Month 2 day 20: Brunch pie and cake

Today I made:
Perfect Brunch Pie, Food Network Magazine March 2010

G made:
2-Minute Chocolate and Salted Caramel Mug Cake (adapted)

This brunch pie was great. I didn't follow the recipe exactly. I don't like olives, so I kept them out and then just was extra generous with all the other ingredients to make up the extra cup of volume. I also added a leek, because we had one left over with nothing planned for it. The onion I used was white, not red, and I used dried oregano and thyme instead of fresh.
This was my first time working with phyllo dough. We didn't often (ever?) use it at my house growing up, although my best friend's parents AKA my second set of parents sometimes cooked with it (my friend and I would often eat two suppers, one at each of our houses). I've heard that it's tricky to use, so I was a little nervous. It wasn't that hard to use, although I didn't read the box instructions beforehand that said it takes 2 hours to thaw... whoops. We were suddenly glad we kept forgetting to invite people to eat with us. Anyway, once it thawed it was fine to work with, although indeed fragile. It's very tasty though! And really the recipe didn't call for that much butter or other things... it very well could have been a Cooking Light recipe. We now have about 30 more sheets in the freezer, so I'll be on the lookout for more recipes to use it on. I would definitely recommend this recipe. Nothing needs to be cooked beforehand-- you just chop up vegetables and cheese, and whisk an egg and milk, and then arrange with the phyllo dough. Then it bakes for about an hour, so I think it would work well with a brunch party or something-- defrost the phyllo dough overnight in the fridge and prechop everything, throw it together and pop it in the oven and be done with it, then spend the next hour setting the table or getting other dishes prepared.

For dessert, G made himself a microwaved mug cake. We were inspired by an awesome website someone posted to facebook of 18 recipes that can be made in a mug. We adapted this recipe too to fit what we had around:

• 4 tablespoons all purpose flour 
• 7 tablespoons salted caramel hot cocoa mix 
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder 
• 1/4 teaspoon salt 
• 1 egg – beaten 
• 3 tablespoons buttermilk 
• 1 tablespoon melted butter 
• 2 of Grandpa's homemade caramels dropped into the middle of the batter 

microwaved for 1.5 minutes, during which time it rose up like a souffle. G liked it, and it was entertaining, but he said he really wished it had been a molten chocolate cake instead. Personally, I feel like if you have to measure all those things anyway and dirty up a bowl, you might as well make a real cake. When I lived in Japan you could buy mug cake mixes that just had to be mixed in the cup with an egg. But my old roommate who joined us for brunch pie pointed out that it's pretty good to have a cake that can cook in 2 minutes. Urge to satiety, you can bake and eat this cake in the span of 10 minutes. So that's pretty good I guess. G says he's happy we found the recipe, which he'll whip out some evening when he wants a nice dessert. I would guess if you stuck in some chocolates instead of caramels you could make a molten lava cake easily enough.

Having a sip of cake

That's it for March! There were two recipes we had planned to make but didn't because things came up. There were several more recipes that didn't we didn't choose to make, but wanted to keep for future reference. The rest of the magazines are off the shelf for good! Tonight we'll go out to eat as a reward for G, who would much prefer if I had started a restaurant review blog. See you in April!

March's best recipe winners: 

G's choice: Corned beef hash

My choice: Pork lover's tamale pie

Month 2 day 19: Pancakes and Beef Rendang

Today I made:
Whole-wheat buttermilk pancakes, Cooking Light 2010
Beef Rendang, Cooking Light 2010

Unlike the last batch of pancakes, I followed the recipe for these correctly and they came out quite nice. They were featured as coming from the "recipe hall of fame"-- they had originally been published in 2003 issue of Cooking Light but were good enough to merit a reprint. Unfortunately I tried to use butter in the pan instead of the cooking spray that Cooking Light always suggests, but it all burned and turned 3/4 of the batches black :-P But other than cooking mishaps, they were very good. The buttermilk flavor is not very strong, though. Neither is the whole-wheat-ness... I think G didn't even realize! Normally he hates whole wheat. (Correction: he says he only hates whole-wheat pasta)

The beef rendang recipe was in Cooking Light's feature on the top 25 common mistakes cooks make. It highlighted number four: "You boil when you should simmer." Where "simmer" means one bubble every second or two. The recipe called for 1.5 hours of this kind of simmering, which was difficult to even get our stove down that low. This was supposed to turn a tough cut, like chuck roast, into tender meat.
I think that Cooking Light make one of the top 25 common mistakes food magazines make: clearly never making the recipe for themselves, because it doesn't make sense. And the picture shows things that are in the recipe. Did I miss the part where it said to garnish with freshly chopped lemongrass, cilantro, and lime wedges? Because I thought it said to simmer crushed lemongrass and then discard it :-P The picture looks little like the dish, and the recipe expects 28 ounces of liquid to evaporate in 10 minutes of gentle simmering (the 1.5 hours is covered). This doesn't really happen, and 20 reviewers agree! So it does make you wonder if the magazine has some sort of review process. Anyway, we just scooped just the amount of liquid we wanted. It was very flavorful, but also quite spicy-- it had one serrano chili and 1/2 jalapeno. At some point I thought I had burned my thumb on the stove and put it in my mouth, but then my tongue started burning and I realized it was capsaicin. My lip is burning too, because apparently I rest my chin on my hand. It's hard to wash off.
We will keep this recipe. I think it would be better to put less liquid in, and less spice. This sauce could be used with other types of meats for a much quicker meal. What's the point in simmering tough cuts of meat for a long time to make them tender, instead of just buying more tender cuts of meat?

