Quick lunch

This weather has got to go. It has been rainy and cold for far too long and it even SNOWED on Sunday. Today as I was walking to the bus I saw a "Happy Easter" sign... directly behind a pile of snow. Hooray Chicago.

This morning it was so cold and rainy I just pushed snooze about 11 times. I finally dragged myself out of bed and realized that I wanted something other than grilled cheese from the cafeteria for lunch, especially since I haven't run in a really long time. I started eating my breakfast and decided at the spur of the moment to put some pasta on to make a tuna pasta salad for lunch. It all came together in less than 15 minutes.

(Photo courtesy of BBC Good Food Online)

Put the following ingredients in a small bowl and mix well:
1 cup of Pasta (Whole wheat rigatoni, thanks for being on sale this week!)
1/2 can of Tuna
2 or 3 glugs of Olive oil
generous sprinklings of Salt/Pepper/Italian Seasoning
10 or 12 Chopped Grape Tomatoes

Add to your lunch bag 1 grapefruit, 1 snack bag of sesame sticks, and 1 snack bag of yogurt-covered raisins, leave the house 20 minutes after waking and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. No grilled cheese for this girl today! :)

Sometimes I feel this way

Courtesy of XKCD

This Saturday I made Margarita Mac and Cheese from "What Megan's Making," a blog I've been following for longer than I've even had a blog, thanks to my trusty Google Reader. (J looks at my Google Reader sometimes and shakes his head sadly, as if there is no hope for me and my endless stream of recipes... he's probably right.) Unfortunately, despite the lovely pictures on Miss Megan's blog, my Mac and Cheese was far less delicious. First of all, I am pretty sure I cooked the pasta too long. Secondly, I didn't have a casserole dish and so I had to use a square-ish brownie pan. Thirdly, my "diced" tomatoes from Aldi, while a mere 59 cents per can, were not exactly "diced" and more like chunked, which overpowered the pasta, which were small. It came out of the oven looking more like a casserole, which is fine, and the mozzarella was yummy, but not the best experience when making my first baked mac n' cheese... I just wanted it to look as nice as Megan's! Maybe next time.

So apparently around here we're preparing for a storm of "historical proportions" that includes "snow squalls" (whatever the heck those are) and I was planning on making some shrimp bisque tonight, but I might have to settle for something a little more quick because I should probably run to the store and stock up on the essentials. We'll see. If a snow day happens in my near future, (keep those fingers crossed) I may be working from home with plenty of time to shrimp it up!

In the meantime, everyone stay safe and warm! I hope this storm of epic proportions blows over relatively quickly and keep on eating warm and healthy food!

Happy New Year!

So I'm already way behind on one of my perpetual New Year's Resolutions, which is to write more. Faithful blog reader of mine, I can only beg for forgiveness. Something tells me you're not too beat up about it :)

In talks with with the other Martha, it seems she is resolved to up her repertoire (what an oddly spelled word!) this year by trying a new recipe each week. I've encouraged her to chronicle her journey here but unless we get a new name/url for this little guy, I'm thinking it might not happen. I hope to hear from her soon on her kitchen adventures!

As for me, I'm about to head on a soup kick. I feel like the soup options in my life are pretty bland and boring, so I'm hoping to try out a few new recipes in the next few weeks... First one, starting tonight, will be soup from a lentil package I picked up from Gene's on Sunday because omg hello this store is my absolute dream come true and I'm so depressed it's taken me so long to discover it. M had visited it before with rave reviews, but I'm not gonna lie, I thought it was too fancy and expensive and just never bothered. Newsflash, kids: the soup I'm making tonight will make five servings and cost me a whopping... $1.19. Let's see how it holds up (it is, after all, lentil soup...eek)! Gene's is so wonderful not only because of their inexpensiveness, but also their crazymazing meat selection, and I will definitely be coming back here for special occasion dinners... or just to get their chicken thighs, which at $2.99/lb, are half as cheap as Whole Foods (sorry Tyrone) and I am sure just as quality. Produce selection was definitely not as cheap as Harvest Time, my new Stanley's, but hey, a girl can take having a nice deli mere steps away. Seriously. Amazing discovery, so so happy!

Other soups on deck for the next few weeks: Shrimp Bisque and Italian Egg Drop Soup. It's nice out today but I have a feeling winter's going to stick around a bit longer... like til April or May. Call it my Chicago intuition ;)

In the meantime, stay warm and healthy! Eat that vitamin C. It's a nasty time out there.

love love,
a

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.

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

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...

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.

Comfort Food

This past week my Grandma died. It wasn't too sudden but it still took me by surprise, like death usually does. One of the last things I bought for her was a box of Zebra Cakes because apparently she ate them like a fiend. My uncle had bought her a few boxes (yes, boxes, not individual cakes) a few months ago and apparently she polished them off in a matter of days. Anywho, Grandma ended up being on a restricted diet lately and being the good granddaughter that I am I decided to eat the Zebra Cakes myself. I don't like to make a habit of eating before bed but after a long day I would crawl into bed with a book, a crossword and a pack of those little dudes and munch a little before bed. Make no mistake--these are not a fine pastry or delicacy. In fact, they have a cloyingly sweet aftertaste of something not quite natural. But I ate them anyway, thinking of Grandma as I munched and laughing to myself, thinking of her munching away as well, perhaps while watching the Golden Girls.

It's been a pretty crappy week all in all but one thing that has remained constant is the food: the massive amounts of food that have been showing up at Grandma's house, my family's house, the luncheon after the funeral, etc. M mentioned in an earlier post how hard it is to cook for one and how much better the food tastes when you have people to share it with. Food and comfort seem to just go together, it's the most natural response I can think of when I want to show someone how much I care about them. Sure, it takes more time than is necessary to whip up a batch of cookies (measuring, baking, cleaning, the whole nine yards) but that's the point. It takes a long time and generally (if you're doing it right) you're thinking about the recipient most of the time. And even though I've been really sad lately, not eating is the last thing Grandma would have wanted, as evidenced by the bulldozed boxes of Zebra Cakes :)

Thanks to all for the food, prayers and love.

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...