Sunshine and blue skies (an early spring tease)

Hello everyone (or maybe just one)!

Snow and gray skies have kept me indoors and out of commission for a while. I haven't stopped cooking but I have become a bit lazy, and reverting to my old mainstay of pasta with sausage a few too many times than I would care to admit. In addition to being less than creative, I am also at work which is not an ideal blogging environment, but still appreciate use of a full keyboard, and will make this post a list format as opposed to my usual rambling text (which I know everyone, not just one of you, will appreciate :) )

Things that are great:

1) This shrimp bisque from Bell'Allimento. I love Bell'Alimento, the writing style is after my own heart and her food looks delicious. This was my first attempt at something of hers and it was fabulous. This soup kept us warm and snug during the Snowpocolypse last month.

2) Soul Vegetarian Restaurant on 75th St: I've had some eating qualms for a while, starting back in the fall when I took my Food and Social Justice class that was taught by one of my bosses, who also happens to be a vegan. While I could never hope to be vegan (I heart cheese wayyyy too much), I have started to consider dabbling in vegetarianism, if only accidentally (ie, I sometimes forget to eat meat or just don't have it in the house). Yet this restaurant, which catered our staff retreat last Wednesday, totally blew my mind. There were "eggs" (tofu scramble) "sausage patties" (I am guessing this was seitan and some kind of bean mixture) and the best biscuits I have ever had. Lest you forget, I've worked at two bakeries. Hands down best biscuits. And all of this was completely vegan and completely amazing and tasted completely like it was supposed to, like real eggs and sausage and buttermilk-y, crumbly biscuits. Nom.

3) Serious Eats: I love love love this website. I can get lost for hours here. For the Super Bowl this year I made their Spinach Dip, M caramelized some onions for a dip of her own, and we anticipated making some delicious wings... except that I left the wings at home. Next on deck, maybe tonight if I get my life together, are these little babies.

4) The smell of basil. It is just wonderful.

5) Sunshine! Even if it still cold, just waking up to sun and being able to go home from work and have it still be sunny is an amazing thing.

Hope you're all having a great week, happy Wednesday, and stay tuned for more rambles!

Consistent Deliciousness

Been a little lacking on my Monday updates and for that I apologize, my lone reader or three :)

Last Friday (not this past one, but the one before), my roommate and I started receiving a CSA from Growing Power. For those of you who don't know, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and is a way to connect folks to local farmers, as opposed to running out to Jewel where your mangos may come from Chile and most of the fruits and vegetables are "seasonless". I have thought about joining a CSA for some time but couldn't justify the cost and amount of food alone, so N and I are splitting the cost and getting a big bag of fruits and vegetables delivered every other week. We're due for our second shipment this upcoming Friday and so I sat down with her on Thusday and was like, "let's do this thing"... meaning plan out our meals for the next week or so to ensure maximum usage of our veggies. She laughed at me and thought it was all too domestic but it's actually worked out pretty great and we've gotten some amazing meals made over the past few days.

Our CSA included a huge head of cabbage that neither one of us wanted to touch with a ten foot pole. I suggested making cabbage rolls, which I had eaten at the amazing German restaurant up on Lincoln with M and her parents after first moving to Lincoln Square. We looked up a recipe on Smitten Kitchen and were not disappointed. With a whole head of cabbage, however, we definitely got more rolls than we bargained for. Guess who's having cabbage rolls for lunch a lot this week? This girl. Luckily the recipe did state that they freeze well, so when we're just about over it we'll probably stick the rest in the ice box.

Amazingly, we still had a few leaves of cabbage left that were too small to roll up. So last night we decided to take the cabbage, shred it, and make fish tacos. Again, this is not something I would readily advocate for. Despite my family's embrace of fish tacos since moving to California I have always been a bit wary. Yet... these were delicious! We actually made two kinds, fish tacos from this book (yeah Martha Stewart!), and black bean tacos from the ever lovely Smitten Kitchen. I also made the other Martha's guacamole :) and we had a very complete and satisfying meal. As N remarked, "It's nice to know that Smitten Kitchen is so consistently good." And I had to agree.