Month 2 day 18: Transylvania

Today I cooked:
Mititei, Saveur March 2012
Supă Cu Găluşte, Saveur March 2012

These recipes were part of Saveur's Transylvania feature. Transylvanian cooking apparently uses tons of paprika (fine) and caraway seeds (eww).

Supă Cu Găluşte is chicken soup with semolina dumplings. But since we were already going to make sausages (G chose that recipe), I decided to just leave out the chicken and make a vegetable soup with dumplings. It didn't seem lacking in flavor, although it would certainly be good with chicken too.
We liked this soup. It's super easy and the semolina dumplings are really good. They have a strong egg flavor-- kind of like egg drop soup except more solid. The dumplings really expand when being cooked, even though they're just semolina flour, eggs, and onion. Is it the flour that expands like that?

 

Mititei are grilled pork sausages. (grilled on a grill pan, this being March. And by grilled, I mean boiled in the grease that poured out of them as soon as they got hot, which was deeper than the grill bars are tall). The reviews on the website are scathing, saying how inauthentic this recipe is (although we kind of trust Saveur).  But, the only thing we could taste was salt. The recipe calls for 4 tsp of salt to 2 pounds of ground pork. This normally would be a red flag, but the recipe also called for large amounts of everything-- 9 garlic cloves, 2 tablespoons of paprika, etc. I left out the caraway seeds because those are gross. G wants to keep this recipe, but we will make note for next time to put in less salt. It was good that we were eating it along with soup to dilute it out. A serving should have been 3 sausages probably, but we were overly ambitious and ate 5 each, which is 1 tsp salt and 1/2 lb meat. Gross. Although these really shrunk when the grease came out while cooking, so not quite 8 oz of meat in the end.

Most of the recipes in this feature are pretty straightforward with simple, easy-to-acquire ingredients (c.f. the Iranian feature with its Persian sour plums, rose water, etc. Or anything else in Saveur). But they pack a lot of spices and vegetables, making them really interesting. I think I might keep a few more of these recipes to try later. Originally we planned to make a meatball soup recipe, but then realized that was the Transylvanian equivalent of the Persian dish we had just last week, so switched to separate dishes of sausages and soup. But it would still be nice to try and compare.

Month 2 day 17: Lemon day

Today I made:
Fennel Salad with Lemon, Cooking Light March 2011
Lemon Potatoes, Food Network Magazine March 2010

We've been having a lot of heavy, meaty meals lately, so today's dinner was a bit of a respite.

The potatoes are doused with olive oil, lemon juice, spices, and simmered in water before going into the oven. They end up being soft, but a little bit brown and caramel-y.
The salad is just some things thrown together-- fennel, parsley, shallot, lemon, and goat cheese. The recipe called for Meyer lemons. I don't think I've ever tasted Meyer lemons myself, but I hear that they are very sweet and mild. Well, Shaw's doesn't carry Meyer lemons, they just carry "lemons" of uncertain origin. We bought a few anyway, but after tasting a bit of one it became apparent that they did not belong on top of a salad. I just used the wedges from one of the lemons, not all three called for in the recipe. Then, I cut some orange wedges into the salad instead of the other two lemons. It was pretty good-- tasted fresh, not heavy or too filling.
G thought it the potatoes were too lemony, so we should keep the salad recipe but not the potato recipe. I thought the potatoes were great, but the salad was blah. I feel like you don't really need a recipe for salad; you can just remember the idea of it. Maybe that's true for these potatoes too.

Month 2 day 16: Pork Lover's Tamale Pie

Today I made:
Pork Lover's Tamale Pie, Every Day with Rachael Ray March 2012
served with salad

This tamale pie is "pork lover's" because it has 3 forms of it-- bacon, chorizo (Portuguese, in our case), and ground pork. Or in the case of one of the reviewers of the recipe linked above, Italian sausage and ground beef :-P I always think it's bizarre when people make tons of modifications to a recipe and then still review it. Sure, play around with the recipe, but then you've renounced your ability to review it!
The filling is all cooked in a single pan, so that makes things nice to clean. It's just the meats, some garlic and onion, and spices. If I make this again I think I would add some corn and kidney beans. I'm not sure why; I just really felt like kidney beans would be good in it. We did not add beer (!?!?!) to ours. Meanwhile, the corn meal is cooked in a separate pot, and it gets kind of stiff and hard to work with, but then it just gets spooned over the filling, sprinkled with cheese, and broiled.
G's reaction when he saw it was "it looks really greasy, but I guess we know that going in." Yep. But when he tasted it, he said it was "superb." It really was good-- I think from the chorizo. I think we will make this recipe again.
We chose this recipe over the tamale pie in the March issue of Cooking Light (for some reason, all the magazines were doing all the Tex-Mex recipes this month). We were curious how this could ever possibly be modified to make it light. That one had just 8 oz of ground beef, mixed with lima beans and some other things. I think we chose the right one to make! I think we should start picking a best recipe each month; G says this one is a possible contender.

