green!

Green is my favorite color. It is the color of growing things, springtime renewal, PLANTS! Thus it is only fitting that I celebrate it today, my ****TWO YEAR BLOGIVERSARY****!

I know I am not the frequent poster that I was before, but I like to believe what I have lost in frequency I have (somewhat) made up for by making posts that are a little less “Dear Diary” and a little more food writer. Plus, my picture quality in the early days had nowhere to go but up.

Anyway, I still relish the time I spend (lately, mostly just Sunday afternoons like this), on my couch, putting together pictures into posts, Sheila working diligently beside me.

 

Sometimes I (narcissistically?) reread old blog entries I have written, and then it makes me remember delicious meals I have eaten and want to recreate them.

So the other night’s dinner was inspired by one of my favorite co-chefs, who lives in one of my favorite places: I remembered the fish baked in rainbow chard leaves I made with my cousin Rachel in Austin. I had bought some beautiful rainbow (but mostly green) chard at the farmer’s market and was easy to take it out for a spin again.

This was made in a rush on a weeknight and was therefore less sophisticated and also incidentally had less (meaning no) butter… but was still good.

Layer of chard leaves. Then salmon. Salt and pepper, drizzle of olive oil.

 

Lemon slicey!

 

More chard on top. Aren’t those colors so beautiful? I think rainbow chard is one of the most artistic looking vegetables on earth.

 

Foil topper for (I hoped) moisture retention and steamage.

45 or so minutes later at 350 degrees, it emerged from the oven steamed down considerably (note to self: use WAY MORE CHARD LEAVES next time! I know intellectually that they cook down but they REALLY REALLY COOK DOWN).

Steaming things inside things makes for such an attractive presentation! Minus the salmon fat, which I sort of scraped off of my piece cause I hear that’s where mercury and other narsty toxins accumulate. True? False?

             

Also green: Thursday! Saint Patrick’s Day! Obviously I was compelled to honor my Irish heritage, at least culinarily, because I am one sixteenth. I know people who get frighteningly drunk over a far smaller percentage.

I arrived at Steve’s at lunchtime with the following things:

For potluck later in the evening, I brought some of my broccoli stem pickles (hereinafter referred to as “brickles”), Cooking Light’s brown Irish soda bread which is intensely delicious but I, in a moment of intense stupidity, misread the recipe of and overcooked by ten minutes, thus making it taste like (slightly dry) plain bread rather than EARTH SHATTERING BUTTERY AWESOMENESS. (I have since made another loaf. It is much better).

And, for our lunchtime sunshiney picnic in the park, a green salad of farmer’s market jolly green goodness mix that includes mustard greens and I don’t know what else but is luscious; some Mutzu apple, and Trader Joe’s Persian cucumbers which, like everything in Trader Joes’ produce section are nonlocal and excessively packaged, but are quite yummy; and homemade dressing of lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, and olive oil.

To round out the meal, Steve contributed brown rice with some nice sauteed trail mix on top. Bizarre, yet not bad at all in taste and highly highly filling. Who knew?

Following work and a lovely walk in the park with Erin, I headed to Steve’s, where he was making his potluck meal. In separate pans, onions and garlic with SCADS of oil (really the reason Steve’s cooking is so delicious and satisfying is that he is not neurotic, like me, about using more than a teaspoon of oil at a time).

And a colorful and nutritious variety of frozen (mostly green) vegetables. It really should occur to me to buy frozen okra because it is one of my favorite vegetables and still totally delicious when flash-frozen at its in-season ripest. And its growing season is just too short!

The resulting dish, with some rice, eggs, and seasonings for good measure, was vair delicious fried rice. Steve is typically not a recipe follower (save that succulent falafel), but there’s a reason: he makes really really awesome rice. If it ain’t broke…

Carolyn is a lot more passionate about Saint Patrick’s day than any of us, so she chipped in heart-stopping and glorious baked potato soup (Expected? Totally rich and cream-packed. Unexpected? Luscious luscious rosemary. Nom!) as well as an amusing looking cake. The shamrock symbology is pretty obvious. The icing just happened because she had two half-containers. We spent a happy moment together in the kitchen cleaning out the almost-empty jars (She took vanilla, I dispatched the chocolate.)