Meanwhile, for those keeping score, I've only mentioned one vegetable out of our entire two week CSA! We also received a bag of spinach, which M and I hardly made a dent in when we made a yummy spinach lasagne. The rest of that will be used in a quiche sometime this week, probably tonight. We also have a head of broccoli and a bag of green beans, used in a stir fry to come, as well as potatoes, mixed greens, mangos, (sadly from Chile, so we're a bit confused as to how they made their way into our bag) and apples. I'm sure there's more but I can't think of it all right now, but be assured that we have had many incredible, easy, homemade meals around these parts lately, which completely curbs the desire to eat out. For real. As the weather gets colder, I am excited to have more and more recipes under my belt so I can leave the house less and warm the kicthen more. Mmmm hibernation. Get excited.

Spontenaity

As I've mentioned several times before, I'm not the best at throwing stuff in a pan and calling it a day. Usually I try to follow some semblance of a recipe but it doesn't get me very far as I can't always seem to read a whole recipe before diving in and finding out I'm missing an ingredient when I'm covered in flour, butter, or what have you.

Last night, however, I had a definite plan in mind for the chicken that was left over from last, last Sunday's potluck (mmm, tasty). I had some zucchini and yellow squash I had picked up from Jewel and the chicken thighs. I also had a $1 can of tomatoes picked up from the Dominick's here on campus. Let me tell you that I do not miss shopping at this Dominick's! It is stressful and small and everyone and their brother's uncle comes to shop here, and they never, ever have more than three check out lanes open... seriously. One time the lady at the customer service desk told me that they're basically the 7/11 of Dominick's, in that they carry just enough of everything but not hardly enough of anything. I think they don't even really have any frozen vegetables. Not that that's a great tragedy or anything, but just sayin'.

So I went home, cut up the squash, cut up the chicken, used the chicken skin to grease the pan (no olive oil! of course) and cooked up the squash, dumped the tomatoes in (I should note that these were special canned tomatoes, garlic and oregano seasoned, yum!)

and threw in the shredded chicken. It was done in about 20 minutes. Maybe less. And it was fabulous. Could even be served with a tidge of pasta. It practically required no thought at all. My roommate ate it with some crumbled feta and lots of black pepper, and some crusty bread, aaaand she had two servings :) Probably because she had just come home from class and was starving, but I like to think it was my awesomeness.

So there you go! Sometimes it does work, this "throwing stuff in a pot on a wing and prayer." Here's hoping to more happy experiments in the future.

An Un-Monday Post

I meant to post yesterday but it was a little more hectic than my average Monday. I got to work late after proceedings in the morning, and then there was some sort of summit/conference/mabob thing and that didn't get out until 3, and then I volunteered at 6, so really, no time to update you, my trusty friend. Seeing as no one reads and comments anyway, it wasn't a total wash.

Sunday night, M joined me for a dinner of pork chops. I've attempted to make pork chops before and they have always turned out pretty dry and uninspired. I was worried these would befall a similar fate. Thankfully, Dinner: A Love Story came through in the clutch again :) These pork chops were tender, juicy, and although I've never been a big fan of mustard, actually tasted delicious. I even substituted red wine vinegar for apple cider vinegar and cranberry juice for apple cider, but it still turned out pretty darn good. Substituting is still something that scares me because I'm not entirely confident my substitutions will contain that one ingredient that I think will be fine and then actually ruin the taste. Despite my fears, all was well.

On the side, we had steamed broccoli and mashed potatoes (too creamy because of too much milk, my Achilles' Heel, always) and a salad. All in all, very good meal, easy to make, and didn't take all night, which is always a perk. (As much as I love Julie/Julia, eating dinner at 10 pm does not appeal to me.) Thanks, Dinner: A Love Story! We love you!

Tonight's goal: take the remaining pork chop and make a nice stir fry with it and the remaining half of spaghetti squash... too ambitious? We shall see...