Month 2 day 15: なんちゃって In-N-Out burgers

Today I made:

Out-n-In California Burger, Cooking Light March 2011
served with a mix of oven fries and Arby's curly fries (these are sold in the frozen-foods section of grocery stores now)

This recipe was supposed to mimic an In-N-Out burger, but I don't know if the editors have ever eaten one. They called for avocado (left out, because none were ripe), didn't include grilled onions (but I did), and they also called for sweet (as opposed to dill) pickles and relish in the secret sauce. It did NOT taste like In-N-Out, unfortunately. G says, what's the big deal? In-N-Out isn't that good. And he doesn't like the secret sauce, which he says is just Thousand Island dressing (um, no... it's secret). To which I declare that he's the worst Californian ever.
True Californian that I am, I made my home-fries with Pappy's seasoning like a good Central Valley girl.
My typical order is an animal style burger and fries shared with someone. If I'm really in for a splurge, I'll get a chocolate-strawberry shake to share, but it's not as good now that they started posting the calorie counts on the menu. It doesn't change what I order, it just makes me feel bad about it. It occurred to me once that I don't know if I've ever eaten a normal In-N-Out burger-- I just have always ordered them animal style, and I wasn't sure what the difference was. I looked it up when I talked about In-N-Out and the secret menu in one of my classes in Japan. They were learning how to order food in their 5th grade class, and we were spending a lot of time there to prepare for this open demo lesson that other elementary teachers came and watched and analyzed. Mom convinced In-N-Out to give us a bunch of hats, which the students liked. Anyway, I told them about the secret menu, and they were amazed that such a thing exists. It's not so secret anymore; it's on their own website, although that leaves out a few key ones, like the Flying Dutchman, which I don't want, but I do want to order, just because it sounds like fun to say.

Month 2 day 14: Sourdough Pancakes and なんちゃって Kufteh

Today I made:
Green Apple-Sourdough Pancakes, Food Network Magazine March 2010
Kufteh, Saveur March 2012

It's an exciting time towards the end of the month, when my magazines only have a couple of sticky-flags left. The only problem is that our freezer is filling up; we need to start paying closer attention to serving sizes and start halving recipes or inviting people over when we make a dish that serves 8.

Today was a day of butchering recipes.

Last night, I mixed up a sourdough starter:  milk, yeast, apple cider vinegar, sugar, butter, and flour. This got left at room temperature overnight. I figured if this was unsafe it wouldn't be published in a magazine.  Now that I look at the recipe, I think it was supposed to just be apple cider of the non-vinegar variety.

Pancakes in the early morning sun, at 6:45 before
G left to snowboard (and I went back to sleep until 11)

This was weird. It tasted like sourdough, in that it was sour, but it really seemed more like this was due to the vinegar than any sort of natural fermentation. Maybe the taste would have been better with real apple cider instead of vinegar, but without the vinegar I wonder if it would have been sour at all-- although maybe the acidity of the vinegar prevented the yeast from doing their job. But the combination of vinegar and baking soda did make it nice and airy, like an elementary science project. So I don't know. Also, are you supposed to put store-bought yeast into a sourdough starter? I thought the point was for this to come from the air. I guess that would take longer than overnight.
Anyway, I don't think we're going to keep this recipe. It's just a little too weird. If anyone tries it with normal apple cider, let me know how it tastes. I'm surprised that this is a March recipe instead of a fall one if they want you to use normal apple cider.

The next thing I made was Kufteh, from Saveur's feature on Persian food, or at least my artist's interpretation of the recipe. I made several changes based on what was and wasn't available/too expensive for my sensibilities. There was no fresh tarragon (needed 1/2 cup! I just put in a generous sprinkling of dried), saffron I think is too  expensive for its subtle flavor, we didn't realize that we were out of batsmati rice but we did have leftover Mexican rice (...), and Persian sour plums? Saveur mentions a website to buy these at, but I wasn't going to do that. I figured they are probably something like umeboshi or li hing mui. There was no li hing mui to be found in Boston, but the Korean store nearby had umeboshi, so I went with that. After buying it, I wondered if this was a good idea, because G has eaten umeboshi before and did not like it I recall. So I decided not to put it inside of the meatballs, but just in the broth, and I erred on the side of less than half-a-cup. For whatever reason, this made about twice as many meatballs as it should've, even though I felt like I was making them bigger than they should be-- they were supposed to be just 1/3 c meat mixture each and end up being 2" diameter. I went for the 2" diameter, using I think more than 1/3 c per meatball, and ended up making 12. A lot of them disintegrated into the soup while cooking though, so it ended up bearing little resemblance to the picture in the magazine:

Surprisingly, the kufteh tasted seemingly-authentic-- very exotic and good, like something you might get at a restaurant. G said it tasted very fancy, but also supposed that might have been influenced by his knowing that the recipe came from Saveur. The umeboshi taste was faintly there, but definitely not overpowering. Same with dill, which I find overwhelming usually. We will keep this recipe.

I forgot that, at least at the time of making the grocery list, I had planned to make a pilaf dish on the side. But we don't have any rice except arborio and brown, so oh well. Now that we have fresh dill, chives, and parsley, I wonder if it isn't worth cooking a couple more of the recipes instead of moving ahead with the things I had planned for next week. It is spring break, so a lot of our normal evening activities (that force us to do 30-minute recipes) are on hiatus.

Month 2 day 13: Migas and Feijoada

Today I made:
Mighty Migas, Every Day with Rachael Ray March 2012
Brazilian Feijoada, Cooking Light March 2011

Mighty Migas have a lot of flavor, but visually they are reminiscent of something not so appetizing. I think if I had made this in a bigger skillet it would've come out looking better, because you could let the egg cook a bit before stirring. I like my scrambled eggs to have big, contiguous pieces. (G, on the other hand, likes his to be almost crumbled they are so stirred).
The portion size for this recipe was ridiculous, I think because Rachael Ray intended this to be a dinner instead of a breakfast. It's basically a breakfast burrito, but the tortilla is mixed in instead of being wrapped around the outside. We don't actually own any hot sauce, so I just splashed with some white vinegar and cayenne pepper and figured that the rest of the flavors of hot sauce (onions, tomatoes, peppers?) were already represented.
G decided that he would rather just eat a breakfast burrito, so we're not saving this recipe.

