any conscious effort to do so, I realized we were both eating meat at LEAST once a day, and sometimes even with every meal. I'm pretty sure we take the availability and inexpensiveness of meat in this country for granted to be able to eat so much of it without even realizing it. We both decided to cut back our meat intake to one day a week. It's not super strict, and nobody is getting yelled at for ordering a steak if we happen to go out to dinner even if we already had meat that week. We both ended up feeling a lot healthier, and strangely enough, I find myself not even desiring meat the same way I used to. If you combine the effort to cut out some of the meat in my diet with the lactose intolerance, a lot of the things I make end up being vegan kind of by coincidence.

The next challenge was re-adjusting my weeknight cooking repertoire to include meatless dishes. The transition actually went pretty smoothly since it's always exciting to try out new recipes, but after a while I began wondering if there was any way to re-introduce some of my old favorites without the meat.

After a ton of tweaking and many different versions, I was able to adjust my favorite bolognese recipe into something that tastes almost identical to the meaty version. There were a few serious challenges, especially since I was convinced that the flavor added to a real, delicious, bolognese by frying your veggies with pancetta was irreplaceable. Pancetta is a cured pork product, kind of similar in flavor to bacon, so in some early incarnations of this recipe I tried adding bacon bits (did you know there isn't actually any meat in bacon bits?) to replace the flavor. It kind of worked, but really, who wants to eat a sauce made with bacon bits? I felt like it kind of cheapened the whole dish, and I would never serve it to friends.

Then came the discovery of a magical spice called "bacon salt." It's simply a spice mix, nothing scary or weird here (except for MSG,) but somehow it really tastes like bacon without actually containing bacon (not to mention it's kosher... a kosher bacon flavoring? Who knew.) Be careful though if you're really going for a vegan version, because the "original" and "natural" blends contain dairy, but you're pretty much good to go with any of the other blends. The resulting sauce after using this bacon salt was so insanely close to real bolognese that both Keith and I could hardly tell the difference. I found the stuff at my local super market, so I can't imagine it's too difficult to find.

One last explanation and then I promise I'll get to the recipe. A glaringly obvious omission in this meat sauce is the actual meat itself. A few years ago I was at a party enjoying a homemade bowl of deliciously meaty chili when the woman who made the chili informed me that there was actually no meat in it at all. I was more than a little confused since what I was eating tasted, looked, and felt like ground beef. I later learned that this ground beef substitute was called smart ground, and it's also available at my local super market in the produce section. I was seriously skeptical of this stuff at first, but after trying to use it myself I was totally hooked. It's made from a combination of soy, wheat gluten, and spices, and it replaces ground-beef well enough in most recipes that it can fool the most avid meat-lover.

Fauxlognese (adapted from Spaghetti alla Bolognese at "What's for Lunch, Honey?")

One package of smart ground "beef"
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 or 3 carrots, diced
1 leek, chopped and washed thoroughly
2 yellow onions, chopped
2 tsp dried thyme or about 1 1/2 tbsp fresh chopped thyme
2 tsp dried oregano or about 1 1/2 tsp fresh chopped oregano
2 tbsp or more chopped fresh basil (you really can't substitute anything for fresh basil, it just doesn't work)
1 28oz can of diced tomatoes
2 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 - 3/4 cup vegetable stock or white wine or a combination of the two (I usually do a combination because I have both and want to get rid of them)
olive oil
bacon salt
salt & pepper
a bay leaf

Heat a layer of olive oil in a large pot over medium heat and add garlic, onions, carrots and leeks. Add about 1 tsp of bacon salt to the veggies and cook, stirring, until soft.

Add a little extra olive oil to the pot and then add in the smart ground, breaking it into crumbles with your spoon. Smart ground starts out extremely dry, so if it begins to stick to your pot, add more olive oil. Once the smart ground is heated, add in the tomato paste and stir until combined. Pour in the liquid, tomatoes, thyme, oregano, and a bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper to taste (and more bacon salt if you feel it's lacking.)

Let the sauce simmer over low heat for 30 minutes or longer, until it has become thick and rich. Fish out the bay leaf and stir in the basil once you turn off the heat. Serve over pasta.

Home Brewing Update

2010-04-18T16:06:00.000-04:00

Jill

My beer has spent about 3 weeks fermenting, and something tastes off. I gave it a little taste-test and it seems to be a little too sweet for the amount of time it's spent in the container. That could mean a number of things, but I'm hoping that the yeast just took a little break. Usually, sweetness could mean that the fermentation isn't finished. If the temperature of my beer dropped below 68º, the yeast would stop fermenting. Luckily, once the temperature returns to an appropriate level, the yeast will pick up right where it left off. If this is the issue, all I have to do is allow the beer to sit for a little while longer. However, if things don't start tasting right in about a week, I'll have to scrap it and start over.

Balsamic Risotto with Roasted Red Peppers

2010-04-06T17:20:00.011-04:00

Jill

After getting comfortable with the idea of risotto, I realized it's actually a pretty easy thing to throw together on a weeknight. It's also a great base recipe to start with to get rid of some of the things in your fridge (like I keep saying I want to do more of.) I had a half of a jar or roasted red peppers in my fridge, so I used that as a starting point for this recipe. Since Keith loves the flavor of balsamic vinegar on anything and I just acquired a bottle of some really delicious stuff, I figured it might be a good addition to the risotto. I started with a pretty small amount of the vinegar and I'm really glad I did. It lent just the right amount of flavor to the dish, but I think any more might have been too much.

Balsamic Risotto with Roasted Red Peppers

2 cups of arborio rice

3 1/2 cups of chicken stock (or vegetable stock for vegetarian version)

1 cup of white wine

2 1/2 cups water

1/8 cup of less of good quality balsamic vinegar (to taste)

1 yellow onion, diced

a couple of cloves of garlic, minced

1 roasted red bell pepper from a jar (or roast your own), chopped finely

olive oil

salt and pepper

Heat a layer of olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and sauté until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the onion and pepper and cook until the onion is soft and the red bell pepper is heated.

Add the rice into the pot along with some salt. Toast the rice, coating it with the oil, stirring frequently for about two minutes. Add the wine to the pot and stir, cooking until the wine absorbs into the rice (this may take up to 10 minutes depending on your rice.)

In the meantime, measure out two cups of your chicken stock. I'm pretty sure that the liquid you add to risotto is supposed to be warm, thought I'm not quite sure why, so I just microwaved the liquid I was about to add for about a minute (before each addition.) So, if you desire, microwave your stock for about a minute until it is warm. I also made risotto without warming the liquid at all, and it seemed to come out fine. Once the wine has been completely absorbed into your rice, add the two cups of warmed stock and stir, just like with the wine, until absorbed.

Add the remaining (warmed) stock and stir as before until absorbed. Measure about 1/8 cup of balsamic vinegar and add it to the rice along with a cup of (warmed) water. Stir the rice mixture until the liquid becomes absorbed, as before (starting to sound familiar?) The rice will take on a darker color. Add the rest of the warmed liquid, one cup at a time in the same fashion until no more liquid remains. Taste the rice to make sure that it is cooked through (if it isn't, continue adding small increments of liquid.) Salt and pepper to taste.

Home Brewing Part 1

2010-03-27T13:54:00.003-04:00

Jill

A few years ago, my brother got me a Mr. Beer kit for my birthday. The idea of brewing my own beer had never occured to me, but as a biology major the process of fermentation was nothing foreign. I always imagined home brewing as something extremely time consuming and easy to screw up, and it probably is. Luckily, the "Mr. Beer" kit is kind of foolproof. Think of it as the EZ bake oven of home brewing.

The first batch of beer I ever made was the one that came with the kit, and I didn't veer from the instructions at all. I was terrified that after months of conditioning and fermenting, somewhere along the line some unwanted microbial pest would make its way into my keg and spoil my whole batch. Surprisingly, the results of my first try were delicious: not too weak on the alcohol content, but not strong enough to be undrinkable. It was pretty balanced, and I was excited to be drinking something that I brewed at home.

Yesterday, I started the process again. The kit comes with a convenient little packet of powdered sanitizer. How does it work? I have no idea. You mix it with water in your two-gallon plastic keg, swish it around to coat everything, and then drop all of your tools into the keg. After 10 minutes, everything is sanitized and ready to use. You also need to place your tools onto a plate that you coated in the sanitizer/water mixture so that they remain clean throughout your process.