PS:
I know this blog is severely lacking in pictures but we're working on it... hopefully we'll get it all sorted out for next week's pumpkin potluck.

Monday again

I think the best I can hope for is updating once a week. Until I start cooking more regularly. Last week I made some good ones... a night of Spaghetti Squash, not that exciting but delicious poor man's garlic bread on the side.

Thursday I made a recipe from Dinner, A Love Story, a site that M sent me, and I've fallen in love with it. The writing style is engaging and she just seems more like a real person than any of the other writers and her meals are much more realistic for impatient, hungry, resource starved me. The recipe I made was Lemony Chicken and Greenbeans (found here) which I did not make the morning before but rather that night, and it was good, if a bit too lemony, even though I only used one lemon instead of two... but it was still really good and so were the potatoes. I'm a sucker for potatoes and their multiple forms. Mmm.

Friday, my roommate took a page from Smitten Kitchen and made one of the most delicious and tantalizing lasagnas I have ever eaten. I know it's stupid but being the carnivore that I am, I have a hard time taking lasagna seriously if it doesn't have meat in it. This was so creamy and delicious, I didn't even care, and surprisingly, despite it's heft, I didn't want to bust out the fat pants after I had a slice. Paired with a salad and a nice vinaigrette, it was incredibly satisfying.

Tonight I'm venturing to DMK with a few friends from a past life to catch up and get my burger on. No matter how many food justice classes I take I'm still going to be enamored by (grass-fed) beef...

until we eat again,
a

Just another manic Monday

So this blog is really, really sad. I think we post about once a month. Obviously our contributions to the world of cooking and baking are not earth-shattering, BAM-inspiring, or food-network-type genius, but darnit, I'm going to update this blog more regularly. I like writing on the internet, even if nobody reads it, because I like food and I like writing, and that's all there is to it.

After a weekend of hardcore partying (truthfully, it was just a string of late nights due to poor movie time decisions and ...babysitting) I woke up quite late on Sunday morning/early afternoon. I walked for a while and toyed with the idea of going out to breakfast but eventually was won over by a place I walked by with a vegan friend of mine a few weeks ago, Chicago's Dog House. (Why we did not go in together should be self-explanatory via the menu.) Lured in by the tantalizing idea of bratwurst (I'm a sucker for meat! this is difficult because I'm taking a food justice class and it just makes me want to go all out vegetarian but to give up hamburgers and bacon and sausage just seems like too much for me right now), I ended up going for a Wild Boar Dog, with melted brie and raspberry sauce, topped with sauteed mushrooms. I went all out and ordered a side of "frips" which are basicaly just pieces of potato curled through an apple peeler corer slicer and fried up (sweet potato frips... mmm) and the side turned out to be an entire basket, which I also devoured in short order.

Since my phone is a piece and I don't carry my camera with me at all times, you'll just have to believe me that this was a phenomenal lunch and completely hit the spot at 2 pm on a Sunday when I should have been eating an omelette or something a little more appropriate. Whatever.

Later that evening I went to potluck at M's and we had delicious chili, cornbread, broccoli slaw, and brownies with Reese's in the middle. It was wonderful. I'm hoping to start eating at home more because it's just ridiculous how little I cook when it's just me, and then I wonder why I feel like crud all the time. Plus, despite what Hollywood tells you, kids, real grownups do NOT go out to eat 24/7.

Tonight I'm hoping to make half a spaghetti squash and maybe some garlic cheese bread or something. It's sunny and the sky is quite blue but it's also a bit colder than I would like, so to tuck in with that sounds like my idea of a nice evening. Ah, not having a television really is quite eye-opening sometimes. Amish country feels closer every day.


talk soon,
a

First Meals

I moved recently. Away from the train and the dirt and the scary downstairs neighbors. Into a quieter part of town, next to a house that has a baby swing hanging from the tree out front, and on a street that's having a block party in two weeks. So I've moved from a somewhat young, central, hip neighborhood to straight up suburbia. Not that there's anything wrong with that... so far. I just have a hard time believing that the neighborhood I currently reside in is actually part of Chicago at all.