We were actually too fully to break into the cake on Thursday, but it constituted most of my dinner on Friday. The ensuing sugar high sent me on a moonlit monument stroll with Steve. So lovely!

Back to potluck, my firsts. Only small plates were clean and available. Thus, many refills.

The soup, lotsa fried rice, and Erin’s green salad with edamame, tomato, olives, avocado, and other goodies. Had already snacked on a lot of pickles. Mostly rejected my own bread: everyone else said it was fine but I knew I could do better. My greatest kitchen competitor is myself.

Finally, some sweet green: our awesome supervisor Katie, following a planning meeting which causes me anxiety when I think too much about it, brought some bizarrely delicious mochi ice cream. Say what?!

I was all over the green tea flavor.

Fascinating. Starchy chewy mochi goodness on the outside, cold, rich, green tea ice cream on the inside. The coldness is a bit unexpected… my fellow Americorpse Joslynn had a pretty hilarious brain freeze.

I enjoyed. Though have always thought green tea ice cream tastes sort of like grass.

A final green story: our cactuses have been getting it on. This cactus now has its original red blossom… and a PURPLE one from the next guy over. Naughty, naughty!

Beautiful beautiful growing things. A final green hope for this (increasingly) length blogiversary post: could spring really be here?

 

I’ve seen better days

I woke up this morning and was decidedly DISPLEASED with the condition of my throat.

The first thing I “ate” today:

(Generic) Dayquil.

Awake earlier than I cared to be, I read in bed. I really should have just STAYED THERE (more on that later) but I eventually got myself and ate breakfast.

Along with tea (you can see my favorite mug in the background), to avoid the throat-exacerbating dairy in my usual bowl of banana oats but still have some comfortiness, I tried a new product I saw at HMart and could not resist.

Hard to read, I know: Pumpkin Porridge with Honey.

Like… COME ON!

I tend to take the nutritional facts on these with a grain of salt (since the actual label is in Korean and they have a not particularly official or complete looking English one stuck on) but its contents at least involve pumpkin, honey, powdered glutinous rice, salt, and water. And it maybe has approximately 210 calories, 0g fat, 440 mg (!) of sodium, and 3 grams of protein.

Anyway, it was very orange.

  

I removed it from the metal container to heat up but did used the enclosed adorable tiny spoon.

I was delighted to discover the unmentioned but welcomed ingredient of sweet red beans!

I decided to make one last trip to the farmer’s market. My last day of work is Friday, which means I can now go to the Saturday farmer’s market again and didn’t really need to go today (and really shouldn’t have- more on that in a sec), but I’ve grown somewhat attached to my fruit guys.

So I went for one last round of nectarines and peaches…

And some decidedly gigantic honeycrisps.

 

So I was driving home from the farmer’s market. Yes, the irony. Going to get my local produce, and I was being a Western Hemisphere carbon-hog, driving a mere (albeit hilly) 3 miles or so.

Mere blocks from my house, I look in my rearview mirror to see FLASHING BLUE LIGHTS! Apparently I ran/failed to adequately stop for a stop sign.

But wait!

I also didn’t have my driver’s license!

I was so busy panicking about that that I really didn’t make the case I could have to the cops (my pristine driving record, the fact that I wasn’t speeding, the fact that I was taking an unfamiliar route home). I realized I had left it at the stupid effing gym where I worked out by my mom’s office because I was new and didn’t have a lock for their locker room so they’d kept my bag for me with an ID as security and the woman had been on the phone when I picked up my clothes and as a result HADN’T MENTIONED THAT SHE HAD MY DRIVER’S LICENSE.

So I now have a ticket for ignoring a stop sign and for driving without a license.

The financial aspect, while sucky (well actually really sucky; I’m mentally calculating how many hours of work will pay off this ticket and guess what? I am starting work for Americorps. You do not actually get rich doing that), for me isn’t the worst.

I am the POSTER CHILD for putting traffic cops on the street, because any time I get in trouble for doing everything wrong, I am positively overwhelmed with shame and self loathing. I drive like a 90-year-old the vast majority of a time. I know it’s incredibly important for the safety of other drivers (and non carbon-hog PEDESTRIANS!) to properly obey stop signs.

Ugh ugh ugh.

Anyway. Comfort food.

