Monthly Archives: August 2009

Lemon Bars, or How Many Lemon Jokes Have You Got?

So this lemon walks into a bar.
Bartender looks him over, thinks about it, says,
“You know, I like you.  You got a lot of a peel.”

What do you call a benefit concert for sick lemons?
Lemon aid.

The local bar was so sure that its bartender was the strongest man around that they offered a standing $1000 bet: The bartender would squeeze a lemon until all the juice ran into a glass, and hand the lemon to a patron. Anyone who could squeeze one more drop of juice out would win the money.  Many people had tried over time (professional wrestlers, longshoremen, etc.), but nobody could do it.  One day this scrawny little man came in, wearing thick glasses and a polyester suit, and said in a tiny, squeaky voice, “I’d like to try the bet.”  After the laughter had died down, the bartender agreed, grabbed a lemon, and squeezed away. Then he handed the dried, wrinkled remains of the rind to the little man.  But the crowd’s laughter turned to total silence as the man clenched his fist around the lemon and SIX drops fell into the glass.  As the crowd cheered, the bartender paid the $1000, and asked the little man, “What do you do for a living? Are you a lumberjack, a weight lifter, or what?”  The man replied, “I work for the IRS.”

Continue reading

Chili and Cornbread are the new Hall and Oates

Dear Chili,

hey.  how ya doin?  It’s been a long time.  In fact, I think the last time we saw each other was the Chili Cookoff at work in March.  That was a great time, wasn’t it?  Remember I had you slowcooking in a crockpot in a corner of the office all morning, filing the room and hall with your gorgeous and spicy aroma, eventually making me so hungry that I almost killed a bear?  Ahh, memories.

It’s good to see you.  We had a good time tonight, you and I and Cornbread.  Cornbread is such a funny, reliable guy.  The two of you together are like a perfect pair and the three of us, well three’s company.  It was great when I diced a small medium onion and sweated it out in a couple good tablespoons of olive oil in my cast iron Dutch oven.  That’s the perfect pan for evenings like this.  You love how nice and hot that pan keeps you.  I know.  And on a rainy day like today, it’s especially excellent.  And then I chopped up three cloves of garlic and a poblano and green bell pepper and added them in with some salt and pepper, finishing out our little magic trinity.  Just that bit made the entire kitchen smell intoxicating. Continue reading

The Local Table

For those of you in the Ann Arbor-ish area, I found this delightful bit of information on the People’s Food Co-op Facebook Feed: a great new program called the Local Table, brought to you by the Matthei Botanical Gardens

The Local Table, a program of classes, workshops, field trips, and events beginning in Fall 2009. The Local Table encourages us to take a new look at where our food comes from. If you’re wondering “Why local?”, there are lots of good reasons. When you buy local you know who grew or raised your food and what production methods they used. Plus, in an increasingly global economy, purchasing food from area producers and growers helps keep them in business-and your dollars stay in the local economy. It’s also a matter of environmental sustainability: buying food from local sources or growing it yourself decreases your energy use and carbon footprint. And thinking locally helps us to better understand our region’s rich food heritage and history.The Local Table has two components: The Local Table passport (your ticket to locavore certification) and the program of classes, workshops, and events. Examples of the program include a field trip to a local winery; a tour of Ann Arbor-area chicken coops, learning how to can and preserve food, stocking the Michigan pantry, the 100-Mile Holiday Dinner, and much more.

I personally am very excited, and already planning on taking the classes on canning, chicken coops, edible garden  planning and the 100 mile holiday dinner.  Check it out!  Even if you aren’t in the area and can’t attend, it might give you some ideas.

The Local Table

I now want to dance in the streets

It was another dreary, icky day and normally these days make me want to just curl up on the couch and order in a pizza and call it a day.  But no, today I resolved to make meal I’ve been wanting to make for…well, about a week.  But still, I had the ingredients, I had the recipes, I had the resolve to make my own dinner and not just fold myself into one of Anthony’s Gourmet Pizzas.

Now, I love Indian food.  Love it.  Indian and Thai food are two of my all time favorite cuisines.  I just love the flavors and the spices.  I’m lucky in that there are a host of good Indian restaurants in town (my favorites are Shalimar and Mahek), but I’ve always wanted to learn to make it myself.

Luckily, the internet is a wonderful thing.  After all, it brought you and I together, didn’t it?  It also brought me to the two wonderful people who made my dinner tonight possible. Continue reading

Petits Pains au Chocolat

Little chocolate breads.  How can you not love everything about that fragmented sentence? I mean, really.