The first meal I made in my new home was something I had attempted before, with success. White bean and tuna salad. Nothing fancy, but got me my core protein requirements :) After a week or so of eating take-out or restaurant food due to the total time-suck that is moving, this dish was perfect. I used cherry tomatoes from the garden, and a few leaves of basil as well. One can of white beans, one can of tuna, a generous sprinkling of garlic salt, pepper, and a splash of olive oil made it all come together nicely. The basil was so fragrant, the girl who lives on the third floor of the three flat was wandering through and poked her head in for a taste. To round it out (okay, I was starving, I'm not gonna lie here), I tossed it with a handful of penne pasta. Mmmmm. Other toss-ins can include red onion and whatever else is in your fridge.

I have also somewhat printed off a recipe from Smitten Kitchen for homemade tomato sauce (from scratch!) so the fruits of my labor will be posted as soon as I can find a few hours to squeeze in the simmering time. (3 hours?) Exciting stuff, folks!

Finally, here is a story from Serious Eats, another website I adore. I wish I was clever like this author. Alas, a girl can dream...

cooking vs. baking

Everyone seems to have his or her preference. I'm not much into baking myself. But I never really thought about why until my recent food preparation revelation.

Despite the fact that I'm writing in a "food blog," I've never really been fond of working in the kitchen in any capacity. I love to eat, but I never found getting to that part to be much fun. Lately, however, I've grown sick of the regular marinara sauce from a jar (I eat a LOT of pasta) and have been throwing together random sauces involving olive oil, veggies, butter, whatever I have. It's nothing fancy, but it's been much more enjoyable, and I'm learning what works and what doesn't. This is what made me realize why I don't bake: it requires sticking precisely to the recipe. Sure, you can sometimes substitute this for that, but it doesn't always work that way. And it's not just the ingredients that are important; the order of the preparation is important, too.

I learned this a few months back when I was baking oatmeal raisin cookies with students at Chicago Youth Centers. Instead of sticking to the recipe and mixing wet ingredients, then dry ingredients, and then mixing the two together, I had the kids mix the ingredients in whatever order was convenient. Needless to say, the cookies were less than desirable. Baking = chemistry.

Cooking, on the other hand, allows a little more freedom. I can skip what I want to in the recipe. Don't like mushrooms? Toss 'em. Prosciutto too expensive? Just throw in some deli ham (or any meat, for that matter). I don't have to go to the grocery store to get the specific ingredients; I can just use what's already in my fridge.

So tonight, I made rigatoni with an olive oil and butter sauce, tossed with red onions, garlic chicken sausage, Italian seasonings, garlic seasoning, salt, and pepper, sprinkled lightly with parmesan. Because that's what I had. And it was delish.

The best freaking sandwich of your life

Tonight when I got home from work the apartment was approximately 9000 degrees. Poor Tobias is so hot all the time he just lays around and stares at you with his big beautiful eyes, begging to be put in an ice bath or something equally pleasant. I turned on the a/c and a few fans and tried to think of what I could possibly make for dinner that wouldn't be too difficult or hot.

I had the whole train ride home to ruminate, and I had switched back and forth from pasta to sandwich back to pasta but walking in the door and the wave of heat that awaited me was all the convincing I needed to switch back to sandwich for good. I had been making garlic bread with mozzarella on it for the past few nights and I decided a grilled cheese would hit the spot.

I don't usually experiment in the kitchen because it turns out horribly and just not as good as I imagined but grilled cheese is pretty hard to mess up. I melted some butter and sprinkled in herbs and garlic salt and mixed it up really well. Then I cut up the fresh mozzarella (which is the best mozzarella I have ever had, by the way.... I got it from Whole Foods and it has taken every ounce of will power not to eat the entire tub in one sitting... it's so good it doesn't even need anything on it, not even olive oil! I just eat it with a fork. om nom nom) and some (prepared, I'm ashamed to admit) pesto. At the last minute I threw a spoonful of tomato sauce on the other slice of bread, which already was layered with mozzarella. I heated the pan and put the two halves of the sandwich over high heat. I turned it down to almost nothing and covered the pan, and everything got nice and melty and bubbly. Then I flipped one side on top of the other and voila! Deliciousness.

