Drinking Alone With the Dog

As most of you know, I live by with a delightful chocolate lab named Claire.  This means that by non-dog-person standards, I live alone.  Or at least without any other substantial companionship like a partner or a roommate.  Personally, I like it this way; living alone is much easier than forging a temporary relationship with a stranger and I can walk around without pants on if I so choose.  I get to eat what I want (when I want) with little regard for socially mandated mealtimes.  It’s very freeing.  As much as I’m a person of routine though I still sort of yearn for family dinner, so I try to eat between 6 and 7 (so I can watch jeopardy) and have an evening break before I dig into my “pre bedtime work.”

This leads to an interesting conundrum.  At home, the hours between 6 and 7 were Chris and Amanda social time.  Usually I’d be cooking or we’d be planning where to go if we were going out and Chris would be readying the table and making drinks, then we’d sit down, eat, talk, and have some connect-time.  I like an evening drink and I don’t quite know how to drink one (or two!) while living without other humans.

I can hardly share a T&T with the dog and I feel a little silly drinking one by myself.  Notably that doesn’t stop me from doing it, I found a bottle of “collins mix” at the grocery store today and have been enjoying it greatly.  My drink of choice is strong on the gin [or vodka] and light and limey and fizzy — I’m a fan.  But then again, I’m here alone and part of me says “oh no, you shouldn’t drink alone, that’s an indication of a problem.”

I’m inclined to disregard that part of me though, because I am a grown up, I drink one drink occasionally, and I don’t really know anyone around here well enough to get together for happy hour.  Let’s also note that Massachusetts liquor laws essentially forbid happy hour (see 204 CMR 4.00) — or the discounting of alcohol to any population at any time.  But on the flip side, I do now live in a state where wine and beer are available in the grocery store and I live across from a liquor store so I’m no longer bound by Pennsylvania’s weirdness that doesn’t let wine and vodka be sold in the same store (and generally requires that beer be purchased by the case — since I lived too far away from anywhere with the mixed six pack).

So I have a new ability to procure my alcohol of choice and a great taboo against drinking it.  Until I can make friends and drink it socially that is.  I’m torn.  I don’t want to do anything bad, but a before dinner drink is a little piece of home to me.  I think I’m going to keep drinking it — at least for now.  Perhaps it will be replaced in the future with a social drink in Amherst after my 4-6:30pm class?

Moving and Eating and Moving

As most of you know I’m moving in August to Massachusetts from Philadelphia.  I will also be leaving my big lovely kitchen (with cabinets, drawers, and a pantry) for a small apartment with a smaller-than-normal refrigerator.  It’s not a mini-fridge by any means, but certainly smaller than the one we have now.  I’ll also be leaving my husband at home — though he promises we can still have Wednesday-Pizza-Night together even though we’ll be far apart.

This brings me to the vast quantity of high-effort high-reward hippie food I have in the kitchen.  I don’t think he’s going to know what to do with, say, dried spelt and I don’t want to carry it with me, so I’m going on a “use stuff up” binge for the next few weeks.  This may also include some cooking that will fill the freezer.  I’m not quite sure what all we have to work with, though our freezer and pantry have lots of good ingredients.

We have grains (barley, quinoa, oats), dried beans (white, black, kidney), sauces and condiments (I have a strange habit of mass-buying barbecue sauce…), baking stuff (corn syrup, molasses, sugars, gelatins), and lots of canned food.  Chris will eat the canned food but I want to attack the dried stuff — particularly the beans and lentils.  I have a few good recipes for lentil burgers, I’ll make some freezable lentil stews, aaand…?

So stay posted (and feel free to make suggestions!) as I journey through the pantry and eat the tasty and more exotic ingredients!

Summer Food

My appetite changes in April or May away from stew and heavy to lighter fare.  I don’t really care for lettuce-salads very much but chilled salad food has a definite presence in my summer menu.  I have a recipe for pasta & 3 bean salad from that I made about a month ago (from Cuisine at Home; you mix pasta, salami, cheese, tomatoes, olives, and peppers with a garlic and lemon dressing) but today’s project is black bean salad.

I was thinking that it would go well with roasted corn and maybe some veggie kebabs on the grill? I’m working on a pretty relaxed dinner for 3, so something that doesn’t involve much prep? I made sangria to drink and we have corn…Maybe chicken?

Point being, salad.  I did some dried beans this morning and then mixed them with some salt and minced garlic, sliced grape tomatoes, cilantro, chopped green pepper, red onion, and olive oil.  The fridge now smells like cilantro.  My general philosophy is that most things taste good when you mix them with olive oil and garlic, though I’m interested in other summer salads? I think my next culinary adventure will involve olives and other marinated ingredients — like an antipasto platter but in a salad.   Not that lettuce is a waste of time, per say, I like lettuce.  If I’m going to have an ‘entree salad’ though I think it should have a stronger base; olives, pasta, protein…mayonnaise.  It might not be as nutritionally sound as an all vegetable dish but it’s just as easy to make and a lot easier to do in advance without it wilting.

