Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for August, 2009
August 27, 2009 at 10:49 am · Filed under food, meta, things other people made
I just wanted to say that we’re going to be moving at the end of this month, which is to say at the start of week. I may be slow getting back online again, not sure, and I may be slow at moderating comments. I can still update and moderate from work, of course, but depending on the status of the unpacking situation, I may not be cooking much worth posting about. Likewise leading up to the move – I’d rather have the freedom to pack any given kitchen implement at any time, you know? Plus I can write posts, but if I can’t upload a picture, I’m not going to publish the post.
And I’m nearly done the last bag of Good Health chips! The Sesame and Garlic Humbles! These have a really interesting and complex flavour. They have the sesame flavour – they all do, actually – and the garlic is somewhat less prominent, but there was also some sweetness there that I’m going to chalk up to the red pepper the ingredients mention, and I also got to feel like I have a killer palate when I determined there was soy sauce in there. And there was! I should go on Hell’s Kitchen just for the palate challenge! Or… perhaps not. Yeah.
Anyway, see you sometime in September!
August 16, 2009 at 11:43 pm · Filed under food, pasta, side dishes/appetizers
A while ago, Culinary Cory posted this recipe for pasta salad with pesto and peas. Last weekend, I made it for “craft services” at Matt’s movie. I had originally thought that it would be more or less the main dish – I mean, I’d eat it for lunch and call it a lunch – and so I wouldn’t have to cut down the recipe at all, because we’d have several people here and they’d all be chowing down on it. But then Matt was like “We have a whole bunch of hot Italian sausages in our freezer” and went to the store for buns. I sauteed a bunch of peppers and onions, and the pasta salad was relegated to side-dish status. Alas. The sausages were really good, though, and everyone acted like they were the best sausages they’d ever eaten. In fact, last night, we were out celebrating the birthday of the lead actress, a friend of mine, and when her father heard that Matt’s actors were paid in sausages, he immediately wanted to sign up. But he did eventually allow as he’d have some pasta salad too. Which was a wise choice on his part, because it’s really good. There was so much left over and I’ve been eating it all week, but I don’t care, it’s delicious. Pesto is always great, the peas make a nice little snap and juiciness, and the Greek yogurt gives it a nice tang.
Triple-P Salad
Ingredients
14 oz, more or less, pasta of a shape appropriate to pasta salad – I used up the leftover penne from the sausage and penne bake, and made up the rest with “large macaroni,” because it was what was on sale
1 1/3 cup defrosted frozen peas
1/2 cup pine nuts, toasted – mine were probably a little under-toasted, because my toaster oven is kind of overzealous in a really sudden way: one minute it’ll be not really done at all, the next it’ll be burnt, so unless you’re really hovering over it, you’re going to have dodgy toasting
1/4 cup grated parmesan
3 tbsp pesto (I always just make my own)
the juice of half a lemon
1 5-oz container plain Greek yogurt
1/3 cup mayonnaise
Method
Cook the pasta according to the package directions.
Meanwhile, whisk together the mayo, Greek yogurt, lemon juice, and pesto until well combined.
When the pasta is done, drain it and rinse with cold water. I KNOW, but pasta salad is different from regular pasta, and the starch on the noodles that would help sauce adhere to hot pasta will just result in a big intractable lump in this case. So rinse and drain.
Put the pasta in a big bowl (seriously, a big bowl) and add the peas, parmesan, and pine nuts… which makes this actually a 5-P salad, really. We looooove alliteration!
Now stir in the dressing until everything is nicely coated.
One thing to bear in mind is that if you make it ahead, as I did, and store it in the fridge, the dressing will be much more solid when you take it out. And everything will want a good stir. It doesn’t taste weird or anything, but it won’t look quite right. It is, though.
In other news, tonight I made the delicious chicken patties from Soupbelly. My photo was completely unsalvageable, so this is all you’re getting – a link and my confirmation that they were, indeed, fantastic. We ate them with rice and I occasionally dunked a piece in some soy sauce. And if you can believe it or not, considering it’s me we’re talking about here, they actually looked just like the ones in the original post’s photos! Seriously. That’s what mine looked like, minus the bed of greens. Don’t worry, I’m not getting a big head or something, but if that’s what they’re supposed to look like, then mine actually came out perfectly.