The sanitized tools (yes, even your can-opener needs to be sanitized)

The brewing procedure starts when you measure out four cups of cold water into a pot and dump in a packet of stuff called "booster". The manual says that this stuff is composed of dextrose (I'm assuming this gets converted to alcohol during fermentation after yeast is added) and maltodextrins. You bring the solution to a boil, remove it from the heat, and add a can of Mr. Beer's hopped malt extract. This recipe is supposed to make a nice, red beer, which is one of my favorites. I also added some molasses for flavor and to jack up the alcohol content just a tad. This mixture is called the "wort". My brother is a little braver and adds stuff like orange peels and other yummy sounding things to his beer, and the ones I've tasted are always delicious. I'm not brave enough yet, but if I didn't somehow ruin this batch maybe next time I'll get a little more experimental.

That's "Wort", not Worf

The wort (the word always makes me think of Worf from The Next Generation) gets dumped into your plastic keg and diluted with cold water. The kit comes with a little packet of brewer's yeast that you sprinkle into the keg. After five minutes, you stir everything up and screw on the lid (which has vents in the sides, so no exploding kegs.)

The good stuff, before screwing on the lid

That's the whole process! I just have to leave my little keg out of direct sunlight in an area with a relatively stable temperature for about two weeks until the fermentation process is complete. It will probably take a little longer since I added the extra sugar. Afterwards, I'll bottle the stuff and let it sit for even longer to condition the flavor, and then I'll update again. I should be able to taste if it's ruined by that point.

Peach Smoothies (non-dairy and vegan)

2010-03-21T13:11:00.002-04:00

Jill

It seemed long overdue, but we can finally turn off the heater and open the windows. That also means that pancakes and oatmeal are going to be off of the Sunday breakfast menu for a while. In this weather, I would rather have something refreshing that's going to leave me energized, as opposed to the usually carb-laden faire that causes me to veg around on the couch for at least an hour afterwards.

Smoothies are a lot of fun to drink for some reason, and they couldn't be easier to make on a Sunday morning. Simply chuck all of your ingredients into a blender and you're done. They're also deceptively healthy, even though you feel like you're having a milkshake or ice cream. I love using frozen fruit in smoothies because you don't need any ice, and that means your smoothie won't start getting watered down if you're slow enough to let it start melting. These are also great snacks, or even healthy summer desserts. This recipe is dairy free, but switching the soy ingredients out for dairy ingredients will also yield delicious results.

Peach Smoothie (Dairy-Free and Vegan)

2 cups of frozen peaches
1 6oz tub of vanilla soy yogurt
1 banana, sliced into chunks
1 cup of soy milk
A squirt of honey (not vegan) or agave nectar, or a few pinches of sugar

If your frozen peaches are in huge chunks or slices, put about 1/3 of them into your blender with a splash of soy milk and pulse until they break down a little. Continue this with the rest of your peaches, 1/3 at a time. This just makes life a little easier for your blender. I didn't do this the first few times I made smoothies and the results were the same, but it involved a lot of stabbing around with a butter knife in my blender to get the huge chunks to go towards the bottom.

Add the remaining ingredients to your blender and blend until smooth. This makes two large smoothies.

Dairy-Free (and vegan) Blueberry Ice Cream

2010-03-15T17:58:00.005-04:00

Jill

It's been pretty rainy and gross in Connecticut for the past few days. Spring seems to be taking far too long to get here, and I've been taking the opportunity to make a lot of the heavier, blazing oven foods that I know I won't be in the mood for once things start warming up. This weekend, however, I decided that we needed a little taste of summer.

Ice cream is another one of those foods that I thought I'd have to give up once I started getting sick. There are some non-dairy brands available, but they're either pretty pricey or pretty bad, not to mention very limited on the flavor front. Making ice cream at home is actually very easy, and all you really need is a decent ice cream maker (or not: here's a tutorial from David Lebovitz that shows you how to make ice cream without a machine.) I've used a few kinds of machines to make ice cream, but I really like the kind that has a freezable bowl. There's no rock-salt required and they're pretty fool-proof.

Blueberry ice cream sounded like a great idea, so I searched for some pre-existing recipes. Most of them required that you cook the blueberries down before blending them with milk. I like blueberry sauce, but it wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, so I ditched the recipes and came up with one of my own. I used agave nectar to sweeten the ice cream and I didn't miss the sugar for a second. I also followed the guidelines that I learned over at A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise for making deliciously creamy vegan ice cream.

Dairy-Free Blueberry Ice Cream (vegan)

1 cup of soy milk

2 cups of soy creamer (like unflavored silk creamer, which conveniently comes in a 2-cup carton)

About 1 cup + 1/4 cup blueberries

3/8 cup agave nectar (or measure slightly less than 1/2 cup)

2 tbsp arrowroot powder

A splash of vanilla extract

Whisk the arrowroot powder and about 1/4 cup of soy milk together in a small bowl and set it aside. In a blender, combine 1 cup blueberries, soy creamer, remaining soy milk, agave nectar, and vanilla. Taste the mixture and adjust if necessary. I started with a cup of blueberries, tasted it, and decided it needed to be more blueberry-y (can that be a word?) and added about 1/4 cup more. Don't worry about the color at this point, it will be almost like a very light pink.

Pour the blended mixture into a medium saucepan and bring it to a boil. Once the mixture begins to look like it's boiling, remove it from the heat. You don't really want to cook the mixture, you just want to bring it to the right temperature for the arrowroot powder to thicken it. ONLY after the mixture has been removed from the heat, add the arrowroot slurry and stir or whisk to combine. During this process, the mixture turned from light pink to deep purple (smooooke on the waaaater.)

Allow the mixture to cool in the fridge for about 2 or 3 hours. If you're impatient, you can cool it in the freezer but make sure to keep an eye on it and stir it very frequently. You don't want it to freeze, just get cold.

Follow the instructions on your ice cream maker once your mixture is chilled.

Garlic and Lemon Baked Chicken with Potatoes and Carrots

2010-03-06T15:30:00.002-05:00

Jill

I love chicken. Baked or roasted chicken is one of my favorite comfort foods, and although the end result is fantastic, there really isn't that much effort required in the preparation. The first time I made Elise's classic baked chicken , I was stunned at what came out of the oven. The only ingredients that went into it were chicken, olive oil, salt and pepper, and yet when I took my first bite it was so flavorful. (If you noticed that both Georgeanne and I link to Simply Recipes a lot, it's probably because I basically learned to cook from Elise's blog when I got my first apartment, and I often link Georgeanne to some of her recipes.)

Two of my favorite flavors on chicken are lemon and garlic, and whenever I roast a chicken, I almost always end up putting garlic cloves and sliced lemons into the cavity. This version of baked chicken incorporates those two flavors. I think that one of the reasons baked chicken is so delicious in the first place is that it's so simple and uncomplicated, so this variation is an attempt to stay along those lines. I almost always throw some kind of vegetable into the roasting pan when making chicken because they soak up a lot of the juices and become chickeny and wonderful, but the potatoes and carrots in this recipe can be substituted with any other veggie that roasts well.

Garlic and Lemon Baked Chicken with Potatoes and Carrots

A 3 or 4 pound chicken, cut up (breasts, thighs, legs and wings)

1 lemon

3 or 4 large garlic cloves

Baby potatoes (I like the red ones because I love the skin)

Baby carrots

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400º. Zest the lemon and mince the garlic finely. Pour some olive oil into a bowl and mix it with the garlic and lemon zest. Place the prepared chicken into a relatively large roasting pan (I like the aluminum ones because they make cleaning up easy, not to mention I really don't have room to store a huge roasting pan in my apartment.) The chicken pieces shouldn't be touching and there should be quite a bit of room between each piece.

Brush both sides of each chicken piece with the garlic and lemon oil. Cut the baby potatoes in half (or quarters if there are some larger potatoes). Place the carrots and potatoes in the spaces around the chicken and drizzle them with any remaining garlic/lemon oil. Generously salt and pepper both the chicken and the veggies.

Don't the colors in this picture look like somebody's '70s curtains?

Optional: I sliced the lemon and put a slice on top of each chicken piece. It made the skin very lemony, but it also prevented that section of the skin from browning, so depending on how you like your chicken you may want to skip that step.

Bake the chicken in the oven for about 30 minutes. Lower the heat to 350º and continue cooking. My chicken was slightly over 4 lbs, so it took the chicken an additional 40 minutes to cook at 350º.

There's a great method for making gravy back at the original recipe (if you like gravy,) but I usually just end up heating the cooking juices with a slurry made from 1 TBSP of the juices and 1 TBSP of cornstarch until it thickens.

