Friday Night!

So I decided to celebrate Friday with some time to myself.  Once classes let out, I started off with a burrito from Chipotle with a friend.  I know that the calories in a burrito from Chipotle are out of control, but I have been pretty hungry all week.  I don’t know if it’s the extra challenging workouts lately or the fact that I upped the number of training sessions the last few weeks.  Or maybe it’s because spring is coming.  Whatever the case, I’ve been eating and eating and eating.  Hopefully, I’m not undoing all my efforts at the gym.

So after enjoying a nice and tasty burrito – I even added guacamole (I love guacamole!!) – I headed off the grocery store.  I love the grocery store here.  There is always fun things to discover.  I just have to be careful not to let my spending get out of control.

The real fun began when I got home from the gym.

I started off with a Salmon Florentine (see earlier post here) for dinner.  Then, still hungry, I made a pizza.  I haven’t had much luck with breads lately, so I bought a pizza crust from the grocery store:

I topped the pizza crust with a glaze of olive oil and leftover jarred pasta sauce from my fridge:

Then…

And…

Frozen mix made my life so much easier!

Got me this:

And into the oven it goes.  After 10 minutes or so, I added some chopped cilantro which was wilting away in my fridge and some freshly ground black pepper:

After another 5 minutes, I wasn’t happy with the meltiness of the cheese, so I left the pizza in a little bit longer.  Only problem is that I forgot to set the timer again and the pizza came out a little bit browner that I wanted.  Oh well.  Still tasty.  Here is the final result:

And a close up:

I ate half the pizza throughout the evening.

So round three of cooking this evening involved making this: Maple Walnut Apple Cake from eggs on sunday.  I was hoping to use more than one apple, but the apples I have are so big that it took only one apple.  Oh well.  I had to cook mine in a square baking dish because I don’t own a cake pan and I left the skin on my apple for some extra fiber.  Here are the photos.

Before baking:

And a shot from the side:

And after a trip to the oven:

Fresh from the oven!

After some cooling and negotiating…the cake is out and upside down!

And plated just right with a glass of Bully Hill wine.

Yum!

Don't forget the wine!

By the way, that wine, was surprisingly good.  A mellow, light, red wine.  I usually like my red wine dark, deep, and rich, but this one is good in its own very light way.

That concludes my friday evening.  Of course there is now a ridiculous amount of dishes to wash.

Salmon Florentine

So I’ve been really grumpy lately and cooking oddly enough makes me feel better.  I think it’s really the eating more than the cooking, but nonetheless, I’ve been cooking.  I really never thought I’d ever say that.  My sister used to say that cooking was her way of coping with stress and she always felt better afterwards – I used to think that was a quirk of hers.

I should be studying, but I had already defrosted the salmon for this recipe from self.com: Salmon Florentine.  Notice a new theme.  I went from 101cookbooks to self.com.  I guess I cook in phases.

So here are the before cooking photos:

Spinach topping before cooking

And now from the side:

And after some oven time:

The final plating with some black rice:

What a great way to start off Lent.

A Rare Occasion – Cooking Meat

So I made an exception to my “I don’t cook meat” policy and made Beef Stew with Butternut Squash from SELF.com.  I was wasting time as usual, trying to avoid thinking about the looming pile of work that I really should tackle but didn’t feel like doing, and surfing for ideas for dinner.

Lately, with all the working out I’ve been doing, I know I need protein.  Sometimes I even think I want to eat meat.  Note the critical “think” in that sentence.  While I was cooking today, the smell of the meat as I browned it nearly made me gag, but I pressed on and ended up with a pot that looked something like this:

The photo is pre-simmering.  As you probably notice from the photo, I went a little rogue on the recipe.*  These are the changes I made:

• added in extra garlic in the form of one clove of elephant garlic – I wanted the meaty smell gone in the final product (of course I don’t know how sound this reasoning is…just made sense to me)
• fresh tomatoes in place of the canned diced tomatoes and tomato sauce – I have a universal rule against using canned tomatoes and canned tomato products for health reasons.  (I’ll have to write a separate post on this.)
• added a little more broth to make up for the lack of tomato sauce
• 1 pound, 4 ounces of butternut squash instead of 1 pound –  that was the size of the package I bought
• added a dash more of spices to compensate for the extra squash

The result was fragrant “stew.”  The final dish was more a soup than stew, probably from the extra broth and the fresh tomatoes.  Also, browning the meat at the beginning resulted in some tough meat chunks at the end.  When I googled how to cook tender stew meat, I found that very, very slow simmering of the stew without the initial browning would have yielded tender meat.  Oh well.  The soup is fragrant and has a good kick to it.

