It tastes like burning...

Hey there. I know I said that I would write again on Monday, but life has been a bit hectic. Our son is sick, and hasn't been napping well. I'm trying to be extra quiet so that this nap lasts as long as possible. Let's see if I can get a blog post out before he wakes up! (Edit: I didn't make it, but he is sleeping peacefully for the night after starting antibiotics for an ear infection.)

Recipe 4:  Caramelized Turnips

During my first search for new recipes, I came across one for something like pork shanks and turnips. It made me realize that in my thirty years on earth, I have never knowingly eaten a turnip. So last week when I was at the grocery store I decided to remedy that problem. It is pretty obvious that HEB does not do a brisk business in turnips. The tiny bin in the unfashionable corner of the produce department was half full of dented, topless bulbs, but I felt committed, so I took home four of the nicer looking specimens.

Turnips in hand, I found this recipe.  This is my kind of recipe. Simple ingredients, and the instructions are basically "don't let the food burn".
At this point, I realized that I don't really know if all of the turnip root is edible, so I once again turned to the Internet for answers. This site let me know that I didn't have to peal turnips ... and that I was probably in for some trouble. The mangy roots I had picked up didn't seem to fit the bill of firm, small, young turnips that they recommend. Still, maybe they would turn out okay with sugar on them.
The recipe went together just fine (the one real change I made was to use honey - based on a recommendation from the comments on allrecipes - instead of sugar).  My husband liked it enough to finish his serving. The texture came out like a firm potato or boiled carrot. The flavor as he described it was like a raw broccoli stem. I totally get that description. I also think "peppery" is fair. To my mouth, though, the best comparison is to poison. After about ten bites, I had to stop eating. As soon as I put a bite in, my body had a strong "this is not food" reaction.

So, I'm not going to be rushing out to try turnips again any time soon. I think the fault is mostly in these individual turnips. They were probably too old and too large for a turnip novice like me. At least according tomy favorite nutrition data site I'm not missing much. I'm pretty sure there are more fun ways to get vitamin C and fiber.

In Which the Author Realizes that She is a Creature of Habit.

So, over the weekend I tried my third NYR recipe, based on a Budget Bytes email.  I've been receiving these emails for over a year, and largely ignoring them.  That is one of the reasons I decided to make my New Year's Resolution to cook a new recipe every week.  It was starting to make me feel dumb that I was getting all kinds of new recipes sent to me, but I was still cooking the same handful of meals week after week.

I like Budget Bytes because the author really seems to try to present simple recipes.  She also breaks down what she paid for each ingredient, and calculates the cost per serving for her dishes.

So, without further ado...

Recipe 3:  White Beans with Tomato and Sausage

Here is the recipe.  I won't copy it out again here because I actually managed to make this dish without meaningful substitutions!


Wait a second, you are probably saying, what does "meaningful" mean?  Well, I didn't put whole wheat flour where only white belonged, or switch around a bunch of acids, so I consider my changes to be minimal.

The first change I made was to use dried great northern beans (btw, are these from Canada?  I can't think of them as anything other than "Great White Northern" beans) instead of canned.  Beth of Budget Bytes talks about how they are less expensive than cannellini beans, but I still couldn't find any for less than $2.50 a can at my grocery store.  Maybe they have a secret low class name with a cheaper price, or maybe Texans just don't eat them.  In any case, I went with the $.88 a pound dried beans instead.  I bought two 1 pound bags at the grocery store, but thankfully looked here and realized that just one pound dried beans would do the duty for two 15 oz cans.

Now, here we come to the inspiration for the title of this blog post.  I picked this recipe and bought the ingredients on Monday.  I planned to cook it over the weekend.  I thought about it all week.

Did I soak the beans on Friday, or even Saturday night?  Nope.  Apparently if I don't normally do something after dinner, I have to write myself a note backwards on my forehead to actually make sure it gets done.

