Mighty Life List #31: Make truffles. December 15, 2010

(Naked Truffles)

I really like truffles and I always thought they would be fun to make – and they are. It would be a good food project to do with kids actually because it’s messy and you get to lick chocolate off your hands at the end.

I decided to make truffles as my Christmas “food gift” this year. Jami and I are staying home for Christmas (A Christmas Made for Two!) and so I sent a lot of holiday packages to our relatives around the country and I wanted to include something a little more personal in them, so this year every package got truffles or spiced nuts, or a combo.

(The Finished Product)

I did two batches, one with the traditional cocoa powder coating and one with a coating of toasted chopped almonds. I used this recipe and it couldn’t have been simpler.Truffles have to be made over the course of two days (there is a fair amount of chilling required), but the different steps didn’t take too long. I will certainly make them again.

Mighty Life List #6: Eat a lobster roll in Maine. September 8, 2010

Look at this lobster roll. It is a thing of beauty!

Shockingly for a girl who married a Mainer, I had never had a lobster roll until this past week. Luckily this sad state of affairs has now been corrected by this lovely and delicious lobster roll from the lobster shack at Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth, ME. It was awesome – and I have to say the bread is what makes it. So good.

P.S. The photo is all Jami. She just got a new camera, and I think the photos she is taking now are truly stunning.

An Abundance of Cucumbers July 20, 2010

Into every gardener’s life, a little veggie excess must fall. This year we are positively swimming in cucumbers. (This isn’t a bad problem to have honestly. I love cucumbers.) If you are swimming in cucumbers too, may I suggest a few recipes that will use them up quickly and tastily?

Lemon Cucumber Tofu Salad from the 101 Cookbooks. Heidi Swanson has never steered me wrong. She uses Lemon Cucumbers, but I don’t grow those, so I used 1 1/2 of the big, long cucumbers from my garden. This salad was awesome – definitely a meal in and of itself.

Greek Antipasto Pitas from Cheap Healthy Good. I didn’t have a red pepper, so I just did another 1/2 cucumber instead. Quite yummy and equally good (if not better) the next day. Bonus points for requiring no heat at all, which is critical this summer.

Horseradish Cucumber Sauce from Epicurious. This uses up one not-too-huge cucumber, and is super tasty on salmon cakes, beet rosti, zucchini corn fritters, or pretty much any fried cake-like food.

And of course, I have been using cucumbers in sandwiches – tuna salad, egg salad, and hummus. I still have plenty more in the fridge. Have any cucumber recipe suggestions? What is your garden swimming in?

Mighty Life List #41: Eat at Nora May 10, 2010

Ever since I’ve moved to DC (or at least ever since I learned of Nora), I’ve wanted to eat there. Nora is sort of like DC’s Chez Panisse – a restaurant focused on local, seasonal, organic food. Luckily my parents also have a penchant for local, seasonal, and organic food, so they decided to host a family dinner there on the Thursday before the wedding. In addition to amazing food (beet salad, risotto with rabbit confit – a dish I recently discovered I liked, and strawberry shortcake!) and really great service, it was a wonderful start to our wedding weekend. Jami and I, our parents, and our brothers and their significant others (my sister wasn’t able to come up until Saturday) all got to meet and eat and get to know each other before the (relatively small, relatively calm) madness began in earnest. What a lovely (pre)wedding present!

Cooking for Hot Weather: Cous Cous Salad April 9, 2010

(Please excuse the crappy picture.)

It finally cooled down last night, but it has been hot this week with highs in the upper 80s. Way hotter than it should ever be in April. As you may know, our house doesn’t have air conditioning and we choose not use window units, so we spend our summers practicing heat mitigation. We make sure the blinds are all shut tight when we leave for work – as soon as it gets cooler outside than in, we open up all the windows to let the cool breeze in. And we try to cook in the kitchen as little as possible – we use the grill in the backyard, or make simple meals that don’t require the stove to be on for long. We almost never use the oven in the summer.  This Wednesday, I had planned an oven centric meal, but when I walked into the house after work, I knew it was already too hot in the house for that plan. This is what I threw together, based on what we had in the fridge and pantry. It’s a perfect hot weather meal.

1 Cup Cous Cous

1 Cup Stock (I used vegetable stock, but chicken would also be tasty).

1 Can White Beans

2 Carrots

5 Scallions

1/4 Red Onion

1/4 cup White Wine Vinegar

1/4 cup Olive Oil

1/4 cup Grated Parmesan

Bring stock to a boil. Add cous cous and stir once. Cover the pot and remove from heat. After 5 minutes, your cous cous is done. Fluff with a fork and allow to cool. (I stuck my pot in the fridge to speed that process along).

Peel and grate the carrots. Thinly slice the scallions. Dice the red onion (I did a pretty small dice). Whisk together the vinegar and oil in a bowl, then add the veggies and the beans. Allow to marinate while the cous cous cools, then mix together, the cous cous, the veggie/bean mixture, and the parmesan cheese. Enjoy!

Makes enough for 2 dinners and 2 lunches.

