V*gan Friends

So, yet another hiatus. No excuses this time.
I'm going to give this a shot, once again, though my budget is tight.
However, life is a pain sometimes. Life delivered me the presence of ACTUAL v*gan human beings. As I'm sure is clear at this point, I love to cook. My cooking isn't always amazing, or fancy, but I definitely churn out food. I also love to play hostess and feed guests. Two friends who I have over regularly, who love to eat, but I can only cook for one of them (and I'm hoping to educate him about cooking). The other is v*gan.
I adore him to death, but I don't know what to cook for him. So, occasionally, he'll cook for himself in my kitchen. That's fine with me, but I've never seen him cook himself anything but a veggie stir fry and rice. So, here's the big question... what do v*gans eat? Is there really any variety to their diet?
I could PROBABLY serve up my spicy black bean soup (recipe coming soon), or a chili. Though I've recently found that v*gan chili and v*gan curry is boring.
Next time: The never ending debate over flavor. When do things cease to be "subtle" and become "boring?"

Look what I made!

Yes! I made ribs! I'm proud of myself.
Furthermore, it only took an hour. The meat was STILL falling off the bone.
As this is NOT my recipe, the real recipe can be found HERE. I think their recipe had a little bit better sauce than mine does because the stupid broiler set off the smoke alarm after three minutes. I wasn't too impressed with that, but really, how often am I going to use the smoke alarm?
Anyway... AMAAAAAZING.

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses...

So, if I still have any readers, you may have noticed my absence. Or maybe not. I am prone to disappearing occasionally. So here are my excuses.
Excuse number one: I moved recently.
Excuse number two: I've been busy. (No, not really.)
Excuse number three: I haven't done anything new. (Flat out lie.)
The truth: I just keep forgetting. I forget to take pictures of my food because I forget about my blog. By the time I remember, I've either eaten the food or I've mangled it beyond the point where it's at all photogenic.
So, here's what you've missed that I don't have pictures of; stuffed peppers, cod with browned butter (it was amazing), pulled pork (AMAAAAZING! I promise I'll make it again and take pictures this time), lactose-intolerant/carnivore stuffed shells, etc.
Recipes may or may not show up when these things cycle back around. Or I could post them soon because I do write this stuff down. The stuffed peppers weren't my cup of meat (and rice), but I've been informed that they were very good.
So, tonight I finally remembered to take a photo. It's a crappy photo, but a photo nonetheless and I suppose it kind of gets the point across.


Care to guess what it is?

Pork Chops with Applesauce
Serves 2.

2 pork chops (or other cut of pork)
1 Macintosh apple
1 1/2 cups apple cider, divided
cinnamon
allspice
nutmeg
cloves
thyme

Directions:
1. Core and dice apple (whether you skin it or not is up to you, I left the skin on), place in a frying pan with 1/2 cup of apple cider.
2. Add alllll spices and herbs (and 1 tbsp butter if you're not lactose intolerant or cooking for someone lactose intolerant).
3. Cook down until apples are mushy and mash with a potato masher. Add remaining cider and wait until it bubbles decently.
4. Add pork! Cook thoroughly, while rotating sides periodically and covering with applesauce. (By the end there will be very little applesauce remaining.)
5. Serve hot.

I served this with a mix of noodles and vegetables (which is apparently not a great pairing). I was slightly disappointed in this dish, overall, because the applesauce was fantastic but pork doesn't exactly infuse nicely with flavor the way beef does. At least, not in my experience.
So, I don't think I'd make this again. I'll always make apple sauce, I just don't want to make pork. Unless it's bacon.
So, here's a pretty pretty distraction that was lurking around on my camera:


Mmmm, pretty sandwich. Mozzarella, basil leaves, and cherry tomato grilled sammy (on oat bread). I could go for one now, that would make me forgive the stupid pork.

We're-Out-of-Food Soup and Pillsbury Got Something Right.