Thankfully, there was a "quick soak" cooking method listed on the package.  So, now I can pass this mistake off as wanting to provide extra information to my blog readers.  The method they recommended was to rinse the beans, put them in a pot with 2" of water covering them, then boil for two minutes and let sit covered for an hour.  I had to repeat this twice, draining the water in between, to get them to cook, and even then they were a little more firm than I think they should have been.  This was my first time cooking great northern beans, though, so it's possible it is how they are supposed to be.  (They also way more than doubled in volume, creating probably three and a half cups of leftover beans.) In any case, I'm glad I was able to proceed with the recipe, but I'll have to be extra careful the next time I want to do something with dried beans.

Once I had fixed my bean mistake, the recipe went together with relatively little fuss.  I used stewed tomatoes instead of crushed, because that is what I keep in my pantry.  I think this added to the cooking time because I had to chop up the tomatoes after adding them to the pan, and I believe they are packed in a little more liquid than crushed tomatoes are.

Overall, I think the dish came together well, and made a good meal.  There are just two things I am disappointed about with this recipe.  First, there isn't enough meat.  Two sausage links, especially cut into rounds, made it seem like most bites didn't have meat in them.  In the future, I think I'll either cook the sausage without the casing, so that it distributes more evenly, or just put more in.  The second complaint is a bit of a nit-pick.  I went with extra finely chopped frozen spinach, because I couldn't find the big blocks of spinach in the freezer case. The spinach basically dissolved, turning the lovely red sauce into a murky brown. Not a huge problem, but a little annoying.

To wrap this up, I want to apologize for publishing this so late. I started writing it on Monday, but the kiddo has been getting up really early and there has been a lot of housework to do. I also started The Red Queen by Phillippa Gregory, and of course a new book can be a time suck.  I tried my next recipe last night, so I'll try to get another update out tomorrow.

Mini Update: Cauliflower, websites, and NYR #1 Update

Just a mini update to justify sitting on my butt instead of mopping. It's supposed to rain today anyway, so why mop before the dogs come through and put paw and belly prints all over the ground anyway?

When I made my last recipe I bought a head of cauliflower, then didn't get around to cooking it because I had my son with me while I got everything ready for the oven. He wasn't going to play quietly while I cut vegetables, so it had to be put off. I made it up yesterday, and it turned out okay. I cut it up in the morning, put olive oil and salt and pepper on it, and put it back in the fridge. Last night I cooked it in a 400 degree oven for about 25 minutes, stirring every 10 or so minutes.

It was still a bit crunchy, and tasted mostly of pepper. I don't think this is how it was supposed to turn out. I suspect that oiling it ahead of time allowed the oil to soak in, and probably changed how the heat effected the veggies. The dish it cooked in was also cold from the fridge, which probably also had an effect. It is hard for me to remember sometimes that cooking is science, and you can't just throw the right ingredients together, the conditions also have to be right. I have about one serving left, so I might look into chopping it up and putting it on some spaghetti sauce I'm going to make for dinner.

So you've probably read this far and are thinking, "Is this all I'm going to get? She's just going to tell us she botched roasting cauliflower?"

To make this post worth your time, I also wanted to share a website I like to look at sometimes. Self.com has this fun nutrition data, which includes (if you have flash player) some fun colorful graphs. I have gone there in past to check if/how nutritious various foods, especially vegetables, are. It isn't perfect; as you can see, they didn't have roasted cauliflower listed, just boiled cauliflower.  But I went from having no idea what nutrients I was consuming to knowing I got some decent vitamin A, so that's something.

Finally, I thawed one of the newton cookie loafs I made for my first NYR recipe. It turned out just fine, in my opinion - no more soggy or crumbly than it was before I froze it. That is a huge plus, and means I will probably make that recipe again. If it hadn't frozen well, it would have been far too big a recipe to eat everything before it went bad.

I have my next recipe picked out, but I'm going to wait until the weekend to make it, in case it is a pain in the butt. So have a good weekend, and see you Monday.

Recipe #2, Italian Marinaded Chicken

So, Thursday I made my second NYR recipe:

Recipe 2: Italian Marinaded Chicken

The recipe is here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/melissa-darabian/italian-marinated-chicken-with-red-potatoes-recipe.html

(Note to self, make these links look nicer in future posts. What kind of amateur hour nonsense is this?)