For quite awhile now, I’ve had in my mind to make the cream-free recipe Cristeta Comerford (the White House chef) came up with for creamed spinach. As an added bonus, we had old spinach in need of using and my vegetable intake has been a bit low lately.

She has you blanch the spinach, and you know that I am usually loath to boil anything- it is a nutrient-wasting cooking method. However, I had a plan.

I brought 1 1/4 cups of water to a boil and blanched the spinach in it just until wilted and tender.

This left me with cooked spinach and green spinach-nutrient-water.

With the spinach, I cooked a thinly sliced shallot in some olive oil

 

Then immersion blended that with the cooked spinach, along with salt and pepper and just for kicks some nutmeg, to result in ugly but tasty and wholesome creamed spinach (I’m sure making this on a larger scale, per the recipe I linked to, would be much easier, but we just didn’t have that much spinach left).

As for the spinach water? I used it to cook up savory oats. It had been way too long.

I mixed the spinach with the oats and then even reused that pot (along with my poach pod!) to make yet another poached egg (still so stoked about eating eggs from a chicken I have personally met)

Layered in a bowl, and I had serious comfort food.

 

Savory oats really are great. The texture of oats (especially slow-cooked, how I do it) is so comforting. Starchy and chewy and lovely.

Rounded it out with a yogurt and an iced tea.

Other people: when you put toppings on oats (whether you’re talking about a cooked egg or a glob of peanut butter) do you sort of shmear them all over the bowl so that you get some in every bite? Cause I do.

So. Good. Look at the incredible color in those yolks! They are freshity fresh.

I feel sorry for people who only eat egg whites. Eggs are good for you. The yolk is where all the nutrients are. It’s also delicious.

Then I was still feeling sorry for myself, and wanting to eat my feelings.

There was something kind of gross in my refrigerator that perfectly fit the bill.

My sister bought them. They were in my fridge.

In these times, some people turn to alcohol or drugs. I turn to creepy unnatural sweet things. Make of that what you will.

They taste like (and are) Jello pudding with extra air.

Wish I could go hibernate now. Ideally til I’m 70 and can be put in a home and never have to drive again.

chocolate and tony bourdain

^^ Really, two of my greatest loves.

Completely obsessed:

 

I’ve been working my way through two hefty bars of this stuff for like a month, trying to savor every single bite because it is so friggin’ good. It was intended to be a Christmas gift from my cousin Rachel, who presumably got it while in Suffolk with her Brit husband Richard. However, my aunt and uncle somehow forgot to get it to me til… June. NO PROBLEM!

The deets, should one ever be in Suffolk:

My God, this chocolate. Snape definitely whipped up a delicious potion with this one (nerd alert nerd alert nerd alert)!

I know proper chocolate snobs have no patience for milk chocolate but… screw the proper chocolate snobs. This stuff has all the intensity and grittiness of my beloved dark-only Taza chocolate (the tour of their factory was definitely the best date ever- see, people should date me, I think of fun activities) but with milky rich wonderful ness.

On the topic of my cousin Rachel: as she put it, she finally “took my advice” and started her own food blog!

She is a trained pastry chef. She lives in Austin, Texas, currently my favorite place in the United States. Her first post is an enjoyably potty-mouthed entry to Tony Bourdain’s Medium Raw Challenge. This blog is sure to be good.

Check it out!

http://mydinnerwithandre.blogspot.com/

And, on her suggestion, I wrote one as well! (This one’s just for me, just for fun. Don’t worry, Rach, I’m still voting for you in the official contest :D)

Bourdain’s prompt for your essay is a simple one: why cook well? Here’s what I wrote:

My sister has taken to buying premade sandwiches. For those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with Oscar Mayer Deli Creations, a primer: in their infinite wisdom, the good people at Kraft recognized that it is far too taxing to ask the American consumer to put the ham and cheese ON the bread. Saving them the effort (and pocketing an unbelievable markup for the privilege) to me marks everything wrong with our country and food. My sister is not a bad person. She is just buying into the general feeling of helplessness that the “food” (quotation marks deliberate) industry tries to cultivate in the consumer.