So, in the week preceding the move to a different state (where there are hopefully more jobs, especially given the fact that something like 400 people were rendered jobless in this area because of tropical storm Irene), I've been lamenting my food situation. For the last time, I hope.
Having been without power for a few days, I got a chance to do a lot of stove-top cooking. There were some seriously messed up fajitas (I went crazy with the rooster sauce), some aaaawesome applesauce (best eaten warm), and this:
Carolyn and I had been talking about making a chicken soup for a long time, but couldn't agree whether to have noodles or not, and whether or not potatoes should be included. Ultimately we decided to use penne (which, as it turns out, are the perfect noodles for soup), and no potatoes. The potatoes were lamentably mushy. As experimental as this was, I feel that it turned out wonderfully.

Power Outage Chicken Soup
Serves ~8 (we managed to get three meals each out of this, but they were big bowls)

2 chicken breasts, thawed (in the brief time that you DO have power) and cut into small pieces
2 onions, diced
4 stalks celery, halved and diced
4 carrots, sliced into disks
1 box chicken broth (its SUPPOSED to smell like dragon farts, I've been told)
1 cup water
1 1/2 cups dry penne
oregano
basil
black pepper
butter

Directions:
1. Stomp around angrily wondering what the hell to eat.
2. Decide you're going to make chicken soup. With noodles. And utter kickassness (shut up, it's a word). Dice veggies and chicken!
3. Melt butter in the bottom of a sauce pan, adding chicken bits and stirring occasionally to cook about 3/4 of the way through.
4. Add onions and allow it to sweat for a few minutes before adding broth and water.
5. Add carrots and celery and herbify as desired. (I opted for 2 parts basil, 1 part oregano, and 1/3 part black pepper.)
6. As carrots soften slightly (I don't mean mushy here. I just mean not raw), add noodles.
7. Stir occasionally until noodles are fully cooked and remove from heat immediately.

As odd as this may seem (and I'm sure others have noticed this too), this soup is waaaay more awesome when it's been refrigerated for a few hours. It's sweet, and subtle, and mild. It isn't at all pretentious or overly bold (like beef stew, which I feel should ALWAYS punch you in the face like an angry Irishman), it's just right for a quiet day when the whole world seems like its about to drown. And don't worry about having extra broth, the noodles will drink it up and then you'll worry about having too little liquid.

Okay, so. Power comes back on after that, doing the infamous on and off thing, just as I become confident that it will stay on. Eventually it does actually stay on, so we opt to bake (because we made mom buy butter... because we wanted to bake).
This recipe is from an old Pillsbury cookbook that belong to my grandmother. As much as I hate Pillsbury's products CURRENTLY, I adore this cookbook, and it gets a lot of action in general baking in this house. I'm pretty sure my mom has made these cookies before, but we hadn't had them since, and I wanted cookies.
They're pretty damn glorious, by the way.
By this point, things seemed fine at home, and I had no idea what the rest of the state looked like aside from rumors from mom, and videos she showed us on her iPhone (via Facebook). So cookies felt like a big victory dance. Yeah. Victory didn't last long.

Pillsbury Drop Butter Cookies (pg. 157)
Makes 45-48 cookies

1 cup sugar or firmly packed brown sugar
3/4 cup butter, softened (Ignore them when they say margarine.)
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla (I did almost double this, and it was AWESOME)
1 egg
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt

Directions: (verbatim)
Heat oven to 375°F. In large bowl, combine first 5 ingredients; blend well. Stir in remaining ingredients; blend well. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls, 1 inch apart onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375°F for 9 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Immediately remove from cookie sheet.

Okay, so there are just a few problems with this. Firstly, these are delicate cookies, and there is a very fine line between perfect and overdone. My recommendation is to cook these cookies for about 10 minutes on a rack placed in the center of the oven. Also, don't worry too much about the size of the drops you put on the cookie sheet (or in my case, parchment paper), they don't spread out much. If you make them too big they won't cook nicely.
Anyway, here is what I got:Light, fluffy, golden brown bundles of buttery joy. My little sister described them as "sugar cookies, just better." I disagree, as they are distinctly buttery (though I'd say not buttery enough to be called a butter cookie. Shortbread is buttery enough to be called a butter cookie.) with lovely hints of vanilla.
This recipe has a lot of potential for modification. For instance, I adore rosemary shortbread cookies, but I'm not fond of hard cookies. I do like my cookies to be fluffy and slightly moist. As this cookie does have a lot in common with shortbread, I am inclined to say that it would welcome the addition of rosemary, lavender, or any other herb you chose to pair with it.
These cookies didn't even survive 12 hours in this house. Carolyn and I went crazy and ate 2/3 of the batch (and that's a conservative estimate), leaving the rest for mom and dad.