I gobbled the whole thing immediately, and it was wonderful. I felt like a human being for the first time all day, and the prep and cook took maybe 15 minutes. If you're feeling less crazy ravenous, and would like to be more healthy (always a good thing), you could skip the butter and use olive oil instead. Otherwise, this is a good meatless dish, and the possibilities are endless: a place near our old apartment had M and I going for their brie, turkey, and apple paninis. Mmmm.

Thursday is the farmer's market at Daley Plaza, so expect updates from that soon :) I'm feeling a little fruit and veggie deprived. Last night I made some frozen green beans and was a bit sad. I was going to try and save some of that delectable mozzarella for a tomato salad thinger but I'm pretty sure that last piece of cheese will meet it's match sooner than Thursday. We shall see... in the meantime, keep on munching.

Dinner for One*

I hate cooking for myself. It feels like such a chore. I spend so much time preparing and chopping and stirring and cooking, and then I inhale the entire meal in about three minutes in front of the TV. Then it's time to return to the kitchen to a sink full of pots and pans and dishes and spoons and forks (how a meal for one can produce seven dirty forks, I will never figure out), not to mention the pasta sauce splattered across the cabinets and crusted onto the stovetop. The rest of my night turns into OCD dishwashing and scrubbing away at cooked-on leftovers and turning my hands into toxic prunes. I suppose this is what frozen dinners and the like are for, but eating neon orange macaroni or flakey mashed potatoes from the microwave is even more depressing than spending $20 and one hour preparing a single meal for one.

The problem here is not a hatred for cooking, and it most definitely is not a hatred of food. In fact, I love both cooking and food, but there's one missing ingredient: people. I feel a need to center all of my human interactions around food. I love going to dinner, hosting potlucks, attending family dinners, and cooking with my boyfriend. I love cooking for a meal, a meal that lasts an hour or two and involves conversation, laughter, and stories. Oh, I love the stories. No matter how many times I’ve heard them, I love hearing old family stories (especially those involving me).

I was on a family vacation this spring with my parents and aunts and uncles and my boyfriend. During our last dinner before the end of the trip, we had a huge meal that took what seemed like hours to prepare, but it wasn't a chore. We shared the responsibilities and cooked while telling and listening to stories. I barely remember what we even ate. I know someone made steak, and I think there were some veggies and pasta. I do know there was white wine. There was definitely wine. It was Aunt Ellen's job to pour the wine (this helps get the stories rolling). It was during this preparation that I heard all kinds of stories, like the time Uncle Bill had too much to drink and my cousin and I painted his toenails red and he thought his feet were bleeding when he woke up. Or how when my parents met at the newspaper, another employee was in love with my mom and stalked her at the gym. Or Aunt Ellen's stories of being a hospice nurse and the crazy things that old people say to her. It's hard to replicate the hilarity or nostalgia of any of these stories, but I think we all understand what I mean here. These are the meals that I truly enjoy preparing, because the emphasis isn't on making something half-way nutritious just to keep my tummy from rumbling all night; it's about togetherness, a communal effort to create a delicious and savory meal that accompanies friends, family, and conversation.

*I'm taking a [free!] 5-week writing workshop (actually called a wordshop) at Open Books. At our first meeting last Tuesday, the prompt was "Write about your most memorable meal." After surveying all the delicious, exotic, expensive, etc. meals in my head, I came to the realization that people, not taste, make my meals most memorable, and that is how this post came along.

