Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for November, 2009
November 28, 2009 at 11:32 pm · Filed under food, side dishes/appetizers
Thanksgiving! This year, it was at Matt’s aunt’s lovely house, which she’s moving out of even though it has a great kitchen and amazing floors and it’s out in the woods. Anyway, we had a nice meal and I made these carrots from Two Cooks One Kitchen (as well as these cheese crackers, but I didn’t wind up getting a photo of them, and they turned out a little wrong… actually, more on these later). The carrots were a big hit. I made the amount in the recipe, which made a ton – or, precisely, 3 pounds – and there were lots of leftovers. There were only 6 of us, after all, and half a pound of carrots per person is asking a bit much even if they are delicious. At least on Thanksgiving when you’re also eating everything else in the world. So I’d recommend cutting this down for any dinner that doesn’t have a zillion people.
The only change I made was that I used baby carrots – I didn’t have time to slice 3 pounds of carrots into sticks, so I let a big creepy factory do it for me. And I actually only really made the decision to do this instead of something else because Matt’s mom had a bunch of shallots she’d had to buy just in order to get one, and didn’t want to let them go to waste. Oh – and the various salt and pepper additions were measured in the original, but I just cranked away at them.
Carrots with Shallots, Sage, and Thyme
Ingredients
3 lbs baby carrots
1 cup chicken stock
3 shallots, sliced thinly
2 tbsp butter
1/4 cup chopped sage
1 tbsp finely chopped thyme
1/4 tsp nutmeg
salt and pepper
Method
In a big enough pot for all the carrots, bring the stock, some salt, and some pepper to the boil.
Add carrots and reduce to a simmer.
Cover and cook for 15 minutes.
Uncover and continue to boil for another 5 minutes so that more of the stock evaporates. Mine didn’t cook off so much, so I ultimately wound up pouring it off.
Take out the carrots and either drain out the remaining stock or if it’s nearly all gone, just wipe it out.
Melt the butter in the pot.
Add the shallots and salt and pepper then generously.
Saute until golden, about 6 minutes.
Add sage, thyme, and nutmeg, and continue sauteeing another minute or two.
Throw carrots back in and toss to coat.
You can either serve it now, or put it in the fridge to serve it later or the next day.
As for the cheese crackers, first of all, when I first saved that recipe, it was different! Now, it has a refrigerate-for-an-hour step in there, but I swear it didn’t when I saved it. In my file, it doesn’t have that. So anyway, I didn’t. And I didn’t want to have two whole sticks of butter in there, so I cut it down to one-and-a-half, which ultimately I don’t think was a big deal. And also the comments on that page refer to water in the dough, but it doesn’t say anything about water in the actual recipe. I tried adding a wee bit. My crackers were crumbly and not particularly salty, because even though they’re being sold as “salty” cheese cookies, it doesn’t say how much salt to add. In the comments, someone asked, and the response was, basically, taste the dough, and add a little more salt than you really want it to taste of. But I don’t want to taste a butter-and-flour dough – I don’t want to eat basically straight butter! So I just added a bit, and it obviously wasn’t enough. Oh well.
November 23, 2009 at 8:22 pm · Filed under food, meals
I don’t usually make pancakes, for a variety of reasons.
1) I don’t like them all that much. I don’t hate them or anything, but they’re never my first choice.
2) I can’t eat before noon anyway, so even if I ate breakfast food, it would be for lunch.
3) Because of 1) and 2), I’d only ever be making them for someone else. Generally Matt. So someone else would have to be around, not have eaten yet, and be interested. Usually on the days he’d be around, namely weekends, I’m at the gym first thing in the morning, and I don’t get back until nearly 11am, at which point it’s kind of moot. Today, though, Matt had the day off, and these days I have every day off – did I mention I lost my job a month ago? I did! – and I wasn’t going to the gym today. So it was the one time I could ever do it.
I actually chose to do this specifically because I saw the blurb under this recipe’s photo on Foodgawker and it said this was “perfect for using up that leftover pumpkin in your fridge.” Which I have, due to the pumpkin muffins. I really, really don’t want it to go to waste. Unfortunately this didn’t use up all of it, since I halved the recipe so as not to make 14 of them – although somehow half of 14 ended up being 6. Not a problem! Well, I suppose it is from a math standpoint, but is this a math blog? I suppose with all the halving and multiplying that goes on it kind of is, but… anyway. The point is, this is what I did, and it will make half a dozen pancakes. Not enormous ones, either. And, of course, credit where it’s due, the recipe comes originally from First Look, Then Cook, which isn’t as didactic a name as it might sound at first – the name was invented by a 7-year-old, so it’s pretty certain she wasn’t trying to come off like she’s talking down to anyone! Oh, and since I used up all my cinnamon making the pumpkin pie spice, I didn’t have a spare 1/2 tsp to throw in here, so I just added another 1/2 tsp of the pumpkin pie spice mix instead. It’s mostly cinnamon, so whatever.
