hello 2013

Some updates, of no particular relevance and in no particular order:

The fella and I rang in the New Year at his place, with my best friend Lydia and her boyf Brian who was in town. SO fun.

If you want to fondly recall 2012, listen/watch this wholly brilliant mashup of the hit songs of 2012. And then you can do as we did and watch 2011 and 2010. And then do the Gangnam Style dance repeatedly.

Steve made this yummy squash, corn, green pepper, mushroom chili. After this picture, he added beans, for good luck dontcha know.

 

Since I had gotten the COOLEST rice for Christmas, dyed GREEN with BAMBOO JUICE, I knew I immediately had to use it to make sushi (thanks Dena!).

See its cool hue?

    

Did I get a picture of the finished sushi? Of course not.

It was mostly plants. A vegetarian and a vegan were dining with us, after all. Ingredients included:
- veggies: long strips of cucumber, long strips of carrot, quick steamed asparagus, sliced avocado
- proteins: edamame, egg cooked into a tomato omelet by my talented boyfriend, cooked shrimp
- just for the hell of it: chopped almonds. Not bad with the asparagus.

I am *rawther* talented at rolling sushi.

We had plans to maybe go out to First Night Alexandria for New Years but it was coooold. And also we just didn’t care that much. So we played Taboo… and Karaoke Revolution! And Brian COMMITS!

From Revolution to Resolution…

(not awkward).

The fact that I stumbled upon this in my house makes me question the wisdom of dieting and making crazy fitness-related resolutions when we are clearly, in our basic and primal DNA, designed to hoard high-calorie food for the coming potential famine.

As evidenced by the fact that I discovered these in the cassette tapes case while cleaning out the basement:

My sister or my dad, I suspect. My dad hasn’t lived in this house since 1997, but who listens to tapes?!

My New Years resolution is to floss every day.

I cannot think of anything else (well, other than I guess go to the bathroom but that is hardly an accomplishment) that I could actually commit to doing every day. Eating healthfully, sleeping properly, exercising enthusiastically… all are things that are just a little tiresome to me at the moment.

That being said, if there are those among you who fancy healthier foods in 2013, may I recommend the following delicious sandwiches?

First we have Lazy Woman’s Falafel Plate

Take a whole wheat wrap/pita/whatever.

Cut up some broccoli or broccoli stems (I am on a crusade on the behalf of broccoli stems. Give them a chance). Toss them with the ingredients you’d put in a falafel sauce: lemon juice and tahini.

Dump the broccoli on the wrap, followed by some sliced pickled turnips (something you should really have in your house- we get ours at the halal butcher!), some microwaved Trader Joes’ meatless meatballs (the secret, and lazy, ingredient), and a dollop of plain yogurt.

Fabulous.

 

The other wrap was awesome- I actually managed to prepare something healthy in the chaotic days leading to our Christmas party. It all turned into kind of a mess (post to come).

Take a whole wheat wrap (incidentally, we get ours at Costco, keep ‘em in the freezer as they go bad rather quickly, and then thaw them super quick in the toaster oven).

Smear with refried beans (Trader Joes makes some fat-free ones that aren’t exactly thrilling, but they’ll do for the purposes of this). Mash some sweet potato (!) and put on top of the beans. Then put on some cheddar.

Stick in a toaster oven, or under a broiler, or whatever, til melty.

 

Then add a few handfuls of spinach, a bit of avocado, and copious amounts of Sriracha. Magnifique.

 

A few more random bits of news:

- Someone recommended Once Upon a Time to me. I watched one episode on Netflix and then watched the entire first season… in 4 days. It is SO EXCELLENT, GUYS. I told Steve he should watch one… the day before yesterday… and now we’ve watched six. I don’t at all mind watching it twice. Also also Snow White and Prince Charming are a thing in real life and that makes me so happy it’s ridiculous.

- I watched like six hours of football on Sunday. As you’ve probably deduced from the constant estrogen-ness of this blog, that is not at all typical for me. Thank God we were too late for the Bears game (Steve’s from Chicago… figure it out) but then we had to watch Green Bay (to see if they’d beat the Vikings, thus getting the Bears into the playoffs) and then of course being Washingtonians we had to watch the Redskins. It was pretty exciting… I really like RGIII. He just seems like a pleasant and wholesome young man. My sister’s analogy was that he seemed like a really enthusiastic guy from the blood donor center who’s like, “I’m so glad you’re donating blood today!” My analogy was that he was like the neighborhood Boy Scout who came to sell you mulch.

- Confidential to the lady readers (which is probably a lot of you. Or all. Except Steve.): I bought myself a Diva Cup as a Christmas gift to myself and it is AMAZING. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend this pretty definitive guide in Healthy Tipping Point. The comments are all great, too.

Finally, Steve and I took a lovely long walk on the Mount Vernon trail yesterday. As we neared the Wilson bridge, around dusk, we saw a single great blue heron sitting, solitary, on a rock out on the water.

Below is my attempt to capture that rather lovely moment.

bits of Bolivia

These days I’m really wishing I could get temporarily adopted by a Bolivian grandmother so she could teach me her delicious cooking ways.