After breakfast, it was time to start preparing the feijoada. Boiling the beans and browning the meats. This dish contains components of several different animals: ham hock, bacon, and pork (all pig, but I'm assuming it came from three separate animals...), beef, and chicken broth. So karmically this is not a great dish. It is basically a solid gallon of protein. It's supposed to be made in a 6-qt slow cooker, but I think ours is only 4-qt or something... not entirely sure... so I filled it literally to (and a bit past) the brim, hoping for the best. It only has one cup of liquid, too, so I was quite dubious how this would end up cooking everything.

But lo and behold, after 7 hours, enough liquid had come out of the onions(? meat?) so that everything was covered and boiling. The ham hock was falling apart, and the beef shredded itself just by stirring the stew a few times.
This dish is decadent. It's heavy, but very delicious, despite there being basically no spices, just meat. The fresh sweetness of the oranges is able to cut through the dense meat and let you keep eating. We're keeping this recipe.

Month 2 day 12: Chicken Mole and rice

Today we cooked:
Chicken Mole, Food Network Magazine March 2010
Mexican Rice, Food Network Magazine March 2010
and some kale sauteed/steamed with a bit of red wine vinegar

I'm not entirely sure what mole is supposed to taste like. I have had it before, but not recently. I do have the impression that it's supposed to be extremely complicated and require something like 40 spices. This  recipe does take a while and dirties many dishes, but it's simple and easy compared to my impression. It started with a whole chicken (just a 4-pounder... this is actually quite small), which you chop into 6 pieces (I took that to mean two breasts, wings, and legs/thighs) and boil. Meanwhile, you toast sesame seeds, then anise, cloves, cinnamon, and coriander, then fry up ten(!) dried peppers, let the peppers soak (after frying?), and then blend it all together with some of the liquid that the peppers soaked in. That liquid was super dark-- when I put my hands in to pull out the peppers, I couldn't see my fingers. So there was a lot of flavor in those dried peppers. That gets blended, AKA sprayed everywhere, and then simmered for a looong time with the chicken broth, even though cooking has already taken about 30-45 min by this point. After that the Abuelita chocolate is added and the meat goes back in to heat through (because by this time it is cold).
G made the rice. It had a lot of things in it-- tomatoes, garlic, onion, and jalapeno-- but wasn't too flavorful. Maybe that was good to balance the mole.
We are saving the recipe. It's certainly not an everyday recipe, but it is good for a special treat!

Month 2 day 11: Spicy tortilla soup with shrimp and avocado

Today *G* cooked:
Spicy tortilla soup with shrimp and avocado, Cooking Light March 2011

(not pictured)

Today I got stuck in lab in the middle of an experiment. Basically, I sit in a dark room for hours staring in a microscope watching a worm grow up. I'm watching the cells divide and then, hopefully, watching to see if they die or not. Today I watched the dividing portion, but realized that the dying part wouldn't happen before I would've needed to go home and cook. I decided to stay and keep watching so the day's work wouldn't be wasted. But alas, the cells did not die before it was time for my shift at the tutoring room. I put the worm in the refrigerator and hoped it might be "paused" until tomorrow. In theory, this happens, but in practice, it's not really paused until a bit later, which is probably too late :-P Anyway, it was still a bit of a victory because it was my first time watching the cell divisions until completion, so I feel more confident for next time. There's a bit of a crazy period where 18 cells divide at the same time, AND this is the exact time that the worm wakes up from its "nap" and starts moving around instead of laying still.

Anyway, I was at the tutorial room (and there weren't even any students there), and who comes but G, who has cooked today's recipe and brought it to me!! He even went out and got a missing ingredient for it. And delivered it to me with a Kindle to stave off boredom at the empty tutorial room. And did all the dishes too! So this was a treat :)

The soup was good-- a bit spicy from the chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, but not overly so-- it added more smokey flavor than spice. I'm theoretically trying to avoid spicy because I think I have an ulcer, but this was good, and hand-delivered, so I ate it anyway. I think this recipe is a keeper. (And so is G!)

As soon as I finished eating, in walked a gaggle of undergrads, fresh from a physics test. It's hell week for them, so no one had started their homework (due tomorrow morning). So I ended up being quite busy, and staying an extra hour. They offered to pay me to stay after the tutorial room closed :-P Then we had a conversation about graduate students and the reputation that we're always miserable, which I explained was not necessarily due to lack of sleep (as they presumed) but more like lack of control over the success of our experiments. At which point one of them was like "I want to go to graduate school!" Haha. How did what I say make him think that....

Month 2 day 10: Vegetarian Moussaka

Today I made:
Vegetarian Moussaka, Cooking Light March 2011
and some plain green beans.

Today my friend Josh came to eat with my sister and I, and he gave it his seal of approval! It was his first moussaka, because he has been vegetarian for a long time. This recipe claims to serve 4, but it seemed very large! I guess there's only 2 people's worth of leftovers though, so maybe 4 isn't that far off. Normally moussaka has ground beef in it, but this recipe replaces that with bulgur. I assembled this dish last night and just baked it today. It wasn't too hard to put together, although if you made and baked this in one straight shot it would take 1.5 hours! Too long. I'm not sure why it needs to bake for 44 minutes, when really everything is precooked... and if it weren't coming from the fridge, everything would already have been hot, too. It was pretty flavorful though! I would make it again. I would also consider just making the tomato-bulgur part as a side dish-- it was good enough to stand alone.

