Filed under: Cooking
Everyday Food is still the reigning cookbook of choice. Saturday nite we cooked dinner for J&R and laid out the following dishes.
Lentil Walnut Burgers. We’ve made them a couple different times and this may have been the best yet. Even with substitutions!!! We didn’t have enough walnuts, so we used pecans for additional nuttage. Also, they seemed really moist so I added an additional 1/3 cup of bread crumbs to the mix. I think the added moisture came from the fact that we had leftover lentils in the freezer which were defrosted just prior to being used. They had more water content than fresh cooked ones would have. And this is part of what I’m going to say helped!!! In previous versions, the patties have been drier and at times, difficult to flip in the pan, for fear of crumbling apart. This mix was much more moist and hung together better while they were frying. I want them back on the menu sooner than later. I hate to call them veggie burgers, because as a meat beef eater, a veggie burger sounds like it is just trying to imitate a burger for people who don’t want to eat meat. This is way better than any “veggie burger” in that regard, in that I love a juicy beef burger, but I love a good lentil walnut burger, so veggie or not, you need to try these!!!
Spinach salad with Shittake Mushrooms and Quinoa. This is a super tasty very easy salad to throw together. The mushrooms get cooked on the broiler, while the quinoa cooks on the stovetop while you wash and prepare the spinach. Where it all comes together in the end is a tasty salad mix. While we did use this as a side salad it can also be featured as a main course, as Martha notes quinoa contains protein and helps balance out the nutrients in this meal.
Sweet Potato Fries. Okay, these aren’t actually Martha they’re Bon-Appetit, but they were quite tasty. Tip to making good sweet potato fries seems to be 1. Keeping the fries thin. The recipe says 1/2 inch, ours were more like 1/4 inch
2. Spreading them out on the cookie sheet. Don’t crowd them together, so they each have plenty of room to be tossed.
3. High heat. These suckers cooked at 500 degrees!!!
And we weren’t the only ones eating dinner that nite. Emerson just started eating Rice Cereal!!! Solids!!! Bravo 
Filed under: Restaurants
For Valentines day we contemplated several restaurants. Lula was offering a fixed menu and was actually taking reservations, but it seemed a little seafood heavy and came at a cost of $75. We could go to Francseca’sthe little Italian place we had tried last year. The food was delicious and I always loved an order of pasta. But no, we decided to forgo the dinner nite out and instead treat ourselves to a splurge of Hot Dougs hot dogs!!! We’d been talking about going there for what feels like forever and had never made it. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. They only make their duck fat fries on Friday and Saturday so that too worked well into our plan. So… on Saturday after planning our weekly food menu, walking the dog and doing some grocery shopping we set out a little late around 1:45 to get a belly full of goodness only to be greeted when we got there with this!!!!
A line, and not just any line, it stretch a block down such that you couldn’t even see the restaurant anymore.
Now perhaps I should have expected this as we had just watched Anthony Bourdain’s Chicago episode of No Reservations where he goes to Hot Dougs and also finds a line, but he went in summer!! and it wasn’t Valentines day!! when I thought most people would step it up and not just get hot dogs like us. We were sadly mistaken. Estimating the line to be at least an hour long, and having only eaten 2 eggs for breakfast (so in order to be fully hungry for this tasty treat) we left Hot Dougs behind and headed to Evanston to get our hot dog fix at
Weiner and Still Champion. And here is the reward.
Country Fried Bacon. What is it you ask? Glorious battered deep fried bacon served with an Argentinian Herb and Garlic Mayonnaise and a spicy bbq sauce, like what you might find with hot wings. OH MY GOD!!! It was salty fatty heaven!!! Accompanying this mound of goodness we each chowed down on two Chicago dogs and cheese fries and a Coke!!!
Heaven. We enjoyed ourselves thouroughly. Stuffed to the brim we rolled ourselves out of the small restaurant and poured ourselves into the car to go watch Coraline(which was awesome). So Hot Doug’s we’re sad we didn’t get to enjoy what has been famed but Weiner and Still Champion, thanx for coming thru and letting us know there’s more than one great hot dog stand in this fine city. (Well a close suburb, but still)
Weiner and Still Champion is located on Dempster just west of Chicago in Evanston. Check them out tonite!!!
