Every year, my parents' office has a party the Saturday before the end of tax season - which, this year, was today. They get a bunch of boney boxes and pulled pork sandwiches from Jim's Rib Haven, a local BBQ joint that recently expanded into Omaha, and everyone else brings sides and what not. For years, two of our long-standing, now retired, employees made everyone's favorite sides: baked beans and dessert (usually some sort of cake). Having retired, it was time for someone else to carry the torch. My sister decided to make a red velvet cake, and I decided that I would finally try my hands at making some baked beans.

But I didn't want to make baked beans that involved barbecue sauce, ketchup, prepared mustard, or other such things. It's somewhat hard to avoid HFCS if you use prepared sauces, so I try to avoid them. You would not believe the number of recipes that call for them!

A few years ago, I bought this fabulous cookbook about soups -- Twelve Months of Monastary Soups by d'Avila-Latourrette. It's got some great bones for soup recipes and is absolutely fabulous for those wanting to get into using seasonal produce.

Black bean soups and chilis are great food for the winter, because they're rich and hearty and the spiciness warms you from the inside out. They also reheat fabulously, for those with smaller households or who like to bring their lunch.

This soup is on the thin side as written on the book (with an extra cup of water), but I like my soups on the thicker side. I'm totally guilty of using up half a package of saltines in thin soups to get it to the consistency I like. The photo above was taken on the third eating of the soup, so it's really starting to thicken up.

I've been sick the last week or so, but I've moved from the point where I'm not hungry and have no energy to cook to the point where I'm still feeling like crap, dont' really have energy, but am out of the anything effortless to make (including canned soup).

Did I mention that I really haven't done much grocery shopping in the last month, beyond one major meat restocking?

Anyway, I opened the fridge and saw that I still had some spinach in the freezer, a variety of poultry filets, and root veggies (carrots, onions, parsnips), and was suddenly, the flavors of my last stir fry exploded in my head - the sultry heat from the chiles, the silky bok choy... yum.

I admit that this was not the most exerting soup to make. It's really a non-recipe, but I'll share it anyway. Chop an onion, peel & dice a parsnip, and toss 'em in a pan to soften with just a little itty bit of oil. While it's cooking, run three cloves of garlic through the press over the pot, grab about a half teaspoon of minced ginger from the jar, and stir. Once it looks about right, pour in a 32oz box of chicken broth, about a tablespoon of soy, a teaspoon of chile garlic sauce, a half teaspoon of hoisin, a scant teaspoon of sesame oil, and dump in a frozen turkey filet (about 4-5oz in size). Let it simmer for some time. I really don't know how long it was there, I fell asleep on the couch and then the city inspector came, and the plumber. Anyway, once the turkey's cooked through, take it out, dice it up, and return with two servings worth of whole wheat pasta, and let it cook until the pasta's plumped up nicely. Then add about 2-3 oz of frozen spinach (oh yeah, still frozen because I still am not feeling well -- I use a cleaver to chunk my box into 3-4 smaller containers to freeze what I don't use for things like this), and once the spinach has thawed and warmed, serve.

It was much like stir fry, and filled my belly well (and helped drain my sinuses - always a bonus!). I don't feel like arse so much, either - between this and last night's onion soup, I think I may be on the mend.

In the last few months, I've been making dietary changes in an effort to eat more healthily -- more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less senseless fat and grease.

One of the things that has been problematic for me is my love for meatloaf, hamburgers, and meatballs. All of these things are typically made with cheap (and fatty) meat, and yet, are so comforting. Swapping out the beef for turkey or chicken definitely helps with the caloric issues, but It Just Doesn't Taste The Same, and sometimes, what you really want is that comforting taste from home, the beef. After many experiments, I have finally found something that saves the ground beef! It really was obvious, I don't know why I couldn't think of it on my own, especially given in my days of vegetarianism, I often used mushrooms as a meat substitute.

