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.

Vegan Pesto

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.

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.

Zucchini "Pasta"

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.

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.

Home Brewing Update

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

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. 

Home Brewing Part 1

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.