The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat By: Charles Clover
Excellently researched and written book about, well about what the subtitle declares it is about. The amount of information packed into this book is a little overwhelming, but the way it is all crafted together in an incredibly persuasive argument here is something to be applauded. It has been by newspaper like The Independent which calls this book “The maritime equivalent of Silent Spring“. If you don’t know Silent Spring, originally published in 1964 it was the book that helped spur the public’s interest and awareness in environmental issues, specifically that DDT pollution was wreaking incredible havoc on the world. But even if you question any of the rebuffs of the information being presented here as being taken out of context, or missing the bigger point even if you could disprove 50% of his information (and I doubt you could) this book is giant slap in the face.
Now.. as I’ve already discussed this book with friends who accuse me of having a prior disposition to want to find reasons to not eat fish (I have never been a fish lover. As a child my mom tried to pass of fish to me as “white steak”, my response? “This white steak tastes a lot like fish!”) I want to try to come out and defend myself. I want to like fish. I’ve heard a lot of good things about fish as a health food, and it doesn’t (at least the wild stuff) have any of the inhumane treatment problems that a lot of cattle, swine and chicken have nowadays, and there’s a ton of different varieties. There seem to be so many positives. I just can’t get used to the taste. I need to experiment more. Try more things. Try more seasoning, but I want to try those new things with a slightly different take which is wildly influenced by my reading of this book.
The abuse of the worlds oceans and taking fish out at an alarming rate have reduced fish populations and he talks more about breeding populations than seems possible. In some areas the fish population has been reduced by 50%, 75%, 90%. Newfoundland used to be a hotbed for cod. Now there is none to be had. The fishing industry for cod there is dead! There are countless examples in the book. All shocking. There seems to be so much greed on the part of fisherman, taking more and more from less and less. Using technology to locate what’s left and taking it too. There is also greed in part on the consumer, not caring to know or think about where the fish came from. How it was caught, what else died so that we could eat it and if it was old enough to have reproduced or removed from an already depleted ecosystem. And many poor countries in Africa especially whose governments sell fishing rights to other countries (such as Spain) because they are so poor and they need the money, yet their own citizen who then fish for sustenance on their own shores go hungry as all the fish is taken up by large boats and shipped off to more wealthy countries.
Without reading the book and having all the convincing arguments put in your brain that way, check this out. Fishbase.org which is an all around smorgasbord of information on fish, links to 36 different organization that all publish lists for consumers. While there are variations on each site, and each one includes separate sets of factors and updates their lists independently they all say similar things. There are fish that can be eaten in good conscious and there are fish that you shouldn’t be eating. Check one of them out. Charles Clover seems to think the WWF (which has been an advocate for animals for a very long time) publishes one of the best lists. I printed it for our fridge. So that I can work on trying new fish, but making sure we are trying something that we can feel good about. As the organic market which includes vegetables, eggs, milk, and meat moves off land and into the ocean and begins to apply more and more to fish and seafood I agree with the author that it is coming.
This was a very interesting read and I would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in knowing more about the fishing industry. It was an eye-opener on more than one occasion, and has definitely influenced how I will think about fish in the future.
I’m sentimentally attached to my Everyday Food: Great Food Fast cookbook by Martha Stewart. It was one of the first real cookbooks I ever purchased and I’ve made quite a few recipes from it, and was therefore happy when April picked several recipes from it to cook this week. One of our new tries was these Enchiladas with Pumpkin Sauce.
April roasted the last pie pumpkin for the food share for the recipe, but after I pureed it I found we only had a little more than a cup and the recipe calls for 15 oz. What to do?? Like in the pumpkin pie recipe we used from Cooks Illustrated April had the good idea to add in sweet potato. By cutting it into small pieces she was quickly able to cook the sweet potato on the stove top to add to our pumpkin so we would have enough for the sauce. I think it was a really great addition. Pumpkin and sweet potato go really well together.
While I continue to feel and internal pressure to follow the recipe I do think I’m learning to color outside the lines a bit more. Besides the switch out with sweet potato and pumpkin we made a number of other tweaks to this recipe.
