I always used to believe that pizza was best ordered out. Call it my Chicago roots talking but I love deep dish Chicago style pizza. Thick and cheesy. Giordano’stops my list but there are many other places I love a slice at. This is not something you can just make at home either. So with that considered, making pizza at home was usually seen as a money saving opportunity or food adventure by making my own crust and topping it with unlikely items, (like the prosciutto and egg pizza we tried earlier this year). So last nite I was just looking for an easy fix to the problem that we had extra pesto in our fridge and needed a food solution to use it up. Stepping up to the plate was Trader Joes.
Trader Joes sells pizza dough still in it’s raw dough form. You just have to roll it out, top it with whatever you choose and bake for 7 or 8 minutes. It’s fresher and tastier than any kind of Boboli or other pre-baked pizza dough, and it comes in a Whole Wheat version which makes it a little healthier. (I say a little because even at home, pizza is not the prize winning choice for healthy meals. However… last nite it was easy to make, cheaper than getting a pizza delivered, and one of the tastiest homemade pizzas I’ve ever made!!!
Instead of using a red pizza sauce, I used the pesto as the base. I topped it with some pepperoni and fresh mushrooms and then covered it with a part skim mozzarella. In the oven for 8 minutes and wala!!! Heaven. We ate the whole thing. I felt overfull when we were done, but when it tastes that good you just can’t stop yourself. Well maybe YOU can, but I can’t.
Filed under: Books
This is not a diet blog. This is a food blog. A Mmm… Food Blog. So while I have read the South Beach Diet and am following the plan, the food I’m eating is no less tasty or satisfying than it was before. In fact we’ve been doing more cooking than ever!! Which totally works out in favor both tastiness wise, health-wise and budget wise. 
I wont’ go into all the details, but South Beach is a 3 Phase Diet. Phase 1 lasts two weeks. The first two weeks you start you are stabilizing your glycemic index by not eating sugar in the form of soda, candy, ice cream, fruits, bread, pasta or most carbohydrates. Phase 2 lasts from after the first two weeks until you are at your goal weight. Here you get to add some carbohydrates back in. Good carbs only though. Fruits, whole wheat pastas, brown and wild rice, whole grain breads. No french bread, white flour or cookies. But you get to eat almost everything else. Phase 3 adds most things back in, in moderation such that you maintain. But really what I think is cool about the whole thing is that while it is labelled a diet, it doesn’t especially feel like one. Sure cutting out things like my morning Coke, and a bag of chips from the vending machine, as well as deep-dish pizza when we get home late and don’t want to cook isn’t easy, but anybody, even those not on a “diet” know eating too much of that stuff isn’t good for you. Eating by the South Beach plan means planning our meals out. Knowing what we are going to eat on a weekly basis, and executing meals to make sure we have the food we want to eat available to us when we’re hungry.
I was laughing at the New Year’s Resolution to cook at least 1 new recipe a week. We’ve made at least 5 new recipes every week so far. It hasn’t been hard. Just the opposite, there are so many things we want to try, we haven’t been repeating. April did voice the concern that she would like to repeat some of the things we’ve made, and this would certainly make planning easier, but it’s still fun to go through and pick out all sorts of new things.
The book and diet plan seem sound. I was very skeptical at first, but I like that Dr. Agatston talks about only looking at this eating plan as a therapeutic way to improve the lives of his heart patients. He wasn’t trying to create a diet to make people skinnier. However, as he says in the intro to his book “I see now that the cosmetic benefits of losing weight are extremely important because they so effectively motivate the young and the old-even more than the promise of healthy hear, it often seems.” (The South Beach Diet, p7) I for one agree.
Filed under: Cooking
We had my parents over for dinner this past Saturday. We decided to make Beef Stroganoff with Greek Yogurt and Dill featured in the February 2009 issue of Real Simple. As repped on the recipe page this version employs greek yogurt instead of the standard sour cream and butter, significantly reducing the amount of fat intake. Awesome. And served over a whole wheat garlic fettuccine I ordered on-line from Pappardelle’s (seriously some of the tastiest and unique flavoured pasta) we added fiber and made this meal even more nutritious. Of course in what at times can be a whirlwind of entertaining, I forget to get out my camera and have no documented proof of how delicious this meal was. However, I do have the fact that my mother asked for “A Doggie Bag” as proof that it was tasty. I used sirloin for the meat and my parents rarely ever eat hamburgers let alone steak, so I felt pretty good when this request was made. I though, can’t take any credit for the cooking of this meal though. April executed everything, from salad greens with blackberries and a fig balsamic vinaigrette, the creamed spinach(which was also in Real Simple) and her version of Banana Chocolate Walnut muffins with a Cream Cheese frosting. Mmm… sooo tasty!!! And once again good for you. Whole wheat flour, no butter, splenda just all around goodness. Props to April!!! Perhaps I’ll remember to pull my camera out again for our next cooking adventure this week!!!