Diet for a Hot Planet March 20, 2010

Diet for a Hot Planet is subtitled “The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It” which should give you a good idea of what this book covers. Anna Lappe (the daughter of Frances Moore Lappe who wrote Diet for a Small Planet back in the 1970s) does a good job of explaining how the food we eat contributes to the climate crisis. There’s a lot to think about and I haven’t processed it all yet, but I know at the very least I will be figuring out how to limit my purchase of items containing palm oil. To establish palm oil plantations (which is apparently in everything from cookies to soap), developers cut down rainforests and drain peatlands (massive amounts of dead and decaying plant matter which are covered by water). When the peatlands are drained this plant matter is exposed to air and begins to oxidize, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Lappe states that ” [t]hough peatlands cover just 0.2 percent of the earth’s surface their destructions is associated with 8 percent of total global emissions” (p. 30). There’s lots more about this in the book – and about other ways that agriculture and food production impact our planet, so if you are interested (or want it explained better) I recommend that you read it.

(I got Diet for a Hot Planet through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s program for free. Lucky me! I will happily loan it out if other folks would like to read it.)

Three Food Choices March 2, 2010

One of my favorite food blog, Cheap Health Good, asked the following hypothetical question this week:

Q: You can only eat three dishes for the rest of your life. They’re dishes, not single foods; this means you can choose bananas, but you can also opt for Spaghetti Bolognese. You must consider proper nutrition. Side dishes are not allowed. Which three do you choose?

What a challenge! Well, mostly because you have to consider nutrition – there are plenty of things that I could eat forever that have very little nutritional value.

I think I would choose:

Tuna Melts! Okay, not the most nutritious – but I do include lots of veggies in my tuna melts. And we eat them every single week now, so I don’t think I could go without them for the rest of my life.

Farfalle with Tomato and Zucchini – My go-to recipe for last summer, adapted from this recipe in Food + Wine. (I cook use “grown-up” zucchini, so I cook them a little first and Farfalle is the preferred pasta in our house, but otherwise I follow the recipe). This is great for using up summer garden bounty and so yummy that we never managed to take a picture of it last summer – we always went straight to the eating. And I can’t imagine life without pasta.

Corn Chowder – I use the recipe in the Joy of Cooking and it is just perfect – fresh and tasty with a little bit of bacon. Mmm, bacon.

What would you eat?

Jam Bars February 14, 2010

Somehow, when Christmas was over, we found ourselves with 5 or 6 jars of jams and jellies. There is only so much jelly that one can eat on toast, so I’ve been looking for recipes that will make good use of the jams we have. Today I decided to make these jam bars – the recipe is an adaptation of the recipe for Raspberry Streusel Bars in the Joy of Cooking. I do love me the Joy of Cooking.

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
12 tablespoons cold butter
3 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 to 1.5 cups jam
Streusel topping (recipe below)

Generously grease an 8 x 8-inch baking pan.

Add flour, sugar and butter to food processor and pulse under the mixture has reached a course crumb. Mix together milk and vanilla extract. Slowly add the milk mixture and pulse until in begins to hold together. Add a little extra milk if it is still too dry (I had to.) Firmly press the mixture into the baking pan and refrigerate for 15 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Bake the chilled dough in the center of the oven for 12-15 minutes until barely firm in the center. Remove from the oven. Spread with jam and top with streusel topping. Return to oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Allow to cool on a cooling rack and cut into bars.

Streusel Topping
3/4 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 cup nuts (original recipe called for sliced almonds, I used slivered, I think any nuts would do – just chop them if they are large)
1/2 cup rolled oats
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk

Whisk together flour, sugar, and cinnamon. Using your fingertips, cut the butter into flour mixture. Using a fork, stir in the nuts, then the oats. Beat together the egg and milk. Stir into flour mixture until streusel is moistened and forms small clumps. Add a small amount of additional milk if the mixture is too dry. Ready to top!

Dinner for Two: Caramelized Tofu and Brussels Sprouts February 13, 2010

Sometimes it’s hard to find recipes for just two people. Luckily I like leftovers a lot, but for those nights when I want to make a meal just for us, with nothing left over, I have a handful of recipes that I turn to. This is one of those – and a very popular meal in our house. It’s a recipe from Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks with a few changes.

1 package extra firm tofu, cut into thin 1-inch segments, pressed to remove excess water
2 medium cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup pecans, chopped
1 tablespoon light brown sugar
1 (10 oz) container of brussels sprout, very thinly sliced in the food processor
olive oil
salt

Heat a splash of olive oil in a non-stick skillet over medium heat; add tofu. Cook until slightly golden, 2-3 minutes per side. Add garlic and pecans, and saute for another minute. Stir in sugar and cook for a few more minutes.

Remove tofu/pecan mixture from the pan. Add a little more oil to pan. Stir in shredded brussels sprouts. Add pinch salt, stir. Cook for 4-5 minutes, stirring frequently, until sprouts begin to turn golden (and smell sort of like popcorn.

Split brussels sprouts into two bowls. Top with tofu mixture. Enjoy!

In with the New January 2, 2010

2010 has arrived, in all its blustery, bright January glory. Jami and I bid farewell to 2009 by going out for sushi at our favorite DC sushi restaurant. 2009 treated us well. After a stressful 2008, all I wanted out of 2009 was a quiet, calm, uneventful year, and it delivered. It felt like 2009 was a bit of a break – a year to sit back, regroup and recharge. 2010 is already going to be a more jam-packed year for us – we get married in May after all. For being just exactly what we needed, 2009 deserved it’s own farewell celebration, and our dinner certainly fit the bill. Jami and I both got tasting menus, so we didn’t even have to order, just sit back as the chef sent out dish after dish of delicious Japanese food. We were quite spoiled – and are ready to make sushi on New Year’s Eve a tradition.

New Year’s Day already has its own food traditions, at least for this Southern girl – black-eyed peas (for luck) and collard greens (for wealth). Both having been properly devoured, we are ready to start our new year.