Food Nostalgia

This past week I made a couple of recipes that reminded me of Jon and mine time living in England and it has made me realize how much I really loved the food over there.  England is not known for having superb culinary history; their food usually a lot like the weather: bland and mushy, however, now that I'm back to living in the states I find myself missing the wholesome honesty of the food there.  It's not as over salted, fat-laden, sugared, and generic as a lot of the menu options I see at American restaurants that I used enjoy!  Even the ethnic food in England seemed more flavorful and true to origin, than what I now can see and taste as the "Americanized" versions of Japanese, Thai, Indian, and Italian.  Why we have altered ethnic cuisines to suit our American taste-buds and why we tend to drown out the unique flavors of different cultural foods is food for thought, but one thing I know is that living aboard has permanently changed the way I view food forever.  

Now, on to the recipes! One type of cuisine that I became obsessed with in England was Indian food.  England has a very large population of Indian people and I'm guessing that this is the reason why you can find an Indian restaurant on just about as many streets and corners as you can find Starbucks in Seattle.  I found a couple great Indian restaurants that I loved in Cambridge, where Jon and I lived, and I literally could not go more than a few weeks without eating there!  I haven't tried any Indian food restaurants yet here in Las Vegas, but I did become inspired when I was flipping through my latest issue of Clean Eating.  Every month they have a "Global Gourmet" feature and this month's was Lamb Vindaloo, so I thought I'd try my own hand at making an Indian dish.  Vindaloo is basically just a meat dish with lots of spices, which is typically served with rice and if you are smart you also order a delicious warm, soft naan bread.  I've never made much of my own Indian food before other than very simple curries, but this recipe seemed pretty easy.  The hardest part is actually having all the spices and I was not able to find cardamom pods at my local grocery store, but the lamb vindaloo turned really good nonetheless! Spice-wary people be warned, this is a pretty spicy recipe.

The other food that I came to know and love in England was bread pudding.  Now, I know that bread pudding is probably on the menu at tons of American restaurants, but for some reason I had no desire to order it when up against a brownie sundae or piece of cheesecake.  However, bread pudding is very popular dessert in England and I can't believe my insatiable sweet-tooth had not discovered this before!  Bread pudding is probably typically made with pieces of torn bread, soaked in sugar, eggs, and milk and baked...and I'm sure somewhere in that process a lot of butter is involved.  For our Valentine's Day dinner last week I pulled to make a bread pudding recipe from a recent issue of Cooking Light titled "Bread Pudding with Salted Caramel Sauce" and let me tell you, it was true love.  :)

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Just a touch of spice

On a typical week, I usually reserve some time on Sunday to peruse my usual recipe sources, make a dinner plan, and mindlessly make a grocery list for the ingredients I need.  I'm guilty of flipping through my cooking magazines and just pulling the titles I think sound good, without even looking at the ingredients or the cooking instructions and this has gotten me into trouble several times!  I will go start making dinner with the recipe I pulled and it says to marinate for an hour or takes a long time to prep and cook and often, I've had to abandon that dinner plan and just pull something quicker together at the last minute, thus throwing the whole plan off!  However on my usual weekend recipe hunt a week ago, I pulled this recipe because I had been craving jambalaya and when the title said "quinoa" I instantly thought "quinoa=healthy" and it would be a good way to use up some turkey kielbasa and shrimp that I had on hand.  So, in my usual fashion, I assembled the ingredients and when it came time to make this dinner one night, I finally read through the cooking instructions.  This recipe is from Clean Eating magazine and is fairly simple, which is why I'm sharing it, however, I got the sneaky suspicion that this recipe was going to end up being a little blah on the spice factor.  What is jambalaya without a little heat?! Here's what I did to perk up the recipe a bit...first, I sauteed some chopped onions in a little bit of olive oil, and then carried on with step 2, and then I added about 2 tsp of cumin to the shrimp-sausage mixture and 1 tsp of chili powder.  And then to the quinoa, I added a few dashes of salt and a dash of cayenne pepper.  Yeah, I added a touch of oil, which rendered the recipe slightly less "healthy", but the extra spices really helped kick this dish up a notch and Jon and I really enjoyed it!  Sometimes recipes are really great bases and it just takes a few trial and error dinners to find what other spices and flavors will really enhance it.  It's probably good cooking practice to read through recipes before you decide to make them, but it's also really rewarding to add your own spin to something and make it your own.  

