Vegetarian | More Cheese More Chocolate

May 14 2013

2013 Weekends – Week 19

I kind of figured that after a weekend as exciting as last, this one was going to be several notches down on the fun scale, but little did I know exactly how far down it would fall. I went to a yoga class on Thursday night, and not even five minutes into it I felt a snap in my lower back. Instead of rolling up my mat and walking out like any sane person would do, I stuck around for the rest of the hour, gradually modifying my movements according to the pain that was increasing by the second. By the time the class ended, I could barely stand up to walk to the locker room, and on the way to my car I had to stop every ten feet as I was overcome by a back spasm. I didn’t plan to start my weekend on Thursday, but when you’re unable to roll out of bed on Friday morning without writhing in pain, getting on a bus and eventually sitting upright in a chair for several hours isn’t really in the cards.

I spent most of Friday laying on the couch with an ice pack, but once Matt headed out of town on Friday afternoon and a voice of reason was no longer present to tell me to stop moving around and lay down, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. To be honest, I didn’t realize just how much time I spent in the kitchen until I uploaded all of the photos to my computer, and now I completely understand why I was in so much pain on Sunday after having felt so much better on Saturday. Sitting still isn’t my thing, even if the effect of my restlessness is pain. At least there were freshly baked cookies to help me cope!

Without further ado, here’s everything* that I made while I should have been laying on the couch.

*Not pictured: a poorly photographed loaf of lemony olive oil banana bread

Stovetop macaroni and cheese plus broccoli that was lightly blanched in the pasta water. I made about a third of this recipe, and it was neither amazing nor terrible, as evidenced by the leftovers still being around yet remaining uneaten.

Toasted brioche with avocado and a fried egg, strawberries, tea.

I was feeling considerably better on Saturday and ventured out to buy groceries, where I was overcome by the urge to buy a container of sprouts. I was pretty hungry by the time I got home, so I made a wrap with the sprouts and a bunch of other veggies. Again, not great but not bad.

I ordered Pizza Luce for a late dinner, and continuing with the theme, it was not very good, mostly bad and very bland. The salad was decent, though.

Another activity that I should have skipped in order to rest: bread baking.

I made two loaves of partially whole wheat bread, and while they were pretty inside, they weren’t my best work. Maybe it was the universe telling me to sit down and relax.

Toast with harissa, fried eggs, blackberries, tea, orange juice. Fuel for more Sunday activities that I probably shouldn’t have done.

Like baking oatmeal M&M cookies. They were good.

Then I made pesto/tomato/mozzarella/basil sandwiches for a picnic lunch with girlfriends.

The only benefit of being stuck in horrible traffic because the main road between Minneapolis and St. Paul is closed for the weekend is that it’s a great opportunity for icing your back.

If you thought that making breakfast, baking cookies and preparing sandwiches seems like a lot of activity for someone who should be doing none of those things, you’d be right. Instead, I did all of those things and prepared a pork shoulder for a day of slow cooking in the crock pot. At least I simplified the recipe to cut out most of the labor-intensive steps.

By the time I got home from our picnic, my stubbornness was being punished with frequent back spasms, but that didn’t stop me from preparing a batch of creamy cilantro lime sauce to go with the pork. Some things are worth a little pain, and anyone who’s had the green sauce from Brasa knows that this sauce is one of them.

After I cleaned my plate, I rested.

Apr 22 2013

2013 Weekends – Week 16

Friday morning. Our deck is usually sheltered enough that it’s free from snow, but that wasn’t the case with last week’s snowstorm.

The street below. A mid-April snowstorm is a bit of a bummer, but at least it’s pretty and disappears quickly this time of year. Also, it’s supposed to be 70 this weekend!

Things worth leaving the house for in the aftermath of a snowstorm: a paying job and a new iPhone. Check and check.

Friday night beer to sip on while being glued to CNN. I liked the beer and was relieved that the flavors in the description (vanilla, star anise, grains of paradise – not even sure what that is) weren’t very prominent. I’d been putting off drinking it because I thought it would taste like dessert, but it was a great pre-dinner drink.

Fuji Ya delivery for dinner. It was a bit of a splurge but worth it to not have to leave the house or settle for the closer Japanese restaurant that’s not nearly as good.

We started with pork pot stickers and then shared a few rolls.

Saturday breakfast: bagel and grapefruit. We ate breakfast while watching public television cooking shows, which inspired everything else we ate that day.