Risotto with Rainbow Chard

2010-02-24T14:45:00.006-05:00

Jill

Risotto. It sounds so fancy, doesn't it? Maybe that's why the prospect of making it has always scared the crap out of me. Georgeanne (who is currently en route to the US, so maybe we can make something fun together in the coming weeks) has explained to me in the past that it's actually really easy to throw together a risotto. Just keep adding liquid to your rice until it absorbs it and stir.

I'd seen this recipe for risotto with swiss chard before over at The Way the Cookie Crumbles . I picked up some really beautiful rainbow chard at the store and decided that it was time to give the recipe a shot.

The process started out simply enough. I added the rice and chard to some sauteed onions and garlic. The recipe instructs you to saute the rice a little bit until the grains turn clear. They weren't turning completely clear, but instead retained little white spots. Like I said, I had never made risotto before, so I panicked a little bit, but continued on with the recipe.

I added some cheap (but tasty) white wine to the rice and waited for it to become absorbed, stirring from time to time. When the liquid didn't seem to be disappearing in the time I expected it to, I panicked again. I tried to be patient, and eventually the wine did seem to mostly disappear into the rice.

At this point I relaxed a little. The rice wasn't "broken," don't ask me how that's even possible, and I continued adding stock and water to the rice in small increments until the liquid disappeared. I heated up each cup of stock in the microwave for a minute because the recipe dictates that the liquid needs to be warm before you add it to the risotto. Is this necessary? I have no idea, but I was afraid to wander too far away from the original recipe.

I didn't add parmesan into the finished risotto for obvious reasons, but in my opinion it didn't really need it. Swiss chard has such a strong flavor of its own and it gave the rice a really savory element. I always thought that swiss chard has a flavor that's oddly similar to soy sauce, but maybe it's just my brain misfiring. In any case, I proved to myself that I didn't need to be so frightened of risotto. Aside from my unnecessary panicking, the recipe went very smoothly and the results were completely worth it.

On an unrelated note, Keith and I scored these glasses at the dollar store the other day. They were so completely ridiculous that we knew we had to buy them immediately. Look at that guy! Look at his horn-nose!

Kitchen Experiment: Chow Fun Noodles made from Won Ton Wrappers

2010-02-21T20:47:00.003-05:00

Jill

I love chow fun, but for some reason, Connecticut doesn't. In New York, it seemed that every Chinese restaurant had chow fun on the menu. Since we moved to Connecticut about a year and a half ago, we haven't been able to find any local places that carry the stuff. I'm definitely a noodle lover, and the big, square-shaped, squishy chow fun noodles are up there among my favorites. It's occured to me several times that I should try to make chow fun at home, but the Asian markets in the area are limited and packaged chow fun noodles are difficult to find.

Packaged won ton wrappers are pretty versitile and I see them more and more in most of the major super-market chains. I've used them to make ravioli, and I've even used them to make dessert. I discovered tonight that won ton wrappers make some pretty decent chow fun noodles, too. If they could write my lab reports, they'd be the best invention ever!

I honestly have no idea what goes into making real chow fun, so this recipe is probably the least authentic thing ever. Real chow fun noodles are made from rice, and the brand of wrappers I used is made from wheat flour. I did a little googling and other chow fun recipes used a bunch of stuff I already had in my pantry and fridge, like soy sauce and oyster sauce. I really didn't do any measuring, so this recipe is very much an approximation.

Vegetable Chow Fun made with Won Ton Wrappers

1 package Won Ton Wrappers (approx 12 oz)

Mixed Vegetables cut into uniform pieces (such as zucchini, carrots, broccoli, water chestnuts, bean sprouts, or any mix of veggies that you have on hand)

Soy Sauce

Oyster Sauce

Rice Vinegar

1 inch piece of ginger, minced, or powdered ginger if that's all you have (but add it at the end instead)

sesame oil

sriracha sauce (optional)

sliced scallions for garnish

Get a large pot of water boiling and add some salt. Cut the wonton wrappers into chow fun noodle sized pieces. I did this by leaving the wrappers in the stacks that they were packaged in and cutting the whole stack at once. Separate the noodles and don't place them on top of each other or they will stick together. This was the most time consuming part of the procedure. Add the separated noodles to the boiling water and cook them until they are no longer white. This should not take more than 5 minutes. Drain the noodles. If the noodles will be sitting around for a while before you add them to your vegetables, you may want to rinse them under cold water for a moment to stop the cooking and to keep them from sticking.

(It was hard to get a nice looking picture of this concoction because many of the veggies I used were the same color as the noodles)

In the meantime, heat some vegetable oil in a skillet large enough to hold the veggies and the noodles. Add the ginger (if not using powdered) and stir-fry for about 30 seconds. Add the remaining vegetables and cook until softened. Splash on some soy sauce (to taste), about a tbsp of oyster sauce, and a few splashes of rice vinegar. Add the cooked noodles and drizzle everything with a little sesame oil and sriracha sauce. Stir gently to combine and taste to adjust seasonings. If the sauce isn't thick enough, you can add some corn starch mixed into some soy sauce, but this shouldn't be necessary (as the noodles are pretty starchy to begin with.) Turn off the heat, and add the sliced scallions before serving.

Pizza Minus Dairy

2010-02-19T17:06:00.004-05:00

Jill

I don't think I'd be saying anything too shocking by stating that it's difficult to eat healthy or cook at home all of the time as a full-time student. A lot of evenings when I come home from a long day of classes, knowing that I have to invest more time in studying for an exam the next day, I just crack open a jar of pasta sauce and boil some spaghetti. On even lazier days, I just dial the number for the Chinese restaurant down the street. I do really enjoy cooking, but sometimes it seems impossible, or I'm just too exhausted.

When I stopped eating dairy, I was almost positive I was going to have to say goodbye to my dear friend pizza, but the huge amount of dairy-free cheese alternatives on the market made it remarkably simple to adapt it into something I could eat. Let me say this, however: not all dairy-free cheeses are created equal. Tofutti makes a great cream cheese and a great sour cream, and they even make some decent ice cream alternatives, but their sliced cheeses (to me at least) are plain awful. I'm not trying to be cruel to the company or anything, but the first time I tried one of their cheeses I spit it out because I thought it had been spoiled.

This is the part where I would usually lay out a recipe for you, but writing a recipe for pizza seems pretty silly. Pizza is extremely versatile, and the ingredients can be changed based on how much of a rush you are in. I'm not a huge fan of the pre-baked crusts they sell in stores, but I'm also not above using them. Fresh pizza dough is obviously the best, but I was also surprised to find pre-made refrigerated pizza dough in a can (like crescent rolls or dinner rolls,) and it also happens to be dairy free. Pizza sauce can also be bought in a jar pre-made for the ultimate "I-need-to-go-study" dinner.

Assemble a dairy-free pizza the same way you would assemble any pizza. Lay out your crust/dough, spread pizza sauce on top, and cover it with dairy-free shredded cheese. It might take some time to learn the characteristics of the different dairy-free cheeses out there. I find that when using some of the pre-shredded brands available, adding too many toppings to a pizza keeps the cheeses from melting together into one mass. It still tastes fine, but it's not as aesthetically close to what you would expect from pizza. One of my favorite toppings is black olives because they don't take up too much real-estate on the pizza and they allow the cheese to melt together nicely.

Bake your pizza in a 425º oven for 13 minutes or longer, until the crust is browned and your cheese starts to bubble a bit. I always serve this with quick salad so that when we sit down to eat, it actually feels like I spent time making something (I didn't.)

Basic Thai Chicken Curry

2010-02-14T17:55:00.007-05:00

Georgeanne

Easy Thai Chicken Curry
(can be substituted with tofu or shrimp, or beef with red curry)
Serves 2 with a little bit of leftovers for tomorrow's lunch

For a little over a euro, I bought a substantial pot of yellow curry paste. I can easily get five or six meals out of that!

Ingredients:

1 cup of rice
1tbsp vegetable oil
2 chicken breasts
1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 small onion, sliced
1 bell pepper (I usually pick the color to contrast with the curry I'm making, green curry = red, yellow or orange pepper, red curry = yellow or green, etc.)
1 1/2 tbsp red, green or yellow curry
1 can coconut milk
A few fresh kaffir lime leaves, sliced (found in Asian markets)
Fresh basil for garnish

On the back of the curry paste you'll find instructions that usually suggest other seasoning sauces like fish sauce and sweeter things like palm sugar. I don't usually add extra sauces and my curries turn out well, though it is fun to play around with extra seasoning like that.

Curry Prep

The nice thing about this recipe is that you can really throw in any kind of veggie that you want, the last time I made it I added a little potato. I think it is best with peppers and onions, but if you have some extra stuff hiding out in your fridge just throw it in.