Filed under: Cooking
While I try to keep on track, for every new item I blog about there are other lost menu items that have never made it up here. So I thought I’d try to make a quick go of a few of the other items we’ve been eating in the last couple of weeks.
Portobella Mushroom caps stuffed with Goat Cheese and Pine Nuts in a Red Sauce. Quick. Simple. Easy. Tasty!!! These dont’ require much prep, and with only 30 minutes in the oven @ 350 they are a quick meal. Just one of several recipes from the South Beach Cookbook.
Flank Steak with Roasted Shallots and Goat Cheese. This Bon Appetit wonder was scrumptious. Marinate the steak in a mix of olive oil, red wine vinegar, thyme and garlic. Toss the shallots with the same dressing. Cook the steaks in the broiler and top it with a little goat cheese and sink you teeth into this wonder!!! LOVED IT!!!
Pistachio Chicken Salad. South Beach has some good ones. Here it’s the simplest of things give a meal the oomphh it’s looking for. For this Chicken Salad I encrusted the chicken breasts with finely chopped pistachios. Add pistachios to a food processor and chop to a fine mix. 
Lay the pistachios in the bottom of pie pan and press the chicken into the nuts, coating both sides well. Add some olive oil to a frying pan. Cook each side of the chicken about 2 minutes. Then transfer to a baking dish and finish cooking in the oven @ 375 until internal temp is 165 about 10-15 minutes. Just chop up the chicken and sprinkle it over a green salad and add any veggies you want. I made this salad with an Avocado Dressing, 1 avacado, lime juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Super simple. And this is really just too easy, and fast!!! It has to be put on the rotation for the “I just got home, it’s late and I want to order take out, but know I should cook something” kind of days. This meal can be ready in less than 30 minutes. Faster than most delivery services!!!
Mustard Tarragon Shrimp and Brussel Sprouts with White Beans and Pecorino. Bon Appetit may slowly be becoming my new Bible. I love Martha dearly, but this food is just so damn tasty.
April continues to bemuse the fact that she didn’t discovered Bon Appetit sooner. The shrimp here were tasty, but the clear winner was the Brussel Sprouts with White Beans. The Brussel sprouts are first braised in some olive oil. Then saute a little bit of garlic before adding in some chicken broth with the white beans and Brussel sprouts and reduce until the broth has become a glaze. Salt and pepper to taste and stir in the Pecorino. The flavours meld so well together. Our friend Jennifer has already remade this meal after we first tried it out on her
So that’s at least a few more of the meals we’ve been trying out
Filed under: Books
I zoomed through Garlic and Sapphiresby Ruth Reichl. Three days on the train to and from work and I had polished off this fun book. Ruth Reichl is currently the Editor in Chief at Gourmet magazine joining the staff in 1999. What’s interesting then about this book, which details her time spent from 1993-1999 as the Restaurant Critic for the New York Times, is that it was published in 2005, after she had left the job behind. It’s interesting to get a hindsight account of her activities. As the books subtitle “The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise” tells us, the stories about her adventures in eating at and reviewing restaurants had her donning disguises to try and get a more “honest” tasting of the food and service at any given restaurant. Any time Ruth was spotted as herself she would be catered to. Waiters fawning on her every need, course after course streaming from the kitchen, the best table in the house. She had to come up with a way to get around that, and so she invented characters to go out and dine in the establishments. This of course is probably a great reason why this book had to be written after she was done being the food critic, even when people would have loved to know about it as it was going on. You don’t reveal your tricks when you still are using them. You wait until the shows over and done and then you let people in on your scheme. That and I’m sure writing about your coworkers when your coworkers are staff at the New York Times may also not be such a good idea. You want to keep your job after all.
The book was laid out in a wonderful fashion. Chapters detailing each new “character” Ruth invented followed them to a restaurant and let you in on her dining experiences. Many of these chapters ended with the printed Times review of whatever restaurant she had been extolling, both the good and the bad. And if it wasn’t the review that you were finding, you were getting one of Ruth Reichl’s own recipes. I for one will be trying her recipe for Pasta Carbonara, which looked quite simple and easy. The book just flowed so easily. What could have seemed incredibly choppy flowed together without fault. I was left constantly wondering, how would she top herself now!