I found this recipe on Epicurious and, loving all things French and chocolate as I do, decided I had to make them for myself.  They’re very quick to make, very easy and super customizable.  Josh liked them, and now wants a batch made with jam.  I personally think they’d be better with a bit of cinnamon sprinkled on top as well.  I can see us easily making these on a regular basis for when you just want a little something to pick you up. Continue reading

At the kofta, kofta cabana…

Josh and I are trying a new thing this month: not spending half our take home pay in food costs.  Radical, I know.  Especially when there’s only two of us.  Well, and Winston, but he doesn’t get people food, much to his dismay.  But between eating out fairly often (especially lunches during the work week, Sunday breakfasts at Afternoon Delight or Mark’s Midtown Coney Island and the frequent dinner out alone or with friends) and shopping at some not-so-wallet-friendly places just because they happen to be right across the street (coughwholefoodscough) and have an excellent meat counter, we do spend an inordinate amount of money on food.  That and we tend to not eat leftovers, and we buy expensive ingredients because well…we’re foodies.  We like to make and cook food of various types, and we get bored easily so…well, you can see how it lands us into trouble.

Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah.  Economizing.  Busch’s has ground sirloin on sale!  I adore ground sirloin.  So we bought a family pack of the stuff because hey, we eat beef pretty often (can you tell?), we have a ton of plastic baggies AND we have one of the greatest kitchen tools ever–a countertop scale.  We are in business.

And because I had this lovely pack of ground beef, I decided to try something new that would also utilize mostly ingredients I already had in the cupboards: beef kofta.

Kofta, or kefta, are basically Middle Eastern/South Asian meatballs which have variations numbering in the hundreds.  Often you’ll see them shaped like sausages and grilled on sticks.  That’s more or less what I was going for here.  Emboldened by the fact that kofta can be so varied, I didn’t worry about whether it’s truly authentic (I can assure you it’s not) and just focused on making something tasty, easy and quick.

Which brings us, finally, to the recipe. Continue reading

Salsa + Spaghetti = Salsagetti

Inspired by reading over Noelle’s entry about her delicious-looking salsa, I decided tonight to utilize the tomato-y bounty given forth to me by Josh’s beautiful heirloom variety tomato plants growing out on our deck.  But instead of a salsa, a fresh tomato sauce that I could mix in with the whole wheat linguine I got on sale at Busch’s yesterday, and serve it with the boneless skinless chicken breast I had thawing in the oven.  AND it would be a light healthy dish.  I love it when a plan comes together.

The smug foodie in me (I am writing this on a Mac after all) was also pretty proud of the fact that just about all the produce in this dish was locally grown, too.  The tomatoes, thyme, parsley and basil came from our own deck garden (we live on the third floor of an apartment building, but are lucky enough to have a big long deck which we line with various pots containing leafy and delicious products).  And the peppers, garlic and onion came from our farm share.  Delicious. Continue reading

Little pig, little pig, let me come…to dinner

Do you know those nights where you’re not really sure what to make for dinner, so you just sort of throw together things you find in your fridge and cupboards?  That’s pretty much where this meal came from.  Next time I’ll make up a better story about how it was actually delivered to me on a silver platter by a band of angels singing the song that never ends, but alas, that’s never happened.  Yet. Continue reading

BBQ 2: Delicious Boogaloo

Sure we just had barbecue last night and perhaps if we were lesser mortals, we’d avoid doing some version of barbecue tonight.  Ha.  Right.  We’re not average mortals.  We’re superheroes.  Wonder Twin powers, activate!  Form of…bbq beef sandwiches!

Just kidding.  Maybe.

Anyway, I put it to Josh to decide what we were having for dinner tonight, since I decided the last few times.  He suggested pasta.  Mmm.  Eh.  We do pasta a lot. But it made me think of meatballs, so I countered with “meatball sandwiches.”  And then he countered with an absolutely brililant idea–why don’t we get the butcher to thinly slice a pound of roast for us and makes barbecue beef sandwiches like I get at Pizza House? I figured sure, it would be like the cheese steaks we sometimes make, but with barbecue sauce.  Delicious.

So we did.  If you’ve never taken full advantage of having a grocery store nearby with a real butcher in it, you should.  They’re trained to do it, they can do it quickly, and they really don’t mind.  Talk to them.  They have ideas, they know what’s good—and ours today clued us in on an upcoming porkchop sale this weekend…faaaabulous.  Anyway, we asked him to just measure us out a pound of one of their great looking chuck roasts and slice it paper thin. Voila!  Perfect sandwich meat.  Time to get home and get cooking. Continue reading

OMGWTFBBQ

Barbecue.  Is quite possibly my favorite. food. of all time.  Now read it back again but like Will Shatner.

