Newest favorite

I am consumed with beet-lust. I didn't know much about them until a few years ago, when Hannah introduced me to her teriakied beet recipe. I liked it a lot, but grating the beets was a hand-staining bitch, and I always had to pretend like I didn't think beets tasted like dirt in order to eat them, so I don't make the dish frequently.

Regardless, I bought a few beets last week because they were on crazy sale, and roasted them. I made a beet, mandarin orange, toasted walnut, and goat cheese salad. Insane. It was so amazing. But I'm a bad judge with how many dusty beets will turn into one dish, and bought too many.

With the leftovers, I made red beet risotto with mustard greens and goat cheese. I am fairly certain never ever in my life have I tasted a better dish. I may have even licked my plate.

Red Beet Risotto with Mustard Greens and Goat Cheese

1/4 c butter (I used olive oil to healthify it)
2 beets, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 1/2 c chopped white onion
1 c arborio rice
3 c chicken or vegetable broth
1 tb balsamic vinegar
1 1/2 c chopped mustard greens
1 (5 1/2-oz) pkg soft fresh goat cheese

Melt butter/oil in heavy saucepan over med heat. Add beets and onions. Cover; cook until onion is soft, about 8 minutes. Mix in rice. Add broth and veingar. Increase heat; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to med-low. Simmer uncovered until rice and beets are just tender and risotto is creamy, stirring occasionally (I stirred fairly nonstop. This is risotto we're talking about!), about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Spool into shallow bowls. Sprinkle with greens and cheese. (Epicurious/Bon Appetit)

Serve with one bottle of sauvignon blanc. Enjoy.

My kind of party

I wasn't looking forward to the party we went to last night. There are always a lot of people I don't know at parties like this, incurably hip people who annoy the hell out of me. The reason we go, though, is that these parties are thrown by one of Tim's childhood friends, J, another impossibly hip person who is also a Really Good Person, and his girlfriend K.

Tim thinks I go overboard when we have friends for dinner. I spend a long time mulling over the menu, and come up with much deliciousness, including fabulous desserts we'd never make just for ourselves. Sometimes I think that our guests can be slightly uncomfortable at the amount of effort I put into things, not realizing how happy I am planning and making sumptous meals.

But this is nothing compared to J and K. They go so very far overboard that it is ridiculously fun to see what they come up with. In an "oh my god, I get to eat this food?" way, and also in a "oh no, they didn't!"

Last night there was a grill going all night, churning out charred vegetables, marinated tofu, pork skewers, flank steak, many different sausages. Out of nowhere, a skate wing appeared, just because it was on sale, and J wanted to try it.

In the dining room, there was an immense table filled with fresh watermelon and pineapple, rice, corn salsa, shish kabobs. In the living room was the bar area. All the liquor you could hope for, and a huge soup tureen filled with sangria made with blood-orange soda, among other things. In the freezer, homemade sangria baby popsicles.

Planted in the middle of the kitchen was K, standing over a deep fryer. Knowing of its presence, we brought hush puppy batter. But the dough sat next to the fryer for a few hours, while K first shaved sweet potatoes into the boiling oil, then sweet potato fries, and finally, yellow tomatoes dipped in a beer batter she whipped up on the spot.

Finally it was time for the hush puppies, and I spent about half an hour watching over them, and listening to people rave. By that time, it was late, and the drunken suggestions about what to fry next were pouring in. J got out a vacuum-sealed can of Pillsbury croissant dough. He and Tim fashioned them into circles, and golden doughnuts soon rose to the top of the boiling oil. Sprinkled with powdered sugar, I swear I have never in my life had a better donut!

Meanwhile, K was still in the kitchen, chopping rubarb stalks and warming strawberries in a pot with fresh ginger. She poured the strawberry mix over the rubarb and put it in the oven to make a crumble.

We couldn't stay for it. I was getting tired.

K's friends are used to her staying in the kitchen, and will drift by through the night to chat. It was the kind of party I've always wanted to host. To be in my kitchen all night, making deliciousness for friends who have come to visit. Yes, that's my kind of party.

How to make your own olives

Start here:


First, order fresh olives online. Make sure they go to your in-laws' house so that you don't miss three consecutive deliveries and have to trek out to Lombard, Illinois, during rush hour on a Friday night to the FedEx handling facility.

Twenty pounds should be good.






Put them in a big-ass plastic bucket (not metal or any other business like that).

Pick out the ones that have obviously gone bad.


Mix a lye solution to pour over olives. Be careful. Lye is serious caustic!





Fill the bucket, covering the olives with the lye, and use a towel to push down on the floaters, making sure each olive is completely submerged in liquid. Let the mixture sit for at least 24 hours, until the lye has been absorbed by the olives, changing the color from spring green to olive. Open a side of the bucket, and pour out the lye liquid.