Boil two cups of water, add the rice and immediately lower the heat. Leave to cook on the burner, remove from heat after about 10 minutes, or prepare rice according to the package.

Add the oil to a pot or deep frying pan over medium heat. Once the oil is hot, add the curry paste, breaking it up in the pan. Once the curry is aromatic, after about 30 seconds, add the garlic. Once the garlic becomes aromatic add the onion and fry until it's translucent. Add the pepper and stir for another minute or two. Add the chicken, stir until very lightly browned.
Pour in the can of coconut milk and stir. Add the sliced kaffir lime leaves. I usually throw in a few fresh basil leaves with it.
Let the curry simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring periodically. Serve over rice, garnish with fresh basil leaves.

enjoy while concentrating really hard on something else, as demonstrated above

yellow curry with red pepper

SEAL OF APPROVAL

2010-02-14T17:44:00.005-05:00

Georgeanne

SEAL OF APPROVAL

My favorite grocery store here in Paris is Tang Frères, a gigantic Asian grocery store with the best prices in the whole city. Seriously, you save so much money by shopping there. Cheese and bread are cheap in France, but nothing else! Though the bulk of their stock is Asian, your culinary prospects are not limited as they have a huge inexpensive selection of fresh herbs and vegetables, fruit, meat and seafood.

My 50 euro haul:

Aaaand in this picture you can see my whole kitchen! The two burners are covered with veggies, but they are there. From the left, the wall with the angry, ape-like neighbor behind it, the sink, burners, and my counter, an Ikea folding table that sticks out about 6 inches (length-wise) farther than the rest of the kitchen. The table was originally on a different wall but a stroke of genius led us to move it here so I could have a kitchen counter / dining table.

SHRIMP CRACKERS MMMMMM

I always buy a bunch of 30 - 40 cent ramen packages. Yeah they're salty, but they make for great, easy and CHEAP lunches.

EZ BOK CHOY with Garlic and Oyster Sauce

2010-02-14T17:42:00.003-05:00

Georgeanne

Really, really easy Bok Choy with Garlic and Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Two bunches of large bok choy, or a few bunches of baby bok choy (or however much you'd like)
1 tsp of cooking oil
1/2 cup oyster sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp brown sugar
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed

Wash the bok choy well! It is common for bok choy to come filled with dirt or sand, so wash well between each stalk.

In a small bowl, mix the oyster and soy sauce with the brown sugar.

Over medium heat, add the oil to a frying pan. Once hot, add the garlic and let cook for 30 seconds. Add the bok choy and cover with a lid, letting it cook down.

After a few minutes, add the oyster sauce mix. stir and let simmer until the box choy is wilted.

Serve hot.

Shrimp with Avocado and Bacon on Seasoned Rice

2010-02-14T15:01:00.004-05:00

Jill

I told myself I was going to start trying to make dinner from food I already had on hand, but for some reason that process scared me. I'm not really used to cooking blind without a recipe yet. Last night, however, I was in a really relaxed mood, and I just didn't feel like going to the store. The boyfriend and I had eaten a late lunch at a diner and had spent the rest of the day at the book store, so by the time we got home in the evening neither one of us was starving.

When we began to think about the prospect of dinner, long before either one of us was hungry, my boyfriend reminded me that we had some frozen raw shrimp. He suggested that I try to use up what we had, including the bottom of a bag of rice that just barely measured out to one cup. I didn't panic. Nobody was in a rush, and there was plenty of time for me to survey my fridge and pantry and start to form ideas.

Maybe it was because I was in such a great mood that everything went really smoothly. I had a general idea of what I wanted to make, and I didn't stress about the details beforehand. I let everything kind of come together as I was making it, adding things that I hoped would work well as I went along. I had a fun record on in the background (Eat Your Paisley,) and I didn't feel any pressure to finish cooking at any particular time.

I didn't make any exact measurements, but this is generally what I did. Go easy on the salt in this recipe because lots of the ingredients are already individually pretty salty.

Shrimp with Avocado and Bacon over Seasoned Rice (Georgeanne insists that I call this recipe Jill-balaya, but I think I'll stick to the basics here)

1 cup of long grain white rice

1 onion, chopped

2 carrots, diced finely

2 cups of chicken or vegetable stock or water (I used two boullion cubes dissolved in two cups of water, which added to the saltiness factor)

olive oil

tomato paste (I don't think I had more than a teaspoon on hand)

old bay seasoning

chili flakes

a few cloves of minced garlic

cumin

1 lime

avocado

1 pound of raw shrimp (I had medium, I'm sure large would be even better)

crumbled bacon (I had a pack of that "real bacon" crumbled stuff that's good on salads, but probably crammed with preservatives. Fresh bacon would be delicious, and I'm sure cooking the shrimp in the bacon fat would take this to a whole different level)

cilantro for garnish

Heat a layer of olive oil in a medium saucepan. Add onions and carrots and cook until soft. Add the tomato paste and old bay seasoning. I didn't measure the old bay, but I used at least a tablespoon. Add the rice to the oil and stir until it is coated with the seasonings. Zest the lime into the pot and let the rice toast for a moment, stirring. Add the stock to the pot, some juice from the lime, stir, and taste the broth. Adjust the seasonings. If it can use more old bay, add some. Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the heat and cover. Let the rice simmer for 15-20 minutes or until all of the liquid is absorbed. Remove from the heat, and let stand, covered, for a few extra minutes. If this method sounds familiar, it's because I was trying to follow the general steps I witnessed our neighbor-chef using the other week.

Heat olive oil in a frying pan large enough to hold your shrimp in one layer. Add the minced garlic and chili flakes and stir fry for a few moments. Add the shrimp and season with a little salt and pepper. Add a few dashes of cumin and a little bit of the crumbled bacon. Fry the shrimp until it is opaque throughout, then remove it from the heat. A good method is to let it fry on one side until you can begin to see the shrimp turning white, then flip it over and let it finish cooking. You can also just stir fry until you no longer see any grey/clear spots.

Cut an avocado in half, remove the pit, and dice. Chop up a nice handful of fresh cilantro. Add a layer of rice to your serving plates. Place the shrimp on top of the rice, and sprinkle it with more crumbled bacon. Place the chunks of avocado on the plate, being careful not to smoosh them. Sprinkle the whole thing with cilantro. We ate this with a crunchy cucumber salad and a corona with a lime.

I was pretty thrilled with the results of my fridge-scavenger dinner. Most of the ingredients were left over from the superbowl party last weekend (carrots from chili, avocado and cilantro from guacamole, limes from corona, etc..) This was actually my first experience cooking this way, without an exact plan formulated from beginning to end. I think I got lucky that this turned into an absolute home-run on my first attempt, not to mention the fact that I don't usually have most of those ingredients just sitting around. Still, the whole experience was pretty encouraging and I can't wait to try cooking like this again.

Dîner à la Française

2010-02-14T13:52:00.009-05:00

Georgeanne

In stark contrast to Superbowl fare, the boyfriend's aunt cooked up a French feast for his cousin's birthday.

Once everyone had arrived, the evening began with some noshing. Uncle François popped open a couple bottles of champagne, which we drank liberally, while munching on green olives and flûtes au sel; light, flaky, savory bread sticks. This went on for about an hour as we stopped talking about our jobs and started telling jokes ; the noise level in the room steadily rose, laughter boomed and my ability to speak French skyrocketed.

Nice and red-faced we stumbled over to the dinner table.

Gambas (large Mediterranean prawns) in Flake Pastry with Mâche (Lamb's Lettuce)

Mâche is my favorite leafy green.

The lightness of the gambas and flake pastry was a great starter to the rich main course.

Plat Principal

Hachis Parmentier aux Patates Douces et Canard
Duck and Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie

Eager reception of the shepherd's pie

This casserole is rich and delicious. I really liked the contrasting textures; the thick and juicy duck and the rich and creamy sweet potato was such an interesting match for my novice taste buds. The flavor contrast was exciting as well, with the slight sweetness of the sweet potato offset by the savory duck. This casserole was just a fantastic eating experience.

A note about the duck: In France, it is very common to buy canned duck confit in regular grocery stores. It's not too expensive and all you need to do is warm it up on the stove. In the USA it seems like one would either have to make their own duck confit or try and find canned confit at specialty stores or online.

Here is an easy duck confit recipe from simplyrecipes.com. Remember that for this shepherd's pie you will be removing the meat from the bone, so don't worry about the aesthetic integrity of the duck legs.

