Filed under Cheese

In Case You Were Wondering…


In case you were wondering, it is quite possible to eat salad for dinner while still keeping it totally unhealthy.  Just throw some bacon, blue cheese, and ranch dressing on it, and serve it with garlic bread that’s pretty much garlic-infused butter with a side of bread.

In case you were wondering, you can put tofu in a taco and totally enjoy it.  Dip slices of pressed, firm tofu it in some kind of sauce or marinade (I used soy sauce, lemon juice, agave syrup, cumin, chili powder and garlic powder <- laziness), broil it for about ten minutes on an oiled pan, and then wrap it in a tortilla with lettuce, radishes, feta, and salsa.  Feta, tofu, tortillas, and hot sauce are the future.

In case you were wondering, it wasn’t until my twenty-ninth year that I cooked a chicken breast, slipped it inside of a sesame seed bun, and called it dinner.  Why have I never thought of making chicken sandwiches for dinner before?  What America am I living in?

In case you were wondering, paying a few extra bucks for downtown parking instead of standing in heavy rain at the bus stop is sometimes worth it, as is getting to work in a fraction of the time that it takes on the bus, enabling you to leave early and get home with plenty of time to make pizza dough and still eat dinner at a reasonable hour.  And cheese pizza always wins, especially when there’s smoked provolone involved.

In case you were wondering, shaved asparagus pizza is a great way to use one pound of asparagus after you’ve made the arguably irrational decision to buy three pounds of asparagus because three pounds was a better value than one pound.  A decent sprinkling of good parmesan is clutch.

Wednesday Dinner: Cheesy Pasta with Kale

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Shells with taleggio, pecorino romano and parmesan topped with lightly sautéed kale

more cheese and chocolate

There will always be days like today, where half of a mug of hot coffee pours into your purse while you’re driving your car with a flat to the auto shop, a flat tire turns into a pricey investment in four new tires, and the potential of another investment lingers unless that bowl of arborio rice works its magic on your coffee-soaked iPod.

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Before the day ends, when there’s still a chance for salvation, get yourself some stinky cheese and a crusty baguette.  When you’ve had your fill of cheese, switch to Nutella.  Things will be better.

The First Supper: Saint Paul

When you move to a city named after a saint, you should probably make a biblical reference in title of the post about the first meal in your new kitchen, right?  And you should break in your new kitchen by cranking up the oven to 400-degrees twice in the same steamy afternoon to make a comforting meal and then toast your new place with tall glasses of milk and water because you forgot to buy wine, right?  And you should whip out your phone to take pictures of the tourists tooling around your new neighborhood on Segways, right?  Check, check, and check.

Our first home-cooked Saint Paul meal started with a lovely composed salad of golden and chioggia beets, sun gold cherry tomatoes, fresh chives, crumbled blue cheese, and a drizzle of buttermilk dressing.  Simple, summery and delicious.

For the main course, we had Pimiento Mac and Cheese. I’ve been craving mac and cheese for weeks, and a scoop of the sorry excuse for it on the Whole Foods salad bar that I ate last week just didn’t cut it.  I thumbed through a few cookbooks in search of a good recipe before remembering a recent issue of Bon Appetit with a picture of gooey mac and cheese on the cover.  The cover photo turned out to be Pimiento Mac and Cheese, and although it wasn’t the traditional route I had originally planned on taking, it looked too good to pass up.

(Sorry for the rotten photos – I ran out of daylight.)

It was awesome!  It was close enough to regular mac and cheese to satisfy my craving, but it also had enough going on to make it new and exciting, just like our new living arrangement.  Instead of starting the cheese sauce with butter, flour and whole milk, you boil a red pepper in a little water until it softens and then purée it with roasted peppers, garlic and a tiny bit of butter.  So, you know, you start with vegetables, and vegetables are good for you.  It’s healthy.  Mac and cheese for your health.  Then you add a few cups of cheese to the pepper mixture and maybe you sample a little of the cheese as you’re grating it, but at least you’re adding all of that cheese to pureed peppers instead of a creamy béchamel sauce, right?

Matt declared this the best mac and cheese that I’ve ever made, and I tend to agree, which brings up a new issue: who gets to eat the leftovers?