This week we did our cooking at Market Basket, the only "real" grocery store in the area. It reminds me of Food Maxx, the grocery store from my childhood (although it's not quite as big). Market Basket has everything you need, including a large hispanic spice section-- good for this week, which continues the Mexican theme with mole and tortilla soup. The vegetable section is comprehensive, with things like dandelion greens, peppers that are actually labeled, and all sorts of other reasonably-priced produce. Their meats are extensive, as is basically every section I guess.
As a project, earlier this year I made a spreadsheet with a list of typical ingredients we buy and compared prices at a few of the local grocery stores. Shaw's is overpriced and the quality is diminishing-- last week again we bought something only to realize at home that it was already opened! I was secretly hoping that we'd find the co-op to be similarly priced, but unfortunately even its bulk sections were equally or more expensive, and the selection was meager. Trader Joe's proved to be similar to Shaw's in price, and I was more excited to shop there (tons of fun snacks!)... until I realized that they don't stock a lot of things we need. It's more of a store for party-throwers or people who want to eat good food but don't want to cook it themselves, so their whole-ingredient offerings are slim. We also compared Peapod, which delivers groceries ordered online. It actually was the cheapest of the bunch (excluding delivery fee), but I find the online interface to be annoying, and I prefer to see what I'm getting-- the one time we tried it, the produce they delivered was not good quality. G loves the idea of getting groceries delivered, though, and thinks that it would be worth the delivery cost.
But Market Basket is the clear victor, now that we tallied up its prices. We didn't have a copy of the spreadsheet with us, so we didn't fill in all of the items... but out of just the ones we did make note of, it's still about 2/3 the price of Shaw's, even when you include an average savings of 15% at Shaw's! (give or take, that's usually the discount with the member card). Given that we usually buy all of our week's groceries at once, this diference in price is probably enough to stay even if we rented a Zipcar to get over to Somerville for Market Basket... and they have everything in stock too. Everyone says that it's hectic and chaotic (and I've seen that too), but when we went on Tuesday evening it was quite fine. So we'll have to figure out some off time and start going!

Month 2 day 9: Chicken with Italian Sweet-Sour Fennel

Today I made:
Chicken with Italian Sweet-Sour Fennel, Cooking Light March 2011
Creamy Polenta, Cooking Light March 2011

This recipe was fine, but nothing too amazing. I do like fennel though. For some reason this was actually pretty salty. I didn't really measure the salt, I just eyeballed it, so maybe that is why... although normally my food is never salty enough so it's surprising that I added too much this time. Or maybe I'm just overly sensitive. I omitted the raisins. The reviews linked to the recipe online complain that it lacked acidity and needed some red wine vinegar or something. This is strange because that is one of the ingredients....
The creamy polenta was good. I used to always see polenta at the dining hall in college and it looked gross-- but we've made it a couple of times now and like it. I didn't have 2% milk around, so I used half-and-half. This may have helped it be delicious! I didn't put in cream cheese, because eww, but I did put in a sprinkling of Italian-blend shredded cheese.

Month 2 day 8: Turkey korma with flatbread

Today we made:

• Chicken Korma, Food Network Magazine March 2010
• Indian Flatbreads, Food Network Magazine January/February 2010

I made the chicken korma (except that it was really turkey korma) and G made the flatbreads!

The korma was pretty easy to put together. I used turkey instead of the chicken it called for, because Trader Joe's doesn't seem to carry ground chicken meat (?!?!) G sometimes likes to try out a little recipe in the kitchen, so he made the Indian Flatbreads. I think he was a little sad that they weren't naan, but they were like chapatis. They were good! I think the same recipe could be used to make whole-wheat tortillas for Mexican food too. We felt like we were eating Indian tacos with this dish.

G-- who has eaten quite a bit of Indian food-- points out that this isn't really a korma, and it wasn't what he was expecting. It's more like a spiced turkey/chicken dish. So it is good, but maybe don't tell people the name of it.

Month 2, day 7: Hash, Gratin, and Pizza

Today I made:

• Corned Beef Hash, Food Network Magazine March 2010
• Crispy Topped Brussel Sprouts and Cauliflower Gratin, Cooking Light March 2011
• Chicken Sausage, Sweet Onion, and Fennel Pizza, Cooking Light March 2010

The corned beef hash was quite a breakfast! It was so greasy and salty! G liked it. "It smelled and tasted delicious, fond everywhere," he says. We had it with fried eggs, just to get a little more cholesterol on our plates.

The recipe has you saute onions with the leftover vegetables and corned beef. Meanwhile, you mash some more of the vegetables with some leftover cooking liquid. When you pour this over the top, it's supposed to bind it together into a pancake somehow. I'm not sure how liquid is supposed to be a binding agent, but this did not flip as one cohesive unit as the recipe made me think it should. Not that this is a problem-- I've never had hash at a recipe that was pancake-like anyway-- but it was a little odd that no one who reviewed on the recipe seemed to have this same problem. G pointed out that many recipes don't turn out quite like the recipe claims, citing yesterday's almond tuiles as an example. This made me look back at the recipe to double-check-- it was heaping tablespoons, right? Um, no-- it was teaspoons. Whoops. I wonder if that would have fixed the cracking problem. This explains why it didn't make 4 dozen, anyway.

