Easy Dijon-Crusted Salmon

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).

Lemony Chickpeas with Chicken Sausage and Spinach

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.

Sick-Day Chicken Soup

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.

Asian-Inspired Vegetable Soup with Shiritaki Noodles

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.

Weeknight Vegetarian Chili

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. 

Baked Pasta Puttanesca

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.

Mediterranean Swordfish in Parchment Packets

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.

Lentil Salad with Dill

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.

Vegetable Tian

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.

Fish Tacos

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.

Healthy Breakfast. No, Really.

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.

Blackberry Gel Pudding

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.

Cucumber Avocado soup with Prosciutto-wrapped Melon

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.

Mini Chocolate Berry Tarts

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.

Vegan Bolognese

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.

Balsamic Risotto with Roasted Red Peppers

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. 

Peach Smoothies (non-dairy and vegan)

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.

Garlic and Lemon Baked Chicken with Potatoes and Carrots

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.)

Kitchen Experiment: Chow Fun Noodles made from Won Ton Wrappers

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.

Pizza Minus Dairy

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.