That’s a long title.  Say that 5 times fast.   No, really, do it.  I’ll wait…

…Ha!  That was hilarious.  You’re a funny person.

Today has been a myriad of ups and downs.  I’m still on vacation, +1.  The fence won’t be finished for days yet so our yard is still a construction zone and our dogs can’t roam freely as they’d like, -1.  Paul came over for dinner and games, +1.  Paul smashed his iPad in our driveway, -1.  We had these chicken skewers for dinner, + 1.  I forgot to make rice to go with them, -1.  We had arugula salad though, +1!  It was 90 degrees outside…+/- 0.  The skewers were delicious, +1.  Tally….whew! I’m in the black today.

I may have gone a little skewer-crazy, today.  I also made skewers of cherry tomatoes marinated in balsamic vinegar, baby eggplants brushed with olive oil, zucchini and red onion and grilled them on salt blocks.  They turned out quite nicely as well.  It got a little hot in the 90F degree heat standing in front of the grill but it was worth the extra tan :).

Enjoy!

This blog post came to me in a dream last night.  Seriously.  In my dream, I created a list of 15 ways to collect recipes in Evernote.  This might be a sickness.  Or it’s a sign from God.  Or maybe in this case, Ganesh.

Organization is hugely important to me.  I like to have information in easily accessible, searchable, sortable structures and I need those structures to be sensible, flexible and, most of all, easy.  I’m very lazy, which is odd because I have a lot going on in my life, so I need the simplest solution possible.  That’s why I’m such a fan of Evernote.

I think about food all the time, and I’m always stumbling upon new recipes I want to try, new tips, new techniques, new ways of doing things—you know, information picked up from family, friends, magazines, books, the internet.  And all of that stuff means nothing if I can’t find it later on.  Hence, organization.

So here are all the ways you can pull recipes into Evernote….or any other information, for that matter.  There actually might be way more that I’m forgetting, but there are my go-to recipe-saving processes.

You can…

1. Type in a recipe.

2. Record yourself or someone else saying the recipe out loud.

3. Take a picture of a printed recipe and pull it into Evernote, or use the Page Camera in the Evernote app.  (This works for your cookbooks too!)

4. Scan in a printed recipe and send it to Evernote using a Doxie, Canon ImageFormula or Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner.  (Example)

5. Email the recipe to your Evernote account using your private Evernote email address.

6. Clip a recipe from a webpage using the Evernote Web Clipper on your desktop computer.

7. Clip a recipe from a webpage using Dolphin Browser on your iPad.

8. Send recipes to Evernote using Instapaper, Feedly, Pocket or Zite on your computer or mobile device.

9. Automatically send recipes from your favorite blog’s RSS feed, your social network accounts, YouTube or your Pinterest boards to your Evernote account using an IFTTT recipe. (Example)

10. Write down a recipe using Penultimate, automatically syncing to your Evernote account, or use a similar iPad notebook app that will let you send a recipe to your Evernote account.

11. Write, or have your family and friends write, a recipe with your Livescribe Sky pen and have it automatically sync to your Evernote account.

12. Pull recipes from Say Mmm to your Evernote account.

13. Mail your massive stack of recipe tear-outs to Shoeboxed and let them scan them into your Evernote account.

14. Clip recipes from Evernote Food into your Evernote account.

15. Join recipe notebooks by your friends, family, or me!

Now…re-read that list again, only replace the word “recipe” with “receipts” or “bills” or “party RSVPs” or “documentation” or “interesting articles” or “stuff to buy” or “journal entries” or anything.

Yeah.  It’s pretty awesome.

Vodka, blackberries, basil, syrup…what’s not to love?  I love the blog Santa Barbara Chic for three main reasons: colorful photography, delicious recipes, and because Santa Barbara makes me think of one of my favorite shows of all time: Psych.  You know that’s right.

Anyway, because I am a fan of delicious flavor, I’ve settled on this Blackberry Basil Crush for this week’s cocktail, replacing the “splash” of club soda with a “splash…or four” of your favorite sparkling wine.  Further, feel free to mix up and make your own version of the recipe, too; experimentation is always encouraged here, so long as it doesn’t incur any terrible catastrophic results, like massive plagues, weapons of mass destruction or casu marzu (which is a real thing).

Speaking of experimentation, I’m still thinking about the idea of olive oil in cocktails.  Does it work?

I dunno.  I’ll ponder it over a nice cocktail….

