the sister cooks

My little sister is home for the summer. My little sister is also relieved to be freed of a dorm room and on a cooking kick.

It was so so so delightful to walk in the door on Wednesday, my most stressful day of the week, and have this absolutely gorgeous thing waiting for me.

 

Restaurant caliber, no?

She’s been digging in a major way to 5 Ingredient Favorites, a self-explanatorily titled cookbook which was actually a gift from my old roommate.

I underutilize it, because it is a really really rather excellent cookbook, particularly for someone who doesn’t want anything too fussy, and this recipe is an example of that.

I also tend to be lazy/thrifty/locavoreish and thus utilize ingredients that are already in my house, purchased at the farmer’s market. But you know what are awesome? Portabella mushrooms stuffed with ricotta, pesto, and tomatoes, atop pasta. White pasta, no less. It’s so yummy!

  

Rounding out the meal was a zippy (local!) cucumber salad with fresh parsley.

Another from 5 Ingredient Favorites: asparagus in a creamy yogurt sauce. It has orange zest.. it was tangy… rich… awesommmmmmmme.

  

Plus yknow fresh local perfect spring asparagus didn’t hurt. Look how fat!

Since she contributed a veggie, I focused on the protein portion of the meal: another wonderful farmer’s market buy, BUFFALO! Made epicurious’s buffalo meatloaf once again. Crikey it’s good.

  

Didn’t feel like opening a new can of tomatoes so I just used some leftover cocktail sauce for the glaze, and I’ve gotta say, I’m not a huge ketchup person but it makes a real good lookin’ glaze.

Annnnnd a very simple rice dish. Heated up some leftover brown rice, jazzed up and pilaf-ified with dried dates, fresh parsley, and orange zest. Lovely.

 

And, lest some of my family members be amazed at Malindi’s rather abrupt transition, I must also say that my house is currently filled with TEMPTATIONS.

Like Lucky Charms. Thin Mint ice cream. Many many kinds of cheese. Chocolate mousse.

Skinny cow ice cream bars:

  

White chocolate. Peppermint. 100 calories. Entirely irresistable. If I read the ingredient list, I will weep.

Ahh, family.

egging me on

We were feeling sort of lazy last Thursday, so rather than going on an all-out walk we just picnicked behind Steve’s apartment. The view was nice:

Well, from a distance. Once you zoom in, you see all the crap floating in that poor creek.

As usual, lunch was a nice li’l collaboration. High on veggies, which is good because it was one of the less healthy potluck Thursdays.

Veggies from him: sweet potatoes, roasted to soft, sap-dripping perfection. From her: farmer’s market tomatoes, never refrigerated (huzzah!) with olive oil, balsamic, and salt and pepper. Sublime.

His is big spoon spud, mine is little spoon spud.

Rounding out the meal, I brought some avgolemono soup my mom had made. Homemade chicken stock, egg yolks, rice, lotsa pepper. All I need in this world.

 

Work we continued a fun thing we've been doing with our families: Cultural Cooking. Basically, a child’s parent (or relative) makes something from their native country and comes in, giving both a lesson about their culture and a delicious snack of some kind.

This is a pastry from Argentina. It’s the bomb.

So potluck. Steve hosted this week, and came up with the theme of “Eggstravaganza”.

So I made lentil soup.

I always do this. I’m craving something and want to make it and then they announce a theme that has nothing to do with it… and then I make it anyway.

But I did come up with a really killer tie-in.

Began by sauteeing onion and green pepper (it was meant to be red, to imitate a truly phenomenal soup I got at the farmer’s market, but all the teeny tiny Oriental Grocery on the corner by Steve’s had was green).

Threw in some curry powder for Indian flava.

Then yellow lentils!

Then homemade broth, then KALE!

And after that’d cooked for awhile, the ultimate: COCONUT MILK! I’ve been seeing kale-lentil-coconut milk combined EVERYWHERE. My cousin sent me a recipe, it was in the farmer’s market soup, I read it in a blog. You cannot ignore when you see things in threes!

Now, see that egg yolky yellow tinge the soup had taken on? Here is the true brilliance: I reserved the coconut cream (the thick layer on the top of the coconut milk can). This lowered the overall cholesterol of the soup and gave the option of a BRILLIANT garnish: white”yolk” in the middle of the yellow “white”= INSIDE OUT EGG!

I know, I’m brilliant.

