cookout paparazzi

I had a guest artist documenting my most recent cookout.

Lydia sent me a text all, “Whatcha doin?” And I said “Grillin! Come over!”

And then she asked if she could help and I said take pictures.

Preheating and Pandora:

 

Sheila stalking something… (She’s on a real vole-eating kick. And got a ROBIN the other day oh God it was so traumatizing)

On a happier note, pesto! Photographed in the pot next to last year’s dead plants. (For the record, that box now contains gernaiums and is much less sad looking).

Fixin’s for a quinoa salad.

 

Fresh deck-grown oregano joined the party.

First off the grill: asparagus (the last of the bunch. Everyone got two spears, heh.)

Then I put sweet potatoes on the grill while Steve frantically tried to rescue a fallen asparagus spear.

Teamwork. Love.

  

Grilled sweet potatoes: Slice. Steam til just tender. Spray. Grill. Try to keep them from falling through the grate, but, yknow, no one’s perfect.

One of my favorite recipes for wilted spinach salad. Mm. Involves soy sauce, lemon, mustard powder, and olive oil.

The finished quinoa salad, most of the work of which was done by Lydia. Quinoa, apple, cuc, vinaigrette, oregano, lemon. Think she also threw in some of the oil from the top of the pesto.

BISON BURGERS! We had half a pound left and I split it three ways for burgers for my mom, the boyf, and I. (Lydia’s a vegetarian; I made her a bean burger and half of it fell through the grate. FOIL, LELE.) Anyway, these were GREAT and I’d been totally jonesing for a burger as I made my way through meatless Lent.

 

Secretly, I could’ve eaten all three. They were amazing. I do my burgers with just salt and pepper, Worcestershire, and fresh oregano.

Fun fact: you know how icky compounds form when you grill foods at high heat and get (delicious) char on them? Well the antioxidants in herbs LIKE OREGANO help prevent that :D I read that in Today’s Dietitian.

Feast! Under the beautiful sky! Next to the beautiful trees! Feeling the wonderful breeze!

Lydia always tells me there aren’t enough pictures of me in my blog, and exhorted me to interact with the food.

So here I am petting the hamburger buns. We both *love* this picture.

And I *loved* this dinner (and ate lots more than this!)

hungry and a half

So I have this new job and it involves manual labor.

Guess what happens when you work in the warehouse of a food bank and spend several hours a day hauling food crates, making boxes, sorting food, packing boxes, and lifting boxes?

If you said “You turn into a hungry beast”, you are correct!

I try to appease myself with sensible, pretty lunches (since I’m currently working part time, most days I finish work about 12:30, which means I can eat lunch at home- SO nice).

For this particular one I was totally jonesing for stuffed peppers and had a tasty one from the farmer’s market. (Already hungry), I wanted the methodology to be quick. To me, quick+ stuffing= bulgur. You just dump boiling water on it!

So I did that. Let it absorb (ish).

Then mixed it with some canned salmon and pesto and threw it in two halves of a pepper and baked that pepper in my peppy little toaster oven til it was softish (which did not take long)

 

It was good but vastly improved by:

 

Like so many things. While the pepper cooked, I threw together an attractive bowl of yogurt, sliced peach, and walnut. Mmm.

 

But, like Sheila whenever I arrive home from work, who begs for much of the afternoon despite the fact that she knows she gets fed at five and has that unnervingly accurate internal clock of cats.

But…. I’m so huuuuuuuuungry.

You are such a bad person.

Anyway. My solution to this “ravenous, unceasing hunger” problem seems to be to eat energy dense foods. By which I mean… cookies.

It does not help that I discovered today (my long day- worked 8:30-4:30, spent a minimum of 4 of those hours laboring away in the warehouse) that on the way home from work I pass a shockingly good and reasonably affordable Korean bakery.

A white bean bun. Lovely fluffy puffy bread surrounding a sweet white bean filling. Mmmmmm.

You know how it goes… you meant to eat half. And then you eat it all. And then you have some potato chips, and cereal, and some cold red snapper (?) and dates dipped in almond butter.

I ask you, readers: have any of you had a super physical job? Any tips for eating sensibly while satisfying that hunger?

My current thing is be incredibly active> eat sensibly> be unsatisfied> eat tons and tons> feel guilty> exercise tons and tons in afternoon (though I really enjoy this; I think being more active at work actually INCREASES my energy level)> eat hearty dinner.

Well, actually, that part is working really well.

Allow me to introduce you to a dinner that will satisfy the bejesus out of you. You will want to lie back and smoke a cigarette after this dinner (but DON’T!)