We used a 9X13 pan instead of the 8×8 Martha recommends. As April started assembling it became quickly obvious that not everything was going to fit into the small 8×8. There was so much more sauce than could fit in that tiny area.
We used 6 8inch whole wheat tortillas instead of 8 6inch corn tortillas. Other people on Martha’s site complained about the corn tortillas completely falling apart. Not so with the whole wheat flour
And one bit of amazement was the adding of 2 1/2 cups of water. Both of our intial thoughts were, that is going to be way too much water. But not so. It thinned the sauce down just enough.
We also added sour cream, some left over avocado creama and tomatoes on top. This will happen again when we repeat, which we both agreed should be done again. Also, we’ll probably add a little cilantro if only for garnish
Filed under: Cooking
And by UP, I mean Stackers!!! We had dinner with J&R last week and Rene made us these tasty veggie stackers with a side of quinoa.
In the mix are layers of grilled portabello mushroom, onions, tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese. Drizzled with Balsamic Vinegar and a Truffle oil and dusted with Parmesan these served up as a tasty treat. They looked so beautiful too!!! I will have to keep this in mind as inspiration. Right now I’m thinking the cool summer version done with cucumber, tomato, mozzarella and mushroom. Served cold instead of warm.
In addition we also had this tomato soup with crab and avocado which is a Rene original. He does love to play in the kitchen and I have to say his creations are right on the money. Never boring. Always flavorful. And served with love!!!
We tried to take advantage of the beautiful 50 degree weather in Chicago this weekend by investigating a new park with the dog. What was not considered was the amount of meltoff and flooding that would come with the 50 degree weather, considering all the snow and cold we have had up to this glorious weekend!!! MUD CITY!!! Alas, it was a fun adventure. I’m trying to work my way around all the city parks, there are so many of them and the dog loves getting out and about as much as I’m enjoying seeing something new. But anywhoozle. The point here starts then with post dog park mud explorations we were planning on getting some groceries on the way home.
On our way to Trader Joes, we saw a sign outside a Church Building advertising “WINTER FARMERS MARKET : PUBLIC WELCOME” So we swung a right with the car, circled back and went in to check out the goods. I was initially hoping for a larger variety of fresh vegetables and squash and such, but what we found was 40 bucks worth of homegrown goodness such as …
Organic Salsas with no added sugar or preservatives. Eat it up!!! Brought to you by Tomato Mountain Farms in Brooklyn Wisconsin. The smoky one is super tasty!!
Breakfast Sausage and Lean Ground Beef from Arnolds Farm. Note – this guy takes orders for his meat and makes some kind of monthly delivery to the Chicago area. I’m looking into this more as these were some super tasty links!!!!
Buckwheat Flour – Seriously we couldn’t even find this stuff at Whole Foods, the mecca of out of the way “Health Food” flours such as Buckwheat. It’s in a Foodsaver container which is a whole other post to come. April foodsaved most of our freezer this past weekend You can find this one at Ted’s Organic Grainsin Dekalb Illinois. Which ooh, they have a bunch of flours that all look rather spectacular!!! Perhaps we’ll have to try some others
Baby Bella Mushrooms – No pic, but these things were plump and beautiful!!!
Blue Cheddar Cheese – I want to try some Mac and Cheese Recipe for this tasty consumption!!! Know of any?? This one is from Ropp Jersey Cheeselocated in Normal Il. Holla at my Aunt and Uncle!! They used to live in Normal.
Next time I see one of these signs I’ll be sure to be stopping again!!! You never know what you are going to find.
Filed under: Books
Diet For a Small Planet : Frances Moore Lappe
One of the first things to know (which may be obvious by the look of the cover) is that this book is not a current title. Originally published in 1971, I read a 20th Anniversary Edition, which while still adds some updated and revised information via 1991, that’s still 18 years ago!!! I wanted to add this book to the list because it does feel like one of those pivotal food books that has ever been published, especially in recent memory. While trying to remain open minded, I admit I went into it thinking everything would sound outdated and not applicable to the world we currently live in where the new food push seems to be all about organic and local. I thought this book would be all about vegetarianism. While some of my preconceived notions were true, I was more surprised at the things that weren’t true, and those things that felt like they could have been published now! It doesn’t feel like an old outmoded movement as a way of eating. Kind of scary.