Ilana once again gets the props for pointing me towards this book. Loved it, want to read more, although it will have to wait. I am trying to venture all over the board, and only read one book by each author this year. There are so many books to choose from, I don’t want to limit myself to just a handful of authors, even if I love their writing. So… until next week.
There are successes and there are failures. I know that you need one to have the other, but still there is disappointment when things don’t work out the way you think they should. Last nites dinner of crab cakes and salsify was decent. Not a failure, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a success.
Let’s start with the Crab Cakes. Lump crab meat is expensive, even more so when you buy it at Whole Foods. However, they didn’t have it at the first grocery store I had been at, so we stopped by Whole Foods
on our way home from seeing Revolutionary Road (side note, very good don’t see it if you’re looking for a pick me up). The woman behind the seafood counter section showed us to the refrigerated section where they had pre-packaged lump crab meat. $3.99. Not bad. Get two containers, add it with our few other items and we’re ready to go. Until. You check out and each container rings up at an alarming $14.99 a piece!!! Definitely read the sign wrong. What is meant to be just part of our Tuesday nite dinner is now costing us 30 dollars!!! Stop. Return that, get the canned stuff. It’s still not $3.99 a can, but much less expensive. I don’t know what canned crab meat at Jewel or Dominick’s might cost, but crab cakes are being viewed as a treat by my pocketbook right now.
After chopping and cooking onions and celery. Measuring all the spices, sauces, mayo, parsley and mixing it with crab meat I thought. Boy these cakes aren’t sticking together very well. I’m not sure how breading them is going to go. Not well is the case. Gingerly touched, they still fell apart. I was able to place in them in the pan whole for first side browning, but forget flipping them. Crab cakes became crab crunch. Not the same, but April didn’t disapprove. She claimed to like them, although I didn’t find anything super special about the seasoning, and am still working on adding seafood and fish to my diet as something to be enjoyed. My vote is don’t make these again.
Salsify. Salsify is just strange. Maybe more strange because I hadn’t even heard of it before last week. April compared the finished version to french fries, but I won’t be buying this as substitute any time soon. 
I prepared the brown root vegetable per Emeril’s recipe here. #1- Peel the salsify. No problem. Softer than a carrot, peeling was relatively easy but time consuming. What’s strange is that you peel a section to reveal a milky white flesh which immediately starts to brown. Within seconds it is a brownish hue. The ends that I cut also leaked a milky substance, oozing out the top really. Never seen anything like it before. #2 Cook it. Put it on the stove top in a mixture of milk, water, salt and pepper. Bring it to a boil and simmer it for about 15 minutes. Pull it out and let it cool. #3 Coat it in cornstarch and sear it stovetop in olive oil. Kind of looks like a french fry. A duller french fry.
But the salsify didn’t seem to have any distinct flavour. I couldn’t detect an oyster flavour, which had been hinted at in articles I had read. Nothing sharp, tart or tangy. Nothing to push you to either side. Just a cooked root vegetable substance with a little browned coating.
Alone the dishes looked sad in their pans. Blah and unappealing. Which is why there are sauces and garnish. The red pepper and mayo sauce to top the crab added some much needed color, and a sprig of parsley brightened up the plate.
Like I said, not a total failure, but not exactly a success.
I did most of the grocery shopping yesterday at Harvestime Foods. A place extolled by our friends Dan and Anne. Located near Lincoln Square on Lawrence just west of Western this store has great produce, meats and breads. It was a very pleasant shopping experience. Poking around in a new store, checking out their specialty items (in this case lots of pickled vegetables, canned seafood and a variety of Greek and Latin foods) is always somewhat of an adventure. Trying to find all the things you need can initially be a challenge, but looking at all the different food stuffs is something new I am enjoying.
The produce looked quite nice. The berries I purchased black and blue, were found at the low prices of $1.19 and $.99 each. Such a steal!! I was thrilled. They also had some other fun fruits, like pomegranate and papaya. They had a variety of different apples, oranges and pears, and the fresh herb section was especially nice. Fresh basil, dill, parsley, the only one I wanted that they didn’t have was rosemary (this was unfortunate). But the basil was fresh cuts, not just the leaves, packaged up for consumer packaging tastes, but cut, put into bundles and rubberbanded together. Wonderful!!! The only other item I wanted that I left without was shallots. I know they aren’t the most popular item, but I certainly thought they had climbed up the ranks of onion/garlic stocks to be on the shelf. 