Pumpkin Pancakes
Ingredients
heaping 1/2 cup flour (or if you want to get really specific, 5/8 cup)
3 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice (I made my own using the recipe here, except I just used regular cinnamon, pre-ground allspice, and did my best to grind the cloves in my food processor but they’re so small they’re lower than the blades, so I’m hoping their presence in the container will flavour up the rest of the mix without having to put whole cloves in things)
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
heaping 1/4 cup pumpkin (technically 3/8 cup, but I just did a big heavy 1/4 cup measure, then added a couple more spoonfuls just because I felt like it)
1 1/2 eggs – yes, this is unfortunate, but just beat the second egg and pour about half of it in
1 tbsp butter, melted
1/2 tsp vanilla
Method
Whisk together all the dry ingredients in a large bowl.
Whisk together all the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl until fully combined.
Now whisk the wet ingredients into the dry ones just until smooth.
Heat a skillet or griddle – I have an electric griddle, go me! – until droplets of water you flick on the surface sizzle and dance (protip I got from my grandma, who makes the only regular pancakes I’m interested in eating).
Use a 1/4 cup measuring cup to scoop up the batter and pour it onto the griddle or whatever.
When tops have bubbles appearing, check underneath to see if the bottoms are browned. If they are, flip ‘em.
Cook the other side until it, too, is browned.
Matt ate them the normal way, with maple syrup, but I ate one later on warmed up in the toaster oven and then spread with peanut butter. This was a very good idea.
November 17, 2009 at 11:50 pm · Filed under dessert, food
Ok. I have attempted to make pumpkin muffins before. They were kind of unsuccessful; I didn’t have buttermilk and totally failed in trying to make my own, because I didn’t know what buttermilk really was and just went with my assumptions based on the name, which, you have to agree, is kind of misleading. Anyway, those ones were because Matt was suffering with allergies, and these ones were because he has to work 6 days this week and he’s going to be so tired. Apparently I didn’t learn my lesson; you can’t make someone feel better with something that didn’t turn out. These turned out better than the previous ones, they had more pumpkin flavour AND they had the brown sugar crumb topping on top (even more like the Dunkin Donuts ones!), AND they had a really great shape. But the texture still wasn’t right, and they kind of stuck to the muffin liners. Maybe I overmixed them, or maybe I should have left them in the oven longer. I took them out at the low limit of baking time, but they passed the toothpick test, so I thought it was ok. Maybe I just didn’t stick the toothpick far enough down.
This recipe is courtesy of Kiara at Flour on Her Nose, and I only really changed one thing. I keep forgetting that I’m out of vanilla, but I did have almond extract, so I used that instead. And the applesauce situation, by the way? I thought there would be an apple flavour, not that that would have been a bad thing, but no. Not at all. Oh… and I dropped in a couple extra spoonfuls of pumpkin. Just in case. And she had 2 tablespoons of spices in whatever configuration people wanted to do, so here’s the configuration I did. Oh… and another thing. Or two. She doesn’t have a food processor; I don’t have molasses hanging around. She made do and so did I – I went the brown sugar route instead of the white sugar with molasses route. Wait, what was the other thing… oh yeah. I didn’t read all the way through carefully, so when she said to mix all the dry ingredients together, I mixed all the dry ingredients, and then I didn’t have any to mix with the wet ingredients. Maybe that’s why my texture was off. Hmm.
Pumpkin Muffins With Brown Sugar Crumb Topping
Ingredients
for the muffins
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp cinnamon
1/2 tbsp (1 1/2 tsp) ginger
1/2 tbsp (likewise) nutmeg
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp almond extract
1/2 cup pumpkin, or maybe a little more…
1 cup applesauce
1/2 cup milk
for the crumb topping
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 tbsp cold butter, cubed
Method
Preheat the oven to 400.
Line 12 muffin cups with liners.
Whisk together all the dry ingredients (what the heck, why not do all of them? If someone else replicates this and doesn’t overmix and bakes them the perfect amount, and they’re still a little not right, then we know it’s because the sugar was in with the rest of the dry ingredients. Science!)