I ate mine over some left over whole wheat pasta (actually it’s a pasta called super pasta from the grocery store brand – I refuse to eat other whole wheat pastas because they taste terrible!).

Dessert was piece of the delectably fudgy and dense cocoa brownies that I made last weekend and stashed in my fridge.

*PS I almost never follow a recipe exactly…sometimes out of impatience or sometimes because I’m trying to up the healthy factor. (Of course upping the healthy factor can sometimes result in inedible disasters – see PS note on this post about my macaroni from scratch)

Tasty, Fast Dish – Bulgur Risotto

I just made a fabulous tasting dish!  It was simple and easy.  This is one dish that you can make on the fly and know that you’re eating well.  Enter the Bulgur Risotto with Corn and Shrimp from SELF.com.  Technically, the dish also has red bell pepper, but I guess that doesn’t roll of the tongue very easily.

Check it out.

Freshly made bulgur risotto!

I had mine with a cup of red wine.  It’s a bottle that was left over from a party.  This wine is not the kind of red wine I’m used to.  I would call it more watery than what I typically drink, but it’s a tasty wine nonetheless.

I think the next time around, I might play around with what I add and the spices, but I love this recipe for it’s utter simplicity.  And the taste factor.  🙂  It’s fantastic right when you’ve made it, all piping hot, but I think it’ll be just as good cold.  I certainly thought it tasted even better at the second helping when it got to sit in the pot for a little bit.

I highly recommend making the bulgur risotto.  I might just go and eat the whole pot right now.  This is definitely a down side to living alone.  You make something fantastic and you don’t have anyone to eat it with you, so you either end up eating it all yourself or resisting that temptation.  I tend to eat it all, but that’s another story for another time.

Dinner – Funny Eater Style

I never was one of those people that loved meat. I ate it, I still eat it once in a while, but the smell of meat increasingly bothers me. Even chicken bothers me. The problem with this dislike for meat is that I need to eat protein. I workout quite a bit and protein is essential.

So, after a hard workout focusing on upper body, mostly upper back and shoulders, and a run on the treadmill after, I need protein and this is what I came up with.

A good dose of vegetarian chili that is made with lentils (see recipe on 101cookbooks: Pierce Street Vegetarian Chili), which I had previously made and frozen, a dash of shredded colby jack cheese, and a heaping scoopful of quinoa.  I made the quinoa fresh.

While I was cooking up the quinoa, I put the thawed chili and a big pinch of cheese in a microwave proof glass bowl and nuked it for a minute, stirred, and then another minute in the microwave.

Put a big heaping scoop of freshly made quinoa on top and stir until well combined.  Cheesey goodness.  Mmm.

Three cheers for vegetarian protein!

A Very Long Post

I should probably be in bed right about now, but I finally uploaded all the photos sitting on my camera and phone to my computer.  I also cannot take any more of the stress of knowing that I’ve taken a bunch of photos and they haven’t been posted.  So this is probably going to be the most annoyingly long post, but there will be lots of pictures.

Unfortunately, due to my neglect, most of these photos will not be in chronological order.

Let’s start with one of my favorite comfort foods/convenience foods.  Macaroni and cheese.  Now, I like to eat fancy foods, but I love Annie’s Mac and Cheese.

I started eating it in college and it still tastes so wonderful when I want to just indulge and not have to worry about the logistics of cooking.  There is definitely a lot of sodium, so I try to buy the one box that is lower sodium.  Lately, because of my attempt to keep the extra salt out of my life, I haven’t been eating much mac and cheese, but when I do, I add vegetables (usually frozen, since the theme is usually lazy when I’m eating mac and cheese).