Take out the towel and rue the day you decided to use a formerly celery-colored, nice bathroom towel to tamp down the lye and olives.


Refill the bucket with clean water.


Do this once a day until the water runs clear (usually 3-5 days).

Refill the bucket with a salt water mixture, and let the olives sit for a few days. Remove a bunch of them to marinate. Pick over them first to make sure they are ok. A lot of them (probably at least 1/8) will be soft or swollen with rot. Get rid of those. Put the good ones in a vinegar/olive salt water bath. Add as much garlic as you can stand, and other herbs like rosemary, thyme, red pepper flakes, lemon zest. The more the better. Let it all marinate for 3-4 days. At that point, add as much olive oil (or slightly less) as you have marinade. This will mellow the flavor and slow the marination process.

Eat. Or give to many grateful, salivating people as gifts.

Vicarious sugar rush

My class wants to have a Valentine's Day party next week, and since we have a frivolous influence on our Policy teacher (a breath of fresh air compared to other classes, apparently), we will. One of my classmates requested my White Russian cupcakes, then I started daydreaming about other options.

Thinking about what I'm going to cook is almost the best part. I've decided on also making Samoas and Mexican Hot Chocolate cupcakes. I only found drink recipes online, so I guess I'm going to just wing it, using the old-fashioned chocolate cupcake recipe from Cupcake Bakeshop as a base (with darrrrk chocolate, of course!).

I was toying with the idea of using that cupcake recipe to create my own: raspberry curd filling with a milk chocolate cream cheese frosting, but Tim made a throw-up face at that, so I'm not trying it now. (Anyone think raspberry curd would be a good complement to a chocolate cream cheese frosting? I think so-ish. I am not certain.) I don't think I'll actually partake in these cupcakes, so I want to make ones that others will enjoy.

Getting to feed people and make them happy really is the best part. I think I'm actually not so much a chocolate (or sugar) junkie as I am a cooking junkie. Throughout this new eating-healthy business, I haven't really missed sweets much.

New addiction

It's really not been as hard as I expected, giving up cheese. I still eat it in wee amounts (to avoid illness brought on by guilt), like a sprinkling of feta on my leftover lentil soup I ate this evening, or the not-as-cheesy-as-usual nachoes I made in a pinch for dinner a few days ago because we were starved and hadn't planned a real dinner. Even still, my habit of coming home for a cheese and crackers snack was surprisingly easy to move past.

Because I found something new to fixate upon. Last week I was grocery shopping, in the cereal aisle to find some generic shredded wheat for Tim, and came across the toasted oooooats. Ah, generic Cheerios! It was kind of a splurge, because the generic isn't that much cheaper than name brand, but still, I wanted some.

And now I've eaten them every day for the past week. They're a good substitute for pre-dinner, "I have low blood sugar" snacking, and with frozen blueberries, just about the most perfect dessert I can think of lately (seriously!), as well as a good "I can't go to bed hungry" snack. I look forward to my daily bowl in a way I haven't ever done before (well, except for cheese, but that wasn't so much a treat as an entitlement).

Though a doctor once told me Cheerios spike your insulin more than some breakfast cereals (I think he was advocating Special K or something), I still feel like it's pretty healthy, and with blueberries and fat-free milk, my body wins like three times over. Good deal.

Preparation

I think one of the great things about being married to Tim is that I have gained a handle on preparation.

I didn't own any snow boots until he came into the picture. Actually, not until now. Six years in Chicago awful winters, and I never wore snow boots.

Each day at the office, I'd get low blood sugar and start shaking, barely making it home before I collapsed, face-down into a pile of cheese and crackers. It wasn't until we explored the South Beach diet that I was able to control that, and arrive home each night not feeling like death.

Now I don't leave the house without an energy bar (homemade), a nail file, hand lotion, and enough layers to deal with whatever the weather throws at me.

I make granola a few times a month so we have breakfast (and snack food for when the low blood sugar sneaks up on us). Our cabinets are stuffed full of canned vegetables and falafel mix, so if we come home without an idea for dinner, we don't have to go out.

Preparation has bought me a great deal of calm, and I love it.

Franziaaa . . . the wine in the box

For what seemed like every single day in Physics class senior year of high school, David Rowe sat behind me and sang this jingle. I remembered it the other day when I was thinking about how I needed to start drinking red wine on a regular basis, but how it probably defeated the health purposes to drink a whole bottle in one sitting because I don't want it to go bad. So really the perfect item for me would boxed wine that wouldn't turn to vinegar if I only had one glass a night.