When I cook, I think of several people who I am refusing to be. I think about the lobotomized woman in commercials for “shortcuts in the kitchen”, seemingly helpless at even the sight of a pot or a spoon. I think about the woman lauded in magazines—“Health” (quotation marks deliberate) and their ilk— nobly filling up on three pounds of raw celery before attending a dinner party to avoid any semblance of, oh dear God, hunger. And, at this point too deeply embedded in our culture, I think of the creepily idealized American woman, that fifties housewife, brittle but ecstatic, opening her Saran-wrapped boneless skinless chicken breast and celebrating the fact that she has no idea where it came from.

I cook well because in this era of materialism, of raping the planet, it means something to me to create something, something real and wonderful, instead of having something produced and unnatural and vastly, vastly inferior shoved at me. Cooking well means getting your food covered in dirt, because it grows in the ground. It means refusing to view food as a delivery system for whatever nutrient scientists have decided is good for you that particular day. In the same token, refusing to deny yourself butter because it’s “bad”: rather, using butter because it makes everything taste a million times better.

I will not be helpless. I will cook. And, I fancy, cook well. Well in the sense that over the years I’ve honed skills and well in the sense that the ingredients I put into my recipes are generally fresh, nutritious, and pronounceable. Cooking gives me pleasure. Tragically, that is a taboo admission in this nation of guilty-eating, guilty-independence, guilty-sex, guilty-but-still-rampant-hedonism. The pleasure I get from cooking comes from the fact that food made well simultaneously gives you nourishment and rocks your world (something no other material entity can do). Moreover, the pleasure comes from the fact that when I cook well, I am sticking it to the man, the powers that be in the weirdly hierarchical world of food. I reject the man and reject my role as a helpless, stupid, dutifully unsatisfied buyer.

Are other people entering the Medium Raw Challenge? Why do YOU cook well?

Mr. Corn Bits says hello

Lately I’ve been trying to organize my posts around a coherent theme. This is not one of those posts!

Since I’ve gotten a lot of comments about the various weird Asian foods I’ve posted about before, I thought I’d continue!

How can you not love a company that has THIS GUY as its spokesmanvegetable?

CORNBITS! My little sister mentioned on the Taiwanese stepfamily’s last visit that she liked them… so they brought her back two crates! We are not complaining.

There are various types of CornBits- original, and the “CornBits Mix” containing dried peas and coated peanuts that we’ve been chowing down on, pictured below. The corn bit itself has the appearance of hominy, the crunch of a dried vegetable (considerably more substantive than popcorn) and the addictiveness of cocaine. Or so I presume.

For snack food, it’s actually rockin’ in the fiber department. However, since everything is coated in coconut oil it’s also chock full o’ saturated fat! Moderation in all things :D

Moving on, more stevia!

When NuNaturals sent me all their stevia swag, they included a bazillion recipes. Seriously. A bazillion. Some were exhaustingly food bloggery (normal people do not have coconut flour in their homes!) but one immediately caught my eye: lemonade!

I love lemonade but let’s be honest- it’s a whole bunch of calories and a blood sugar spike. This is why I was stoked to try it stevia-fied!

Their technique is so cool! I halved the recipe: I combined 1/2 a cup of water and today’s form of stevia, the pure extract (this boggles my mind: this entire batch of lemonade took 1/2 tsp of stevia! The stuff is SWEET!)

Then I took two entire lemons, cut them into chunks, and, as I read in the instructions “… Place in blender and puree…”

So I did.

Then kept reading…

“… until lemons are coarsely chopped”.

Er, not so much.

But it still worked! I strained the mixture into my pitcher, added an additional 3 1/2 cups of water and had some gorgeous, non blood sugar spiking, basically calorie-free, lemonade!

 

I enjoyed a glass al fresco with an extremely delicious lunch.

Yogurt, muffin, and a salad of note:

Arugula and white beans, dressed in olive oil, lemon juice, and red pepper flakes. Marvy!

Now as for the lemon pulp…

It was sweet, it was lemony… lemon poppy seed bread!

The dry:

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 T. poppy seeds
1/2 tsp. baking soda

Stir, then add the wet:

Lemon-stevia pulp (1 cup? From 2 lemons…)
1 egg
1 T oil
1/4 cup water

The batter:

 

Baked for 20 minutes at 350*.

And the finished product:

 

Pretty, eh? And a slice held together reasonably well…

As for the taste?

Lemon pulp, hahahaha.

It’ll probably be palatable toasted with honey, but it’s not likely one I’ll repeat. Oh well, a fun experiment!