Get the Blackberry Basil Crush Recipe from Santa Barbara Chic

Julia Child once said, “People who love to eat are always the best people.”  I fully agree with Miss Julia, as I usually do.  I also think a subset of those best people also enjoy dogs.  (And another subset enjoy cats, gerbils, snakes, marmosets, sloths, etc.)   For those of you food lovers who also enjoy sharing meal times with your canine friends, you might be interested in this fun little blog: Coffee with a Canine.

It’s full of brief interviews with interesting people (writers, small business owners, buyers, etc) about their dogs, and their favorite coffee occasions.  It’s fun, super cute and full of pictures of awesome four-legged friends.

And there’s a post about yours truly and my two favorite mutts!  Check it out.

I am on vacation.  From my main job, anyway.  Sadly, there won’t be any beach or Mediterranean abode or even a lot of relaxation.  There’s a lot to do–a new fence being built (yay!), garden beds to replant after being tramped while the fence was being built (boo!), storage spaces to clean, committee meetings to go to, a zoo to visit.  But at least there won’t be any boredom…?

Remember when summer vacation was actually…a vacation?

Stuffed Cheddar Dog

Oh well.  At least I’ll get a lot of good stuff done and this “vacation” was definitely started off right.  I got at least one proper, full relaxation day in, though.  Slept in, laid around, watched tv (a Psych marathon if you’re interested), had a mini cookout with friend and watched a movie.  I won’t go into detail about my feelings on the movie we watched (Oz The Great and Powerful)–I hated it but that’s ok.  Because at least while watching it, I got to eat good food.

Stuffed Cheddar Dog

First of all, jazzed up hot dogs from Biercamp, an artisanal charcuterie in town.  Their sausages are delicious enough, but we decided to kick it up another notch….so we split them in half, stuffed them with sliced jalapenos, wrapped them with Biercamp peppered bacon, grilled them, served them on Zingerman’s buns and smothered them with shredded sharp cheddar.  There should have been grilled, buttered onions on top too but sadly, I forgot to make them.  I know.  I know.  I’m working on forgiving myself.

Mexican Corn

Alongside those hot dogs, we had Mexican street corn–you know, grilled corn on the cob slathered with a “crema,” or essentially, mayo, sour cream and lime juice, and rolled in parmesan and chile powder.  Pretty good, I will say.  We also sampled a bit of this week’s Champagne Wednesday cocktail, too.

Dessert was also fabulous: grilled peaches with vanilla bean gelato and balsamic glaze.  More specifically and food porn-ingly, we brushed halved, fresh peaches with butter, ground cinnamon and brown sugar, grilled them on either side and served them in cocktail glasses with a scoop of Talenti vanilla bean gelato and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar glaze.

Grilled Peaches

Yeah baby.  Just thinking about it makes my muscles feel all soft and happy.

The meal in general went a long way to soothe frustrations I have about how ridiculously difficult it’s been to get our fence replaced.  I mean, endless paperwork and permits and days of construction and blah.  But it’s ok because peaches.  Peaches.

I don’t know about where you are but it is super hot, humid and rainy in Michigan.  Hot and humid enough that you don’t want to use the oven.  Rainy enough that you can’t grill and your herb garden is exploding…in fact, I think my oregano plant may have eaten one of the neighborhood children.

So that’s when I turn to one of the greatest inventions of mankind: pizza delivery.  Just kidding, I really mean the slowcooker.  And I know that we often think of the slowcooker as a winter-meal-generator and mostly useful for heavy comfort food, but really, you get out of it what you put into it.

Literally.  What goes into the slowcooker comes out of the slowcooker, only better and more moist.  (I wrote “moister” there the first time, I did.)  And it can be light and summery, and use up all those fresh herbs you’ve got in your yard….or the ones you found in the produce section of the grocery store.  This dish packs a lot of bright, delicious flavor for what ends up being very little effort on your part.  Chicken, pancetta, rosemary (though you could substitute thyme or fresh oregano).  It takes about 10 minutes to put together—all you have to do is slice a few things and layer them in your slow cooker. Less time to cook, more time to fight off the mosquitos.

You know, it’s not easy coming up with a new cocktail every single week.  It takes a lot of research and imagination…and a strong desire to experiment with as many different combinations of liquor and flavorants as possible.  That’s hard work.  That’s thirsty work.

So thirsty.

But thankfully, we have an ally in the search for more, better cocktails.  The newest one is a fabulous new site called The Cocktail Guide.  What I love about this site is that not only can you find cocktail recipes to try out, but also what occasion a cocktail is good for,  how long it takes to make, even what kind of glass to serve it in (cause I always wonder).  You can see a visual ratio of the elements in the glass, images of the cocktail and you can even submit your own fancy cocktail photography via instagram (and other methods of uploading pics are coming soon).  Find a recipe you like?  Save it to your Pinterest account, tweet it (there are champagne cocktails too, #champagnewednesday fans!), or you Evernote-lovers can use the Evernote Web Clipper to grab it for your own recipe library.