Marie-Noëlle's Duck and Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie

4 medium-size sweet potatoes, peeled
1 cup heavy cream (or light if you want, but heavy is always tastier)
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 lbs duck confit, with fat, removed from the bone and cut in pieces
1/2 cup bread crumbs, unseasoned

la méthode:

Preheat the oven to 350F (can be done after cooking the sweet potato)

In a large pan, place the sweet potatoes with enough water to cover them about halfway. Simmer over low heat for about 40 minutes. Marie-Noëlle says that this way the vitamins and sweetness of the sweet potatoes isn't lost.

Once the potatoes are mushy, transfer them to a large mixing bowl. Mash until creamy, and gradually add the cream and butter. Stir until smooth (a few lumps here and there is ok.)

If you're using canned duck confit, the duck is already cooked. Over a large bowl, pick the meat off of the bones. If you want, warm up the duck a bit in a pan over low heat. Though this step isn't necessary, Marie-Noëlle offered it to me as an option presumably after seeing the look on my face when she said not to cook or warm it at all.

In a large casserole dish, layer the duck and sweet potato making sure that the top layer is sweet potato. Sprinkle the bread crumbs evenly on top.

Bake for 1 hour

This dish is so rich and filling, but don't forget that you're also given many pieces of baguette throughout the entire meal.

Wine

A white Côtes du Rhône was first with the gambas and flake pastry

Followed by a red Bourgogne

The Cheese Course

From left to right: small pieces of goat cheese, cheese knives, roquefort, fromage Basque, camembert. Center: black cherry confit.

In France, no matter how stuffed you are, you eat cheese after your main course. Marie-Noelle fed us some excellent cheese that night, a hard Basque cheese served and eaten with tart black cherry confit, and an extremely delicious raw milk camembert, which is sold on a small straw mat (fromage camembert du lait cru de Normandie sur paille)
The tart cherry confit and the creamy, so slightly sweet Basque cheese was another fantastic matching of flavor and texture.

Le Dessert

Gâteau Trianon

No French birthday is complete without some kind of decadent dessert. This time Marie-Noelle bought a Gateau Trianon, a 3-layer chocolate mousse cake with almond macaroon base, a second layer of crushed crepes and pralines and a top layer of milk or dark chocolate mousse dusted with cocoa powder.

I haven't made this since I don't have the facilities in this little closet I'm living in now. One day when I live somewhere normal I'll attempt it.

Rainbow Cupcakes!

2010-02-14T10:16:00.004-05:00

Jill

Superbowl Sunday usually means chicken wings, chili, and other heavy man-type food. I definitely enjoy all of that deliciously unhealthy stuff, but this year I wanted to throw a little something extra in. I wanted to break up the usual masculinity with something completely frivolous, and almost ridiculous in contrast. That's right. It's rainbow cupcake time.

I've been seeing rainbow cakes and rainbow cupcakes around the blogs for the past year or so, and something about the completely inedible-looking colors stacked on top of each other is strangely appealing to me. There were certainly a few raised eyebrows when the cupcakes came out, but all but two were gone by the time the party was over.

The concept is simple enough, and doesn't really require a recipe. You whip up your favorite white cake batter, or in my case, you get ultra lazy and buy a white cake mix at the grocery store. I know that cake mixes are sacrilegious to some people, but precisely measuring out ingredients to make cupcakes on superbowl Sunday wasn't exactly my top priority when so many other dishes were being made at the same time. Split your prepared cake batter evenly into separate bowls depending on the amount of colors you want to have in your finished cupcakes. Six is probably the ideal amount of colors, but I skipped out on the orange and went with five colors. Gel food coloring will create really vivid, saturated, almost alien-looking colors that you see in a lot of the rainbow cakes. I really wanted to try the gel, but I didn't have time to go to a specialty store and my local supermarket only had the liquid stuff.

Tint each bowl of batter with food coloring, being careful not to overdo it. If you use liquid like me, you'll probably need to do a little mixing to make the non-primary colors. Pour a small layer of one color into the bottom of each cup of your cupcake pan. Pour a small layer of a different color on top of the initial layer, and repeat this until you have used all of your colors and the cupcake cups are half-way filled. Bake the cupcakes according to their original recipe.

There's something kind of magical about the finished product. Maybe it's the way that the colors stay separate instead of turning into a big brown glob, or maybe it's just ridiculously fun to be eating something so silly, especially when it's starkly contrasted against something like the ultra-masculine superbowl. Either way, this is a pretty simple undertaking with really great results.

Dairy-Free Lasagna

2010-02-05T12:32:00.004-05:00

Jill

Nutritional yeast is something that used to really scare me. It's a vegetarian supplement, made from little yellowish flakes of yeast (obviously.) I kept running into it in vegan-friendly recipes, mostly worked in as a cheese flavoring. I kept avoiding it, however, because not only did it seem a little too weird for me, it also seemed unnecessary. Plenty of cheese substitutes were easily available around me, and they worked just fine. Macaroni and cheese? All I needed was some soymilk, some margarine, and some shredded soy "cheddar". Pizza? Shredded soy mozzarella worked just fine. Tofutti makes a pretty good "cream cheese" and "sour cream". Still, there was one problem I kept running into: ricotta. Nobody sells a non-dairy ricotta, and if they do, I have no idea how to get a hold of it.

So many of my favorite foods rely on ricotta cheese, and living without those foods would kind of suck. There's baked ziti, stuffed shells, ravioli, and perhaps the most craveable one of all: lasagna. I racked my brain trying to figure out how to make a lasagna without ricotta, but all paths led to a very sad lasagna indeed.

I often turn to vegan recipes for inspiration, mostly because any vegan recipe I make doesn't have to be adapted to be non-dairy. A while back, I purchased a cookbook called "The Veganomicon." Lo and behold, the cookbook contained not just one ricotta substitute recipe, but two: one based in pureed cashews, and the other made from tofu. I decided immediately that I needed to try and make my own "ricotta," but then I saw that fearful ingredient on the list. Should I suck it up and try the damn nutritional yeast already? There didn't seem to be another alternative.

After trying the tofu-based recipe, I was so impressed that I never tried the cashew ricotta. Not only does the stuff look and feel exactly like ricotta cheese, it tastes awesome and is really simple to make. It replaces that missing substance and texture in ricotta-containing recipes that really weren't worth trying to replicate before.

This lasagna recipe is very basic and straightforward. The proportions here make a lasagna for two (baked in a loaf pan), but you could easily make a full sized lasagna with these ingredients. The sauce is also pretty basic, and if you have a preferred meat-sauce, you can substitute that right in. I've made this into a veggie lasagna in the past by using chopped eggplant, zucchini, carrots, and peppers, and I've also used smart-ground in place of the ground beef (surprisingly delicious.) If you have some leftover sauce, don't try to cram it into the lasagna. Since this recipe is a combination of a bunch of different recipes I've read in the past, I'm still not the greatest at having the right proportions of everything. Leftover sauce is actually really good on pasta for lunch the next day.

Lasagna (dairy free)

1 recipe of veganomicon tofu ricotta (recipe below)
6 regular sized lasagna noodles or 3 noodles that are wide enough to cover the area of a loaf pan (you can also use more noodles to make more layers, but I like my lasagna to be super gooey)
6oz shredded non-dairy mozzarella
1 lb ground beef
1 small yellow onion, chopped
15 oz can of stewed tomatoes
8oz can of tomato sauce
A few leaves of chopped fresh basil
1 tbsp chopped fresh oregano
1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper

Preheat your oven to 375º and grease a loaf pan. Cook the lasagna noodles according to the package directions.
Brown the ground beef in a large skillet or saucepan and drain. Add the onion and stir a few minutes more. Add the herbs, tomatoes and sauce, and salt and pepper to taste. Bring this mixture to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes more. Try to break up some of the bigger chunks of tomato with a fork.

Add 2 noodles, side by side, to cover the bottom of the loaf pan (or one noodle if you were able to find some wide enough.) Cut the noodles to fit if necessary. Add enough meat sauce to the mixture to cover the noodles. Add a layer of "ricotta" on top of the beef. Sprinkle this layer with "mozzarella" shreds. Layer two more noodles into the loaf pan and repeat this pattern. Add two more noodles on top, and sprinkle with more "mozzarella" if you'd like. The mozzarella substitute I used melted together beautifully on the inside, but the layer on top kind of stayed separate and got slightly crispy (it was still tasty.) Bake in the oven for about 20-25 minutes. Allow the lasagna to sit for a moment or two before you cut into it. I served mine with garlic bread made from some leftover rolls, margarine, garlic, and herbs that I stuck under the broiler for a few minutes.