I did it! (Kinda)

Despite every intention to blog regularly while I was not eating out, I had a hard time blogging about what was happening mostly because I was (too lazy) too busy being awesome to really comment on it. Okay, so we all know that's not true. I did manage to eat okay while not going out and I saved a TON of money, though, so that's good! I discovered a few things about myself along the way as well. First of all, my food routines are pretty established. I have a hard time thinking outside of the box when it comes to making new meals. I yell at J a lot for eating these narsty processed bagel dogs he buys from Dominick's but when I make food for myself it is usually a variation on chicken or pasta. And damn can I pack away the pasta...

I also simultaneously challenged myself to eat on 30, which is something I learned from Bell'Alimento who I just love love love to read (see http://www.bellalimento.com/2009/10/11/eat-on-30-project/ for more details) and I did do well on this side of things also! I went to Whole Foods one Sunday with only $25 and got lots of meat and some kick-butt asparagus, which I ate for about 4 days.

On the negative (?) side, I only went grocery shopping twice the whole month during the challenge. This is why although I managed to make it almost the entire month without eating out (I slipped up maybe twice), I didn't eat nearly as much as I did when I did eat out. I started working more regular (longer) hours at the bakery (another reason I didn't need to buy as much food because I am constantly surrounded by bread) and just lost my appetite for about two weeks straight.

I also (I know, it never stops, and probably no one is even reading at this point but! I will continue) started being super conscious about serving sizes and I realized that one serving of pasta is 2/3 of a cup. That makes my one box of Prince rigatoni last for 10 meals instead of 3, and at $1 a box, it's hard to spend over $30 a week on groceries. Like M mentioned, she's looking to start eating more responsibly, and I discovered the things I most worry about eating, especially after watching Food Inc, is meat, and I can buy it for myself at Whole Foods and not break the bank, and that is exciting.

SO

If you've made it this far, you get a cookie, if you skipped everything, here's a summary:

*I went almost a whole month without eating out (Give or take two or three meals)
*I ate a lot less
--due to increase in bakery hours
--due to self-imposed budgetary restraints
--due to watching my serving sizes like woah
*I had a hard time breaking out of my rut of the usual stuff I prepare, because despite the fact that I read a ton of recipe books and blogs, I sometimes just don't have the energy to be creative in the kitchen or even blog (shocker).

Regardless, I am glad I did this challenge, it definitely made me eat with a conscience (thanks Cathy! :) ) and even though I ate less and didn't grow much in the way of new recipes and experimenting, I am hoping that with summer farmer's markets, I'll be able to improvise a little more. My other wish is to one day wake up after falling asleep reading a cookbook and have all the information in my head like osmosis and diffusion or something. Never mind that it didn't work when I tried to stick my pre-calc books under my pillow in high school...

Ps.
Props to M for being featured on Whole Living! Our first shot at the big times!!!

We're baaaack

Hello!

Since we last wrote, many things have happened to our intrepid bloggers M and A. We have happily settled in to the Marsh, and entered into a brand spanking new decade, among other things.

Since September, I personally have been doing the following:
~searching for work
~getting discouraged
~giving up
~volunteering at a food bank
~not volunteering
~applying for jobs again
~nannying for not enough pay
~working for a bakery for no pay
~working for a bakery for real pay
~and now, finally applying for more jobs again.

In the meantime, I've been able to read, a LOT a lot, books on everything I like, books about food security and social justice, books about India and Pakistan, books about e-mail, cookbooks about eating local, books about cheese making, memoirs of foodies, whatever I can get my hands on.

Recently I finished a book by the lady who writes "Not Eating out in New York" (see www.noteatingoutinny.com for more details) and, like Julie Powell, I thought: "I can write a blog, I have thoughts!" and have decided to challenge myself to not eating out for a whole month.

Maybe I'll save money. Maybe I'll lose weight. Maybe I'll cave and run to Chipotle in the middle of the night. M is doubtful:

A: i'm starting a cooking experiment
you're welcome to join in if you like
i'm going to try to not eat out for a whole month
starting april 1
M: just like how you gave up sweets for february?

With that rousing dose of support, I begin my quest. April 1. As we've said before (famous last words!), stay tuned...