Salad projects for this week include:

Black bean salad, carrot/garbanzo/cilantro/mirin salad, and perhaps a caprese because the tomatoes I got yesterday at the Dutch Country Market are so beautiful.

Shrimp & Grits

My holiday efforts, kitchen-wise, have been few and far between this year.  Because of the hectic December travel schedule I’ve been vacillating between cooking interesting (tasty, healthy, pretty…) dishes out of ingredients from the freezer and eating less interesting, healthy, or tasty food that uses up food that will spoil.  We did a pretty good job cleaning out the fridge before leaving for Christmas and brought half a gallon of milk, a few oranges, a piece of buffalo mozzarella, and some ground beef on the road with us.

However, I have been visiting the South.  I love the South.  I love the South mostly for the food available here — beans and slow cooked meat and hush puppies and Krispy Kremes and “country ham” and waffle house and oh my the calories I could consume!

Today, though, the culinary project is Shrimp and Grits.  My mother in law is an amazing cook and suggested that we try stone ground grits during our visit.  We sautéed onions and garlic in broth and butter, cooked shrimp in the reduced garlicky broth, and then served them over creamy grits.  It was simple, satisfying, and amazing with a small glass of dry white wine.  We enjoyed that with a salad of romaine, feta, pears, dates (chopped), pecans, and soy vinaigrette.

Perhaps not a gloriously healthy meal but certainly preferable to the cheeseburger I ate in the car on the way down here.

Oh man, I eat well.

So I haven’t been posting since October for a few reasons.  I made the decision to apply to graduate school, I started a new job, I attempted to succeed more mindfully at my old jobs, I got a new kitchen floor, I became a finalist in the 44th Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest (which is more time consuming than it should be) and I wanted to think more about what I’m cooking and eating before I wrote about it.

That doesn’t mean I’ve been fasting since October 3.  Au contraire, fair reader.  I have instead been eating a lot of the same thing.  Three bean chili, chikpea cutlets from Veganomicon, egg salad sandwiches, steamed spinach, and homemade pizza have been staples in the Maiden Street kitchen.  I also took the show on the road last weekend and made pot pie from scratch (or close to it — we did use puff pastry for the crust) with my Mother in Maryland.

In the interest of energy efficiency and using cheap ingredients I’ve been trying to learn new things to cook in my slow cooker.  I have a slow cooker similar to this one; oval, 6.5 quarts, with a penchant for cooking food hotter than I would like.  In order to adequately cook for two in this slow cooker is a big challenge.  Fortunately I borrowed a copy of “Not Your Mother’s Slow-Cooker” from my mother (hello, irony) last weekend.  This cookbook is pretty good in that it’s huge and has recipes for just about everything you’d want to cook.  It even has a section on bread machine pizza crust.  I don’t know the connection between bread machine pizza crust and slow cookers but I do like a good recipe for pizza.  Though I don’t have (or want) a bread machine.

The cookbook also contains size guidelines for each recipe and suggest which shape and size slow-cooker works best.  Fortunately beans seem to cook well in all sizes/shapes if you get the water ratio right so we’ve been making many bean-based recipes.  Last week we started off with winter vegetables, white beans, and a poached chicken on Tuesday and ate leftovers in various combinations for a day or two.  It wasn’t a particularly photogenic recipe (poached chicken looks pretty gross) but it was moderately tasty.  I peeled and cubed a small butternut squash, a few carrots, 2 potatoes, a large onion, and a few parsnips and dropped them in the slow cooker with a few cloves of garlic (smashed) and about a tablespoon of fresh thyme.  Let’s be honest, I didn’t measure it.  It was left over from Thanksgiving and you can’t really have too much of it so I just dropped “some” in still on the stems.  I’ve since learned you should add fresh herbs at the end of cooking (as opposed to dried that do well in the slow-cooker from the beginning) but they did look very pretty and they didn’t make it taste worse so no harm done.

I then skinned a chicken (a 4lb. “roaster” that had been sitting in my freezer for way too long), put half of a lemon (sliced) into it’s cavity, and snuggled it into the veggies in the slow cooker.  Then I added about a cup of water (again later I learned this would be a mistake) and set it on low to crock for about 6 hours.  In the last hour I added beans I had pre-cooked and some salt and pepper.

The chicken was delicious and shreddable and the veggies were done well after 6 hours or so but man there was a LOT of liquid.  I saved it to cook with beans later (what, throw it away? never!) but it made the whole process rather messy.  Whole chickens, especially when poached, do not hold together very well and then make big splashy messes when you drop them back into the cooker.  Or at least when I drop them back into the cooker.