Tofu Ricotta (from the Veganomicon)

1 lb extra-firm tofu, drained well (I actually used firm tofu this time around and it was still fine)
2 tsp lemon juice
1 clove of minced garlic
1/4 tsp salt
A pinch of pepper
About 10 leaves of chopped fresh basil
2 tsp olive oil (I used some fancy garlic infused stuff, but it really doesn't make too much of a difference)
1/4 cup nutritional yeast flakes

Mush the tofu in a bowl for a few seconds until it's crumbly. Add lemon juice, garlic, salt, pepper, and basil. Mush again with your hands. This step is kind of fun in a gross way because it smooshes through the spaces between your fingers. Do this until the tofu begins to look like ricotta. Add the olive oil and nutritional yeast. The veganomican advises you at this point to stir the mixture with a fork because it gets very sticky. Stir until combined.

I've Been Schooled

2010-02-01T13:05:00.004-05:00

Jill

I can't really speak for Georgeanne, but I pretty much know a few things to be true. We are not photographers. We are also not chefs. We are two people who truly enjoy cooking at home with the limited resources that we have, and we enjoy learning a few things on the way. We spent a lot of time talking about cooking together, and this blog kind of naturally came together as a way to share our food experiences with each other. If other people enjoy reading about them or can benefit from them in some way, that's even better.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, HOLY CRAP. I got schooled the other day. My new neighbor is a professional chef. He's not even a sub-par professional chef, he's a real professional chef. He's become pretty close with my boyfriend, so it's not unusual for him to be in my apartment. The other day, he asked us if we would like it if he cooked us dinner. My answer was a pretty enthusiastic yes.

I asked him if he wanted me to go to the store and pick up some food, but he was already looking through my fridge and my cabinets and he had the beginnings of a plan in his mind. I truly thought that I had no food in the house, but he pulled out a few straggler veggies that didn't get used up in other recipes.

I watched him chop through a pile of vegetables in a quarter of the time it would take me to make such uniform little slices. Some carrots, celerey, green onions, and yellow onions went into a pot with some olive oil and salt, along with garlic that was popped out from the insides of garlic-stuffed olives. Broccoli went into the broiler until it was brown and beautiful. Jasmine rice went into the pot and toasted for a minute until he doused the whole thing with some vegetable broth, which was also sitting around unused.

I had some pine nuts sitting around that were definitely on the verge of going bad, but they were toasted on my stove top. In a cake pan. Craziness was ensuing. The remnants of a jar of roasted red bell peppers got chopped into tiny bits and thrown into the mix near the end along with some olives. Even some leftover pizza sauce was used in place of tomato paste, which was absent from my fridge.

The verdict? Amazing. I mean, maybe it was just rice, but it was some pretty damn delicious rice that came from what I presumed was garbage laying around in my fridge and pantry. I'm not even sure which other seasonings were used during this process, because it honestly happened so quickly. The broccoli was mixed with some salad greens for a side salad, and everything seemed to blend together perfectly. I definitely learned a few things, but mostly I learned that I'm a pretty wasteful person. I'm bad at keeping an inventory in my fridge, and before I know it there are creepy mystery items hanging out in the back that get dumped into the garbage. Once a week, I'd like to try and create something like this by going through my cabinets and seeing what I come up with. Even if it's gross, it has to be a good learning experience for me... right?

Fancy Frühstück

2010-01-31T19:30:00.004-05:00

Georgeanne

Our last morning in Berlin we took a break from our grease binge.

This was my breakfast: a soft boiled egg garnished with fresh thyme in a fancy asymmetrical glass, a few slices of cheese and a slice of ham, and a few grapes with half a lychee. There was also a basket of bread with butter.

I love the elegance of presentation of this meal. To the American eye this “breakfast” looks rather ridiculous, yet there is a certain effortlessness in presentation that makes every item look like they belong together. I see this as an illustration of how the mood of presentation can change the way the eater feels about and enjoys the meal.

My friend’s breakfast was similar to mine, a bowl of fruit: beautifully sliced apples, grapes, orange, peach and banana, two slices of cheese, grapes, litchee half, and a small egg omlette.

Again, a modest breakfast made beautiful and elegant through presentation.

Interior of the cafe

Eine Kleine Context

The café is not too far from the Kaiser Wilhelm church near the Kurfürstendamm subway. The church, below, was badly damaged in WWII, which is why it stands jagged against the sky. The streets and buildings of Berlin are all etched with memory. There are buildings riddled with damage from bullets, there is a cobblestone line indicating where the Berlin Wall once stood and the German tax bureau is located in the former Luftwaffe headquarters.

bullet holes

Berlin Wall

street

Glühwein and Mulled Cider

2010-01-31T19:09:00.001-05:00

It's a crime to talk about the Winternachtsmarkt without mentioning the rich, hot beverages. Glühwein, a staple of the German winter markets, means “glowing wine. Glowing like…embers!” as my German roommate explained to me. Glühwein is hot mulled wine that really just hits the spot while outdoors on a brisk Berlin evening.

My sister with Glühwein at the Edinburgh German Christmas market

Jamie Oliver's recipe for mulled wine is a great start. I like to play around with the spices, for instance I tend to like more cinnamon (his recipe calls for one stick, I like two) and maybe a couple more cloves. But really, it’s to your liking so his method is a good foundation for your own personal mulled wine recipe.

Instead of making it in a pot, my dad adds the wine then the spices to the Crock Pot and lets them mull slowly. I like this method the best, it keeps the wine warm and rich.

Trying something new, my friend got hot Apfelwein, or mulled cider. Oh yeah, the Glühwein and cider stalls all had free gingersnaps to much on and dip into your hot drink. Amazing.

Mulled cider is made like mulled wine, so you can follow Jamie Oliver’s recipe and use cider rather than wine. For the nice and easy Crock Pot way- add as much cider as you’d like to the Crock Pot and then add the spices and boil. Turn down the heat as it mulls. Add some rum for some fun.

- Travel Tales -

The woman working at that mulled cider stand was pretty grumpy, unlike anyone else at this festive market, and carded my friend when she ordered the Apfelwein (nobody cards anybody in Europe.) It took about 10 minutes for her to angrily pantomime what she wanted us to do since our German was limited and her English was nonexistent. We tried handing her money, saying the name of what we wanted again, saying “bitte?” over and over etc. Anyway by some miracle of Gott we figured it out what she wanted and handed her the ID. The woman was confused/angered by the hologram on her driver license (from British Columbia), glanced at it briefly, and, without making eye contact, gave us the drinks anyway.

Yeah yeah cop lady, two dumb North Americans wandering around Berlin looking to get drunk at 1pm. Little did she know we had peed our pants earlier that day taking in the history of her amazing city.

Berlin Frühstück

2010-01-31T18:52:00.004-05:00

Georgeanne

Breakfast in (continental) Europe is different than back in the USA. One of many things I miss about home is a nice big diner breakfast complete with endless cups of (American) coffee, eggs, pancakes and fake maple syrup. I’m really hungry right now. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria, hotel/hostel breakfasts usually involve rolls, butter, jam, granola, and platters of cold cuts and cheese. Being a cheapskate, I eat granola for breakfast then make myself a sandwich for lunch and sneak it out in a napkin. Exception: this one time in Frankfurt I stayed in the Hilton and the breakfast was this ridiculous buffet with any type of breakfast food you can imagine.

Anyway – my friend and I skipped out on hostel breakfast and went to this café recommended by one of her friends near the Brandenburg Gates for breakfast one day. Cafes in Germany and Austria (and a few here in France) have newspapers hanging up on and held together by long sticks. You’re welcome to take one down and read it over breakfast or coffee.

I ordered an omelette at this place and it was delicious. The wide shot was blurry so you’re stuck with my pickle close-up. It was rich and heavy with potatoes and bacon (recurring theme) inside, topped with fresh chives and tomatoes, pickles(dill, not sweet) and more roasted potatoes. It also came with a side of potatoes.

Here’s what I do to make an omelette like this:

A swig of olive oil
Small potato (I like the red ones), diced
Small onion
2 or 3 large eggs
2 strips of bacon cut into small pieces
A swig of cream
Salt and pepper to taste

- Cut up the small-ish potato into cubes and fry in some oil over medium heat.
- Add the onion as you want and fry with the potatoes until golden.
- When the onions and potatoes are almost done, add the bacon to the pan. When the bacon is done but

not crispy, put the contents of the pan on a plate and set aside.
- In a separate bowl, beat 2 or 3 eggs with a swig of heavy cream
- Dump the egg mix in the pan, keeping it over the heat.
- After about 30 seconds add the onion/potato/bacon mix to the egg. Let it sit for a few seconds then fold over.