Two Recipes: I was hungry.

So, unfortunately there are no pictures this time around. I was hungry, and in focusing on the food I was planning to eat, I forgot to take pictures for you. Bummer, right?
Technically, one of those food items isn't actually food. It's a drink, because I'm hormonal and was having cravings that couldn't be denied. (That's a lie, they could be, I just didn't feel like it.) I was craving a chocolate peanut butter milkshake. However, as usual, we lack ice cream. So, I made chocolate peanut butter MILK.
(I would like to take this moment to state that blenders are AWESOME.)

Chocolate Peanut Butter Milk (because people can't figure this out on their own)
Serves 1.5

a lot of peanut butter
a lot of chocolate syrup
a lot of milk

Directions:
1. Combine and blend!

Don't you love one-step beverages? Unfortunately, now that I've discovered this, we're going to go through peanut butter reeeeeeally fast and I will no longer be on a HFCS-free diet (Hershey's Chocolate Syrup has HFCS, unfortunately. This is among the many things I love to hate about it). Add a banana and swap out the milk for soy milk and you can KIND OF pretend that it's healthy. Kind of. Not really. But we can dream, right?
Okay, so, onto something healthier.
We all know that I am a devout lover of mozzarella, yes? Well, I am. I've been drooling over this recipe for months (minus the capers, not big on capers), and decided today that I was going to roast some leftover peppers that were about to go iffy. So, in an act of bad judgment, I decided I was going to roast them over a stove burner. Like a marshmallow. (I can hear family members laughing already.) Well, let me just say that is the wrong technique and we're not going to try that again. So instead I took a different approach and ended up with something completely different from what I was aiming for.

Mixed Pepper Saute, Without Capers
Serves 2

1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/2 green bell pepper, diced
1/2 yellow bell pepper, diced
1/4 yellow onion
2 cloves garlic, smashed and minced
black pepper
1/2 cup mozzarella, shredded
grapeseed oil

Directions:
1. Dice all peppers and toss into a lightly oiled pan on medium-high heat.
2. After about two minutes of occasional mixing, added diced onion, and sprinkle liberally with black pepper. Stir gently and then ignore it for a minute or two.
3. Smash two cloves of garlic, dicing as fine as possible. Add to the pan and stir, lowering heat to medium-low.
4. Continue moving veggies around until the garlic is aromatic and slightly cooked and golden yellow, but not brown. Brown means your garlic is burnt, and therefore terribly bitter.
5. Remove from heat, serve on two plates, and top with mozzarella as desired (you know I'm a little heavy-handed with the mozzarella), or eat plain.

Now, this is very different from Smitten Kitchen's dish in a lot of way. No vinegar, more garlic, different oil (no big deal there), no capers, and no parsley. If you don't like your food to be very garlicky, one clove of garlic is fine, but I'm a total garlic junkie. Parsley would have been a good idea, but I was winging it and didn't think of that. If I have fresh parsley to work with next time, I will definitely consider the addition. For now, I'm happy with it.
My audience (Carolyn) rated this as a "cook again" dish.
Considering that she isn't big on peppers or onions, that's a high compliment.