Of course, I once again didn't have all of the ingredients the recipe called for. I ended up doubling the recipe, so what I actually used was something like this:

6 T olive oil
6 T Apple cider vinegar
3 T Rice wine vinegar
The juice of 2 limes (Okay, 1.5 limes. I was trying not to get lime juice on my dry winter hands and ended up dropping half of a lime.)
4 small cloves of garlic, sliced
~1 T Oregano
~2 t Rosemary
Some salt and pepper

I was pretty confident this would work alright, because I looked online and found that vinegar is less acidic than lemons, but lemons are less acidic than limes. So where I was using some vinegar and some lime (instead of some vinegar and some lemon), I figured it would work out okay. Also, I just didn't have lemon, so what's a girl to do? (Clearly not pick a recipe where she has all of the required ingredients, that would be silly.)

I also didn't use the chili flakes, which is a pretty major change. I do own chili flakes, but I wanted to be sure that the chicken was palatable to my son, and I wasn't entirely confident that the acid mix I was using would mesh well with heat.

The final substitution I made is to use bone-in chicken breasts instead of legs, but I consider that a fairly minor change.

I cut everything up and put it in two freezer bags at about 7am, and got them in the oven at about 5pm. I put the veggies and two of the chicken breasts in a 9x13 pan, and the other two breasts in 9 inch square pans. The breasts were large enough that if I had tried to bake them all together, they would have completely filled the 9x13 pan. The marinade did a goo d job coating everything, but what was left in the bags was extremely thin, so I'm not sure if pouring it over everything right before baking did any good.

The chicken cooked in about the 40 minutes the recipe predicted, but I was very disappointed to find that the veggies were still firm. I left everything in the oven for an additional ten minutes, but the carrots especially were still hard, and most of the potatoes were also underdone. I'm not sure why this happened. Maybe I should have crowded the pan with chicken? Would that have steamed the veggies more? Maybe it was the glass pan? (If anyone knows what I did wrong, please tell me!)

In any case, it is extremely disappointing to cook a side, then end up having to serve instant mashed potatoes and canned green beans instead.

The chicken itself turned out very nice. Normally when I cook chicken, I use frozen chicken breasts and just slather them with olive oil and coat them with spices. They end up pretty flavorful, but often dry.  Even after being cooked for ten minutes past done, this chicken was very moist (I am tempted to characterize it as damp, but that is a very unappetizing word to use). It had a nice roasted flavor, but otherwise I found it somewhat bland. I was a little stuffed up, though, and my husband thought it was flavorful enough. (The kiddo just chewed it up and spat it out, but he is going through a phase where he does that with food I know he likes.)

We ended up eating the veggies last night, and it made me wish they had made it on the plate with the chicken. They really soaked up the vinegar, and were very tangy. I had left them in the turned-off oven while we ate on Thursday, and my husband warmed them in foil on the grill last night, so they had some nicely browned bits as well.

Over all, while I might not use this exact recipe again, I plan to use marinades more in the future. It was easy enough,and resulted in noticeably better quality food (eventually). I'm also guessing that if I did the math, I'm probably paying a heavy premium for the convenience of the frozen chicken breasts.

I still have to pick this week's recipe. I got a couple of suggestions of places to look last week, so I'll be scouring those while we eat up the grillables from yesterday. I'm going to try to actually follow a recipe to the letter this week. We'll see if I make it.

New Year's Resolution

So, I've made a New Year's resolution, and I thought I would use this blog to track it.

I've decided to try a new recipe every week this year. I figure this will shake up our routine, and hopefully out of ~52 recipes, I'll end up with at least a few that I like enough to put into regular rotation.

This reaolution got off to a roaring start with exactly zero recipes tried last week. I didn't *quite* do nothing; I checked out a cookbook based on the show Good Eats, and read through a couple chapters of Mark Brittman's Quick and Easy Recipes from the New York Times. I hope to find something in the former, but I'm a bit dispairing of the latter. Sorry, Mr. Brittman, but with a toddler, carefully watching something under the broiler doesn't count as "easy".