August 14, 2009 at 4:47 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Well, even though I can’t get anywhere with Foodgawker, Tastestopping has posted my plantain casserole! I honestly thought that was a good picture, you guys. Granted it loses some resolution on the Tastestopping page, but the original wasn’t so bad! I appreciate what they do there – making a place for all the rejects, whether the reasoning behind rejecting them be understandable or obscure, that the big foodblog aggregators wouldn’t take. It’s nice. Of course, there is someone who goes around there commenting on people’s photos with critique and criticism, which is kind of counter to the point, but if you can steel yourself against having your photos dissed one more time, I say submit away. If that site gets big and important, I’ll be happy as pants.
Weirdly enough, though, the link to my site from there isn’t showing up in my comments or linkbacks, and my stats aren’t registering it as a place that has linked to me. I know it does link to the right page – I clicked it – but I wish it would “count” over here too.
And your chips update for the day is that the just-sea-salt flavour of the Good Health Naturals avocado oil chips is great. It’s a good, plain chip – I used to eat plain chips exclusively, so I should know – and the fact that it’s better for you is just a bonus.
August 11, 2009 at 4:51 pm · Filed under dessert, food
Matt was shooting for his new movie this past weekend, so I took charge of the Craft Services table, which is to say our kitchen table, and made these caramel-rum bars as part of it. I also made Culinary Cory’s pasta salad with pesto and peas, about which I’ll post later, if I manage to get a photo of the leftovers, and Matt threw some Italian sausages on the George Foreman. Which I think is why people didn’t eat as many of these squares as they would have done otherwise. I know I was pretty full.
So about these squares. First of all, it was an excuse to buy rum, which we usually don’t have around, since we’re not big-time cocktails people – not that we shun booze, but we don’t have a well-stocked bar or anything. These squares were well-stocked bars, though (see what I did there?), because they call for two tablespoons of rum in the caramel sauce, and since I didn’t want orange flavour in them, I replaced the two tablespoons of orange juice in the crust batter with… more rum. You can’t really taste it, though. Actually, you can’t really taste it strongly anywhere – you could if you sampled the caramel sauce on its own… which we did… but in the finished product it’s not that noticeable.
Also, these were inadvertently made more healthy (and more crumbly) because either our microwave is stupid or our bowls are. You know how microwaves are supposed to heat the food but leave the bowl (or plate or whatever) normal temperature? Not so much with ours. I melted the butter in a bowl, and it was so hot that my hand slipped when I was taking it out, and a bunch got spilled. I just soldiered on with what was left, and that was fine. So my actual measurement was somewhere between half a stick and 3/4 of a stick of butter, which doesn’t make the finished product suffer other than having a crumblier texture than I suspect they’re supposed to have. But if you use the full stick, more power to you.
Although I suppose I backed up on the healthiness somewhat by running out of whole-wheat flour and making up the difference with regular AP flour.
Caramel-Rum Bars
Ingredients
for the crust
1 cup oats – I don’t know whether mine were quick-cooking or not, so I encourage you not to worry about it either
1 cup whole-wheat flour
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp rum
1/2 cup unsalted butter (1 stick), melted, and ideally not spilled all over the counter…
for the sauce
21 individual caramels
2 tbsp milk
2 tbsp rum
for topping/filling
2/3 cup sliced almonds, toasted
1/2 cup chocolate chips
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Grease a 9″ square pan – am I the only one who calls that a brownie pan? I mean… that’s what it IS
Whisk together the oats, flour, salt, baking soda, and brown sugar.
Add the rum and melted butter and stir to combine.
Press 1 3/4 cups of this mixture into the pan.
Bake for 10 minutes.
When it’s ready, take it out and set it aside to cool a bit.
While it’s baking, make the caramel sauce: melt the caramels in a small pan with the rum and milk, stirring constantly, until smooth. This, by the way, is delicious.
Pour this evenly over the baked crust.
Spread the almonds over the caramel.