Garnish ideas: fresh parsley, chives fresh tomatoes, small dill pickles, ketchup.

These are the potatoes that came with my potato omlette. One of my favorite ways to prepare potatoes like this is to use duck fat. Fat makes everything delicious.

Take a few potatoes – I usually use the red ones, but whatever.
Cover them in a few good spoonfuls of duck fat.
Season with salt and pepper and fresh rosemary
Throw them in the oven at 450F until they’re done.

No I’m not being precise, just poke them after 20 minutes and see if they’re soft. If they aren’t then leave them for another 10. With stuff like this I just go without really using any precise measurements.

NUTS 4 NUTS, or VERRÜCKTE 4 NUSS

2010-01-31T18:34:00.004-05:00

Georgeanne

No, no we weren’t done eating. We stopped at the German equivalent of New York’s NUTS 4 NUTS stands. These delicious honey-roasted peanuts came wrapped in a little beak (as demonstrated by my friend) that reminded me of the herb-filled beaks doctors used to wear during the plague epidemic.

The resemblance is incredible and terrifying. Peanut packaging serves as a dark reminder to the people of Europe to beware the friendliness of rats (it doesn’t.)

The next day we saw a full plague doctor outfit in the Berlin history museum. Coincidence? Probably because if not we're totally f*ed

Honey roasted nuts are easy to make and are great to have out at parties, fancy or not. They're also easy to eat in one sitting so be careful.

There are some recipes that don't require an oven, which is good since my apartment in France doesn't have one, but I prefer oven-roasted peanuts. This is a decent recipe from gourmet.org: vendor nuts

BEST OF THE WURST (wurst title ever)

2010-01-31T18:25:00.004-05:00

Georgeanne

Next stop on the tour de market was the popular wurst stand. There were many and it was difficult to choose, but again, we picked the one with the most German people lined up. I used this tactic in Italy and ended up having the best pizza of my life. There were plenty of wursts to choose from, but we went with the classic pork bratwurst.

Although it was comically served in a small roll, as you can see, it was amazing. Yes, I put ketchup on it. I know, it’s soooo American, but whatever, some Germans were doing it too. I like my ketchup.

WURST LUNCH EVER

This is an easy meal to prepare if you have some friends coming over or you want to impress your new love interest with an exotic lunch but don’t have the time/energy to invest in making something intricate.

Remember that this kind of thing is all about presentation.

All you need:

A few links of German sausage
Package of sauerkraut
Kaiser rolls (or you can get the comically small ones)
A package of frozen French fries or potato wedges

Fry up the sausages in a pan over medium heat until they’re brown. Prepare the sauerkraut according to the package instructions. Do the same with the fries or wedges.

Remember, this kind of thing is all about presentation! It will be obvious that you used frozen fries, but that’s not a bad thing because they’re tasty and if you present them in the right way they will be better received by the eater. Serve them in a nice dish or on a nice plate next to the finished sausages.

Put the ketchup and mustard in small dishes that you’d usually use for side sauces or salad dressings and serve with cute little spoons.

If this isn’t a formal or trying-to-impress-someone affair, then do whatever you want, which is what I usually do in an attempt to cut corners and get to the eating part as fast as possible.

You can find the German sausage at butcher shops. I feel very 19^th century writing “butcher shop,” but that’s usually the best place to find a good, fresh cut of meat or stuff like bratwurst. There are many, many varieties of European sausage so you can do some research before you set off on your meaty adventure. To me, Bockwurst and Knackwurst taste most like hot dogs. Currywurst is quite popular too, which is a spicy pork sausage topped with curry sauce, or a spicy pork sausage made with curry powder.

Beware the blutwurst, I myself am not a huge fan of eating coagulated livestock blood.

german sausages on ol' wikipedia

Weihnachtsmarkt and Knäckerbröd Pizza

2010-01-31T18:12:00.004-05:00

Georgeanne

My friend and I decided to travel to Berlin in early December. Unbeknownst to us, this was the time of the brilliant German Weihnachtsmarkt, Wintermarkt, or Christkindlmarkt for all y’all in Bavaria. My friend and I were floored by the array of covered stalls with local merchants peddling their wares, the omnipresent melodies of live brass quintets and, most of all, by the abundance of delicious German winter foodstuffs.

candy stand. delicious.

At night, after a failed attempt at last-minute opera tickets, we stumbled across the brilliant market right outside of the Schauspeilhaus that had denied us entry. It was cold and we were hungry, and this place was flooded with people, laughter and the succulent blend of aromas radiating from the vendor’s stalls. So whatever, opera.

Not having any clue as to where to begin gorging, we picked the stall that had the biggest line. We ended up with this pizza-type thing that we named “the shoe,” since it looks like the sole of a shoe with stuff on top (note: does not taste like shoe.) The shoe had an oven-baked crust with a cream sauce, topped with fresh scallions and bacon. It was delicious.

Bear with me, I use the term “pizza” loosely and liberally. This shoe pizza reminds me of pizza that I had at a friend’s house this past summer, made on Swedish Knäckerbröd, a round, crispy rye bread with a little hole in the middle. Kind of like an edible record.

Leksands brand Knäckerbröd

Knäckerbröd Pizza with shoe pizza influence

1 piece of large Knäckerbröd

For white pizza sauce- I use an amalgamation (no mercury involved) of a bunch of white sauce recipes. I usually cook by eye so these amounts are an approximation of what I normally use.

2 tbsp butter

½ cup cream (I use heavy cream)

½ cup of of grated parmesan or romano cheese

½ cup ricotta cheese (again, I use the fattiest possible option)

A couple cloves of garlic, crushed (or more, it’s up to you)

Dash of salt and pepper

7-10 scallions, chopped (or however many you want)

1 cup of crumbled bacon (or however much you want)

Heat the oven to 350˚

In a frying pan, heat the butter and garlic over medium heat. When the garlic is fragrant but not brown—after about 30 seconds or a minute—stir in the cream and ricotta. After about two minutes stir in the parmesan or romano cheese. Add the salt and pepper and remove from heat.

Spread the sauce over the Knäckerbröd and top it with the bacon and scallions bits.

On a large baking tray, heat the Knäckerbröd pizza in the oven for about 15 minutes.

Let it cool, break it into pieces, et mangez.

Chicken and Broccoli Puff Pastries

2010-01-30T08:37:00.005-05:00

Jill

I’m pretty new to coming up with completely original kitchen ideas. That is, something that I didn’t see somewhere else and alter to my tastes. That’s why I was totally shocked when I was struck with random inspiration for some party food. I got the idea early in the morning last week, and by the time I was making it that night it was totally different. I was craving beef with broccoli, like the kind you get from Chinese take-out. I thought it would be neat to make it portable, like in an empanada. Through a series of improvements, it morphed into chicken with broccoli (and a little rice mixed in) wrapped in puff pastry. It’s not really an empanada, so I’m not sure what to call these. I was in a rush to take these pictures, so I left them on the parchment paper they were baked on (with browned bits of dripped eggwash and all.)

1 lb ground chicken
1 cup of cooked white rice (measure one cup AFTER cooking)
approx 9 oz broccoli (I bought a 12 oz bag of fresh broccoli and used around 3/4 of it)
1 1/2 tsp minced garlic
a pinch of crushed red pepper
1/2 to 1 tsp sesame oil
olive oil for cooking
1/4 cup hoisin sauce (i used lee kum kee brand)
3 tbsp oyster sauce
salt and pepper
1 box of puff pastry sheets (2 sheets)
1 egg, beaten with about a teaspoon of water (to make an egg wash)

Thaw puff pastry according to package directions. When ready to bake, preheat your oven to 400º.
Heat some olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet or frying pan. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the ground chicken and cook until no longer pink, breaking it up with a spatula. Chicken should be opaque throughout. Add the crushed red pepper and stir.
In the meantime, cook broccoli. I cheated and steamed the broccoli in the microwave, but you can use whatever cooking method you prefer. Once the broccoli is cooked and cool enough to handle, chop it into very fine pieces. This step is important, because the idea of biting into a big lone broccoli chunk in the final product seems like it could be a little... surprising (although probably not the end of the world.)
Turn the heat to low, and add the broccoli. Drizzle the chicken and broccoli with a little sesame oil. Sesame oil is super potent, so you really only want to add a tiny bit at a time. Add the cooked rice, hoisin sauce, and oyster sauce and stir until coated. You don't want too much sauce, or the pastries could get soggy. Taste, and add salt and pepper if needed. Let this mixture cool to about room temperature.