Stale Bread, Cupcakes, and an Explained Absence

To the few who may actually follow my little blog, you may have noticed that I've been absent for a while. Like, a month (unless that's just my imagination). A week of that absence was spent in utter tummy rebellion, resulting in my fourth stomach flu of the year thus far. Icky icky. This one takes the cake, however, for landing me in the hospital with cramps so bad that I thought my appendix burst.
Anyway, that's all you get for an explanation. I'm back now. Not dead yet.
On to fun stuff... This past weekend I played caterer for my niece's birthday party. By caterer, I mean maker of all things, decorator of cupcakes, and creative director. In other words, mom wants fancy lettering on the cupcakes, I have the right to say no. Yay me! Yay power! So, nothing terribly abnormal was served up (Alas, no experiments were done my family), but I wanted to share the cupcakes.They are, in no way remarkable or special. In fact, they're the scary Betty Crocker boxed stuff. However, I just wished to demonstrate the fact that they're PRETTY. This is not how cupcakes looked when I was given them in school and on my birthday. Parents liked to smear the frosting around to HIDE the cake. I, however, have discovered the great art of improvised piping bags (i.e. a Ziploc bag filled with frosting with one corner snipped off), and decided I wanted to make nice, neat little piles of frosting. It's prettier. It's also heavy enough that a layer of saran wrap won't pull off all the frosting. So, yay physics.
Now, with all the stressful party stuff behind me, and no real food left over (things disappeared more quickly than I thought they would), I'm back to making my own. What was left over, among various snack foods (like a bag and a half of potato chips [we had FOUR]), was about one third a loaf of French bread. Getting home this afternoon, I was STARVED. I craved that thing that I always crave. Pizza.
So, as the house is utterly devoid of other human beings, I decided to make myself a French bread pizza. Mmm. I've seen recipes for this online, and I wasn't sure that it would work with bread that had been sitting since Friday evening and was undoubtedly stale. In all honesty, the cuts in my mouth say that I should probably use fresher bread next time. I enjoyed how this tasted, despite not containing all the optimal ingredients (we're out of garlic!), and there will DEFINITELY be a next time.

French Bread Pizza Made From Leftovers
Serves 2-4.

1/3 loaf French bread, slightly stale
1 small can tomato paste
~1 cup tomato juice (yes, we have that now)
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp garlic (I was forced to use jarred, icky), diced
1/2 small yellow onion (or other onion. This could be really good with scallions...)
basil
2 cups mozzarella, grated
1/4 cup parmesan, grated

Directions:
1. Slice French bread in half and arrange on a cookie sheet.
2. Empty tomato paste into a small saucepan with tomato juice, garlic and olive oil. Stir together to thin out the tomato paste. I aimed for a thick sauce, but if you want it thinner you can add more tomato juice. DO NOT USE V8 FOR THIS. If you do, I will hunt you down and stab you with a can opener.
3. Heat tomato mixture over a low flame, adding as much basil as you like.
4. Dice the half onion, and stir into sauce, cooking for another two or three minutes.
5. Cut 1 tbsp butter into six relatively even pieces, arranging three on each half of the bread. Place in an oven heated at 400°F until butter is soft, then spread.
6. Remove tomato sauce from heat, spreading sauce over buttered bread.
7. Top liberally with mozzarella, and sprinkle with parmesan. Top with more basil.
8. Place prepared bread back in the oven (still at 400°F) for 10 to 15 minutes, or until cheese is melted and slightly bubbly.

Eating this with a fork and a knife is recommended until it cools slightly, in which case it's stable enough to pick up and eat like a very sturdy open-faced sandwich.
This recipe makes a very sweet tomato sauce, but it has great flavor and the thickness was entirely agreeable. The only downside to this was that the stale bread was not softened at all by the butter (which I had planned on) or the sauce, and left me with little cuts all inside my mouth. Furthermore, as I was hungry, I didn't really leave any for anyone else.

A Sweet Weekend Snack

It's pretty, isn't it?

Mmm, snacks.
We all love snacks, right? I know I do. I'm a notorious snacker.
This little recipe combines two things I find myself craving most: peanut butter and chocolate. However, on the plus side (the "let's feel less guilty for eating this" side), it also uses fruit! So, while reading Instructables today (about food, of course) I found myself wanting snacks. Yes, snacks. I had already had lunch and so forth and it's too early for dinner.
I wanted something sweet. Something tasty. And, of course, something with enough mass to fill me up a little bit. What I really wanted was essentially a peanut butter s'more, but we have no graham crackers (mmm, graham crackers would be good on a banana).
So, meandering around the kitchen (as I often do), I found myself gravitating towards bananas. I like bananas. They're sweet, they're fairly filling, and they make for a decent blank slate. Conveniently, bananas go well with both chocolate and peanut butter.
So, I'm not going to give you a recipe, because if you can't figure this out by the picture then you should really consider getting some help for that. (I would say try something easier, but this is about as easy as it gets. Just as easy as toast or a PB&J.)