Many other examples of culinary creativity displayed.

Several people, like me, elected to do the things that look like eggs thing.

Kyle’s creation, pear stuffed with bleu cheese and walnut, was exquisite (and I came up with the idea of slicing the pear this way :D Oh smug smug Ileana)

Patricia’s peanut butter cookies with marshmallow on top were SO GOOD. I would say melted marshmallow and peanut butter were a revolutionary combination, except me and Steve’s s’more fiesta the other month introduced me to it. It’s awesome.

I was lucky enough to have an extra special guest of Maya, the Collegiate Gourmande! Well she never blogs anymore. And I am not a great blogger either, as I neglected to take her picture, eesh. Anyway, both she and her friend Genvieve (sp? Sorry Maya!) are dependent on a dining hall kitchen so they both ignored the theme (rightfully so). Maya brought beverages, and Genvieve (sorry if I spelled your name wrong not once but twice!) brought hummus and veg, which was sort of a necessary healthful component.

The rest of the evening was eggs eggs eggs.

French-toasted (Erin makes AMAZING french toast. And I enjoyed the toppings bar. Love me some berries)

  

Carolyn’es delicious green pepper salsa creation (with hot sauce, obvi)

 

And of course our host. He went all out on the eggs theme, because he goes all out on everything.

As with most of Steve’s recipes, it began with the ingredient that gives them their signature deliciousness: great deals of butter.

 

An exquisite mixture of butter-drenched mushrooms and onions, spinach, oodles of feta and cheddar cheeses, and in one the addition of ARTICHOKE hearts, yielded extrawdinary quiches.

With homemade crust, no less!

People went crazy on these.

 

My (first) plate. As usual, a highly misrepresentative look at all I consumed.

Also included on my plate was a muffin made by my baby sister, who joined us at potluck, which was oodles of fun. Don’t know exactly what was in it except three kinds of cheese… and almonds… and pesto. Great stuff!

sickety soupety

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go…

MAKE SOUP!

Whine whine whine my life is so hard, I stayed home sick and made soup. Story of my life this year.

I am so sick of perpetually getting overwhelmed by work/failing to take care of myself/failing to feel capable of being a good enough friend/sister/daughter/girlfriend to everyone in my life.

So I will give this, a measly but concrete contribution to the world.

Good soup.

But I am getting ahead of myself. In fact that was the second of TWO soups I made today.

I made Indian-spiced tomato soup, which I’ve made many a time before, but it was vastly improved by THIS:

So living at home (something that, despite the good company, I’m also sick of) sometimes means making discoveries in one’s fridge. This vindaloo curry paste—I’ve no idea how old it is. Who bought it. What they bought it for.

I do know that it’s totally delicious. And the ingredients are pretty darn wholesome for a bottled condiment.

So in the onion and ginger sauteeing process, instead of making my own spice mix I just threw in a tablespoon or two of this.

 

Then my usual pantry staples. I kind of can’t remember my life before fire roasted tomatoes.

And I must confess, I learned of their glory from Rachael Ray. I’m gonna say, she’s all right. Though I haven’t seen her show in awhile… any, actually. I think the last time I watched a TV show was an episode of The Office with the AmeriCrew… in October? I stayed home sick today and thought about watching TV because it seemed appropriate. And then was just like… Why? What’s the point?

Anyway, fire roasted tomatoes. Imagine what other culinary discoveries I’d make if I watched TV more regularly.

 

The finished soup (let simmer together for half an hour or so) filled my body with warmth and my throat with pain-relieving spice.

And was rounded out with a lovely snack plate (yay yay yay hot food eaten at a leisurely pace for lunch! I love not being at work!)

On the left, a “quesadilla”. Only in the sense that it was warm, on a tortilla, and sort of cheesy. I mean, a Trader Joe’s whole wheat flax wrap spread with Laughing Cow garlic and herb and thrown in my toaster oven is in no danger of fooling anyone’s Mexican grandmother. But is quite tasty. As for the stuff on the right, that was carrots and my current favorite dipper…

  

… DESSERT HUMMUS!

I made dessert hummus!

I’ve been totally jonesing for it ever since I tried Crazy Camel’s varieties at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival (a really smashing event). It’s been all over food blog land. It’s such a brilliant idea- protein and fiber-rich, snackable, yet sweet and delicious.

Yes, there are now a plethora of recipes out there, but I’m just so awesome and original, so I created my own.