Swapping out 1/3 of the meat for cooked minced mushrooms, adding more diced vegetables, and swapping out bread crumbs for steel cut oats are all things that go for the good cause: switching to leaner meat (reducing the fat content and calories), increasing the grains (and better-for-you than pulverized white bread), and adding all sorts of vegetables ends up making meatloaf healthier without sacrificing the texture or flavor is great! And I'll be honest: as good as my mom's meatloaf was, this tastes better. (Sorry, mom!)

According to the magazine whose recipe I based this off of, the ground chuck/ground pork/bread version has 440 calories and 30 grams of fat per portion and their version (which has less vegetables - I've marked my additions in the ingredient list) has 268 calories and 12 grams of fat.


Since trying this out, I've tried swapping out 1/3 of the meat for cooked minced mushroom in meatballs and hamburgers, and it's worked out really well. As well, grinding the oats down (to be as fine as the bread was) makes the oats a fairly good substitute for bread crumbs in meatballs, as well.

Last weekend, I went to Chinatown with my parents. While there, I did some pantry shopping (mmmm chile-garlic sauce!), ate lots and lots and lots of dim sum, and stopped by my favorite little barbecue joint and picked up some roasted duck and pork (both split with my parents). Today, I threw together a quick stir fry -- 1.5c (uncooked) brown rice, 1 head of bok choy, your typical aromatics (celery/carrot/onion), the meats, and a little stir fry sauce (2Tbs soy sauce, 2 tsp chile garlic sauce, 1 Tbs sherry or rice wine, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1/2 tsp hoisin, 3 cloves garlic, 1 tsp ginger paste). It was fairly good for something I literally threw together, and I'm definitely looking forward to tomorrow's lunch (leftovers!), but I think next time, I may add some chiles...

Brazilians have lots of little sweets - cocada, brigadeiro, beijinhos de coco, doce de leite, and so many more. Many of them (or, at least, the ones my Brazilian boyfriend has introduced me to) involve sweetened condensed milk and take about ten to fifteen minutes to make.

Brigaderio's no exception. Sweet little balls of slighty caramel, chocolatey goodness, typically rolled in balls, and rolled in sprinkles. It's not unlike a slacker fudgey truffle, with only three (or four) ingredients: a 14oz can of sweetened condensed milk, 3 Tbs of cocoa powder, 1-2 Tbs of butter, and (optionally) up to 1 tsp of vanilla, which are cooked over medium heat until it all comes together and gets thick, about 10 minutes (constantly stirring).

Normally, at that point, you pour it into a bowl, let it cool 30-60 minutes, and butter your hands to make it into balls, and roll the balls into chocolate sprinkles. I made this batch at 3 am, while finishing up laundry, so I didn't hang out long enough to roll it and just spread it out like I would fudge and shook sprinkles onto half of it. (Totally not traditional, but what can I say? It was 3 am, and I was tired!)

Incidentally, beijinhos de coco is essentially the same thing, but instead of 3 Tbs of cocoa powder, you use 4 Tbs of sweetened dried coconut that you add after 15-20 minutes (instead of immediately), and instead of rolling it in chocolate sprinkles, you roll it in more sweetened dried coconut. Traditionally, you also press a whole clove into the top of a beijinho de coco (but it's entirely for decoration so you don't haaaaaaaaaave to).

Looking for a quick and easy dinner tonight, I perused the freezer of DOOM, where I have a bunch of frozen meat, and found an excess of pork. Deliciousness coming up!

I'm not particularly a fan of the 'meat and potatoes' school of thought for dinner, but there is something to be said about how quick and dirty it is. But as much as I love my mother's meatloaf, complete with its 1950s ketchup glaze, I do like shaking things up a bit. Minced aromatics (onion, garlic, bell pepper, carrot, celery) add a nice flavor, as well as ups the vegetable quotient (and nothing is as wrong as when she was feeling short of time and used dehydrated onion instead of chopping an onion). Worcestershire sauce and Dijon mustard do a great job at adding a bit of flavor, along with the typical salt and pepper - the extra liquids help keep it moist and juicy. Personally, I strongly prefer rolled oats to bread crumbs as the extender (fresh or not), though I'll be honest: I haven't tried it with my heartier multi-grain bread. (White bread is so flavorless - why would you want to put it in anything?!) But my favorite thing is my tweak on her ketchup glaze (2 parts ketchup to 1 part brown sugar). Adding some vinegar does wonders at thinning the sauce and balancing the sweetness.