Roll out your puff pastry sheets with a rolling pin on a floured surface to about 1/4 in thickness. Make 2 cuts across the pastry to divide it into 3 strips. Cut the strips into squares.
Spoon a bit of the chicken mixture onto a pastry square. Brush the edges of the pastry with egg wash. Fold the pastry diagonally over the chicken to make a triangle and seal. Use a fork to crimp down the edges. Brush the top of the pastry with egg wash. Repeat this with the remaining puff pastry. I ended up with some leftover filling (but I didn't mind eating it as a side dish the next day.)
Bake the pastries in a 400º oven on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or tin foil until golden brown, about 10-15 minutes.

Yield: About 20-25 pastries, depending on size.

Lactose Intolerance and Fettuccini Alfredo

2010-01-22T13:32:00.004-05:00

Jill

Lactose intolerance has been a major part of my life for the past few years. I went from having symptoms that seemed like minor annoyances to having horrifyingly painful symptoms that no amount of treatments seemed to be able to stop. My body was clearly trying to tell me something, and I was ignoring it by continuing to take enzymes and other things to work my way around the problem.

Cutting all dairy out of my diet was a difficult decision and one that I knew would change my eating habits forever. It was also one of the major reasons why I started cooking more frequently. If I want to eat something I like, I have to make it myself. Sure, I miss eating things like milk chocolate, penne vodka, lasagna; the list could go on forever. This is where substitutions come in. I’ve become pretty sufficient at adapting recipes to become non-dairy, as have many other lactose intolerant, vegan, or dairy-allergic people… the internet is full of these resources.

Plenty of things that I cook have nothing to do with dairy ingredients in the first place, but sometimes I just get that craving. I originally got the idea for this pasta sauce from this eggplant casserole from the now seemingly defunct digs magazine. Back in my dairy eating days, I remember thinking that the sauce from this recipe would make a great alfredo sauce for other pasta dishes.

Dairy-Free Fettuccini Alfredo with Peas and Bacon

Ingredients:
12 oz Fettuccini (I used spinach fettuccini in this instance)
1 package frozen peas, thawed/cooked
several strips of bacon, cooked and crumbled
2 cups of plain soy milk
2-3 tsp minced garlic
½ tsp dried thyme
2 tbsp chopped fresh basil
1 bay leaf
a pinch of nutmeg
3 tbsp earth balance buttery spread or other non-dairy margarine
2 tbsp flour
¼ to ½ cup non-dairy shredded or grated parmesan cheese – I use veggie shreds, but this contains casein which is not a vegan ingredient, so substitute accordingly
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Bring salted water to a boil and cook fettuccini according to package directions. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan with a heavy bottom, combine soymilk and garlic with the herbs and spices on low heat.

Melt margarine, covered, in the microwave. Whisk the flour into the butter mixture with a fork and cook, covered, an additional 30 seconds in the microwave.

Whisk the butter mixture into the sauce. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce begins to thicken, about 10-15 minutes. Do not leave your sauce unattended, as this mixture tends to boil over easily.

Add “cheese” into sauce a little at a time, stirring after each addition until it has melted.

Place individual servings of fettuccini on plates. Ladle sauce over fettuccini, and top with peas and crumbled bacon.

Serves 4

Three-Bean Chili

2010-01-21T12:07:00.003-05:00

Jill

Something would feel really wrong if I wasn’t eating a bowl of chili while watching the Super Bowl, even if I have no vested interest in either of the teams playing (which is usually the case.) This has been my standard chili recipe for the past few Super Bowl parties we’ve hosted. There are no crazy ingredients that are impossible to find, it comes together quickly, and it’s relatively stress-free to make when you’re making a bunch of other stuff at the same time. It has served me well, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be retiring this recipe after this next party. I’d like to trade in the ground beef for something chunkier and swap the quick cooking-time for something that gives more complicated flavors time to develop.

The original recipe appears here, and I’ve made very few adjustments. Sauté about a cup each of onions, carrots, and bell peppers together in olive oil until they become soft (about 10 minutes.) Add 2-3 teaspoons of cumin and cook a few additional minutes. This step initially confused me, but good ol’ google revealed that heating the dry cumin powder can help it develop its flavor, similar to curry powder.

Add a pound of ground beef to the mixture and brown. At this point, the original recipe instructs you to add 2 cups of water. Adding water to most recipes always seems like a waste to me because you could be adding more flavors to whatever you’re making instead. This time around, I just added the beer I was drinking at the time as a replacement, but in the past I’ve also added beef stock.

Add a can of crushed tomatoes and then some seeded and minced chipotle peppers from a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. About 1 and ½ peppers is a happy balance for me and my boyfriend, who tends to like things on the less sweat-inducing side of the spice scale (which is a totally fictional scale that lives in my mind.) Also, add some of the adobo sauce from the can into the chili for flavor. Simmer this mixture together for about 30 minutes. Taste, and add oregano, salt, and pepper. If it tastes a little bland at this point, keep adding salt.

Add a can each of RINSED AND DRAINED black beans, pinto beans, and kidney beans. The goop that collects at the bottom of the bean can contains un-digestible starches, and they’d be happy to take your intestines on a wild ride. Simmer this mixture for an additional 20 minutes, and you have yourself a heaping pot of spicy chili. Make sure to taste your stuff throughout this process. I found that it needed a lot of salt, some additional cumin, and the adobo sauce from the can was also a really helpful spice to have on hand. HELPFUL HINT: Don’t touch your eyes. Ever. It’s gross. Especially don’t touch your eyes at any point in time after handling chipotle peppers. Some people wear gloves when working with chilies to avoid burning the butt out of themselves, so make sure you wash your hands exceptionally well after touching any kind of chili pepper.

This makes a pretty satisfying winter meal in general, and leftovers the next day almost taste better than the initial pot of chili.

2010-01-19T19:16:00.003-05:00

Georgeanne

Sausage, freshly grated horseradish, spicy senf and pretzel roll thingy. A delicious 2 euro lunch that wouldn't kill Jill! Before I ate this, the guy working at this wiener stand cut his finger really badly while slicing the next guy's sausage(ha ha ha, "wiener," "guy's sausage" etc.). The image of his sliced finger next to the sliced sausage, both roughly the same size, really,really grossed me out. I would love this picture, but that finger slice is the only thing I can think of when I see it. Now I've ruined it for you too.

2010-01-19T19:05:00.003-05:00

Georgeanne

I stumbled across these beautiful red currants in Salzburg, Austria, at this little market that sprang up around noon right behind Mozart's house.

Recipe Index

2010-01-15T10:49:00.028-05:00

Here's a quick recipe index to help you find what you're looking for. Some of these recipes may appear in more than one category (since they apply to more than one category)

Asian
Vegetable Chow Fun made from Won Ton Wrappers
Basic Thai Chicken Curry

Beef
Three-Bean Chili
Dairy-Free Lasagna

Beverages
Glühwein and Mulled Cider
Peach Smoothie (non-dairy and vegan)

Breakfast/Brunch
Berlin Früstück/Omelette Recipe
Peach Smoothie (non-dairy and vegan)
Mini Frittatas with Veggies

Desserts/Baking
Rainbow Cupcakes
Dairy-Free Blueberry Ice Cream (vegan)
Mini Chocolate Berry Tarts
Blackberry Gel Pudding

Pasta/Pizza/Italian
Dairy-Free Lasagna
Fettuccini Alfredo
Knäckerbröd Pizza
Pizza Minus Dairy
Vegan Spaghetti Bolognese
Zucchini "Pasta"
Vegan Pesto
Baked Pasta Puttanesca

Pork
Best of the Wurst
Prosciutto-Wrapped Melon

Poultry
Basic Thai Chicken Curry
Duck and Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie/Hachis Parmentier aux Patates Douces et Canard
Chicken and Broccoli Puff Pastries
Garlic and Lemon Baked Chicken with Potatoes and Carrots
Sick-Day Chicken Soup
Lemony Chickpeas with Chicken Sausage and Spinach

Rice
Risotto with Rainbow Chard
Shrimp with Avocado and Bacon on Seasoned Rice
Chicken and Broccoli Puff Pastries
Balsamic Risotto with Roasted Red Peppers

Seafood
Shrimp with Avocado and Bacon on Seasoned Rice
Fish Tacos
Mediterranean Swordfish in Parchment Packets
Easy Dijon-Crusted Salmon

Soups
Cucumber Avocado Soup
Asian-Inspired Vegetable Soup with Shiritaki Noodles
Sick-Day Chicken Soup

Vegetables/Salads
EZ BOK CHOY with Garlic and Oyster Sauce
Vegetable Tian
Lentil Salad with Dill
Weeknight Vegetarian Chili