All right, so moving right along here.  Next up is my chicken sandwich.  Now, if you don’t already know this about me, it’s probably something you should know.  I hate cooking meat.  I actually don’t really like meat to begin with, but given my crazy workout schedule and all the running around I do, I’m sure my body could use the protein and iron.  In any case, when I do try to eat some animal protein, I either eat out or have someone else cook it.

Well, my way around the cooking chicken for my chicken sandwich was to buy a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store.  I bought the chicken and then took all the meat off and put it in a plastic bag in the fridge for eating.  So, I used the chicken one day to make this fantastic sandwich.  

Two slices of farm style bread, a handful of mixed greens, chicken, cheese, black pepper.  Now, I took the cold chicken from the fridge and heated it up in the frying pan with a teeny tiny bit of olive oil and a dash of black pepper, and then melted some cheese with it.  I don’t have a toaster, so the bread was toasted on the frying pan before I heated up the chicken.  Let me just say, this is a very delicious sandwich and this picture does not convey that tastiness.  I’m getting hungry just talking about it.

We must continue our journey.  Next up, a pretty picture of my hot chocolate from a local coffee shop.

Now, I have to say, that this was the only visit to this coffee shop that resulted in such a pretty looking hot chocolate.  After that, my hot chocolates were quite plain looking.  (On a side note, I have quit caffeine and this is putting a crimp in my coffee shop / studying habits … a story for another post.)

More… so a couple of weekends ago, I went on a crazy cooking spree.  I spent over a hundred dollars at the grocery store shopping for ingredients, but I cooked four plus recipes.  My spree was prompted by my disgust at having had to resort to Lean Cuisine meals the previous couple of weeks due to exam stress.  Let’s just say that amount of salt is gross and I did not feel good.

The first dish – Giant Chipotle White Beans off of 101cookbooks.

This is probably the tastiest new recipe that I’ve tried in a while.  I cannot tell you how amazing the flavors are.  (I think the picture would look better rotated, but that is not going to happen.)

Dish two of my culinary spree was vegetarian chili off 101cookbooks, which I wrote about in a previous post (https://funnyeater.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/starving/)

Dish three was a leek soup with dill oil from 101cookbooks (Yes, I love that website and the recipes).  Sadly, I did not take photos of this.  It is well frozen in my freezer right now.  So tasty.

Dish four was pumpkin feta muffins from 101cookbooks.  Except, mine were butternut squash and not pumpkin.  These are also undocumented and sitting tasty in my freezer.

Now, after that spree, I had all these leftover ingredients and I had to make use of them.  I hate wasting food.  So I made up some variations on a theme.

First variation – cilantro pesto tossed with super pasta (it’s a whole wheat pasta that actually tastes fantastic) and peas and corn (both of the frozen variety…I just add them to the boiling noodles when there is about two minutes left on the timer).

Next variation.  I had some chickpeas and yogurt and dill.  I also had some bread and left over queso blanco.  So I turned that into an appetizer looking thing.  I melted the queso blanco on the bread in the microwave oven (I would prefer to use a toaster oven, but I do not own one) and then topped it with my chickpeas smothered in a yogurt-dill-curry-scallion-black pepper-salt concoction.  If it was not so late and I wasn’t feeling so lazy, I would actually make it more of a recipe, but it’s late and I’m feeling a little lazy, so that’s the best you’re getting out of me right now.

Okay, now for a shot into the mundane for a moment.  The following is what my breakfast on weekends tends to look like.

Eggs with Vegetables

And finally, to round out this post…Valentine’s Day fun.  First up is what I had for lunch with my parents.  A skirt steak (I think…it was some cut of beef in any case) over some gnocchi.

And finally, the Valentine’s Day sweets.  Chocolate cupcake and some really chocolatey dessert thingie.  This clearly has to be the end of this post because my facility with words is going.

That's all frosting on top of the chocolate cupcake!

Not a very good picture, but extremely tasty. Complete chocolate bliss.

Well, that rounds up this long post that I’m hoping makes up for my lack of posting lately.  I have to figure out a way to be better about posting.  Hope you had fun.