Seriously, I love barbecue.  I could eat it all the time and, like any good connoisseur, I have my opinions about what constitutes good barbecue.  For starters, throwing a chicken breast on the grill and slathering it in Open Pit is not barbecue.  Cooking ribs on a grill over very low heat for hours until soft and sumptious and falling off the bone–that’s barbecue.  Or smoking a nice meaty pork butt spiked with herbs and spices.  Mmm.  I am so hungry.

I generally only do “real” barbecue a few times a year.  Sure, about once every six weeks or so, I rub down a pork roast with spices and put it in the crockpot and after about 8 hours, introduce it to some great sauce and a good hefty bun and that’s my “barbecue” fix but it’s not the really real thing.  I only do it during the summer, because I consider the grill to be absolutely necessary for the process.  And I only do it a few times in the summer because if I’m going to do it “right,” it normally takes me about three days.

Yes.  Three days.  This tickles Josh to no end.  My usual process involves a bath in garlic, onion and olive oil, followed by a lengthy rubdown with a generous helping of homemade dry rub, followed by a day of slow cooking over low heat on the grill while delicious, tangy sauce is carefully applied at regular intervals until the meat is falling off the bones and I’m about ready to just stand there at the grill, tearing pieces off with my hands in some sort of deliciously primal haze. Continue reading

Lemony Snicker…doodle

These were pretty quick to make and fabulously easy, which I appreciate.  They were also very light and fluffy and soft, partially because I only had about half the granulated sugar I needed for the recipe, so I substituted powdered sugar for the other half (1 3/4 c. packed powdered sugar per 1 cup of granulated sugar needed).  If you want a crispier cookie, use just the granulated sugar that the recipe calls for.

These cookies are like lemony clouds of deliciousness, if deliciousness were a cloud….wait, that doesn’t make any sense.  Not that it’s ever stopped me before.  Continue reading

Do you know the muffin man?

I’ve said before that despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t really like to bake.  I only do it because I like baked goods and so far as I know, you either have to bake them or buy them.  And really it’s better if you bake them.

Well today I wanted to use up some buttermilk and I figured, might as well make something for breakfast tomorrow–after all, Josh will be back late tonight, he’ll want to sleep in tomorrow morning; might as well have breakfast waiting for him already.  Muffins sounded about right.

Now, I am not the Muffin Man of this apartment.  That would be Josh.  Josh is the Muffin Man.  He makes delicious blueberry lemon muffins and someday I’ll get him write a guest post on that.  But he’s not here today.  So the muffin making is up to me.

I have this recipe I’ve been wanting to try for a while–raspberry cream cheese muffins—from MyRecipes.  Looked delicious AND they were healthy.  I adapted the recipe a bit, though, to make it fit my style more.  And by “fit my style more” I mean, “I added dark chocolate.”  Mmmm.  Chocolate.  I also added the seeds of half a vanilla bean and a bit more of a nice rum-based Tahitian vanilla.  But what’s really important here is the chocolate.  Let’s not forget that. Continue reading

The Immunity Boosting Salad

So I’m on my own again today.  And still sick.  It’s been over a week at this point and while I don’t feel terrible, I just can’t get the congestion, tiredness and fever to go away.

Well it’s moved on towards lunch time and I need to eat something.  I don’t have a car today, which takes care of that pesky lazy thought of “Well, just go to Panera and get some soup.”  And while, yes I do live just half a mile from a Panera–and 3/4 a mile from Whole Foods–my tiredness and the 83F took care of any inclination to walk someplace where I can simply hand over a credit card and some kind person will hand me a giant bowl of already prepared food.  No, we’re on our own today.  And since we’re tired and tired of being sick (and for some reason, speaking in the royal “we”), we want something that’s not just delicious but about as healthy as we can possibly stand it to be.

As luck would have it, I have a freezer full of chicken breasts and a fridge of nutritional goodies, so I can indeed accomplish this weighty task and I will not submit to the tiny voice in my head that says, “You could just order in Chinese.”  Even though my favorite Chinese restaurant is simply around the block (near the Panera, y’know) and they not only deliver but deliver quickly and the delivery guy is great.  But no.  No, we’re cooking ourselves well today.