This week I am trying to make up for lost time by making two new things.  Here is the first one.

Recipe 1: Sort of newton-esque cookies

I hadn't intended to bake for my first recipe, but after dithering for a week I thought I had to just pick something. I wanted to do a fig newton style cookie because I had picked up some fancy baby newtons for my son, which he really liked, but which are too expensive to buy regularly.

The Recipe:  http://m.allrecipes.com/recipe/10760/prune-and-raisin-filled-cookies/

To call what I did "following" this recipe would be a stretch. This was the closest thing I could find to what I wanted, but it didn't seem terribly toddler compatible. Instead of prunes and raisins I reduced about 4 cups of frozen strawberries with about 1\2 cup of sugar. I also used 3 cups of whole wheat flour and 3 cups of white flour instead of just white.  I was originally going to cut the recipe in half, then saw that it calls for three eggs, then ended up using flax seed meal instead of eggs. (I look back on this string of decisions and just have to shake my head. Listening to podcasts while cooking is apparently too much for me.) I completely forgot about the lemon zest (which I would have had to use lime or orange zest for anyway), and didn't make a glaze.

So, yeah. What I made was a "riff" on this recipe? Thumbs up?

The results were not bad, really. The strawberries didn't really get enough body to make a satisfying filling, and spread a lot when I put them on the dough. To combat this I rolled two of the sides up to partially contain them, then folded the other two sides up to enclose the top. This made for pretty thick filling-free ends, but otherwise worked well. The end result reads more as sweet bread enfused with strawberry than cookie filled with jam, but the kiddo likes it. Which is good, because I have an infinite amount of it. I'm hoping it freezes well, because there is no way to eat this much pastry before it goes bad.

Okay, the boy is starting to roll around, so I'll end on that note. Tonight I am cooking recipe #2, so I will be back over the weekend or early next week to report on how it went.

Still Alive!

So... I kind of forgot about this blog? Or rather, I had a bunch of life happen and just sort of stopped.

So, since last writing I gave up on the supper ambitious Bellingham Betties project, made a much smaller project for Sadie, gave birth to my son, and became a stay at home mom. My project tie has become extremely limited, but recently I have worked on a few things that I will post about later.

New Project!

Thanks to my wonderful friend Sadie, I have a new project!  Sadie is one of my oldest friends - I've technically known her since 6th grade, but I don't remember meeting her until high school.  We hung out all of the time - and because we were such good kids back then, most of it was playing card games at Sherie's or at grocery stores. 

Sadie is an awesome, dedicated, driven person, and since (like a lot of us) she doesn't find a good outlet for that in her work, she organizes bouts for her local roller derby club.  I think that is AWESOME.  I'm a huge fan of things that allow women to get a little aggression out every now and then, and don't assume that we're all delicate little flowers.

...she wrote in her blog about embroidery.  Anyway.

This is an interesting project for me, because I've never taken a logo and tried to translate it directly onto cloth before.  I try to be precise, but I'm more aware than anybody that this medium isn't made for crisp, precise lines.  Just look at the flower/gear project - not one of those shapes is 100% round. 

Hopefully, that blurring effect won't make this look shabby.

Here is the Bellingham Roller Betties logo - in all of it's crisp, original glory (yay, Google Image search!).

Here is the image Sadie sent me to make the template from.  I wanted something bigger than the picture above so that I could start with something that was large enough to look good on the project, rather than get everything perfect on a small picture and then lose detail when I made it larger.

And here is a photo of the image after I made a black outline of it in Photoshop and traced it onto the cloth.  I don't know why it looks so red - the cloth is black, I swear.  

This s going to need a lot of adjustment on the clost, I can tell.  I don't think that the bottom lines are so slanted in real like - they are laid on an uneven surface which is making them bend.  I will probably have to pull the N in Bellingham up a little bit, though, and do some more work to even out Roller Betties, although personally I like how the letters undulate.

In any case, I hope that I'll be able to actually keep this up to date week by week as I make progress.  I am really exited about this - I think that it will be an interesting challenge.

Expect more cruddy pictures from my phone's camera in the future!