Even this week’s Champagne Wednesday cocktail came from perusing The Cocktail Guide.

So check it out and bottom’s up: The Cocktail Guide

Imagine: Mississippi.  In the middle of a dry spell.  Maybe….Jimmy Rogers on the vitrola up high.  Perhaps Mama’s dancing with a baby on her shoulder.  The sun setting like molasses in the sky.

This drink can sing, knows how to move,everything.  Always wanting more, it’ll leave you longing for….

…wait for it…

….black velvet!

(Those of you that don’t get this reference make me a little sad.)

Last week’s Champagne Wednesday, the French Kisses, went over splendidly.  It was like a flavor explosion in every glass.  This week, we’re trying something a little daring.  No idea if it’ll be good or not.  But that’s why we experiment.  To separate the drinks from the DRINKS.  This week’s cocktail comes via The Cocktail Guide and it’s very simple, just two ingredients: stout and champagne.

I don’t know whose idea it was to combine beer and champagne but I imagine they are interesting people.

Update: my estimation of the cocktail was that it was a beautiful cocktail but mostly just tastes like sweet, extra bubbly stout.  Your thoughts?

Find more tips on this cocktail at The Cocktail Guide.

Spicy Enchilada Poblano Black Bean Burger.  That’s a long name.  It’s a solid name.  It’s weighty with deliciousness.  It sprang forth from the communion of two of my dear loves: black bean burgers and enchiladas.

Here’s the thing about black bean burgers: sometimes I love the idea of making my own delicious, spicy black bean burgers from scratch.  But other times…most times, really….almost all times, I don’t have the energy or the time or the desire to mold soft beans with my hands.  So then I turn to the next best thing: Morningstar’s frozen black bean burgers.

I’m not a fan of frozen beef burgers.  But veggie and black bean burger patties seem to do pretty well frozen.  I like that I can grill them like regular burgers and get a bit of that fire-kissed, smoky flavor going on, or I can fry them in a skillet at my house because I live in Michigan and we only have so much “grilling weather” to go around.  They’re ready in minutes and they are delicious.  They actually have flavor!  FLAVOR!

But anyway, I have this disease, it’s called “Enchiladosis*.”  Essentially, every time I hear the phrase “black beans,” I immediately begin to salivate and crave black bean and poblano enchiladas.  Some days it’s not so bad; I can get to the market or to a nearby Mexican restaurant and satisfy my craving before it gets too terrible, but some days it can be pretty bad.  I mean, we had friends over for gaming last night.  You can’t game and eat enchiladas at the same time!  That’s madness!  It’s messy!  No, you need a hand-held meal for board game night and sadly, enchiladas are a fork-and-knifer.

But it’s ok, because I have found a treatment for Enchiladosis, so all of its long-suffering victims can rejoice.  Enchilada flavor in a delicious, meatless, hand-held format: the spicy enchilada poblano black bean burger.

Just say the words.  Just breathe it in.  Even the words have flavor.  Delightfully, it’s super easy to make a bunch of these at once, too, whether you can get to a grill or not.  And for you skeptical meat-eaters, trust me: this is a delicious burger in its own right and you will be thoroughly satisfied.

There recipe below makes 2 burgers, but is easily scaled up for more.  I also included some notes on possible additions or substitutions.  Enjoy!

*This isn’t really a thing.  But it should be.

The esteemed gentleman, Jim No Last Name Needed, who often inspires many of the choices for this illustrious weekly event–event? nay, affair–suggested yet another fantastic combination of life-giving liquors, dream-inducing syrups and tantalizing bubbles for this week’s cocktail when he forwarded the following image:

Of course what this otherwise seemingly perfect photo lacked was ratios.  How much gin?  How much juice?  I bet Snoop Lion knows but I didn’t.  So I took to the final arbiter of all things: the Internet.  A quick Google search, though, revealed a number of French Kiss recipes.  Apparently the French do a lot of kissing.

So I decided right then and there that we needed to

So for this week’s Champagne Cocktail, feel free to make one (if you’re a lightweight), two (if you’re average) or all six (if you’re fun-loving but a bit of a lush) cocktails and pick your favorite.