Around mid-July, I became obsessed with the idea of lemon and blueberry in baked goods. I know exactly what sparked it: I was driving home from work in Tucson and stopped off at a bakery for a blueberry muffin. I had some lemon Frut2O in my possession, and spent the drive drinking this nondescript blueberry muffin and my lemon water, marvelling about how much better that muffin tasted right after I took a drink, or how the aftertaste was just more blueberry-ish after taking a swig.

But I had a huge problem: nowhere in my rented kitchen was a muffin tin, or even a bread pan.

Woe!

So I waited, considering my options for breads and muffins and what would do me better.

Ultimately, I decided on a blueberry-lemon bread recipe found on epicurious, and just had to wait until I happened to have everything I needed to bake it.

As luck would have it, this coincided the same weekend I was gifted with a ginormous mutant zucchini, and I had to put the bread aside for a few days to deal with the squash. But now, it's 4am, and I couldn't sleep -- too jazzed up. I was hungry, and my sister (my roommate) is gone for the rest of the week, called into work unexpectedly. So I decided to make that blueberry-lemon bread to calm down, and while it baked away, unpacked and cleaned my apartment a bit. (As sad as it is that I've been here 17 days now and am not fully unpacked, but truthfully: I unpacked what I originally brought, and went to my parents' to pick up some more things they'd been holding for me, stashed in the room that used to be mine.)


Anyway: this is brightly lemon, with juicy blueberries. It's a great, sunshiney bread, good for a raining morning like today.

I went to visit the parents yesterday, and they said "Look at our giant zucchini!" and I said "Yum, zucchini bread" and they said "Oh good, you know what to do with it: YOU TAKE IT HOME!!"

So I did.

And it was good.

My sister and I spent about 90 minutes hacking at it with a cleaver, seeding it, and abusing my food processor.

I don't know how big it was, but I ended up with 10 cups of shredded zucchini and 12 cups of sliced zucchini, all of which is happily sitting in my freezer.

As it so happens, I also had 3 overly ripe bananas that I was going to turn into banana bread today. Instead, it was turned into zucchini-banana bread, and it is DELCIOUS!

First off, if anyone cares, I'm on twitter (spicybrains). It's linked to my facebook account, so if you've got me on facebook, you're already reading my status updates.


Anyway. Earlier this month, my sister and I moved to Iowa City. We have a fairly limited budget at the moment, as she's job hunting and I'm just a grad student. Of course, limited budgets create interesting scenarios when one is trying to reduce the number of refined sugars in ones diet - those alternatives aren't particularly cheap. They are, however, filling. It's made even more interesting when the two halves have very different ideas on food.

One of the foods my sister has always refused to eat is beans. Outside of chili, I don't think she's ever eaten beans (at least at my house). No baked beans, no refried beans, no black beans, and nothing that contains any of those things. Suffice it to say, since beans are a staple in the thrifty cook's pantry, this put a bit of a crimp on things. In theory.


So, I made enchiladas. Delicious, yummy enchiladas. Rolled up, so you can't really see what's in it, and as long as it tastes delicious, you don't really question it. Full of beans. Black beans, to be exact, and some pumpkin (though the pumpkin actually did NOT go over very well with either of us!). The beans did, so for your viewing pleasure: the first batch of beans that my sister voluntarily ate, loved, and has already begged me to make again.

I was feeling inspired by the spinach-y cheesy filling in spanakopita, but was in the mood for pork chops. So today, we had a garden salad with feta (and Italian vinaigrette), garlicky toasted pita, and porkchops stuffed with feta and spinach-y goodness. It was soooooo delicious.

3 lb whole peaches, peeled
2 C granulated white sugar
2 C champagne vinegar
4 sticks of 2" cinnamon
6 whole allspice berries
1 whole star anise
4 whole cloves
1 whole vanilla bean, halved and scraped of seeds.