The gratin was pretty good too-- at least the bacon was. It might have been a bit more hassle than it's worth though, and it probably considerably diminishes the goodness of eating vegetables. G doesn't like brussel sprouts, but didn't mind them in this. The creamy sauce was good, but maybe this would've been better if it were turned into a macaroni and cheese type dish with broccoli and a creamy, cheesy white sauce. And then you're counting it as a main dish, so there's no pretense of it being a healthy vegetable. It might seem strange that this recipe is from Cooking Light, but there actually is no butter in it! Just some grease from 4 slices of bacon, and some half-and-half and 1% milk (except I just used entirely half-and-half). So maybe if prepared in the directed way it's not so bad. 148 calories and 5.2 g fat, it claims. It feels heavy though. We ate this while the pizza baked, and I felt really full just from a serving of this.

We liked this pizza-- G says "would do again." The chicken apple sausage we used was from Trader Joe's and was very sweet! We used their basil pizza dough, which G chose but was skeptical of later, because he thought it might be whole-wheat. We used a mix of 1000-day gouda and pre-shredded Italian blend. The cheese is light and overpowered by the sausage and onion/fennel mix, so there's no point in using 1000-day gouda, which G has been enjoying as a snack. I like fennel, and the package had two bulbs, so I'll have to find a way to use the other one soon. The toppings were a little dense. I think it's nicer when you still get to taste the crust.

Month 2, day 6: Slow-Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage

Today I made:

• Slow-Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage, Food Network Magazine, March 2010
• Almond Tuiles, Food Network Magazine, March 2010

I'm not really into corned beef and cabbage, but G really likes it, and especially looks forward to having corned beef hash in the morning. We made this St. Patty's Day dish a bit early just so that we could leisurely make corned beef hash the next day without having to rush to work.

This recipe is for corned beef in the slow cooker, so by the time we got home it had been boiling away for hours. Everything was very tender, and the vegetables were super salty from the beef's brine. Strangely, the beef didn't come with pickling spices (as the recipe assumed), so we were kind of on our own. We googled a recipe and realized that while we didn't have everything, we had enough to get the main flavors.We added black peppercorns, coriander, red pepper flakes, ground allspice, a smear of grey poupon (in place of mustard seeds!), cinnamon, cardamom, bay leaves, cloves, and ground ginger.

After dinner we decided to try to bake something. I found an almond tuiles recipe to make. They are supposed to be round as shown on the food network page:

But that did not work for us. I think my "heaping tablespoons" were too large too, because this made nowhere near 4 dozen cookies for us. They did not wrap well around a spoon handle, and instead just cracked. I decided to leave the last ones just round:

 

They are very sweet, and very buttery. G thinks they taste like an egg. I think they taste like store-bought sugar cookies. I don't know if that is a good thing. They are ok, but if I'm going to bake with almond flour I would rather make French macarons.

Month 2 day 5: Cheese and Green Chile Enchiladas

Today I made:
Cheese and Green Chile Enchiladas, Every Day with Rachael Ray March 2012

These were better than expected. After reading the recipe today, I realized that they sounded kind of gross-- just tons of sour cream and cheese, with some chiles. There isn't much in the way of nutritional value here. It did taste good, though! I suppose that is to be expected with cheese and sour cream.
I made a few modifications. I only used one can of chiles, because I had a traumatic experience once with them. I was making a green chile pozole recipe once, and even though I used just half of the chiles it called for, it was almost inedibly hot. This time I halved the chiles again, and it was not very spicy at all. Maybe I got the wrong kind last time. Also, I didn't cook the tortillas in olive oil before rolling them up, out of laziness. I just heated them a bit in the microwave. They did tear when I rolled them because they weren't that warm, but it doesn't really matter-- they rip later when trying to serve them too. Anyway, it tasted pretty good. G was at a happy hour, but my sister is visiting and ate with me. She thought they were pretty good too.

Month 2 day 4: Chili-spiced Chicken Soup with Stoplight Peppers and Avocado Relish

Yesterday I cooked, but it took much longer than expected and I had to rush off to ceramics class and then rush back and go to sleep (it was an early day today). But, tonight I didn't cook after all, so I guess the blog writing got all worked out.

Yesterday I made:
Chili-spiced Chicken Soup with Stoplight Peppers and Avocado Relish, Cooking Light March 2010

This month has a Mexican theme, and in particular, it's the showdown of Mexican soups. There's this recipe, and then later two tortilla soup recipes. We liked this one a lot, but G says not to label it a keeper until we've seen the rest of the competition. This isn't actually a tortilla soup, but G put chips in his after all.

This soup wouldn't inherently take long to make, except for the fact that we only have one big cutting board and I didn't want to get it meaty before cutting the vegetables. So I cut everything before starting any cooking. In retrospect, I should've just cut the relish ingredients first, then the chicken, and then cut the rest of the soup vegetables, which ended up getting cooked anyway.

In the sake of time, we didn't remove the chicken and saute just the vegetables and then add the broth etc. later and simmer for 15 min. We cooked the chicken, then added the vegetables and waited a short amount of time before adding the broth, and then just gave it a short while to simmer. We figured flavors would mingle more for the leftovers anyway. We also didn't cut the cooked chicken further after cooking. It stayed in as strips, which was fine, and kind of made the soup more interesting even.