I have learned several things about cooking a whole chicken in the slow cooker.  I will share them with you.

1. It might be the easiest way in the world to cook a chicken without having to think about how done it is (and knowing it will be cooked through) and still having tender meat.

2. That said the meat does have a different texture than if you roast it.  I’m OK with that for burritos and soup…But it’s not an all purpose way of cooking chicken.

3. Roasting makes a more appealing result.  It’s also easier to separate the “juice” from the fat; the slow cooker seemed to muddle it all together which was delicious but sort of gross the next day when there was chicken fat on the squash chunks.

4. I need to cook more stuff that comes out of the freezer.

5. Add more thyme (or add the thyme) at the end.  It would have looked pretty and tasted good.

Tomorrow’s adventure: Black Eyed Peas “Southwestern” style from “Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker.”

Ratatouille! Minus the Snazzy 3d Animation

I’m sure everyone was inspired by Ratatouille to concoct (or at least research) their own version.  Mine is loosely based on the Moosewood Cookbook’s non-spicy Mediterranean version with the addition of multi-colored peppers (because they were on hand) and some spicy Italian Sausage because it was starting to look pretty sad and lonely in my freezer.

Recipe is as follows:

Combine;

• 1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes and juice
• 1 medium (7″) zucchini, cubed
• 1 medium eggplant, cubed
• 2 bell peppers (colored ones are good, in a medium dice)
• 1 tsp. basil
• 1 tsp. marjoram
• 1/2 tsp. rosemary
• 1/2 tsp. thyme

In a slow cooker.

Sautée in 1T oil (or cooking spray, I guess, but it’s not as tasty);

• 1 onion (diced)
• 4 cloves garlic, smashed
• 1 tsp. salt
• & a grind or two of pepper

until the onions are soft but not translucent.  Add to the slow cooker.

Brown about 8oz sausage, drain, add to the slow cooker.

Add a little bit of water (about a can full).

Cook on low for about 6 hours or until the vegetables are soft and the eggplant tastes like tomato instead of eggplant.  Add 1/2 can ripe olives to the slow cooker — when they’re warm serve vegetables over pasta.

The secondary cookbook I was using suggested adding “quick cooking tapioca” before serving to make the sauce a little thicker.  I don’t care for the idea of adding tapioca (and I didn’t have any) so the sauce was quite thin.  I served the vegetables over spaghetti with goat cheese melted in so the thin sauce was incorporated quite nicely.

The recipe was rated as follows:

• 3 (out of 4 possible) husband grunts
• 4 (out of 4) Amanda stars
• 3 (out of 4) nutrition stars.

If I’d had whole wheat pasta or had left the goat cheese out (or used parmesan instead) I would give it four nutrition stars; the sausage isn’t overwhelming and the vegetables go well together.  Lycopene from canned tomatoes is good for you and…well…the slow cooker ads karma points to the day? Moosewood recommended serving with polenta but I was in the mood for pasta yesterday.

Things I Love: Soba Noodles

When I was in college, or more specifically in April 2002, I was lucky enough to eat at Suzie’s Soba twice a week for six weeks.  My school also paid which made a good thing extra fantastic.  Since then I took a breather from soba noodles for a few years until 2005 when I discovered how forgiving they are to cook and how much easier they are to eat than spaghetti.

I made for dinner last night a bell pepper and tofu dish from the New York Times‘ “Recipes For Health.”  Basically you marinate tofu in a soy sauce/sugar/oil/hoisin sauce marinade and then mix it together with stir fried bell pepper strips and add ginger, garlic, and more spicy sauce.  I didn’t have the green onions the recipe called for but I did have some delicious buckwheat soba noodles.

I learned from this that the recipe is amazing — spicy but not too spicy — and it goes well with a light beer.  I also learned that once you mix the extra sauce together and then serve the peppers etc. over soba noodles (and then reheat the leftovers) that the sauce permeates the soba noodles and just gets even more spicy and sweet.  I’d love to photograph this and show you all how pretty it was — I used some adorable miniature sweet peppers in red, yellow, and orange to go with the green bell pepper so the colors were just lovely.  
The recipe called for a lot of peanut oil.  I’m not honestly sure how the nut oils stack up healthwise, but the rest of the recipe was relatively light — 2 T of soy sauce (especially the low sodium kind) isn’t too much salt when it makes three servings of delicious.

It also means that I get to use leftover baby peppers with shrimps and goat cheese on our Wednesday pizza this week!

Planning ahead for tomorrow I’ll need to mix up the dough for Wednesday (and let it rise in the fridge).  Tomorrow I’m getting home from work relatively late (7pm) and we’ll probably eat eggs — though I was thinking about putting together some Moosewood Carrot Soup? I wonder if I could do that in the morning before I leave?