I give you…

Heavenly Harvest Bison Squash-Topped Autumn Shepherd’s Pie

(the magnitude of the length of its name I hope is a testament to the magnitude of the recipe’s deliciousness)

Filling:

1 red bell pepper
2 tsp. oil, divided
1 lb ground buffalo
½ cup chopped onion
½ apple, diced
¼ tsp. chili powder
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cloves
2 T red wine
1/3 cup vegetable broth
1 T whole wheat flour (or your flour of choice)

Topping:
1 roasted acorn squash, scooped out of its skin
8 oz sweet potato (I used three teeny baby ones, this is about the size of one normal one)
2 T milk
1 tsp. maple syrup
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Cut acorn squash in half. Remove seeds (roast or discard). Put squash cut-sides down on a baking sheet. Prick sweet potato(es) with a fork and place on baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees until the squash is tender, about 40 minutes. If necessary, cook sweet potato(es) a bit longer. Mash squash and sweet potatoes with milk, cinnamon, and maple syrup. Use a spatula to smear topping over filling.

Cut red pepper into sections and broil them until blackened. Place in a paper bag and leave for ten minutes. They should then be easy to peel. Chop them into bite sized pieces.

Heat ½ tsp canola oil over medium heat in a nonstick pan. Add bison and cook to brown. Remove bison from pan, and wipe out pan. Set bison aside.

Increase heat to medium high. Add remaining oil, and add onion, apple, and spices. Cook until onion is tender and brown. Add wine to pan to deglaze, and remove pan from heat. Stir in slurry of broth and flour. Also add reserved red pepper slices and browned bison to filling mixture. Pour filling mixture into the bottom of a large casserole dish.

Bake at 350 until topping is golden and starting to crisp.

It will rock your world.

To take you through the process-

I didn’t get a lot of filling pictures but I had to brag about my adorable tiny sweet potatoes. I mean look at these charming things.

That’s a teaspoon. Sweet little sweet potatoes!

  

The filling is enhanced by a tasty base of golden onion, sweet apple, and a variety of tongue-tickling spices.

 

It’s sweetened and given a pop of color with roasted red pepper

As you can see, it’s pretty darn meaty. I wanted shepherd’s pie, and shepherd’s pie is proper, stick-to-your-ribs, meaty food.

The nice thing is, it’s very very healthful meat- bison is naturally  very lean and rather than some tragic feedlot cornfed cow, it eats actual natural plants.

Nice, thick layer :D

  

The filling was a very very THICK layer! I was delighted by this.

I started with roasting just the acorn squash, but I had horrific visions of the topping being too thin. I also thought of how the traditional potato shepherd’s pie topping is wonderfully thick and dense, not at all watery, and thought that perhaps a starchier veggie, like a sweet potato, would do well.

The combination was perfect and I was really glad it was so HUGE AND THICK!

 

Watching (and smelling) it bake was pleasantly tortuous. When it came out, you can see the beautiful browning that happened around the edges.

The bottom, however (thanks perhaps to the help of just a bit of broth to keep everything moistened) was still wonderfully tender and not at all dried out.

 

A woefully poor job of demonstrating the heavenly filling/topping symphony that ensued.

 

You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

The wonderful, tender meat layer was earthy and rich. I got the idea for apples for a subtle sweetness (and some moisture, and another nod to the autumn flavors) from a Cooking Light picadillo recipe. I also really enjoyed the combination of the savory meat and the traditionally sweeter spices like cinnamon (a combination that pops up everywhere from Venice to Latin America).

And the awesomely THICK orange carby wondrous topping, also sweet, brought the dish together really nicely.

My boyfriend, my mom and I TOOK DOWN this shepherd’s pie. It did not stand a chance. It was gone in a really, really brief period of time.

And at long last, my hungry toiling self was satisfied :D

classic

This is a very ME post. It incorporates local foods (which sheep that I am, I have fully embraced), and baked goods (specifically, what I might consider to be my signature baked good, muffins).

It is particularly classic and old school because it includes actual RECIPES, which I haven’t posted in eons.

In fact, I realized that said recipes are actually new versions of the two dishes I posted in my first ever blog post. Crazy! It’s kind of cool to think how far I have come mentally, culinarily, and blog-ily (yes, of course that’s a word) from where I once was.

A few things are new:
Ingredients and finished dishes are (slightly) more attractively photographed with a (slightly) better camera.
And made in a real kitchen with nice pans instead of in my college apartment.
And filled with classy ingredients only subsidized by very nice people sending me free stuff for my blog (thanks NuNaturals for the stevia baking mix!) and my mother subsidizing me because I’m a useless member of a useless generation who is stuck living with their parents after graduating with basically useless degrees.

So while some things have changed, I will always be the kind of girl who cleans out her refrigerator by making a nice dozen muffins.