First up, gjetost, a Norwegian goat cheese that looks like peanut butter and tastes like dulce de leche. I hated it the first time I tried it several years ago, but after learning about it on New Scandinavian Cooking and hearing the Norwegian host say “fudge cheese” over and over again, I had to give it another try. It’s so good! I’m not sure what I didn’t like about it the first time – maybe I was surprised by the sweetness – but I am now a believer in fudge cheese.

It’s good plain, on crackers, on buttered toast or with jam.

Next up: Corn cookies from Momofuko Milk Bar. The cookbook has been sitting on our bookshelf, largely undisturbed, for the last year, and it wasn’t until watching Christina Tosi make these cookies on David Chang’s PBS show a week or two ago and Matt’s interest in them that I was compelled to make a batch.

I used a really fine cornmeal instead of corn flour, assuming they’re essentially the same thing, and it seemed to work well. I also discovered that the bags of freeze-dried corn available at Target are almost the exact amount required for one batch of cookies.

These cookies are rather unassuming, and I probably would have overlooked them had we not seen them being made on TV, but we would have been missing out on something great. They’re like a sweet, buttery cornbread in cookie form, and they made me think of one of my favorite state fair foods, sweet corn ice cream. I think they’d be awesome cookies for homemade ice cream sandwiches, especially if the ice cream is salted caramel or maybe something tart like a lemon sorbet to cut through the sweetness. Or, oh my god, this… Yep, I think that’s the one.

For dinner, we made the vegetable lasagna that we’d seen earlier in the day on America’s Test Kitchen. Like most lasagna recipes, it was a bit labor-intensive, but as with most labor-intensive recipes, it was well worth the time, effort and number of dirty mixing bowls.

Vegetable lasagna conjures up images of bland, soggy squash and zucchini, neither of which I find very appealing in any state, but especially when overcooked. This recipe might have changed my opinion on those two vegetables as well as the potential for vegetable lasagna with red sauce (I’m already a fan of the white sauce variety). The squash, zucchini and an eggplant, which was microwaved for 10 minutes to draw out excess moisture, are all sautéed with a thyme-and-garlic-infused olive oil before being mixed with cooked spinach and layered with noodles, tomato sauce, cream sauce and cheese. Instead of having mushy vegetable layers, you have a layer of flavorful, slightly crunchy vegetables that hold their own and aren’t just there to make you feel better about eating the layers of cheese and noodles.

Really good.

Sunday brunch: toasted brioche with avocado, cheddar and a fried egg // strawberries and mango // earl grey

Yes.

Apr 16 2013

4 Comments

Beverages, Breakfast, Fruit, Salad, Vegetarian, Weekend Eats

2013 Weekends – Week 15

After a three-week trip to California for repair, my new camera is home and fully functional! It’s taking a little time to get back into the swing of things, but I played around with it for a while on Friday night, taking poorly focused selfies in a dirty sauté pan lid among other things.

Brasa take-out on a snowy Friday night: fried catfish sandwich, pulled pork sandwich, macaroni and cheese, creamed spinach

Saturday breakfast to go: cherry, banana, mango, yogurt, oj, oat, and flax smoothie

Reward for working all day: tarragon cocktails. Tarragon simple syrup + gin + lime juice. Loved these and plan to drink them all summer.

Round two: tarragon cocktails, doubled and with mostly grapefruit juice instead of lime juice. Good, but I prefer the first one.

Homemade coconut milk. Incredibly easy, incredibly delicious, could be dangerous.

Giant brussie.

Broccoli, brussels sprouts and coconut sautéed in coconut oil

Plus peanut sauce and broiled tofu

Mixed

Purple sticky rice

The sauce was a little on the sweet side because I used sweetened coconut to make the coconut milk, but it was delicious nonetheless.

Our new Sunday morning treat: newspaper delivery with two giant crosswords. It’s no Onion crossword, but it’ll do.

Purple rice and pinto burgers to use leftovers and to freeze for easy meals

Sunday dinner: a recreation of the barbecue chicken salad that I ordered multiple times a week from the restaurant in our dorm freshman year of college. Lettuce, tomatoes, red onion, carrot, cheddar, avocado, chicken, ranch and barbecue sauce. So bad, yet so good.

Apr 01 2013

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Appetizer, Bread, Breakfast, Pasta, Seafood, Vegetarian, Weekend Eats

2013 Weekends – Week 13

Our first Friday night pizza delivery in months. A simple salad made my someone other than yourself and smothered in blue cheese dressing is an occasional necessity.