First, she isn’t trying to promote vegetarianism. She wants a return to a more “natural” way of eating, where the majority of our food consumed is plants and meat appears only briefly as a supplement. She wants people to eat whole grains and vegetables and fruits. Un-processed foods. The further we get away from the initial starting ingredients the worse our food becomes and it become less and less about food, and more about profit margins for corporations and power over the food supply and therefore the people. The return to natural grains echoed what I had read in the South Beach Diet. The thing that continually gets me, is it seems so obvious! Whole grains have all the fiber and nutrients that your body needs. You feel full. And there are so many different kinds of foods to eat you can hardly believe it at first.
So much of the book actually seems to focus on power. And the lack of power by many people to control the foods available to them. Why are there starving people when there is so much food? We feed so much grain to livestock to provide meat for an elite world class while millions starve and don’t have enough sustenance to live. Lappe argues people to do starve because there is not enough food. The solution is not ramping up our production. The solutions lie in what food gets to what people. Can we forget the masses and only think of ourselves?? Lappe feels that choosing to eat in the reduced meat way that she provides is responsible and a start to addressing the real problems involving the needs of the powerless. Starting here will you get you interested there, learning more, becoming informed, no longer turning a blind eye, doing something about it. Change can happen. She wants it to happen. We can make it happen.
Here’s a little video she’s got on the website http://www.smallplanet.org
2.5 stars. Interesting informationt that helped push me more to think about where the food movement has been and where it is now to where it is going. But no revolutionary new information that you can’t find in something newer and perhaps more relevant to today’s food systems (such as “The Omnivores Dilemna” which I read a couple years ago, or what I am guessing will be “In Defense of Food“. (which I plan on reading soon) Michael Pollan seems to be the new mass media published voice for a new way of thinking about our food).
Ooh, this quick articleMichael Pollan published in 2008 in Newsweek sums up a lot of the ideas from this book which are still a problem today!!!
The 1980’s seemed like the heyday for the food myth that eggs are bad for you. Too much cholesterol. You shouldn’t eat more than 3 a week. They would be your doom. Times have changed and we know that eggs arent’ the the threat they once loomed to be. Which is perfect for me and my weekend breakfast. We seem to have eggs every weekend. Never the same, which is one of the reasons eggs are so fascinating. They go into so many foods, can be prepared in a myriad of different ways, but they’re always an egg. This past weekend we had them
On Saturday…
Poached atop a wholewheat mini bagel with melted mozzarella, tomato tapenade and garnished with cilantro. Also a side salad of avocado with lime and cilantro.
We bought this poaching pan at a garage sale for a quarter, it looks kind of like this one. 
The problem being we only have the insert and don’t have a pan that the insert fits into thus making it worthless. Until… I watched April put the mini bagel halves in the holes and put the whole thing under the broiler. Brilliant!!! If it worked the way it was supposed to and the the eggs were more perfectly round they might fit atop the bagel better without hanging over, but I like the way these ones kind of drape over the side. They certainly taste just as good. And I’ll venture better!!! Because they require a bit more care and love to cook
And on Sunday…
Poached again, but with a side of sausage links and a green salad.
This was some of the tastiest breakfast sausage I’ve had in a long time. We randomly stopped at a Winter Farmer’s Market on Saturday held in a church basement down in Roscoe Village where we got the links straight from the source. Arnolds Farm. (I’m working up the entry about all the other great stuff we found at the market. Great spontaneous stop shopping trip!!) With a side green salad with blue berries and a fig vinaigrette. And a piece of toast!! HEAVEN!!