For flava, I immediately thought of roasted almonds. So into my toaster oven they went, til they smelled awesome (I’m terrible at giving times in my recipes)

Then I opened a can o’ chickpeas. This took hilariously longer than it should have, because the so called “easy open” failed to work and broke off, and when you try to use a regular can opener on an “easy” open it is in fact  very DIFFICULT, not EASY at all. So there was a can opener and a variety of knives used. Levers, physics, etc.

I persevered.

 

And in my food processor I combined the remaining ingredients to create on my first try, something I am proud to say is impossible to stop eating.

Roast Almond Dessert Hummus

1/4 cup roasted almonds
1 can chickpeas
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
scant 1/8 tsp. pure stevia extract (equivalent to like a tablespoon and a half sugar or honey)
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. canola oil
3 T milk

Blend until combined, scraping down sides often.

The stuff is ADDICTIVE!

 

Back to soup. Soup #2.

I had a very large quantity of lamb bones in my freezer left over from my awesome Lebanese Butcher experience at Easter time. I had an afternoon and a crockpot at my disposal. Stock was in my near future.

From reading various cookbooks, I knew that if I wanted to be a proper stockmaker, I had to roast the bones first. So into an oven they went (having no clue what I was doing, I just stuck ‘em in a 350 degree oven for… awhile. Til they started to smell good,which seemed as good a test as any).

They were still sorta reddish at that point, but I knew they’d be going into a hot pan for several hours, so I wasn’t real worried.

Carrot and onion tops, coupla garlic cloves, salt and pepper, hot water.

 

On high for 4 or 5 hours. Made the whole kitchen smell fab.

Assembled lotsa veggies (onion, carrot, garlic, and shrooms)

Sauteed in olive oil til golden, adding some crushed red pepper flakes at the end for some zing

Added a cuppa lentils, tossing around to coat with flava

Poured in the wonderfully aromatic homemade stock

 

And cooked til the lentils got soft.

Finished with fresh mint.

 

Make it Work Wednesday

Wednesdays kind of kill me. Our kids get early release so from about 12:45 til 6 (oh wait, that’d be if parents were on time to pick up their kids; let’s say 6:20 then) it is all kids all the time.

SO Wednesday mornings a workout is non-negotiable. And I attempt to bring some tranquility to the ensuing breakfast.

Have hit on the official Green Monster combo for Summer 2011: tiny banana (or 2/3 of a big one); 1/2 T sunflower seed butter; 3/4 cup milk; 2 handfuls ice, 2 handfuls spinach. Whirrrrrrrrrrred. Topped with 1/2 cup Shredded Wheat, original style.

  

Lunch I decided I was going to make whatever made me happy. I had already had a serving of vegetables before 9 am, after all.

So I was craving beans. I work with children, which means they are obsessed with all things gaseous and shriek at the mere mention of beans. Sauteed some onion, threw in some cumin.

Then added a can of black beans and a can of fire roasted tomatoes. They hung out. For not very long, cause I had to go to work.

The real craving, though? Quesadillas. I blame Patricia: she hosted the previous Thursday’s potluck (when I was off being wined and dined at Citronelle) and copious amounts of leftover Mexican goodness from the Cinco de Mayo festivities meant she’d been feasting on quesadillas all week. So I’d been drooling at said quesadillas all week.

I made my own!

Mushroom quesadillas are the bestest.

 

On a TJ’s whole grain tortilla with flax (<3) plus chedda.

 

Plus my finished beans, finished with hot sauce the way God intended…

… and an orange, which I’d already zested so looked a bit… busted.

 

As for dinner, it was eaten solo which was actually really nice. I’ve had woefully little alone time lately, and I really like it.

This was vaguely inspired by a Washington Post food section salad (the WP food section as a rule totally sucks- a guy made homemade individual sized lobster pot pies for a “Casual Saturday Lunch”- but they had an article on greens that was aight) except much less ambitious.

Blend of farmer’s market baby kale and butter lettuce dressed with miso, lemon, crushed red pepper flakes and a whispery sprinkling of Parmesan.

And canned smoked herring, which I read about courtesy of Kath and am now kind of obsessed with because I am kind of obsessed with all smoked fish; on a bagel thin and a half (cause it’s what we had) with light cream cheese.

Yes, that was a small dinner. Yes, it was followed by my body weight in snacks.