Burnt Noodles and Fruit Lupuls

Last week, I was down with an illness. These things happen when you start a new job and hang out with over 80 new germ carriers aka kids. In my wallowing, dinner magically appeared, cooked with love.



Mmmm... Delicious Delverde brand Tagliatelle all'uovo a nido, made in the Majella National Park, Italy tossed with sauteed fresh scallops, giant prawns and portobello mushrooms in garlic butter and a lovely secret sauce. Let me say again: MMMM... I think I may find myself coming down with a cough...

Posted by HG at 5:19 PM | 2 comments  

Labels: Pasta, scallops, shrimp

The one thing I love best about summer ending is that despite it also meaning the end of all that readily available fresh produce and delicious summer cooking is that when the weather starts getting cooler and you end up bundled up inside buried in a hoodie instead of lounging in front of a fan wishing there was any possible way you could budget yourself just one more day of air conditioning, you get to make fall food. And fall food is awesome.

Fall is when you get to bust out all the heavier, spiced foods; soups, potatoes (especially sweet potatoes!), squash, super crusty breads...the list goes on.

So anyway, when I saw this garbanzo bean soup recipe over at Vanilla Garlic, my first thought HOLY CRAP GARBANZOS! (I've inexplicably loved them since I was about five, and thought that there was nothing weird at all about ordering the salad bar at a restaurant so I could mix croutons, garbanzos, cucumbers, and those weird little Asian crispy things together with ranch), and second, FALL FOOD!

I made it immediately, and then couldn't think of what to drink with it. Neither tea nor coffee sounded right, nor did juice, and I was sure as hell not drinking my roommates' Mountain Dew. What's fall drink? I asked myself - and the answer, my friends, is cider.

Except all we had was buy one get one free $1 apple juice from Meijer.

Even that, can be remedied, though, I have learned: you can mull apple juice too. It certainly isn't as good, but it's damn well better than what you started with.

YOU NEED:

1 3 inch cinnamon stick
Allspice (to taste)
Nutmeg (to taste)
Cloves (to taste)
1/4 cup brown sugar

Basically it's as simple as real cider: throw all that in a pot with a quart of apple juice and let it simmer for 20 minutes. I like to add a bit of orange zest, too - and when it's possible, use whole cloves, etc. - today it wasn't.). Then you can strain and serve! It's always a little sweet since it's made from gross artificial apple juice, but it tastes a hell of a lot better, and goes awesome with hot soup and crusty bread.

Posted by Steph at 2:10 PM | 1 comments  

Labels: Drinks, soup

So, when you just get home at 2 am from working 15 hours straight, outside, on your feet, living heavy objects that are twice as tall as you, getting painfully sunburned, and having subsisted all day long on nothing but a particularly lackluster disaster of a meat-slopped-on-a-bun type thing that you're told is a "pulled pork sandwich" and a granola bar, you are both (a) starving and (b) dead on your feet and much too lazy to cook something real.

This was my Saturday.

The clear solution was something totally unhealthy (uhh it has fruit! that counts for something!) - a plate of greasy, cheesy, sour-cream saturated nachos.

I'd made guacamole (two avacados, a glop of sour cream, and some generic guacamole spice mix on sale at Meijer) the night before after getting off of a similar, though not as long, day of work, and devoured most of it, but there was a little bit left, so I through it together with some cheese, sour cream, hot taco sauce (I was out of salsa and there was no WAY I was going anywhere), nectarines (my dad makes an amazing peach salsa that I could probably die for and fully intend to get the recipe for from him, so I figured why not freshen this whole thing up a little with some fruit?), and green onions.

My eyes deceived my stomach and I only got through about half the plate before I had to go pass out from exhaustion, but they were amazing. Who says I can't break this whole trying to eat healthy thing now and again?

Posted by Steph at 10:05 PM | 1 comments  

Labels: Dinner, nachos

So a couple weeks ago, the power cord on my laptop died, leaving me with no functioning computer until Best Buy could get around to sending me a new one. I was so bored I at one point baked three batches of cupcakes in a matter of two days (I had to take a bunch of the extras over to my friends' place - being a house of four college boys, they demolished them, even as they insisted I should make something more "normal").