Other interesting things on the food front: How long do parsnips keep? I have some in my vegetable drawer that have been there since at least June 15, 2009 and probably longer.  They still look like “normal” parsnips and have the right “ripe” parsnip texture…are they OK?

Food it is!

The final decision for the next year or so of this blog is to explore food, cooking, and food culture.  Yes, there are a million food blogs out there.  There are probably even a million student food blogs.  But I’ve had a few friends this week comment on what Chris and I eat, how we store it, and how we balance food prep with our combined 6 jobs, that it seemed worth writing about even for a small audience.  And to be fair we do have six jobs but he works more than I do; thus a majority of the food prep (and shopping) is my responsibility along with the majority of the bathroom cleaning but that’s a story for another day.

This brings me to a description of how we eat…

• We’re not really picky eaters, either of us.  Though we do share a penchant for spicy food from India / North Africa / South America.
• We eat a lot of vegetables.  They help my skin stay pretty and I heard they were good for you.
• I love fried food but try to consume it only outside the home.
• Wednesday is pizza day.  Homemade, usually not ordered.
• We agreed to try to eat more locally and seasonally this past year.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading on macrobiotics and we’re always trying to save money — seasonal local produce is a lot cheaper than stuff imported from Hawaii or…?
• We eat meat and cheese, full and low fat dairy, and a variety of oils.  I understand that Olive and Canola oils have benefits for your cholesterol balances, but butter tastes good.  Everything in moderation.

For now that brings me to today’s food, and as discussed above, Wednesday is pizza day!

What to do with the blog?

I haven’t been writing this week, er month, mostly because of a trip to Georgia to see Chris’ parents and a good dose of home time.  I’m going on another trip this weekend which should be wonderful.  Anyway, the point is I’ve been busy and away from home a lot and I don’t want to write a lot about what I eat and how much I poop because I think I might be the only person interested in those things.

So I’m trying to decide what to do with this lovely blog other than let it languish and I have a few ideas.  What do you think? What should I do?

• Home improvement / home ownership journal.  My beautiful 1904 home is crumbling gently around me and it’s interesting [to some] to hear about our efforts to keep it standing and heated.
• Food? Nutrition? Food politics? I am deeply interested in those things but I’m not sure my perspective can’t be found more easily elsewhere.  There are so many food blogs out there…
• Cooking on a budget + grocery lists for the month? I’m doing a lot of planning to help Chris and I eat healthfully and economically this year with minimal reliance on things like rice that are cheap but…taste like cardboard.
• Teaching, school, education stuff.  This might be useful if I’m applying to school again.  Spending time with education and measurement issues in a public forum could be good practice?
• Other ideas? What to write about? I can always fall back on the eating / pooping / dog stuff that happens in my day to day life if focus gets boring?

Back to Philadelphia

I’m back in the city of brotherly love (for more than three days this time) from a splendid trip to Oregon.  Amy’s wedding was so much fun and Chris and I had a lot of fun exploring Portland, drinking Oregon wine, and walking through the ex-urban sprawl near PDX.

Wine Tasting

We drove the Historic Highway along the Columbia Gorge (where the wedding was held) and were just in awe of the scenery.  I would have loved to bike the road if I were stronger and the weather were cooler — somehow we ended up in Oregon during record hot weather.  It was lovely, actually, and much dryer than home.

The wedding was beautiful and perfect to what I know of A & J together.  It was also at a really nifty site with a sink that made donkey noises and canoes to play with.  There were also some gorgeous paths to walk around and reflect post: ceremony.  Congratulations you two!

We came home to an appointment with RightWay Waterproofing — for $3,100 they would install a “water proofing system” into the basement/kitchen to hopefully stop the leak that happens in the rain and to stem the damp.  I didn’t see the mold they said was growing in the tupperware cabinet, but I believe them.  They showed up on time and jumped right in to jackhammering the floor, removing the wall (!) and destroying the kitchen.  They dug down around the foundation on two sides (about 15 feet of trench) to install a pipe with holes and then dug out the closet by the fuse box to bury a sump pump and sewer link.  Holy crap.  Then they covered up the pipe with gravel and then concrete.

Now…the kitchen is mostly cleaned up, I didn’t clean under the table yet and I have to load up the dishwasher.  I don’t know what’s going to happen when Claire gets home and wants to put her little paws in wet concrete.  Partially I hope she does, because it would be super cute, but then there’s the issue of tracking concrete all over the house…Less cute.

I’m looking forward to having some time at home to replace the insulation and walls, then repaint (and replace the chalkboard wall).  For the next few weeks this might turn into a home improvement story.  Though it would certainly be useful to post the stories and pictures of the past few years’ home improvement adventures…From the water heater (not such a big deal, just expensive) to the heater heater (a huge deal, a crane, a new roof, and expensive) and all the stupid ceiling repair in the bedroom it’s been an interesting journey.