In the mean time, I will continue to frequent hole-in-the-wall (and even some surprisingly cute) eateries along the Columbia Pike corridor, the for-all-intents-and-purposes Spanish speaking section of Arlington in which my boyfriend is lucky enough to live.

Cafe Sazon is super adorable and super delicious and basically where I meet everyone for coffee and hanging out, because it’s also wonderfully cozy and has a blissfully bizarre soundtrack going (the owner told me they just Pandora whatever they feel like: this has ranged from hours of Weezer and other 90s delights, to Phantom of the Opera, to reggaeton).

I tend to not like drinking my calories but make an exception for api-morado, the intensely sweet, thick, and comforting purple-corn based drink:

My new love is linasa, a flaxseed and lemon infused drink (?!)

Honestly, I thought flaxseed and the like was mainly the providence of upper middle class white female food bloggers (no?). However, a bit of Internet research informs me that in fact fresh flaxseed juice (flaxseed= linseed= linasa, get it?) is an incredibly popular street food in Bolivia.

The way they serve it at Cafe Sazon is warm and lemon and spice infused. It is enormously comforting. Imagine Theraflu if it tasted delicious. Which is basically impossible, I get it. But that’s what this is!

I finally brought my mom there when she had some time off over the winter holidays. I’d been raving about it like a lunatic, and was delighted to finally get here there. I was also happy because that meant getting two drinks and swapping sips! Hurrah.

We also got an actual entree, something I don’t do that often, actually.

I just spent like twenty minutes googling it, and cannot for the life of me remember what it is called. I will likely wake up at two this morning with it in my head. At which point I will go back to sleep. I am not that devoted to this blog.

Anyway, it was yellow rice topped with a fried egg with fried plantains. So obviously it was awesome. The rice… again, I need a Bolivian grandmother to teach me!

It actually turned into a fun little outing, because then my mom and I walked to Shirlington and did some Christmas shopping at my favorite olive oil store. (Yes, these pictures were taken awhile ago!)

And then I decided I needed some frozen yogurt.

To add joy to my life, they had POMEGRANATE SEEDS! Delicious, light, and expensive: the perfect kind of topping when you pay for frozen yogurt by the ounce. I love gaming the system :D

There were also globs of froyo in strawberry, taro, and apple pie (!) flavors. And a peanut m+m garnish.

So fun!

Back to Cafe Sazon… another day. I go there all the time, man.

They are delightful because sometimes they have edible art:

I mean. How cute.

But actually that particular trip was just a pit stop, because Steve and I were taking a stroll (despite the fact that it was, oh, 30 degrees out.)

We just stopped in to have an appetizer (cheese empanada for him), and then made our way to another place of which I’ve grown quite fond: Pan American Bakery.

We’ve actually been to both Pan American (a bakery with chairs) and Pike Pizza (their sister place, a sort of sit-down restaurant next door). Pike Pizza is hilarious. They serve no pizza. More importantly, they have an all-Spanish, earnestly serious karaoke night. Steve and I had a blast, in the way that people do who know everyone will be talking about them the second they leave.

Anyway, Pan American is great when you just want to run in and grab something. There’s no visible menu at the place, except a few specials written only in Spanish on a board. It seems best to just point at what looks good.

Steve did that and got this:

 

Dude: Deep fried pastry with powdered sugar (awesome), then stuffed with cheese.

He was in heaven.

  

And then I saw (mystery plantains and rice and egg dish) on the menu and went, “Ooh, I’ve had that, that’s good!”

And this arrived:

 

Dude. The Cafe Sazon one was good but this was AMAZING. The rice was equally delicious but the plantains were both more abundant and sweeter.

And the egg was perfectly fried.

Mmm mm mm mmm mm.

Okay, so all this being said, all of the aforementioned things are fun to eat but not particularly healthy. (I actually enjoyed a few bites of the plantain thing but then went home and ate a salad. My body thanked me.)

BUT.

Linasa! Flaxseed and lemon! Doable!

I found this linasa tutorial on the Internet and made myself a delectable delight!

Infuse water with cinnamon and cloves:

(mm, the aroma!)

Then add the flax.

They gave you the choice of whole or ground flax in that recipe, so I consulted with my pals at Cafe Sazon about how they do theirs and they say they do ground but grind them themselves.

So, I put my flaxseeds with perhaps a cup of water in a blender and blended away.

After their simmer, it looked pretty revolting!

 

I drained it, and was left with a LOTTTT of flax at the bottom. And abhored the waste. and thought there was still flavor to be had.

So I added some lemon (because my initial taste of the unlemoned stuff made me miss the citrusy zing I get from the lemon at Cafe Sazon), and more water, and cooked more.

And had a big delicious BUCKET of linasa!

As an added bonus (bonus?), my mother, my boyfriend and I have all been sick to varying degrees, so its throat soothing properties have been particularly appreciated.

The flavor is kinda nutty, kinda sweet, kinda lemony. It is simple, nourishing, and nice.

 

So what’s next, Bolivian grandmother?

(fried) rice, (ginger) bread, (ravioli) pasta

All carbs. All delightful comfort food one might enjoy while deprived of the presence of one’s loved one.