Cover with the remaining crust mixture.
Bake for 12 minutes more.
When you take it out of the oven, sprinkle with chocolate chips right away so they get all melty and adhere to the surface.
Let cool before cutting, but accept the fact that this also means cutting through the caramel in a somewhat hardened state, and resign yourself to the fact that you, like me, may get a blister on your finger from cutting them.
August 10, 2009 at 10:37 pm · Filed under food, meals
Matt had to work late recently, so I made this Moroccan stuffed-tomato dish. He wouldn’t be interested because first of all it is a tomato, and second of all it is stuffed with tuna – which he used to eat, but decided that he felt a little weird after eating it, blamed the mercury, and gave it up – which also contains some other ingredients that he may or may not be wild about. Olives, for example. But I was on the phone with my mom while making it and she agreed that it sounded pretty delicious.
Here’s the thing, though: I can’t give credit for this recipe to the place where it is due. The original blog was so snobby and uptight about the correct ingredients, even down to the only two acceptable methods of catching the tuna, that not only does that entire attitude grate on me, but my substitutions and omissions would probably horrify the author to the point of a small heart attack. And I can’t be responsible for that. However, someone in the comments there mentioned that they had been to Morocco and eaten this dish and been underwhelmed, because the actual Moroccans had used canned (i.e. WRONG) tuna. So the people whose dish it is are cooking it wrong, apparently. I cooked it wrong too. Maybe my palate is unevolved, but I thought mine was perfectly good, except that I burned my mouth on the first bite, and I don’t really know how to eat a stuffed vegetable (do you eat the insides first and then cut up the vegetable itself? do you cut slices of the vegetable WITH the stuffing?). And if a burned mouth and some awkwardness is the worst thing about the dish, I’d call it a success. So here’s what I did, and this is one tomato’s worth (more or less). Multiply accordingly.
Tamatem Ma’Amrine
Ingredients
a biggish tomato (you’re going to scoop out the insides, but you have to leave a fairly thick wall, so choose wisely)
a can of tuna
3 olives (thank you grocery store salad bar!), chopped roughly
a couple spoonfuls of capers
a few leaves of parsley
a glug or two of olive oil
a couple of shakes of paprika
a couple of squeezes of lemon
a few grains of coriander (if you’re the kind of person who likes the flavour of cilantro, add more, but this is all I can really take)
sesame seeds
fennel, if you’ve got it (I didn’t, but I tried experimenting with other herbs to see what would work. Nothing else is really that similar)
salt and pepper
Method
Preheat oven to 375.
Cut the top off the tomato and scoop out the interior, leaving a reasonably thick wall so it doesn’t crack when it’s baking. What you do with the insides is up to you. Drain any liquid.
Mix the tuna with all the other ingredients.
Pack the tuna into the tomato.
Lash a little more olive oil over it and pop it into the oven for 30 minutes.
Don’t repeat my mistake – let it cool a bit before trying to shovel it into your mouth.
If I’d still had roasted red pepper, I’d have added some in – that’s something the original mentions – but alas, I was out. And I wasn’t about to buy a whole new jar just for this. But if you have some around, go for it.
August 9, 2009 at 9:56 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
Ok. This was delicious, but the picture (at the bottom) was so bad that I had to add labels. Wow.
Not super different from the regular baked ziti my husband makes, this has a more homemade sauce, and it has sausage, and it’s a little more layery. Which he didn’t really agree about, apparently, because while I was waiting for the pan to cool so I could just cover it with tinfoil and put it in the fridge as-is, he took it upon himself to scoop it up and dump it into a tupperware. Would you do that with, say, a lasagna?
Recipe is from sweetestkitchen.com. Hers came out looking beautiful. Perhaps you should just look at hers. Hers also had mushrooms, which I, sadly, had to cut from mine. There was just no way to ensure that Matt didn’t get any. Adding them back in would be a delicious idea.