I'd had a lot of these recipes sitting around for a long time, so despite the fact that I probably gained five pounds that week, it was awesome! First on the list was the zucchini ginger muffins that got rave reviews when the lovely ladies of IPB first made them.

My favorite thing about these cupcakes was the ingredients - the fact that my kitchen now has such exotic things as "crystallized ginger" and "valencia orange peel" was worth making them in and of itself. Then again there wasn't much to not love about them - they had a great, spicy taste without seeming too much at all like "health food" cupcakes. Except for the frosting (which was amazing itself - I usually dislike frosting because it's too sweet, so this cream cheese variation was brilliant), they could have almost been muffins. And besides that, they were moist and crumbly and twice as delicious when warm. I definitely intend to make them again!

After the zucchini cupcakes, I realized I had a box of dark chocolate cupcake mix lying around. Schnookie had mentioned chocolate pepper snap cookies (and chocolate habanero gelato!), and I started wondering if the same principle - chocolate and spicy peppers - could be done in cupcake form. It sounded brilliant to me, so I went to work. I bought some canned chiles, threw them in my food processor, and then added it to my chocolate batter until I thought it was spicy enough. After searching around on the internet for a while for what might be a suitable frosting, I stumbled on Vanilla Garlic, a blog that had the same idea I did - only with cinnamon. That sounded like a brilliant idea, so I followed that recipe and added some of my own, then frosted them with a mixture of cinnamon, confectioners sugar, and a tiny bit of cayenne. I can't believe how good these turned out - everyone who told me those flavors went together great was very right.

Lastly, now that I'd found the blog, I of course had to wander around on it for a while, which led me to these red bean-filled green tea cupcakes. I've had extra red beans ever since I made oshiruko last October, and I love any and all things flavored like green tea which, combined with the fact that I've always wanted to try filled cupcakes, pretty much settled it. You can't tell from the picture (which is terrible - I don't know how I didn't get anything better of these), but I forwent the suggested frosting and ended up with a strawberry flavored glaze that was delicious. The only problem I had with them is that they were a little dry, and thus dried out a lot in only a couple days. I would have thought the bean paste would help with that, but apparently not so much.

I froze six of both these and the chipotle chocolate cupcakes and took them to Collingwood with me to visit my grandma - not only did they survive the trip, but they were both just as delicious upon thawing!

Posted by Steph at 1:44 PM | 3 comments  

Labels: cupcakes, Dessert

Posted by HG at 7:01 AM | 0 comments  

Labels: Food Humour

Breakfast today: Scrambled eggs with sauteed mushrooms and smoked salmon, toasted sesame bagel with fresh chive cream cheese and tomato slices. Chased with a cup of coffee and swig of orange juice (straight from the carton, hee hee).

I know it doesn't look like much but it's the first meal I have made in my new place and I am damn proud of it. It's actually the first time I have cooked a whole meal in almost two months too. I miss cooking. I miss creating. It's time to start. I'm getting settled now and picked up a frying pan yesterday so things are coming together.

I don't have a real camera anymore so pardon the blurriness of the picture that was taken on my phone and transferred to the computer via good ol' Bluetooth.

Posted by HG at 6:39 AM | 2 comments  

Labels: Breakfast, Eggs

A good chunk of my friends absolutely swear by tortillas as being all-purpose college kid food - and they're probably right. Leftover Chinese food? Throw it in a tortilla! Hamburgers? Chop them up with some melted cheese and slap it on a tortilla.

So we always have them lying around. I thought, though, that it would be more interesting to dress up the typical quesadilla with a recipe I replicated from a cafe downtown (where it was inanely overpriced) and ended up with delicious Crab Apple Quesadillas:

Like all quesadillas, these are super-easy. Spread one tortilla with a generous amount of cream cheese, toss some imitation crab meat, slices of apple (Granny Smith and McIntosh both work well, you definitely want a tarter apple), chopped up green onions, and Colby Jack cheese. Stick them in the oven until they're toasted and the cheese is all melted, then top with a dollop of sour cream, some cheese, and the leftover green onions - they're also delicious with some fresh salsa or a nice pico de gallo. The apple and the crab add a tiny bit of sweetness that really make the quesadilla for me - and the apple gives it an awesome crunch, too.

Posted by Steph at 12:19 PM | 2 comments  

Labels: Lunch, quesadillas