So this is what I put together: a salad.  No, not just a salad.  THE salad.  An easy, delicious salad full of flavor, vitamins and antioxidants.  In fact, there is not a single unhealthy thing on this salad.  It is the exact opposite of certain other meals I have made while sick that may or may not have contained over an entire day’s worth of fat.

The great thing is that I made this with ingredients that I normally keep around anyway: chicken, fresh baby spinach, lemon, red onion (okay, I normally don’t but red onion, but I got some from the farm share this week), walnuts, olive oil, part-skim mozzarella, strawberries and basil.  Little known fact about me: I bleed strawberries.  It really freaks out the phlebotomist, but eventually they get over that when they realize I am made of deliciousness.  (Ok I made that last part up.) Continue reading

Everything you ever didn't know you wanted to know about vinegar

Thanks to the Ann Arbor People’s Co-op Facebook feed, I found this jazzy little article all about vinegar, by professional Chef Kelly Myers

Vinegar quality depends on two things: the vinegar’s source material (what the vinegar is made from) and the length of time, if any, the vinegar is allowed to age and develop flavors.

Vinegar can be made from any sugar, making for a broad spectrum of choices. Besides wine vinegar, there is cane vinegar, malt vinegar, cider vinegar, East Asian black vinegar, purple sweet potato vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and vinegars made from white and red rice.

Read all about the magical wonderland that is vinegar in her article on culinate.com

Bye-bye banany

I gained a new superpower in the last…oh, two hours or so.  I mastered ice once. Now, I have mastered fire.  Well, dry heat.  The oven.  Specifically bananas in the oven.

I know what you’re thinking.  Okay, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but if I were you, I would be thinking, “Who the hell puts bananas in an oven?  What kind of deranged Pop-n-Fresh monkey business is this?”

I’ll tell you: roasted banana bars.

I got the recipe from Cooking Light (that means it’s healthy!  Okay, maybe not healthy.  Light.  Lighter.  Light enough to not feel guilty) and immediately I added it to my Evernote, which is where I store all my recipes (I’ll write more on that another time), because Josh loves anything and everything banana.  And this one is indeed bananariffic.  That’s not really a word.  But we’ll pretend it is. Continue reading

Pretend you’re a chicken…parmesan

I just want to state for the record that I’ve never made chicken parmesan and I didn’t actually look for a recipe for it before making this, but for the life of us, Josh and I just could not decide on what to have for dinner.  I mulled over what we had in the house (a thawed chicken breast, a bunch of groceries from the farm share) and thought at first of doing a chicken paillard with a tomatillo sauce and maybe some potatoes on the side…but then I thought, well we have tomatoes too…how about a tomato sauce…and we have mozzarella…we could top it with that….and then I realized I was basically thinking of chicken parmesan but without so much parmesan…So I figured, I can just throw something together and we’ll see how it  comes out!

Fake Chicken Parmesan Continue reading

Green Goddess Potato Salad…

…for when those ribeyes you grilled just aren’t fatty enough.

The inspiration from this came from FoodTV’s 5 Ingredient Fix, during an episode of which the host made a side dish called “Green Goddess Rice.”  Josh and I decided to grill steaks tonight and were thinking of a side dish.  He ingeniously suggested using up some of the couple pounds worth of redskin potatoes we got from our farm share this week.  I thought, hmmm.  Rice, potatoes…both starches, right?  Sure.  Let’s just make a potato salad with green goddess dressing instead.

So…that’s what I did.

I steamed a bit over a pound of redskin new potatoes.  I figured the steaming would be good, as it would retain the most nutrients from the potato skin, which I would then liberally coat with a layer of fat.  Mostly healthy fat, though…right?  Right…?  Yeah.  Anyway.  Recipe below! Continue reading

Tomato, Tomahto, Totally Tasty

…I like alliteration.

Anyway, it was a terribly rainy day today and Josh and I are both sick with the flu.  We’ve been on the couch or in the bed pretty almost all day.  Not exactly pleasant.  But I knew what would perk us up—a giant heaping platter of our favorite home made chicken enchiladas with roasted tomatillo salsa.  In fact, not only would it be delicious, but also not more work than I could handle being bogged down with a fever and all.  Unfortunately, the tomatillos I’d gotten from the farm share had not lasted the week–a tragedy of epic proportions.  However, we still had a good pound of farm share tomatoes left….compromise!  I’d turn the roasted tomatillo salsa into roasted tomato salsa and hopefully this modest little offering would appease the Good Health gods.

The original recipe for this I got from none other than Tyler Florence, my favorite FoodTV chef, but as usual, I considered his recipe a guideline and went off and did my own thing, which is described below: Continue reading