Mix the eggs, applesauce, and almond extract together in a big bowl.
Add the pumpkin and milk to the wet mixture.
Gradually stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, trying not to overmix it.
Now it’s time to make the topping. If you’ve got a food processor, just chuck all the ingredients in there together and process them into coarse crumbs. Otherwise, do the same by hand, or with a pastry cutter, which I think would work quite nicely.
Pour the batter into the cups about 3/4 full.
Cover them in the crumb topping (I wound up with extra topping sitting in the fridge, just waiting for me to think of something else to put it on…).
Bake for 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
November 14, 2009 at 6:56 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
Last night I made this dish, which I found at Annie’s Eats. Now, she made it because she was inspired by a dish of the same name at the Cheesecake Factory. I’ve never been to a Cheesecake Factory, for three reasons:
1) I don’t like going to chain restaurants.
2) I don’t like cheesecake.
3) Why would you want to eat in a food factory? That’s just not appetizing.
But I wasn’t about to begrudge the recipe based on what it was mimicking. Obviously if a chain restaurant has a good idea, it’s still a good idea – and it’s a better idea if you make it at home, in your non-factory kitchen, putting in what you like and taking out what you don’t like, and serving as much or as little food as your needs dictate. Cheaper, too, obviously.
A large part of this dish is that there are bell peppers in it. To me, this is a plus; to Matt, a minus. He doesn’t mind picking them out or eating around them, but he doesn’t like it when they flavour up the whole sauce, for instance, because there’s no picking that out. So what I proposed to do was to saute the peppers with the onions, per the recipe, but then pick out all the peppers and just add them back in to my portion. He generously let me leave a few in, because I couldn’t pick them out fast enough when it was time, but I could tell he’d have rathered I didn’t. Probably the only thing that saved this dish in his mind was that it was liberally festooned with Tony’s. For me, these two things, AND the creamy sauce (another minus for Matt, sort of) are all pluses. So I loved it. Him, probably not so much.
I cut it down further, in some of the measurements, than Annie’s already-cut-down recipe. This made enough for the two of us. There’s a me-sized portion in the fridge, too.
Louisiana Chicken Pasta
Ingredients
1 chicken breast, sliced
salt and pepper
creole seasoning (seriously, Tony’s)
enough pasta for 2 people – I used shells
1/2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1/2 a red pepper, chopped coarsely
1/2 a green pepper (or use a freakishly small whole one, like I did), chopped coarsely
1/2 a small red onion – seriously, the original recipe called for 1/4 cup, and I thought I was halving things, but that came out to more than 1/4 cup! You really don’t need much.
1/4 tsp salt
pepper to taste
1/8 tsp garlic powder
1/8 tsp cayenne powder
1/2 tsp creole seasoning
3/4 cup light cream
1 1/2 tsp corn starch
1 1/2 tsp water
2 green onions, chopped
Method
Heat a splash of olive oil in a pan over medium heat.
Throw your chicken pieces in and season them with salt, pepper, and creole seasoning.
Cook through.
Remove to a plate for later. You’re going to keep using the pan, though, so don’t toss it in the sink.
Meanwhile, cook the pasta according to package directions. If it finishes before you’re done the rest of the stuff, just drain and set it aside.
Add the butter and olive oil to the chicken pan and heat until the butter is melted.
Dump in the peppers and onion and season them with salt, pepper, garlic, cayenne, and creole seasoning.
Saute until tender, about 6 – 8 minutes.
Add the cream, and it wouldn’t hurt to scrape up any delicious crusty business on the pan.
Mix the corn starch and water together in a small glass or bowl.
Stir this mixture into the simmering sauce.
When the sauce is thickened, add the chicken and pasta, and stir to coat everything.
When everything is heated through, stir in the green onions and serve.
That’s my serving, with the peppers thrown back on it from having been kept aside.
November 11, 2009 at 3:11 pm · Filed under things that are not food
Michelle at Thursday Night Smackdown is having a contest, and it is a contest based on nasty old potholders. Winners get sweet new potholders. And not only do I need new ones, for reasons that will become obvious, I also looooove Marimekko designs. So without further ado, here are my old potholders!
These came with me when I moved out of my parents’ house, so they’re pretty old already. Somehow, they did not get discoloured and stained until they were mine, though. The back one there is closer to the original colour, but even that’s not quite right.
This one either came with a kitchen set my husband bought, or he brought it from his mom’s house when he moved out. I believe that intractable crusty bit on the thumb is scrambled egg.