The soup was very flavorful even without the simmering. It has a ton of spices in it-- about 3 Tbs total for the spice blend, plus lime juice, fire-roasted tomatoes (which had chiles in ours), and then a relish with cilantro, green onions, lime zest, avocado, and queso fresco.*

Unfortunately I've had a weird stomachache thing for the past month-and-a-halfish, where sometimes I think I'm hungry but when I eat it feels like my stomach has a rock in it. Today it turned into just a day-long stomach tingling-gross sensation ever since lunch. This soup wasn't super-spicy, but it did have a bite, and I'm feeling like maybe having this month be dedicated to spicy, cheesy foods is not a good idea :( So I'm not sure what will happen with recipes for the next couple weeks. G might have to judge them on his own while I eat plain pasta...

* It's Massachusetts, so there is no queso fresco. We used feta.

Month 2 day 3: Chickpeas with Broccoli Rabe and Bacon

Today I made:
Chickpeas with Broccoli Rabe and Bacon, Cooking Light March 2010

This concludes our foray into Cooking Light's section on chickpeas.

The flavors in this were nice, but nothing too spectacular. G says the recipe I have for penne arrabbiata is better, if we're going for something with bacon. And, between the broccoli rabe and bacon, it seems like something you would get at Sebastian's. While a bit expensive for what it is, a pasta bowl there serves me for two meals, while this dish (I guess since it doesn't have pasta) was not very filling. I think we'll end up making some cookies or something later.

Month 2 day 2: Penne with Chickpeas, Feta, and Tomatoes

Normally on Thursdays I'm rushing to finish cooking and eat before 7:45, when I have to leave to work in the tutoring room. Today I started cooking at 6:30, same as most Thursdays, but when I finished at 6:50 I was confused as to how I'm normally so rushed for time. The limiting step of this dinner was actually just boiling water and cooking pasta. This is a good weeknight recipe.

Today I made:
Penne with Chickpeas, Feta, and Tomatoes, Cooking Light March 2010

That picture doesn't look very appetizing, but it was. The penne look red because we buy the pasta that counts as a serving of vegetables, whatever that means. We feel like it's healthy.

Chop up some onion and garlic, add in some chopped red pepper and chickpeas (I had pre-chopped the pepper over the weekend. Thanks Past Holly!), and add in some halved cherry tomatoes. Each of these steps only needs a couple minutes in between, which is actually basically enough to chop that next ingredient.
Unfortunately the basil we had was old and no longer tasty, so we had to leave out the fresh basil. I think that would've been really good in it.
The lemon zest was really nice, and the feta just melted into the reserved pasta liquid and juice from the tomatoes as they cooked to make a sort of creamy sauce. I thought this was pretty good. G thought we've had better recipes, citing the fettuccine we made last month. But I'm much more likely to have chickpeas around than hazelnuts, so I'm keeping this recipe too.

Month 2 day 1: Maple and Soy Glazed Flank Steak with Silky Sesame Cucumbers and Scallion Noodles

It is already Month 2!

This month, there are five issues:

• Cooking Light, March 2010
• Food Network Magazine, March 2010
• Cooking Light, March 2011
• Every Day with Rachael Ray 2012
• Saveur, March 2012

There were a ton of recipes to choose from, so it was difficult to pare it down to the number of days I have to cook. Some weekends are going to have breakfast recipes too. I'm excited to make corned beef and cabbage, which G loves, and then use the leftovers for St. Patrick's Day corned beef hash breakfast, which G loves maybe even more. I won't be cooking much from Saveur-- I am a bit intimidated by recipes with more than a few unknown ingredients, and there just aren't enough weekends when I have more than an hour to cook. I made a cake from this issue once which was great, so maybe I'll try another one this month. Anyway, I'm looking forward to cooking these recipes.

Today I made:

• Maple and Soy Glazed Flank Steak, Cooking Light March 2010
• Silky Sesame Cucumbers, Cooking Light March 2010
• Scallion Noodles, Cooking Light March 2010

This was one of Cooking Light's fast meals where they pair a main with sides. I think it did come together in the suggested 40 minutes. We don't own a broiler pan, so I put a cookie rack on top of a cookie sheet and called it a day. Unfortunately our cookie racks are funky and get warped in the oven, so just a couple minutes after putting the steak in we heard a big pop. The juices kept getting charred at the bottom of the pan. This will suck to clean.

G wasn't a fan-- he said it was just ok-- but he was also in a bad mood already when he said that, so maybe it's better than that. I thought it was fine, like teriyaki beef. The sides were nice too. I'm not a big steak person, so I might try this marinade with chicken, tofu, salmon, or something sometime. It's not particularly maple-y though, which is too bad because that would've been an interesting flavor for a meat.

Month 1 day 11: Lemongrass-Cilantro Chicken with Honey Dipping Sauce

Today I made
Lemongrass-Cilantro Chicken with Honey Dipping Sauce, Food and Wine February 2011

I won't be making this dish again. It needed to marinate overnight, but despite this it was basically unflavored. And, the chicken breasts were pretty thick, so they took much longer than the suggested 13 minutes to cook on our grill pan. By the time they were cooked through, they were kind of tough and dry. The only good thing is just that all the cutting was done yesterday, so today it was just grilling. But that would've been true of the fines herbes chicken too, without any time for marinating, plus it was way more flavorful, AND I now actually own fines herbes. So this recipe is in the recycling bin.