My sister went on a business trip (hahaha at the tender age of 20, I love it) and it gave me an opportunity to deal with the stuff she frequently abandons in our fridge. Half-eaten yogurt and applesauce, boom.

 

We’ve had some ground flaxseed for QUITE awhile now, and though we buy the kind in the opaque bag to extends its shelf life, it was still really sort of rancid. Finished off that puppy to make my flax “eggs”.

 

And in one beautiful fell swoop, finished off a thing of canola oil, baking powder, and a bag of oldish carrots. Why exactly is that feeling so satisfying to me?

Finally, upon returning home after a rawther intense workout (the arc trainer alleged I had burned 910 calories), I had opened a bag of granola (a free sample courtesy of Galaxy Granola) and eaten RAWTHER a lot, hand to mouth style. I decided it would be fortuitous to use up the rest of the granola, in some sort of healthy application, as quickly as possible. Fortunately, I love granola in muffins!

 

Clean Out the Fridge Muffins

1 c granola
1/2 c milk

2 T ground flax
1/4 c water

1 c WW flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1  T stevia baking mix (or your choice of sweetener- these were barely sweet so you may want to add more)

1/3 c. apple sauce
3 T or so yogurt (I used flavored, you could use plain)
1 tsp. canola oil

3 tiny carrots, very finely diced

Combine granola and milk and let soak to soften granola. Combine ground flax and water in a separate small bowl and let sit until thickened.

Combine dry ingredients (flour through stevia). In a big bowl, combine wet ingredients (applesauce through oil). Add granola and flax mixes to wet ingredients. Then add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and stir until just combined. Then fold in carrots.

Bake at 350 degrees in a greased muffin tin for 20 minutes.

Got the job done.

The best parts (for moisture and flavorfulness) were carrot bites! I actually ended up making an impromptu “icing” (light cream cheese+honey+cinnamon) that greatly enhanced these. I recommend. Steve seemed to be a fan, too, as he ate 3.

Another fun recipe: BUFFALO! I am so into buffalo right now. I have also (guiltily, furtively, but quite intensely) been craving meat. So I’m trying to stretch it with veggie fillers and buy the kind of meat I can be happy about; specifically, local, from a nice small farm who I feel good supporting, from an animal that doesn’t eat corn. Buffalo’s also great cause it’s mad lean and simultaneously mad delicious.

I began by browning up my buffalo in just a tad of peanut oil (it’ll release a buncha fat, which I drained and you are welcome to, too, but you need the initial oil to get it going). It’s important to only do this on medium heat, because since buffalo is so virtuously lean, it’s also easy to overcook and toughen.

 

I took out the browned buffalo crumblies with a slotted spoon, drained off the fat, and added another tsp. of peanut oil. At that point, I sauteed green onion, ginger, and garlic.

 

Then in went finely diced carrot..

 

… and a whole buncha ‘shrooms (I really love mushrooms as a flavor extender of red meat because they have that great earthy richness of flavor)

  

I returned the buffalo to the pan along with s’more seasoning (hoisin, soy, and of course Sriracha) and plated it up.

This filling was FANTASTIC. I was unbelievably pleased at how well this recipe came out (and that I wrote down the ingredients and quantities, something I’ve been too lazy to notice for awhile now!). Buffalo has such a lovely tender sweet flavor that I didn’t want to mask it. I loved the interplay of the Asian flavors that stayed nice and delicate, and veggie textures that stayed mostly soft. It let the buffalo be the star while enhancing all the yummy things about it.

And out it went with beautiful local purple cabbage leaves for wrapping! Gosh, I forget how fun lettuce wraps are. It’s so fun to make your meal as you go. Somehow the ritual of eating that way makes the food you eat so much more satisfying.

  

And purple cabbage made for a FAB color combo.

 

Buffalo Cabbage Wraps

2 tsp. peanut oil, divided
6 oz. ground bison
3 green onions, white and green parts, finely minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. minced fresh ginger
1 carrot, finely diced
2 cups sliced mushrooms
1 T hoisin sauce
2 tsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. Sriracha
1/2 tsp. orange zest (KEY! DO NOT OMIT! IT MADE THE DISH!)
lettuce or cabbage leaves, for wrapping

Heat 1 teaspoon of oil on medium heat. Add bison to the pan and crumble with a spoon. Cook until browned on the outside. Remove from pan with a slotted spoon, and set aside. Drain fat and wipe out pan with a paper towel.

Add remaining 1 tsp. peanut oil. Add green onions, garlic, and ginger and cook until fragrant. Add carrot and mushroom and cook until mushrooms are golden brown.

Reduce heat to low and return buffalo to the pan, and add hoisin sauce, soy sauce, Sriracha, and orange zest. Stir together and heat through.

Plate with lettuce leaves for wrapping!