November 8, 2009 at 9:05 pm · Filed under food, meals
So, this recipe. I got it from another site, but I changed it quite a lot – unrecognizably, you might even say – and the recipe is one of those “add any vegetables and/or proteins you like” deals. And so I’m not going to link to them, because honestly? That site is really off-putting. This person sets him-or-her-self up as some great fount of cooking wisdom, promising to bring out the inner chef in his or her readers, who obviously don’t know crap about cooking. And he or she does this with the help of spelling and grammar failure and outdated, offensive sexist stereotypes! Hooray! That makes me want to go back to your site… never! So I don’t really want to drive more traffic there (if, in fact, my piddling little site has traffic-driving power, which, p.s., it does not).
Onwards! This is a dish from Ghana. Ghana, clearly, knows from delicious food. I’ve never made an African dish before, I don’t think, but evidently I should have started sooner. Looking at the ingredients, it looked like the flavours were located, as the continent is, in between Mexico and Asia. There’s cumin, there’s jalapeno, there are beans, but then there’s also ginger and curry powder. And other stuff too, of course. Maybe this makes sense. Maybe Africa, from whence our ancestors all spread out, took some food influences in one direction and some in another. Or maybe this dish got changed as people around the world picked it up, and I’ve got the equivalent of a culinary game of Broken Telephone in a tupperware in my fridge. At any rate, if I were ever to go to Ghana, I could just eat this every day.
Ghanaian Jollof Rice
Ingredients
1 lb beef, cut into bite-size chunks
1 tsp cumin
1 shallot (or a small onion, whatever – I happened to have about 2/3 of a shallot left over from something else, so I used that), diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 jalapeno, minced (or 2, if you want more spice in your life)
1 carrot, sliced
1 tbsp tomato paste
2 tomatoes, diced
1 tsp curry powder
1 cup rice
3 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup red beans, already cooked – I used canned beans and just drained and rinsed them, but you could reconstitute dried beans as well if you’d prefer
1/4 tsp nutmeg
salt to taste – I didn’t think it would need it because of all the salty stock and I think the beans had some salt in them too, but Matt salted his portion, so… whatever
Method
Throw your beef into a big pot. I used about 1/2 tsp of oil but maybe I had secretly really fatty meat because it turned out to express enough fat of its own to have made the oil superfluous. Your call here vis-a-vis oil.
Sprinkle the cumin over your beef and toss it to get some on all the pieces.
Cook the beef over medium heat until it’s browned on all sides.
When the beef is getting close to being done, throw the onions, garlic, and jalapeno in, and continue sauteeing away.
Once the beef is browned, that’s your cue to dump in the carrots, tomatoes, tomato paste, and curry powder.
Saute that all for another couple of minutes. At this point, there should actually be quite a bit of liquid in the pot, what with the beef fat and the juices from the tomatoes.
Add the rice and let it go for another 2 minutes.
Pour in the stock. If it seems like too much liquid to you, it did to me too. A lot of it absorbs, but the first day you’re eating this there will be a soupiness to it. The leftovers, in the fridge, will be less so. Use less stock if you don’t want this effect.
Close the lid and cook until the rice is just about cooked – not all the way but most of the way. I don’t know how long this was for me, maybe 20 minutes? Maybe I’m making that up.
Now stir in the beans and peas.
Add the nutmeg, and cook for another 5 minutes just to warm the peas and beans through and allow all the flavours to meld.
Hmm. Super soupy photo. Maybe I’ll take another picture when I have some leftovers for lunch later this week.
Also, it was cheap as pants and it made a ton. I am kind of inclined to submit it for the upcoming Hobo Monday over at Thursday Night Smackdown, but I don’t know what this month’s theme is, so maybe not. We’ll see.
November 4, 2009 at 5:56 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
I tried to make these macaroni and cheese cups the other night. Don’t get me wrong, it was tasty and everything, but they didn’t really stay in cup format after I took them out of the muffin pan, and I really had to change the proportions of stuff. The original amounts would have made about 2, maybe 3 cups, and Matt saw how much pasta was in the pot and said “You know I’m going to need more than one, right?” Yeah. He wound up having 4. I modified this a bit to make 6 cups. But the original one was a recipe to feed children, so it’s probably plenty for a kid. Oh, wait, I figured it out – she had cabbage and celery in there bulking it up, and I know my audience, so I had skipped that… that’s why. Ok. So if you want some veggies in your macaroni and cheese, throw in about half a cup and reduce the pasta accordingly.