The Line Up:

1. Jim’s version of the French Kiss from whatever restaurant he was sending me pics from.  Pick your own ratios: gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, raspberries, sparkling wine.
2. Pegu Club’s French Kiss: gin, simple syrup, pernod, lime juice and mint (add sparkling wine!)
3. Drink Mixer’s French Kiss: vodka, raspberry liqueur, Grand Marnier, whipping cream (add some sparkling wine!)
4. Serious Eat’s French Kiss: vermouth, vermouth and lemon peel.  No, seriously. (add sparkling wine?)
5. Chris Kelly’s French Kiss: cointreau, raspberry Absolut, lime juice, pineapple juice, cranberry juice, sparkling wine
6. Greg Guzelian’s French Kiss: vodka, peach schnapps, chambord, pineapple juice, cranberry juice, (add sparkling wine!)

There you go….happy cocktails!

Wolfram Alpha is an eccentric genius trapped in a small box known as the internet  a completely non-human computational engine.  It can do your calculus homework–I mean, it can help you learn math, statistics, physics, culture, geography, music and even…help you cook?

Wolfram Alpha, in addition to apps for music theory, calculus, chemistry and a bunch of other things I didn’t really study in school (coughfilmmajorcough), also has an app to help the culinarily minded and curious amongst us: Culinary Mathematics (sorry Droids, iOS only at the moment).

Why this is cool:

• You can calculate the nutritional information of individual foods or entire meals on the go.
• You can access dietary recommendations for individual vitamins and minerals.
• Perform cooking calculations while you’re busy in the kitchen.  For instance, a recipe calls for a certain volume of flour.  How much is that by weight?  Or the recipe is using metric ingredients and you’re a crazy imperial-system-using American.  You could convert those yourself by why, when you can have a super fancy calculator do it for you?
• Research food economics—how much does food cost in your area versus another?  How much chocolate is consumed in say, my town versus yours?  Fun food trivia for the whole family.
• Calculate the cost of food per unit, portion or even usable yield.  This makes party planning so much easier.  Trying to figure out how much food you need to buy to feed 40 people at a family holiday brunch, a graduation celebration or a semi-formal grilled cheese dinner party?  Now you can figure out how much you’ll need to buy per person, including the trimmed or unusable portions of food, and how much it’ll cost you.  Yay for planning!

Where you can get it:

• In the iOS App Store for $1.99

This cocktail sounded like something new and interesting.  I mean, most champagne cocktails have flavors like ginger, mint, lime, berries or citrus.  This one had coconut!  And grapes!  And vodka.  Vodka’s not a flavor, really, but it is vodka.

However, I have to say, I wasn’t a huge fan.  It just tasted like champagne with more champagne.  I was a little disappointed.  If someone has ideas for improving the flavor of the basic cocktail, suggest it.  I will try it and if it is indeed amazing, or at least improved, I will name a marshmallow after you.  Seriously.

But if you’re interested in trying something out, the recipe is below.

Get the recipe for the Red Grape & Coconut Refersher at Food & Wine magazine.

Evernote Food is a great app that you’re not using because you just haven’t figured out what to use it for.  I understand.  Evernote is already so awesome, how could you possibly need any other app?

I myself wondered the same thing.  For a second.

And then I opened the Evernote Food app for the first time and all the cool things I could do with it came flooding to my brain.  If I hadn’t already been sitting down at a table eating dinner, I would have had to sit down at a table and eat dinner.

I’ve detailed four of those awesome reasons (with pictures and Skitch annotations!) on Chad Williams‘ awesome fitness site, Anthrophysique.  Pop on over and take a peek:

4 Reasons You Should Be Using Evernote Food on AnthroPhysique

I didn’t use to like ginger much, but then I started making cocktails and now it’s one of my favorite ingredients ever.  I blame my friend Jim, who I shall refer to henceforth as The Ginger Champion.  The Ginger Champion loves ginger.  Ginger in food.  Ginger syrup.  Ginger beer.  Ginger cocktails.  Ginger on Gilligan’s Island.  I mean, she was way more interesting than Mary Ann.  The Ginger Champion is correct in all these things.

Ginger root is the epitome of simplicity.  It’s just a rhizome, or a plant stem essentially, and it’s not very pretty but that’s because it has discovered it doesn’t need to tart itself up and be all flashy like that attention-whoring pomegranate.  It may not look like much but it has substance, it has flavor and a little bit goes a long way.

I really wanted three things this week: some ginger, a cocktail, and a cocktail with ginger that wasn’t complicated.  This Ginger Sparkler from Martha Stewart fit the bill.  Yesterday in particular was one of those days where it seemed like everybody needed something at all times.  So cocktail time was much needed.

It might be needed again tonight.  It looks like there might be a raccoon living in one of our attics.  Or maybe he just came for the cocktail too?