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Good Advice

When it comes to who I turn too for good recipe inspiration and advice, I usually turn to my friend, Amy; who in my opinion is probably one of the best cooks I know! So, when Amy tells me to try out a Moroccan Chickpea Chili recipe from the cookbook we both have in our arsenal, I don't hesitate.  It's actually kind of funny how she will find recipes I haven't even thought about trying, because I had probably passed over that recipe a hundred times while going through the cookbook looking for dinner ideas!  This recipe comes from Cooking Light's, The Essential Dinner Tonight Cookbook and I thought I'd pass it on to my blog readers for several reasons: one, it's very healthy; two, from start to finish it only took about 30 minutes; and three, it helps fulfill my quota of trying to have at lease one vegan dinner a week.  Like, I mention in my introduction, I really like eating vegan and this Moroccan Chickpea Chili is hearty and loaded with protein, so you are left feeling satiated.  And I'm not making a blog about this recipe because I think everyone should try eating vegan, but this is a different way to get protein other than meat, and I think keeping things different and adventurous always makes cooking more fun.  To complete the meal, I even found Lavash bread (at Walmart, of all places!) and warmed that up in the oven a little and served along side of the chili with a little bit of olive oil.

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Fourth Baked Potatoes

I look forward to the November issue of Cooking Light every year because it always supplies plenty of ideas to shake up the conventional ways of cooking holiday foods.  Of course, we all have our favorite versions of holiday foods, so I sidelined a few of the recipes I wanted to try at a different time so that I could enjoy my traditional versions on the actual holiday.  One of my favorite dishes on Thanksgiving are sweet potatoes, served buttered, sugared and marshmallow-ed.   It's basically a dessert and you get to have, guilt-free, along side your other Thanksgiving side-dishes knowing that what is actually the dessert is still coming later.  I'm a sweets person, through and through, so I find this concept to be awesome.  This past year the holiday issue of Cooking Light categorized all the different holiday dishes into recipe sections and in the "Potatoes" section, I found a recipe that sounded good, but was a little cautious because it wasn't a sweet sweet potato recipe.  The recipe is called "Twice-Baked Sweet Potatoes with Chipotle" and I ended up making this recipe for the first time this Christmas, because with only having one guest over for dinner I didn't want to make traditional mashed potatoes and a sweet sweet potato recipe to go with the brisket I was serving.  This recipe sounded like it would be a good blend of sweet and spicy, so I decided to give it a holiday try-out.  Words can not do this recipe enough justice, so do yourself a favor and make it!  I've titled this blog entry "Fourth Baked Potatoes" because in the last month alone, I have made this 4 times; it's that good.  This recipe is also easy to bring to get-togethers, which is why I made this recipe for our Super Bowl gathering and they turned out to be quite the crowd-pleaser.  Going out of my holiday comfort zone really paid-off and I think I've found a new holiday favorite...that is if Jon and I aren't tired of eating twice-baked sweet potatoes with chipotle by next Thanksgiving! 

Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes with Chipotle

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Chicken or Fish?

We have a couple weekly regulars in our dinner rotation and it usually involves having chicken or salmon as our main and then I'll just throw together a side or two to make it a balanced dinner.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Well, if you are a recipe connoisseur like myself, then you are continuously getting bored with the same ol' way to cook chicken or salmon so the "easy" dinner becomes harder and harder to get excited about.  First, let me preface, that this difficult to start with because I am just not that into chicken and would much rather prefer to eat salmon.  Seeing and dealing with raw chicken has always left me less than jazzed, however, Jon loves it and marriage is about compromise, right?  I have a hard time getting motivated to buy it at the store and then bring it home and decide what to do with it, but I know that salmon is pricier and chicken is still a good source of protein.   So like a prayer answered to get me amped about chicken breasts I had in the freezer, I was in luck this past month because my issue of Cooking Light featured over 50 different ways to cook chicken.  A lot of the recipes looked and sounded tasty, and to my surprise I marked several that I wanted to make.  The first recipe I tried from the issue is called Miso Chicken and it ended up being really, REALLY good! So much so, that I'll probably make it again when chicken comes up in the rotation.  In fact, I might choose it over making salmon. :)


Miso Chicken
After the hour of marinading, this recipe comes together really quickly.  The recipe says to only saute the chicken 4 minutes on one side, but I did 4 minutes.  Also, if you are like me and have no clue where to start with finding miso in your grocery store, I found mine in the asian food section and it's basically a grainy liquid in a bottle that is essentially what you pour into hot water to make miso soup.  At least, that's what I found and it seemed to work just fine.  This would taste great with a quick vegetable sir-fry, cucumber salad, rice noodles or soba noodles.

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Corriander-Rubbed Wild Salmon

As for a good salmon recipe, here's one I tried recently from an issue of Clean Eating.  I liked the infusion of coriander and lemon and I thought the fish came out tender, flaky and deliciously simple.  I also made it with wild rice and used fresh spinach instead of swiss chard.