Stupid Steve had to go be with his stupid family in stupid Chicago so we celebrated Christmas early.

(He’s coming back tonight YAY!)

To mark the Christmas holiday, as he marks all days ending in y, Steve made fried rice.

Were you curious what we had eaten two days previously, when last I'd dined at his apartment?

That would be fried rice.

Components to Steve’s fried rice:

-short grain brown sushi rice (yum!)
-a variety of fresh and/or frozen vegetables cut in the way very particular to him (carrots in sort of extra large matchsticks, mushrooms in extremely thick slices, etc. etc.) Different things are cooked in different pans and I don’t totally get the rhyme or reason of it but I’m certainly not going to mess with a very delicious system
-eggs made into a proper omelet
-if he has it, FRESH tofu from the Asian market (mm)
-buckets of oil
-every Asian seasoning under the sun
-the occasional totally whacky addition: cheese and/or cilantro and/or something totally random but... sure why not

I was director of the salad department. Steve likes salad now, which he attributes to me.

By “salad” he means, “Salad with cheese and apples and nuts on top.”

Fair enough!

The evening’s entertainment:

Gingerbread was homemade by Steve (and he created, and bequeathed unto me, enough leftover dough for me to make an entire city of gingerbread people for my family for Christmas!)

Icing was canned cream cheese frosting. Should be delicious, right?

Cream cheese frosting- DELICIOUS (I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I really don't like buttercream frosting. 7 minute, marshmallow, whipped cream, ganache, sign me up! Buttercream? Eh)

Canned frosting- DELICIOUS. Like you don’t love every trans-fat-laden bite. In high school my best friend and I devoured an entire can of fourth of July red and blue confetti icing.

But cream cheese canned frosting? Kind of gross. Achieved neither the deliciousness of canned nor cream cheese’d. Sad. But also kind of a relief, since I ate less.

Initial progress was, if I do say so myself, extremely impressive. Especially given that the house’s structure was a bit… warped.

Yeah, it collapsed shortly after these pictures were taken. Too bad so sad chomp chomp!

And, continuing with the holiday festivities, if you squint, you can kinda tell that that laptop is airing the EXCELLENT film National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

So we were great.

And Steve had his “delicious” PBR, so he was extra great (rolls eyes)

On the subject of Steve’s cooking, he really is extremely impressive.

We’d tried homemade pasta before but it had sort of dissolved into vindictive words. (Hahaha not really but man you put two oldest children in a room to accomplish a task and it’s gonna get a little competitive!)

Steve was ready to do it all over again, in a positive and nurturing way. Sure.

I stood back and watched, calmly and not alpha and oldest child-y.

It meant watching him crack those eggs into that well of flour…

Get his hands up and ready to start kneading…

… getting raw egg all over my kitchen table!

He persevered. Sure enough, the dough came together enchantingly (and half whole wheat, I might add).

I needed my own project- bread and ricotta dumplings in my beloved How to Cook Everything Vegetarian? YES PLEASE!

You basically mix up torn up stale-ish bread (or if you’re me, Sandwich Thins!), herbs, sun dried tomatoes, ‘n cheese of the ricotta and parmesan types.

Combined it makes a REAL thin dough. You are supposed to add it to boiling water to cook IMMEDIATELY… which I did not.

Er.. anyway. Thickening it with flour fixed everything! You’ll see the finished product later.

In the meantime, my help was required in coordinating the pasta machine. Man cannot roll pasta alone.

(Yes, I wear scarves inside. I am always cold).

It was then fillin’ time. (Just to mention, when Steve plans cooking projects he’s like “Oh, I’ll come over at 6:45 and we’ll eat at 7!” Well okay that is a slight exaggeration but suffice it to say that Steve is OPTIMISTIC about timing! This, like many other adorably enthusiastic Steve meal plans, ended up coming to fruition at more like 9:30.

Fillin’ #1 was butternut squash and onions (ultimately what Steve deemed to be too many onions, so he didn’t eat many. I didn’t either, because I was snottily and whinily protesting that Steve had DOUBLED the butter in an already decidedly decadent recipe).

Fillin #2 was the bee’s knees and entirely Steve’s invention:

It was awhile ago that we made this but I can fairly confidently say that it contained mushrooms, garlic, grapes, walnuts, and basil. Then he mixed it with ricotta to stuff the ravioli:

(positively regimental in its straightness, no?)

Beautifully formed, ready for their boiling water bath:

To give you the scale, quite LARGE ravioli (and a peek at the butternut filling)

Fact: it takes an EXTREMELY long time to make pasta. Then make filling. Then fill pasta. Then boil pasta.

But at long last, dinner was served!

Two megabowls of mega ravioli, and Ileana’s bratty concessions to health in the form of a salad and sort of forgettable thawed frozen vegetables stir fry.

My successful but not especially healthy contribution: the little ricotta gnudi! Seeing this is actually reminding me of how good they are and makes me want to take them again.

Before putting food on his plate, Steve took care of the all important “cheese pile”

I focused on emphasizing veggies (though you know I ate way more pasta than that :D)

My favorite was the awkward wizard-hat shaped ravioli. So dear!