Filed under: Cooking
Earlier in the week we had prepared a Thai Caramelized Pork Salad where we cooked 4 pork chops instead of the 2 requried leaving us with 2 leftovers. As we were missing the rest of the ingredients that went into the Thai salad, we had to find a new use for them. Enter the fried rice stir-fry. When I looked at the wonderful creation that April whipped up for us Friday nite, I thought. Yes!! Stir-Fry is a great answer to leftovers when you don’t know what to do with them. We made a batch of rice in the rice cooker (I think it was Julie Powell in “Julie and Julia” who said people either love or hate the rice cooker. We love it, I promote it, and never ever!! want to make rice in a pot with a lid again ever!!!) and then April set out to make some fixings to make a pork fried rice stir fry. So simple, I plan on trying it soon. (Although really my logic side likes a recipe more than free wheeling in the kitchen. April is the one to ask to make you something, when we don’t have a plan and you have to use what’s available)
What she used.
1 onion – diced
1/2 container mushrooms – sliced
1 carrot – diced
1 red pepper – chopped
handful of almonds
can of water chestnuts
2 leftover pork chops cut into cubes
2 garlic cloves – chopped
1 piece candied ginger
2 eggs
hoisin sauce
olive oil
salt
pepper
Simply add some olive oil to a pan and stir fry your vegetables. Start with the one that will take the longest to cook, like the carrots and onions, you might add the chopped garlic and ginger now also. Gradually add in the other ingredients like water chestnuts, peppers and mushrooms. You’re trying to get everything cooked to the right degree without overdoing it. You can set all of these aside.
Add a little more oil and put the rice into the pan to fry. Break 1 or 2 eggs and whip them in a side container. Pour the eggs over the entire mixture. Toss together to get cooked egg mixed in with your rice. Add all of your vegetables and meat back in with your rice. Add the hoisin sauce and mix everything thoroughly. Season to taste with salt and pepper and Voila!! You’ve got yourself a tasty new treat.
While we do love the hummus, and make it almost weekly for a snack or appetizer, I upped the Mediterranean anty last nite by making a cannellini bean salad and chickpea and goat’s cheese felafel. My success varied between very tasty (the salad) and needing to learn more about correct frying methods (the felafel).
Both recipes are from a cookbook called “Off the Shelf: Cooking from the Pantry” by Donna Hay. This book is pretty superb. But one of the things that can throw you, is the measurements. Here’s the recipe for the cannellini bean salad. See if you know what I mean.
Cannellini bean salad
Combine 2 x 400g (140z) cans drained cannellini beans, 200g (7oz) blanched and halved green beans, 200 (7oz) halved cherry tomatoes, 1 teaspoon paprika, 1/2 cup chopped mint, 1/2 cup chopped flat leaf parsley, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) lemon juice, cracked black pepper and sea salt. Serve with grilled flatbread.
Do you spot what I’m talking about? 400g? 200g? Just where was this cookbook published. Australia!! That does it. Metric rules most everywhere except for here in the US, and yet… Not everything is metric. 1/2 cup and 2 tablespoons. These are odd measurements in themselves that only seem to apply to the cooking world. Are there non-food products sold in such increments?? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Hmm… Anywhoozle, super tasty salad. Healthy. Try it.
So along with the salad I also tried to make chickpea and goat’s cheese felafel. The problem was not in making the felafel. The problem was in the frying of it. April came home in the midst of my cooking and she was set to the task of frying. She got out the candy thermometer, (cheap piece of crap that it is, we need to find out and upgrade to the one recommended by America’s Test Kitchen) but it was not going to cooperate with the pan. So we had no idea what temperature the oil was. Just that it didn’t work. When she added the felafel to the peanut oil, it’s like the patties started to dissolve. The outside layer would get crunchy and fall apart in the pan, coating the bottom with a fine brown sand. Pull them out, try them in the broiler. Helped some, but really there is some technique that needs to be researched to try and improve the end result. So… if you want to try and let me know what the secret is…
Chickpea and goat’s cheese felafel
Place 2 x 400g (140z) cans drained chickpeas, 1/2 finely chopped red onion, 1 1/2 cups fresh breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup each of coriander (cilantro) leaves, mint leaves and flat-leaf parsley and 2 teaspoons ground cumin in a food processor and process until the mixture is finely chopped. Shape into rounded patties with a small piece of goat cheese inside, then refrigerate for 30 minutes. Shallow-fry in hot peanut oil until golden and drain on absorbent paper. Serve with a squeeze of lemon with drinks.