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Workin' With What You Got

I had a friend over for lunch yesterday and in the course of our chatting we started talking about how we both feel like we need to use and eat more of what we already have in our pantries, fridge or freezer.  As someone who loves trying new recipes all the time, I know that I am guilty of buying a lot of recipe ingredients, using just what I need and then moving on.  Or like my previous post about slow cooking and then freezing half, which sounds great until I forget I made it and it sits in the freezer forever! So as I cooked and prepared the Butternut Squash and Smokey Black Bean Salad recipe that I had planned on making (which I've included in this post because it was really good!) for us, I decided that for dinner I would not head to the store in a panic as usual towards the end of the week but rather get inspired and pull together a dinner with what I already had.  What I ended up making was a Sun-Dried Tomato Spiced Shrimp recipe from one of my all-time go-to cookbooks, Cooking Light's, The Essential Dinner Tonight Cookbook, which features an entree recipe and then two accompanying sides while also giving you a sort of schedule or time frame to pull it all together.  It's a great cookbook and I love that they give you a nice photograph of every recipe.  For last night's dinner, I passed on the side dish ideas, but I chose this recipe because it called for jarred sun-dried tomatoes which I had happened to buy a couple weeks ago; I used 1-2 tomato halves out of the jar and then plopped it into the fridge amongst the other various condiments and that's where it's sat since.  Curry paste is another ingredient in this recipe that I had bought for another recipe and you only really use a little each time, but it keeps and I'm slowly chipping away at it.  The recipe also called for other fridge staples in our house such as a lemon and fresh cilantro.  I recently bought a big Costco sized bag of frozen shrimp, which are easy to thaw in a hurry so we tend to always have shrimp on hand if we need to add a little protein.  The recipe is pretty straight forward and Jon and I both thought it tasted really good!  I paired the shrimp with some roasted Brussels sprouts and a slice of french bread, both of which had been impulse buys on my usual Sunday grocery trip and by Thursday were needing to be eaten.  All in all, I think it feels pretty good to "budget" your pantry, fridge and freezer!

Sun-Dried Tomato Spiced Shrimp

A couple notes on this recipe: I did not strain the tomatoes; I just picked them out of the jar with a fork and figured by not straining them the residual oil on the tomatoes was enough oil for the marinade.  I tend to skimp on oil content when I can to keep the fat amount down.  However, I do not recommend skimping on oil with making roasted Brussels sprouts...they need it! Another note, is that I would probably cook the shrimp about a minute longer on each side just to get them a little crispier, but I caution that because shrimp can get over-cooked really quickly, so my advice would be to set a timer. 

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Butternut Squash and Smokey Black Bean Salad
This doesn't quite go with the theme of this post because I got the ingredients for this recipe specifically to make this for my friend and I, but like I said it was really good and very filling.  This recipe does have goat cheese in it, which tends to be easier on my stomach than cow's milk cheese.  My friend and I loved this salad because of the goat cheese and I knew my husband wouldn't go near this salad with a 10 foot pole!

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Slow Cooking

Now, that I've found myself unemployed, I've decided to do something I've always wanted to do but just didn't have the extra time for, a recipe share blog!  This week I had a couple of friends write to me asking for a meal ideas that are easy and nutritious, so I've decided to start this blog by highlighting my current love affair with my crock pot.  When I am working, I can't tell you enough what a delight it is to come home to house smelling delicious and a meal requiring little to no prep-to-table time.  I've gathered a few of the crock pot recipes that I've tried recently and they all made about plenty of servings.  If you don't currently have a crock pot, I suggest getting one (today!!) and buying one with a timer because that way if you are out longer than the cooking time, it will switch to the warm setting.

Ratatouille

This recipe comes from a Williams Sonoma cookbook, called Food Made Fast - Slow Cooker, that my sister-in-law gave to me.  The ratatouille made about 10 servings and combination of veggies was really tasty.  This went great with pasta, along side a chicken apple sausage, filling for a wrap with hummus, and over a baked potato.

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Turkey in Mole Sauce

This also comes from the WS cookbook and it was excellent!  I think Jon and I have both agreed that meat just tastes better when shredded.  A couple notes on this recipe is that I just used butterball skin-less, bone-less turkey breasts because at my local grocery store the only turkey breasts with the bone-in had a lot of extra added fat and seasoning.  I think I could have also just used 6 chicken breast fillets and it would have turned out the same.  I did 8 hours on the low setting and meat was so tender that I just shredded it all and put half in the freezer.  The recipe made about 16 servings.  One thing I'd recommend with this recipe is to up the amount of chocolate.  I thought the sauce was delicious, but it wasn't as chocolate-y as I remember other mole sauces being.  This recipe goes great with some warmed flour tortillas, avocado, cilantro, and chopped tomatoes.

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Thai Chicken Tacos

This recipe comes from one of my cooking magazine subscriptions, Clean Eating.  This is a great magazine for people who like simple recipes focused on whole foods.  Again, this is a variation on a shredded meat taco, but I love the infusion of a little Thai flavor.  One recipe recommendation, however, would be to add a little salt to the chicken mixture.  This made way more than 4 servings, I'd say closer to 8.

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