I made a pre-run donut run to Mojo Monkey on Saturday morning to surprise Matt with his favorite breakfast treat. His top pick was the maple bacon bar, which I though was good, but a slice of bacon on a donut isn’t really my thing. Maybe if it were crumbled I’d be more into it, and I know this is nit-picky, but why not just put a solid strip of bacon on the donut instead of slapping on two odd pieces? The raspberry brie was my favorite of the lot, although I would still choose a bagel with cream cheese over it any day. The german chocolate cake donut was pretty good despite tasting a bit overcooked. The classic raised was the unanimous least favorite. I’d go back to buy donuts for Matt and maybe sample more flavors, but I don’t envision myself craving more anytime soon. The donuts from Hanisch Bakery that someone brought into work a couple weeks ago? Worth a trip to Red Wing.

After sampling each donut, I made a real breakfast for myself: an omelet with arugula and Marieke gouda, extra arugula on the side, grapefruit and earl grey. I lightly dressed the arugula with white balsamic and lemon juice before adding it to the omelet, a trick I learned last weekend that makes a world of difference. This breakfast was awesome. Even Matt, high on donuts, was a little jealous.

After the overnight rain and thunder moved out, Saturday was beautiful. I sat on the sunny deck doing crosswords and listening to drunken revelers leaving Firkin Fest for a good hour. If the ground wasn’t still covered in snow and the temperatures didn’t drop back into the thirties overnight, I might believe it’s actually spring.

Warm weather calls for a big ginger to sip on while making pasta.

Pasta dough. A little dry but workable nonetheless.

I somewhat unknowingly splurged on the most amazing ricotta I’ve ever tasted while picking up dinner supplies at Whole Foods. They sell it bundled up in tins with a domed top. I learned long ago that the plastic tubs of Sargento ricotta at the grocery store taste horrible and hardly qualify as cheese, but this stuff blows any ricotta that I’ve had, homemade or otherwise, out of the water.

It almost tasted like a savory version of the sweet cream ice cream from Grand Ole Creamery, but I might be saying that only because I want to eat a bowl (or cone – I’m not picky) of this with a spoon.

I resisted the urge to eat obscene amounts of ricotta, although I did use a piece of bread to wipe every last bit of it from the wrapper. We had ravioli to make! The vegetable and cheese ravioli recipe from The Silver Spoon Pasta was my guide. I feel like most of their recipes are open to interpretation, and I interpreted their four pounds of spinach to mean three boxes of frozen spinach. Two probably would have been plenty. Also in the mix: an egg, parmesan, salt and pepper.

Ravioli is both easy to make and hard to get right. I think we improved upon our first ravioli-making experience, but we haven’t quite perfected the art.

The motley crew of ravioli, patched, crimped and sealed. We must have done something right because not a single bundle came apart in the boiling water.

Cooked, mixed with pesto, topped with parmesan

A salad inspired the Valencian salad in Ad Hoc At Home. Greens + Valencia oranges + roasted red peppers + oil-cured olives + slivered almonds + red wine vinaigrette

Last week’s bread is this week’s garlic ~~bread~~ toast

I found these plates a couple of weeks ago and had to have them because they make me think of this.

My plate

Sunday breakfast was a repeat of Saturday except I used Milton Creamery chili pepper cheddar (the best spicy cheese!) instead of gouda, and I added a slice of toasted brioche with avocado. Saturday’s cheese pick was a better omelet filling, but brioche toast tilts the scale in favor of Sunday.

Nuts, seeds, oats, bran, and flour for baking…

Big Sur Bakery Hide Bread from 101 Cookbooks

Extra ravioli filling transformed into spinach-artichoke dip

A leek nearly as big as my forearm! This was one of the smaller ones to choose from at the store.

Leek, lentils, mustard-herb butter – a fantastic dish in its own right…

But even better when topped with seared salmon and more butter. I highly recommend this recipe (one of the top-ranked of all time on Epicurious and with good reason). The liberal use of butter in every step makes it a bit of an indulgence, but once you taste the mixture of butter, grainy mixture, tarragon, chives and lemon juice, you’ll see that it’s worth it.

More Cheese More Chocolate

Category Archives: Vegetarian

2013 Weekends – Week 19

2013 Weekends – Week 16

2013 Weekends – Week 15

2013 Weekends – Week 13