One for me, one for the raccoon…

And while the Ginger Sparkler was the official recipe for this week’s Champagne Wednesday, I didn’t follow it truly myself.  It was late before I got to it and I was tired, so I improvised and created a hybrid, sort of, between this cocktail and a classic champagne cocktail.  Both recipes are below.  Hope you get to enjoy this week!

I blame Emily Dingmann.  A day after looking through this interesting Learnist board she’d created on fancy nut butters, my husband brought home, completely on his own, a jar of spicy peanut butter.  Today, I had nothing in the house to make a real dinner with except a package of chicken, some butter lettuce, bell pepper and….that jar of spicy peanut butter.  Clearly, the universe was compelling me to make peanut chicken wraps.  Clearly.

Sadly, I don’t have an actual recipe to share with you.  I can tell you that I heated canola oil and a tablespoon of Chinese 5-spice powder in a pan and then fried died chicken in it, added half a diced onion and one diced bell pepper, and a couple chopped leaves of basil.  Then I added a big scoop of spicy peanut butter, thinned it out a bit with chicken stock until it coated the chicken mixture without being too runny, and served it in lettuce cups with chopped peanuts and some chives from my garden.  That was about it.

Despite what this blog and my Evernote recipe notebook might lead you to believe, most of my cooking doesn’t involve recipes at all.  It just involves me saying, “Hm, what should I eat?”, perusing the refrigerator and cupboards, finding a few ingredients and thinking, “Yeah that seems good” and just sort of throwing things together.  I never think much of it; chances are you do the same thing.  But I do often get questions and exclamations of wonderment from friends and acquaintances who aren’t as comfortable just throwing culinary paint at the wall, as it were.  “How do you know what to put together?  How do you know how much?  How do you know it’ll taste good?”

The answer is, I don’t always, except I sort of do, and it usually works out.  Part of it is knowing what individual ingredients taste like (raw and cooked), which comes with experience; part of it is being able to imagine how they’ll taste together, which comes with experimentation; and part of it is being confident in your instincts, which comes down to trusting yourself a little bit.

Maybe you’ve never considered trying a spicy peanut butter; maybe you’ve never thrown a scoop of peanut butter into a dish with chicken; maybe you’ve never imagined spreading peanut butter on a grilled cheese sandwich, but you should because it’s delicious.

Unless you have a peanut allergy.  I mean, it’s delicious but it’s not worth anaphylactic shock.

I can’t really think of anything that is worth anaphylactic shock, off the top of my head.  Unless you’ve been in the desert for months without the slightest bit of chocolate and some desert mirage offers you an Almond Joy.  Then you eat that sucker.

No, seriously, don’t do that if you have a nut allergy.  I’m just kidding.

Anyway, for the rest of you, if the Universe gives you a nut, use it to make something delicious and new to you.  The Universe wants you to experiment.  It wants you to be happy.  It wants you to make delicious food.

Also, it thinks you should check out the following Learnist boards on peanuts and things you can do with them.

Also, it said you look really cute today, so kudos.

Somewhat surprisingly, my backyard is not overrun with mint.  Sure, it’s overrun with dogs, various weeds and oregano (so much oregano!) but not mint.  I do have a healthy mint plant, though, and usually I use it for mojitos, or as I like to call them, “Other Water.”

But anyway, I rarely use mint for savory dishes, generally just drinks and garnishes for ice cream.  Today I was on my own for dinner, since Josh had to do some freelance work, and all I had in the fridge (that wasn’t calabrese, anyway) was ground beef.  One of my go-to meals for myself is meatballs.  I like meatballs.  I mean, my twitter handle is chickenmeatball, after all.  This time I thought I’d use some traditional flavors from Greek cuisine—like mint and feta.

I also thought that instead of a traditional tomato sauce, or a heavy bell pepper sauce, I would use up a bag of peas I had in the freezer, thaw them and make a mint-green pea sauce to pour over my meatballs.  So I set about making the meatballs (recipe below) and it was all well and good until the meatballs were almost done and I went to make the sauce…..and realized I’d already used those peas up last week.  Oy.

Always check to make sure you have ingredients before you begin cooking.  Yeah, yeah I know.  One of those days.

But I recovered nicely, I think.  I just went all-in with the mint.  I made a flavored oil with fresh mint, garlic cloves, lemon juice and olive oil, and drizzled it over the meatballs, which I ate alongside some prepared fattoush salad I had leftover from Hiller’s market.  Not a bad finish.

Grilling Around The World – An infographic by the team at Kalamazoo Gourmet