Set peaches aside. Combine remaining ingredients in large stainless steel pot. Simmer 20 minutes, add peaches, and simmer an additional 15 minutes. Carefully remove peaches from pan, place in a container, and cool in the cooking liquid. Best flavor develops if peaches sit for at least two weeks.

Slice peaches and use in salads or serve over ice cream or other desserts. Makes 1 quart.

This is more a "newspaper clippping" than anything else - from yesterday's paper, but I don't want to lose the recipe.

Last night, I went to a restaurant I've been meaning to go to for quite some time -- Kingfisher Grill. I meant to go last year, during the Road Trip extravaganza, but never did. I completely forgot about it when I returned, until it was mentioned on LJ as being a place that's open late at night.

For my west-side livin' self, Kingfisher's quite the haul away - almost 8 miles away. (In the scheme of things in good local restaurants in Tucson, it's fairly centrally located at the Tucson and Grant intersection.)

An unpleasant surprise for me, as I had been told it was a casual place - think more nice jeans and polo rather than slacks and a button down, basically, the kind of clothes we wear at work - is that it's much more dressy. Or at least, last night's crowd was. It's bad enough eating as one, but being underdressed to boot? Oy.

Suffice it to say, I did NOT get the best of service, aside from the water/coffee girl. (She got a cash tip separately because she rocked hard core -- it's a fine line between coming too often and not often enough, especially when you're interrupting someone who is either contemplatively eating, or reading a novel. She managed to toe it perfectly and hit me JUST as my glasses were getting almost empty, but not so empty it was an issue.)

In all fairness, the manager recognized the crap service without me having to say anything -- he saw me reading with the menu down and came over and asked if my order'd been taken, and took it and said my wine and dessert (should I opt for one) would be free, which was a nice touch. My waitress was a little bit more attentive after that ... but not much that I forgive the long delay. As I said: the water girl got it right, service-wise. (Had I not been alone, it would have been ... better.)

Atmosphere, service aside, was pretty relaxed. Soft music playing, muted (but not neutral) colors on the wall, interesting art. Nobody was rushing. Like most restaurants, they brought out some bread - a rosemary bread, with a compound butter. The butter was too hard for a good spread, so I ate my bread without it, and it was tasty.

The wine list was fairly good for by-the-glass. I ended up with a Gewürztraminer (Ash Hallow, which is out of Columbia Valley), because I wasn't feeling the reds, and Fumé Blanc and Chardonnay just didn't seem right. It was a mellow white - something I'd recommend to someone who doesn't normally drink wine. It paired acceptably well with my entree - got a little spicier and a little crisper, but it wasn't out of whack or anything. (It's something I can see myself drinking regularly - it wasn't too dry or too sweet.)

My entree was one of the road trip specials. This week's road trip is California/Hawaii. I had the coconut crusted mahi mahi, which came with a slightly spicy mango barbecue sauce, an ogonari salad, some purple potato hash, and plantain home fries. (That's right - two starches!) I think if I was plating it, I would have found another vegetable than the plantains, because it was too starchy - maybe go with some more greens. In any case, it was all very delicious. The salad was plated on top of the fish, so when I ate the fish, I had some seaweed, some fish, and a swish of barbecue sauce, and it was ... divine. While the plantains may be somewhat traditional, they were boring and bland on their own, but acceptable with the fish. The purple potato hash? Was awesome. Yum!

For dessert, I had the triple lemon gateau - a lemon cake, brushed with a limoncello-based syrup, filled with lemon curd, and frosted with a white chocolate buttercream. There was a berry swish on the plate, and mine came with a berry compote to the side, though that was not on the menu. (No complaints here - I LOVE berries with lemon curd and the cake was no exception!) I also had a giant mug of the house coffee, which was flavored with Bailey's, and came with a cookie. Yum!

Price wise - if I had paid for all of it, it would have been just under $50 before the tip, which isn't terribly bad for a meal with wine and dessert and coffee at this sort of restaurant. With tip, I think it hit right around $50, but - yum! I'm definitely going to go back next year before I leave for the summer, even with the so-so service. Everyone needs the occasional treat.