Macaroni and Cheese Cups
Ingredients
enough pasta for 2 people – probably around 2.5 cups uncooked is what I used, maybe 3, I just sort of dumped pasta into the pot straight out of the box after it became clear that the first cup wasn’t going to be enough
1 1/4 cup grated cheese, whatever kind or kinds you want – I used sharp cheddar because that’s my favourite, but whatever floats your boat
2 tbsp flour
salt and pepper
a generous few shakes of your favourite seasonings or herbs (I used Tony’s, which my Baton-Rouge-dwelling friend brought us the last time she visited, and which Matt fell in love with)
Method
Cook the pasta according to package directions, and drain.
Preheat oven to 375.
Mix pasta, cheese, flour, and seasonings together.
Grease muffin cups.
Spoon pasta mixture into cups.
Bake for 15 – 20 minutes or until cheese starts to brown on top.
Allow to cool for 10 minutes so that the cups can set. Note: mine didn’t really.
Scoop them out carefully with a spoon and hope for the best.
November 2, 2009 at 10:22 pm · Filed under food, meals
Matt worked late one of the days this week, so I made myself this sausage, mushroom, and rice dish I found at Kalyn’s Kitchen. Of course, she’s all about the South Beach diet and phases and glycemic indices, and I could not care less about that stuff. She used wild rice because of her adherence to these diets, and I would’ve used wild rice because it’s pretty good, if I could’ve FOUND any that wasn’t part of a seasoning-packet type kit thingy. Even at the hippy organic store where I spent $15 on a jar of miso paste, they only had the kit kind! Granted, they were a hippy organic kit with cranberries and whatnot involved, but anyway I just wound up using regular rice, because a) I’m really good at making rice the normal way, and b) I don’t caaaare about the glycemic index. Of course, the next day or sometime later that week, I was in an even hippier store, and they have bulk grains and so on, and of course they had wild rice just plain, in a bulk dispenser. Of course.
Anyway, I made it just for myself, because Matt doesn’t like mushrooms, and also because he doesn’t think rice is enough to be dinner on its own. Although maybe if it’s got a bunch of sausage in it that changes things. I overdid it with the parsley, though, so it tasted more of parsley than anything else. It wasn’t bad or anything, but I just wish I’d been a bit more restrained with it. And the making it just for myself means that I divided the recipe by 6, except when I divided it by 3 or 4. So here’s enough for one. Except that I wound up putting half of it in the refrigerator and eating it for lunch today. But I suspect that normal people might eat the whole thing in one sitting. So whatever, do what you need to do for the amount you want.
Rice with Mushroom and Sausage
Ingredients
1/4 cup rice
1/2 cup chicken stock, plus another splash for later
1 tsp olive oil
1 hot Italian sausage, either sliced or taken out of the casings and broken up, whatever you like
1/2 a shallot, diced
1/2 tsp thyme
4 oz mushrooms
1 tbsp chopped parsley
pepper
Method
Cook the rice as you would normally cook rice, except using stock instead of water. If you want my secret to perfect rice, it is basically to get a pot with a glass lid. That way you never have to open the lid to see how it’s coming along, and you never let steam out. And then you just monitor for when the bubbles have gone down and the rice has “eyes,” and no more, or very little, water is bubbling out of those holes. I figure you knew that part already. But the thing is just never to open the lid until it’s done, and the best way to do that is to be able to know when it’s done without having to open it.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350.
Also meanwhile, cook your sausage in a frying pan. This isn’t where the oil comes in, by the way – sausages generate enough of their own oil. Cook it all the way through.
Remove cooked sausage pieces to a paper-towel-lined plate to drain.
Drain off all but maybe 1/2 a tsp to 1 tsp of the sausage fat.
Saute the shallot in it until it’s translucent – this took about 5 minutes for me.
Add the thyme and cook another 2 minutes.
Take this out of the pan and add it and the drained sausage to the cooked rice, which should be ready by now, in an ovenproof dish.
If you need to, add the oil to the pan now and heat it.
Saute the mushrooms for 5 minutes or until golden.
Throw them in the dish with everything else.
Splash a little more stock in there.
Dump in the parsley and crank some pepper in too, to taste.
Cover the dish, either with a lid that it has, or, in my case, with tinfoil (what, the only ovenproof dish I have with a lid is my big ol’ Le Creuset pot, and I wasn’t getting that dirty for one serving’s worth of rice!), and stick it in the oven for 10 or 15 minutes or until heated through.
I got the idea partway through that this might be good with some parmesan sprinkled over it, and guess what? I was right!