Today I read Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, or most of it anyway. I was about a quarter of the way in and finished it today. This was helped because while I was eating delicious leftover Beef Tagine for lunch, I all of the sudden got hot and weak-- like I was going to pass out minus the black vision. Which is weird, because on a fairly regular basis (like this morning a few times, for example) I get the black vision minus the rest of the sensations you get from fainting. So I figured it would be best to just stay in my PJs on the sofa all day, dozing and getting excited for food blogging.
There are some similarities and differences. Her recipes are much more complicated than mine, and also more comprehensive. But at the same time they are highly repetitive-- in particular because she follows one chapter at a time, she can get stuck on one type of meat for a while. And everything calls for butter. I do intend (intend...) to try recipes that will push the edge a bit, although unlike Julie I can't cook for hours everyday, and so more complicated recipes are already getting overlooked in favor of <40 minute ones. My recipes are selected from a preapproved short list of recipes that look awesome-- no aspic or offal for me. I like to think that I am nicer, although I do have a tendency to get angry while cooking, especially when cutting teargas onions. But, for example, I would never write that I sometimes want to slam [my husband's] head into a sharp rock. Or write a book about having an affair, after said husband had put up with a year of kitchen tantrums. Along that line, the book is probably only half about actually cooking, and another half about her dramatic life. My life is (thankfully) not so dramatic, and I don't think people would want to read about me watching worms grow up and counting green dots in the dark. Although that's another difference-- Julie, starting when blogs were still scarce and novel, immediately was followed by non-family/friend fans who somehow found her blog. Anyway, it did make me think that G and I should probably weigh-in before moving on to the second month, to see how we do against Julie's 20 lbs of butter weight. It will be a contest to see who wins out-- Cooking Light or Food Network? It also made me think that a year is a very long time to stay true to a blog. But, we'll see how it goes. Jokingly, I pulled out my two huge editions of The Gourmet Cookbook from the sixties and threatened to work my way through those after the magazines. These things are beasts, and filled with the contemporary sentiments that make me so fascinated by vintage cookbooks. G thought something more modern would be better-- The Good Housekeeping Cookbook maybe? And we each pulled out our editions, 38 years apart. They're pretty different in most ways, but they both have boeuf bourguignon.

Month 1 day 10: Beef Tagine with Butternut Squash and Scallion Couscous

Today I made:

• Beef Tagine with Butternut Squash, Cooking Light January/February 2011
• Scallion Couscous, Cooking Light January/February 2011

One of Cooking Light's features is a section of fast weeknight menus. They prominently display the estimated time to cook, a game plan suggesting how to multitask, and a side or two that will go well with the dish. That last part is especially nice, because most cooking magazine recipes are just for mains, with a list of unmatched sides that won't complement those mains too well, and you're stuck just having some salad and rice or something.

I thought this was a great dish. Not only did it come together even faster than its 40 minute claim, but it was super-easy and flavorful. I was in love on step 2, when I was stirring onions and beef that was coated in paprika, cinnamon, salt, ginger, and red and black pepper. G wasn't a huge fan though, because apparently chewy beef makes him nauseous (!?). Whatever, I'm keeping this recipe.

Tonight I also prepped some chicken for tomorrow's lemongrass-cilantro grilled chicken. Except that I used up the rest of the cilantro for the topping of the tagine tonight, and anyway we were supposed to have a full cup. So it's more just lemongrass chicken. Apparently it's basically impossible to separate chicken from the styrofoam platter/its gel packet if you froze the two together. We basically freeze most of our meat anyway, if we're not going to cook it later in the week, so it's ridiculous that we go to the one grocery store in the world that doesn't just sell frozen chicken breasts. We end up paying premium for fresh ones that we can then freeze ourselves into one big block :-P Also, lately all of the produce we buy there has been rotting, and that one bag of coconut flakes we got last week had a hole in it, and I had a coupon the other day that they took and did not apply. So I want to go to Trader Joe's from now on. Screw Star Market!

Month 1 day 9: White Chili with Quick-roasted Garlic

We're mostly through the recipes we decided to cook for February. March's recipes will start after the weekend, since we already bought the ingredients for the last couple of meals. March will be jam-packed with a wide variety of foods, and it was hard to forgo some of the recipes, but there just aren't enough days.

Today we cooked:
White Chili with Quick-roasted Garlic, Food Network January/February 2010

One of Food Network Magazine's regular features is a cook-off between two chefs. Subscribers are meant to cook both versions of the dish (that month's was chili) and vote. I wonder how many people actually cook both of them, though. The competing dish seemed overly complicated, so we went with Melissa D'Arabian's version, which has about a full head of garlic in it. I should've used more, but I ran out after making the "roasted" ones. Instead of 12 shallots, I used 3 onions, thinking it would be less peeling and less crying. But the onions burned my eyes too... I think I need to sharpen my knife :-P

The picture doesn't really do it justice-- all the cheese melted before I could take the picture :-P This was really different than what I tend to think of as chili-- very soupy, and with just one can of beans, but it was good. We used a rotisserie chicken, and it was nice and moist.

After dinner we clipped the final recipes from the February issues to file away and closed up the magazines for good! I planned out the dinners for March. I think they'll be good.

Then, I put together a tea rack. I wanted a new way to organize my loose leafs, since I acquired a large number of new teas from a Lupicia New Year's "Happy Bag." But they didn't come in tins, so they were just in packets in a paper bag. I was looking for some sort of small shelf organizer, but ended up just buying a spice rack. I'm sure real tea connoisseurs will fault me for the transparent containers which will let light in and also for opening up nine airtight bags all at once instead of on an as needed basis. But I am just a tea enthusiast so screw them :) It makes me happy to have a rack of 18 spice jars filled with loose leaf tea.

This makes me so excited to drink tea! I think it's a nice display, and now I'll know what all of my options are. Now I just need to wake up early enough to fit in a cup with breakfast before it's time to leave for work.