Penne and Sausage Bake
Ingredients
3/4 lb (so, 3/4 of a box) uncooked penne
about 3 italian sausages – I used hot, because those are the best kind
1 medium onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tsp oregano
3/4 cup beef broth
1 14.5-oz can stewed tomatoes, chopped
1 8-oz can tomato sauce
1 bag of Italian-blend shredded cheese (except the original recipe said you needed the equivalent of 2 bags, but the instructions only provided for the use of one… so I kind of used 1 1/2, which… I mean, melted cheese is awesome, what do you want from my life?)
Method
Cook pasta according to package directions.
Slit open the sausages and scoop out the insides into a pan, breaking it up into chunks.
Cook over medium heat until fully browned.
Take the sausage out and drain on a paper towel, but don’t drain off the grease in the pan – you’ll be using it.
Saute the onion (and mushroom if you’re using any) in it until softened.
Add garlic and oregano and saute for another minute.
Stir in the tomatoes, tomato sauce, beef broth, and sausage. I reserved the tomato water in the can in case things got too dry, but I didn’t really wind up needing it.
Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and let cook, covered, for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, your pasta will probably be done, so drain it.
Preheat the oven to 350 at some point. Why not now?
When your sauce is done, spread some of it (original recipe says 1/4 cup, I say whatever it takes to cover the bottom of your casserole dish) in a greased casserole dish.
Layer half the pasta over it.
Now pour over half of the remaining sauce.
Now layer half of the cheese.
Repeat your layers with the remaining halves – pasta, sauce, cheese.
Cover with and bake for 25 minutes.
Take the foil off (or whatever you used to cover it with) and bake for another 5 – 10 min.
Yeah!
August 2, 2009 at 4:34 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
This is a dish that goes by many names and has many variations all over Asia. The recipe I used is for the Filipino variety, which is called either arroz caldo or lugao, depending on where you’re from and what you put in it. This one was called arroz caldo, but it sounds like it has more in common with lugao, per Wikipedia, but what do I know? I’ve never even been to the Phillipines. Whatever you want to call it, it was yummy. And apparently it’s sick people food, but I might consider getting sick just to eat it. Or perhaps not. But maybe it’s got preventative powers as well?
I halved this for the two of us, and I omitted a couple of the topping options, but hey, they’re optional. I’ll still mention them in the recipe so that if you have and/or want those things in yours, you know.
Arroz Caldo, or Lugao, or some magical combination of the two
Ingredients
2 bone-in chicken thighs, skinned
4 cups chicken broth
1 cup uncooked short-grained rice (apparently medium is also ok, but long is not – it won’t turn into the right consistency. I actually had Arborio rice left over from a zillion years ago, so I essentially made Filipino risotto)
1/2 an inch to 1 inch ginger, grated (I used a microplane zester!)
2 green onions, chopped, the white and the green parts separated
soy sauce
pepper
Method
In your big soup pot, cover the chicken thighs with the broth. If there’s not enough to cover them, for some reason, add water.
Also add the ginger, the white (and maybe some of the light green if you’re feeling it) part of the green onions, a few cranks of pepper, and a few glugs of soy sauce. Oh and the rice.
Simmer – do not bring to a boil! – for 30 minutes or until the chicken is cooked.
Take out the chicken and shred it with two forks.
Now put it back into the pot. Challenging, I know. We are operating at a very high level here.
If the rice is cooked, you can stop and serve it at any time – now you’re just letting it get to the consistency you prefer. Some people go for soupy, some for thick porridge, and some in between.
Now you get to add condiments to your individual bowl! This is the fun part! Here are your options:
more soy sauce
lemon wedges (did not use)
sesame oil
hot sauce (forgot to use)
the rest of the green onion
fried minced garlic (one clove was just about perfect for two people)
Stir whatever you like into your bowl, and enjoy.
I didn’t know until I read the wikipedia page that this was essentially the same as bubur ayam! When we lived in Indonesia, I never had it (as far as I remember… I was 4 – 6 years old), but the name is familiar. I’m going to tell my dad about this and he’ll probably recognize it from the ingredient list.
P.S.: I’m caught up! But not for long. I’ll be starting on something else in about 20 minutes, and Matt’s birthday is coming up, and he’s also making a movie next weekend, for which I am helping out by being Craft Services. So things will add up.