The meat counter was especially nice. Fresh cuts to order. 1 pound of sirloin and 1 pound of ground turkey. Cut and packaged to order. They did have a small section of prepackaged meats, but most of it was laid out deli style, with a glass case, counter and a butcher waiting on the other side to take your order. Love it!!!
They also had a variety of fresh baked breads. Things made from the simplest list of ingredients. Flour. Yeast. Honey. Water. None of the extra preservatives and colorings and High Fructose Corn Syrup. A Ukranian Rye and Sourdough. Mmm… I purchased a round loaf of Whole Wheat. Tasty tasty toast!! It’s nice to find foods closer to their origins. The list of ingredients on convenience foods moves the item further and further away from actual food, that it starts to become absurd.
All in all I would recommend shopping at foods. If you cook from scratch and don’t require a lot of extra processed items, you will most likely find 95% of what you’re looking for. And other people know what I’m talking about. The parking lot was entirely full. I waited 10 minutes for a spot before giving up and finding one on the street. I don’t mind carrying the groceries a little ways. It’s good for me. So try it out. It’s got the goods.
We picked up our last Winter Food Share this past Thursday. We have been inundated with lots of squash, potatoes, and onions in all the deliveries, plus a variety of other food stuffs. Parsnips. Turnips, Popcorn on the cob. Maybe not standard items purchased at the grocery store, but still easily recognizable. Then there were the roots we were delivered. Upon pulling them out of the box, I declared “Parsnips, except they seem a little brown and smaller” the next item that came out I again thought “parsnips, but wait I declared the last item to be parsnips, so they can’t both be parsnips, so what the heck was the first thing?” After going to the website of the CSA Homegrown Wisconsin (you can sign up for their Summer CSA now!) and checking out the Newsletter I was able to identify the food as salsify. What the heck is salsify you ask?
All the dishes (and there weren’t many) that I found on various sites seemed to pair salsify with seafood. Based on wikipedia, I assume this is because of the oyster flavour ascribed to the root. We are currently planning to try out this new root in the following dish by Emeril Lagasse. Flatiron Steak with Lemon, Herbs and Olive Oil with Sauteed Salsify and Elephant Garlic Chips. The next problem of course being, what is a Flatiron Steak?? While I like to think of myself as a Foodie. I may be misrepresenting myself. I have a lot to learn. I don’t know different cuts of meat or which part of the cow they come from. I’ve never had lobster and Dim Sum was unheard of only a year ago. I’ve come a long ways already, but I have many more miles to go. But I’m willing to try. Bring on the salsify. I’ll see what I can do. Worst of all, you throw it out and order a sandwich.
Check back later this week to see how it turns out
Filed under: Books
Oh Kitchen Confidential. How I enjoyed you. Props to the Shabanov for making sure I added this one to my list. I’ve watched Anthony Bourdain’s show “No Reservations” plenty of times, and perhaps that what gave this book the extra kick that made me love it so. It was as if Tony himself was reading it to me, or rather he was sitting in the back room of the Edgewater Lounge, (by their newly added fireplace, love it!!!) telling me about the adventures he has had in the restaurant biz. He’s got such an air, an authority, a tell it like it is showmanship, that is really just honesty. He tells it like he feels it. Sometimes he may be bullshitting, but it’s because he knows he can get away with it. And we’ll let him. We want him to. Perhaps that’s what makes this even more pleasureable. I don’t think he is BS. In fact, I think there are plenty of things he toned down to spare the innocent. For those of us who haven’t worked in the restaurant industry (I briefly worked at a hotdog stand after high school taking orders and bussing table, so my experience is limited) he gives us the inside view. The long hours, the lack of sleep, the drugs, the alcohol, the debauchary. He lets us in on all of it. And he ends in a way I just love. He says not to believe a word he says. After he goes to visit a fellow chef and observes the calm and cool kitchen. The drama free air. He takes it all back. It’s just his experience after all. And that’s why it’s great. It’s his and he owns it.
I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential to anybody looking for a good read. Foodie or not, you’ll love this book. It draws you in. You wonder, will he make it? Will he be able to deliver? Will he survive this hell? Well I suppose we know he survives. He wrote the book after all, but pick it up, check it out, borrow it from a friend. Just read it.
star star star star