Oh, if only it was good wine!

I thought about the red wine because I need to start eating heart-healthy. Because I just found out my cholesterol level is currently on red alert, danger zone.

Though it could primarily be from genetics, I do eat what could technically be defined as an ass-ton of cheese. It is, after all, my number one favorite food. And as much as it kills me to cut down on the cheese, and despite the genetic predisposition, I just can't wrap my head around going on medication when I'm only 30.

Like I blogged about earlier, my resolution is to maintain calm in the face of stress, so my first thought was, "(damn it) I'm going to have to start an exercise program (damn it)." And so I did.

And then I decided to get rid of all the unhealthy food in the apartment--by eating it. (Don't want to be wasteful--and Tim sure isn't going to polish off that half-pound of sandwich ham!)

And I announced to my classmates my newly discovered condition, and that I was starting an exercise program, and several of them said they'd join me, so now I have to stick with it.

But the thing about remaining calm is that it doesn't always work inside. My head knows all the logical things, but I guess I didn't give myelf time to acknowledge what a potentially huge thing it is to have proof that there is something terribly unhealthy and dangerous in my life. Dad says, "well, it's not like you're going to drop dead from a heart attack tomorrow . . ." but doesn't that happen to 30-year-olds sometimes? I mean, it's not outside of the realm of possibility or anything.

And I do eat a lot of cheese!

So I'm upset and depressed, and scared, and I'm worried I'm going to develop an eating disorder. I came home with low blood sugar tonight and needed to stuff some food in my face just so I wouldn't pass out. Normally, that would be cheese and crackers. But instead I looked for something healthier. I found a Trader Joe's frozen bag of chicken fried rice (and all the ingredients were good) and made that. And then ate it worrying that I used too much of the spray olive oil in the pan to fry it, and what about the fatty bits on the chicken, and is white rice merely not the greatest thing to eat or is it in fact raising my cholesterol by fractions of a point as it heads down my gullet?

It's pretty ridiculous, I know. I know what's healthy, and that we do eat very healthily. (I guess I did marry someone who is beyond anal when it comes to the food he puts in his body.) But I suddenly feel paralyzed and in the dark, like I forgot all of that, and as though I was just deluding myself into thinking we were healthy when actually we subsist on McDonald's supervalue meals.

I guess that year of mozarella sticks and hot wings, aka 2002, is catching up with me.

Content

Katie and Hannah came over for brunch this morning, and it was just lovely. Good food (roasted garlic and red pepper quiche, and raspberry cream cheese coffeecake), good friends, good weather (68 and sunny!) . . . There is nothing better.

Tim and I decided we couldn't do as much entertaining as we used to in Alabama, because it got expensive (of course, I would often go overboard with it all), but I think even if we can't afford to go out to eat, we still can afford to have people over. My home is finally cozy and cute, and I love to share that.

And there's no better way to start a morning than with people you love. (Of course, an even better way to continue the day would be to lay around with them and watch cheesy teen movies, but I do have to study.)

Stuffed Zucchini

I pulled this recipe together out of things in the kitchen and a recipe from J. Key, though, is fresh basil.



Stuffed Zucchini

zucchini
onion
garlic
feta cheese
fresh basil
bread crumbs (I used Panko)
salt and pepper, to taste

Using a knife and spoon, cut/scrape out the guts of the zuch. I like to leave a thick rind on it.

Dice the onion (the smaller, the better, but I'm not a huge onion fan), and sautee in olive oil with garlic. (I used roasted garlic, because I had some leftover, but fresh would be fine, too.) After cooking the hell out of the onions, add chopped zucchini guts.

You're supposed to cook that until the water from the zuch cooks off, but I didn't notice it giving off a TON of liquid. Just cook it until you think it's done.

Add a handful or two (depending on your love of feta) of cheese, and roughly chop the basil. (I like leaving them in fairly big pieces. yum.)

Add a few shakes of breadcrumbs. (Though I didn't do a side-by-side taste test, it seems like the Panko crumbs probably lighten the stuffing a lot more than regular crumbs. But really, I think any kind would be fine.)

Salt and pepper to taste. Spoon the filling into the zucchini shells. Cook them in a baking dish with sides, just in case they leak, and spray the bottom of it with cooking spray so they don't stick.

Bake in a 400 degree oven for 20-30 minutes, depending on how soft you want the zucchini rinds (I like them still with a bit of crunch).


As much as I am irritated by recipes calling for pinches and dollops and glops (god, I hate glops!) that's basically how I cook, so I can't give out any real measurements. Sorry.

I think there's really no way to fuck up this recipe--provided you don't forget about it in the oven and burn it. It is deeeeelicious!